New work on hyper responsibility by Niels Åkerstrøm and Hanne Knudsen

Hyper responsibility is how professor Niels Åkerstrøm and associate professor Hanne Knudsen describes today’s form of responsibility. 20 years ago responsibility were moderate and concrete – today we experience boundless responsibility which in the same time invites individuals to act in charge of own actions. Read about their new research here.

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen is professor in political management at Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS. He is the research director of the politics group at MPP. His field is public administration and welfare management in a very broad sense, which he approaches through Luhmann’s systems theory, Laclau’s discourse theory and Derrida’s deconstruction. He has been working on topics such as the “Hetrophonic welfare organizations”, “polycentricism and the supervisions state”, ‘intimization of management’, “contractualization of citizenship”, “management of feelings and interpenetration”, “partnerships as second order promises”, “games as technologies of potentiality”, “towards a playful form of hyper-responsibility”, “hybrid governance”.

Hanne Knudsen’s work centres on how management is created in municipal primary and lower secondary schools. Focus is on the discussion about and practice of management with the aim of providing better understandings of the dilemmas, opportunities and conflicts new institutional conditions and current discourses create for the various players in municipal primary and lower secondary schools.
Her PhD dissertation "Har vi en aftale? (U)mulighedsbetingelser for mødet mellem folkeskole og familie" ("Do we have an agreement? The (im)possible conditions for the meeting of the municipal primary and lower secondary school and the family") focuses on the way the school deals with a central part of its surrounding community, namely, parents.
Hanne Knudsen has previously researched how organisations use values.
She draws theoretical inspiration from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and Gregory Bateson, among others.