Timon Beyes appointed new professor at MPP

Timon Beyes has just joined CBS's Department of Management, Politics and Philosphy as professor of design, innovation and aesthetics. Before joining MPP, Timon Beyes was a visiting professor at the Institute for the Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, where he directed a large-scale, EU-funded research and development-project on digital cultures, as well as associate professor at the University of St.Gallen (HSG), Switzerland. He has a background in Sociology and Management Studies and has done his doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Institute of Sociology and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in St.Gallen. There he also engaged with curriculum development and a wide range of activities on the threshold of academia, art and civil society. Among other things, he was HSG's Director of Curriculum Development in 2004 and 2005, overseeing the realization and further development of a major curriculum reform process. From 2006 to 2010 he was a co-director of St.Gallen's Contextual Studies Program, setting up and organizing numerous courses on undergraduate and graduate level and experimenting with teaching formats and events, like a week-long teaching project for 800 students on the city of the future together with architect Daniel Libeskind or an international symposium on urban artistic interventions that took place at Hamburg's Kampnagel Theatre and brought together artists, researchers and students. In 2008, he was a Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Theory, Swansea University, UK. 

Timon's research focuses on the spaces and aesthetics of organization, entrepreneurship and innovation with empirical emphases on digital media, the arts and urban space. It has been published in a range of monographs, edited collections and international journals. These include the book-length Soziale Medien - neue Massen? (with I. Baxmann and C. Pias, Akademie Verlag, forthcoming); Die Macht der Gefühle: Emotionen in Management, Organisation und Kultur (with J. Metelmann, Berlin University Press, 2012); Parcitypate: Art and Urban Space (with S.-T. Krempl and A. Deuflhard, Niggli, 2009);  Finden und Erfinden: Die Entstehung des Neuen (with J. Mittelstraß, Berlin University Press, 2009); Von der Kunst des Balancierens (with U. Jäger, Haupt, 2008); Die Stadt als Perspektive. Zur Konstruktion urbaner Räume (with H. Keller, D. Libeskind and S. Spoun, Hatje Cantz, 2006); Kontingenz und Management (Hamburg, 2003). In earlier cooperations with CBS faculty, he has among other things researched new forms of urban entrepreneurship, and published chapters in Entrepreneurship as Social Change (Edward Elgar, 2006) and The Politics and Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship (Edward Elgar, 2009), edited by Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert, as well as in the recent Handbook of Organisational Entrepreneurship (Edward Elgar, 2012). 

Timon is excited to continue and further develop his work on processes of organization and entrepreneurship in the context of culture, media and the arts, or what could be called the expansion of processes of aestheticization and aesthetic mobilization at work in contemporary life. He is delighted to be able to join forces with CBS colleagues who work on related and neighbouring issues, and to be part of and contribute to MPP's unique interdisciplinary set-up. Moreover, he is keen on bringing his experiences in teaching and developing new teaching formats to CBS, and he is looking forward to working with CBS students. In what he hopes to be only a first step, Timon already is a driving force behind the cooperation between CBS, University of St.Gallen and the German Haniel Foundation to set up the European Haniel Program, a series of innovative courses that will bring together students from CBS and HSG and that will be accompanied by research symposia and publication activities on the relation of the humanities and social sciences to management education.