PhD Defence: Leadership & Cynicism in Alternative Organization
The Department of Organization (IOA) invites you to Elias Gilling Borgmann's dissertation that explores tensions between alternative and mainstream forms of leadership and organizing in worker-owned organizations, and how such tensions can be productively navigated.
Invitation for PhD Defence - Elias Gilling Borgmann
(Reception: Atrium, Kilen)
Leadership & Cynicism in Alternative Organization
Tracing a new spirit of alternativity
In an ethnographic study of two such alternative organizations it combines participant observation, action research and interview methods and analyzes how the alternative ways of leading and organizing pursued in these organizations break some established orders but rely on others.
Through three research articles, the dissertation identifies:
1) 'metamodern cynicism',
2) contingent negotiation of leadership and followership roles and
3) romantic mythologization of collective leadership as organizational strategies that turn tensions between the mainstream and the alternative productive.
The dissertation thus challenges and extends the literature on alternative organization and critical leadership by showing that contradictions, cynicism, and romanticism are not failures but generative conditions for leading and organizing differently.
Primary Supervisor:
Associate Professor Emil Husted
Department of Organization
Copenhagen Business School
Secondary Supervisor:
Professor Sara Louise Muhr
Department of Business Humanities and Law
Copenhagen Business School
Assessment Committee:
Associate Professor Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen (Chair)
Department of Organization
Copenhagen Business School
Professor Alessia Contu
Department of Management
University of Massachusetts Boston
Professor Owain Smolović Jones
Centre for Research on Organisations, Work and Society
Durham University Business School