Rethinking Politics in Organization
Copenhagen Business School & Alliance Manchester Business School present
Rethinking Politics in Organization
Copenhagen Business School
March 28-29th 2019
Inaugural Workshop Announcement
Speakers
Professor Eirikur Bergmann, Bifrost University
Professor Mitchell Dean, Copenhagen Business School
Professor Vivien Schmidt, Boston University
Politics remains an understudied subject in Organization Studies, and yet we all presume to know what politics is, and what it means and where it takes place. This taken-for-grantedness might explain why there is no chapter devoted to politics in the major handbooks and various companions and encyclopedias associated with organization studies (Clegg, Hardy, Nord, 2003; Adler, du Gay and Reed, 2016; Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2005). It also explains why scholars of organization studies are not consulted for their insights and guidance as to how politics, for example, organizes an electorate in ways that produce populist leaders, nationalisms, and all manner of totalitarian states. How to explain Trump, Erdogan, Orbán, Johnson, or Le Pen? What resources are there in organization studies to develop an understanding of politics, or what we might call politics-in-organization? What role does management or entrepreneurship play in these wider social and political forces? What role the corporation, the family firm, the military? And what of the grounding organizational configurations of technology? Power, politics, mobilisation and resistance should be central to our discipline, but this may require an escape from current intellectual and theoretical divisions (institutional theory, actor-network theory, critical management studies, process studies, population ecology, etc.).
In this inaugural workshop we invite 3 distinguished keynote speakers to present work relevant to these questions as we launch a 3-year program of activities devoted to the development of politics in organization studies, or ‘organizational politics’. Our speakers will sketch out a problematic they are currently working on and it will be the task of the seminar participants to explore further where organization studies might meet politics empirically and/or conceptually in the light of these sketches. Participants who join this workshop will work with our speakers on one seminal text and explore questions chosen by each of our speakers to form focussed discussion groups. The purpose of this first in a series of advanced seminars will be a) to make connections between people interested in the broad area of politics and organization and b) to explore joint interests, develop concepts and novel perspectives, and build topics and reading lists for research and future seminars.
Members of the Program Committee: Professor Damian O’Doherty (Alliance Manchester Business School), Professor Christian De Cock (Copenhagen Business School), Professor Barbara Czarniawska (University of Gothenberg), Professor Hugh Willmott (Cass Business School), Professor Robin Holt (Copenhagen Business School), Dr Sheena Vachhani (University of Bristol), Professor Leonard Seabrooke (Copenhagen Business School), Professor Daniel Nyberg (University of Newcastle), Professor Gibson Burrell (University of Leicester).