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alessia contu

University of Massachusetts, Boston, Warwick Business School, Faculty Member

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Hello! Few brief things about me: I currently work at the College of Management, University of Massachusetts Boston where I am the Chair of the Management department. My research addresses issues of power, politics and ethics in contemporary work organization. I mobilize ideas from philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis and literature to problematize some of the current trends in management, leadership and organizational behaviour. One of my most pressing projects is to develop the ideas and tools, and forward the practice of intellectual activism in business schools. My latest empirical project is on alternative organizations, specifically I am researching the phenomenon of workers' recuperated firms. Do contact me: at [email protected]

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University of Bristol

Georgina Tsagas

University of Bristol

Jukka Mähönen

University of Turku

London School of Economics and Political Science

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Guido Ferrarini

University of Genoa

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Papers by alessia contu

Corporate governance for sustainability : Statement

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the pract... more The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term.

Rationality and Relationality in the Process of Whistleblowing

Journal of Management Inquiry, 2014

Reporting wrongdoing is seen as desirable to fight illegal practices, but whistleblowers often su... more Reporting wrongdoing is seen as desirable to fight illegal practices, but whistleblowers often suffer retaliations and are in need of protection. Overall, whistleblowers engender strong reactions and are cast either as saints or rats. I consider why whistleblowers are seen as unsettling and ambivalent figures by exploring the analogy between Antigone, the Sophoclean heroine, and whistleblowers. These reflections reconfigure the rationality and relationality of the process of whistleblowing. The rationality of the whistleblower is singular and not easily subsumed into universalizing norms which explains some of the limits reached by the empiricist pro-social research agenda. The relationality of the process of whistleblowing indicates that the reactions of those who hear the whistle are as important. This opens up to an appreciation of the ethical and political valence of the process of whistleblowing and highlights a number of counter-intuitive and interesting issues in its synchron...

Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of CMS:Setting an Agenda for Action and Activism

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018

This panel symposium will be of interest to members of the CMS Division, as this year marks the 2... more

We Are Boiling: Management Scholars Speaking Out on COVID-19 and Social Justice

Journal of Management Inquiry

COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deep... more COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare. Contributors to this article draw attention to the way that the pandemic has highlighted long-standing examples of injustice, from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves. They consider the fact that few management scholars have raised their voices in protest, at least partly because of the ideological underpinnings of the discipline, and the fact these need to be challenged.

$Research paper thumbnail of On the knowledge making enterprise in OMT:the significance of reflexivity and diffraction$

On the knowledge making enterprise in OMT:the significance of reflexivity and diffraction

Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethno... more Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethnographic work. Through reflexivity one can account as a researcher and author of the ethnographic practice, and acknowledge one’s responsibilities in knowledge-making and the impact this work has on others. Yet, it has been suggested that same practice has a darker side, as it tends to ‘overshadowing participants’, producing a ‘warped narcissism’, and ‘self-indulgence’. We explore these argumentative positions on reflexivity in ethnography, and clarify that the premise of a “narcissism” critique is an ontology of separateness that the concept embeds. We suggest and illustrate empirically how an ontology of inseparability of participants and researchers, such as one engrained in diffraction, can contribute in extricating narcissist tendencies of those ethnographic works weighting more on the left side of the “Self-Other” continuum. Our theoretical contribution is to elaborate a framework enabling a politically responsible ethnographic practice, which takes differences as methodological premise for grasping a phenomenon

$Research paper thumbnail of From a Reflexive to a Diffractive Ethnographic Enquiry in Management Research: An Outline for a Promising Methodological Approach$

From a Reflexive to a Diffractive Ethnographic Enquiry in Management Research: An Outline for a Promising Methodological Approach

Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethno... more Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethnographic work. Through reflexivity one can account as a researcher and author of the ethnographic practice, and acknowledge one’s responsibilities in knowledge-making and the impact this work has on others. Yet, it has been suggested that same practice has a darker side, as it tends to ‘overshadowing participants’, producing a ‘warped narcissism’, and ‘self-indulgence’. We explore these argumentative positions on reflexivity in ethnography, and clarify that the premise of a “narcissism” critique is an ontology of separateness that the concept embeds. We suggest and illustrate empirically how an ontology of inseparability of participants and researchers, such as one engrained in diffraction, can contribute in extricating narcissist tendencies of those ethnographic works weighting more on the left side of the “Self-Other” continuum. Our theoretical contribution is to elaborate a framework e...

Philosophy and Organizational Research

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016

In this symposium, the presenters will collectively discuss ways in which organizational research... more

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

On the Notion of Exchange Within the Voluntary Work Circuit: Insights from Pop Music Festivals

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014

This paper offers reflections on exchange relations in markets by exploring the concept of volunt... more

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies

Organization, 2017

The Hybrid Nature of Volunteering

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 2016

This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges invo... more This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges involved and their precise meanings. The context for this analysis is the U.K. music festival industry, where volunteers are offered specific “exchange deals” for providing their work efforts. The article argues that it is in such exchanges, and in their inherent meanings, that the nature of volunteering can be appreciated as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. By theorizing volunteering as possessing Janus-face features represented by its symbolic and economic faces, this research demonstrates that the practice of volunteering is inherently hybrid. This article advances conceptual knowledge on volunteering by showing the irreducibility of the concept to either of these symbolic or economic dimensions. It offers a new perspective that addresses apparently incompatible readings of volunteering, recognizing volunteers’ different experiences and how they feel about the nature of their e...

The Docudrama: A Situated Learning Experience

Does the social theory of hegemony allow us to rethink the labour-capital relationship?

In praise of holistic scholarship: A collective essay in memory of Mark Easterby-Smith

Management Learning, 2021

This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smit... more This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smith, a founder of the Management Learning community. To do this, we invited community members to share their experiences of working with Mark. The resulting narratives remember Mark as a co-author, co-researcher, project manager, conference organizer, research leader, PhD supervisor, and much more. The memories cover many different aspects of Mark’s academic spectrum: from evaluation to research methods to cross-cultural management, to dynamic capabilities, naming but a few. This space for remembrance however developed into a space of reflection and conceptualization. Inspired by the range and extent of Mark’s interests, skills, experiences, and personal qualities, this essay became conceptual as well as personal as we turned the spotlight on academic careers and consider alternative paths for Management Learning scholarship today. Using the collective representations of Mark’s career as a...

On Boundaries and Differences: Communities of Practice and Power Relations in Creative Work

Tensions and struggles are a usual occurrence when knowledge ‘to get the job done’ needs to be pr... more Tensions and struggles are a usual occurrence when knowledge ‘to get the job done’ needs to be produced at the boundaries of different disciplines and skills. Yet, power struggles have been often overlooked, and a deeper understanding of power dynamics in, and between, communities of practice is needed. An ethnographic study of the work practices of a digital media agency is utilised as a basis for the conceptual work of addressing tensions and struggles evident in creative design work. The approach developed here reactivates the critical and relational perspectives of communities of practice theory rearticulating it with the insights of Laclau and Mouffe’s site ontology. This study offers a transformative redefinition of communities of practice’s existing theoretical kit. It also shows how creative abrasions are situated in the broader politics of management and organisation of creative design work.

Macht, Lernen und Organisation (Power, Learning and Organization)

Rappresentare il lavoro" in azione": potere e capacit�� di apprendimento

NGOs management and the value of 'partnerships' for equality in international development: What's in a name?

Human Relations, 2014

Partnership' is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation str... more Partnership' is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation strategies for effective international development. We call such an ensemble of policies and practices the 'partnership discourse'. We explore the value of the term 'partnership' in international development with an empirical focus on the African context and issues of equality in relations between international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are routinely characterized as partnerships. The results of our research in Uganda indicate that a hiatus exists between the rhetoric and reality of such partnerships. Partnerships on the ground reproduce relations of inequality characterized by subordination and oppression. The retroductive explanation we offer for such an emergent picture is to recast partnerships not as neutral management tools, but as political processes actualized in a terrain that is contested and uneven. Our theoretical contribution is to develop a political theorization of interorganizational relations that allows us to explore the social consequences, specifically on inequality, associated with the partnership discourse. Our substantive contribution is to elaborate the value of the term 'partnership' in the international development domain. Its value is to smooth over antagonism and co-opt dissent by proposing a solution to effective development that is both ethically and managerially good. Downloaded from Contu and Girei 3 NGOs managers) by management scholars (Murphy and Zhu, 2012). Finally, we elaborate the substantive implications of our theorization of IORs as a political process. The substantive final contribution suggests that the discourse of partnership is better understood with reference to the notion of inclusive neo-liberalism , hence as a strategy for building consensus around the neo-liberal transnational historic bloc, that is, the historical conjuncture of material/ideological/organizational forces shaping the ID domain . While potentially progressive, the discourse of partnership − mostly driven by institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/ Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) − reproduces in subtle ways, which we show, the entrenched unequal political-economic North/South relations.

The Hybrid Nature of Volunteering Exploring Its Voluntary Exchange Nature at Music Festivals

by Maria Laura Toraldo, alessia contu, and gianluigi mangia

This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges invo... more This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges involved and their precise meanings. The context for this analysis is the U.K. music festival industry, where volunteers are offered specific “exchange deals” for providing their work efforts. The article argues that it is in such exchanges, and in their inherent meanings, that the nature of volunteering can be appreciated as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. By theorizing volunteering as possessing Janus-face features represented by its symbolic and economic faces, this research demonstrates that the practice of volunteering is inherently hybrid. This article advances conceptual knowledge on volunteering by showing the irreducibility of the concept to either of these symbolic or economic dimensions. It offers a new perspective that addresses apparently incompatible readings of volunteering, recognizing volunteers’ different experiences and how they feel about the nature of their exchange.

L'apprendimento situato e la semiotica della pratica:" nuovi vocabolari" per l'apprendimento organizzativo

Corporate governance for sustainability : Statement

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the pract... more The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term.

Rationality and Relationality in the Process of Whistleblowing

Journal of Management Inquiry, 2014

Reporting wrongdoing is seen as desirable to fight illegal practices, but whistleblowers often su... more Reporting wrongdoing is seen as desirable to fight illegal practices, but whistleblowers often suffer retaliations and are in need of protection. Overall, whistleblowers engender strong reactions and are cast either as saints or rats. I consider why whistleblowers are seen as unsettling and ambivalent figures by exploring the analogy between Antigone, the Sophoclean heroine, and whistleblowers. These reflections reconfigure the rationality and relationality of the process of whistleblowing. The rationality of the whistleblower is singular and not easily subsumed into universalizing norms which explains some of the limits reached by the empiricist pro-social research agenda. The relationality of the process of whistleblowing indicates that the reactions of those who hear the whistle are as important. This opens up to an appreciation of the ethical and political valence of the process of whistleblowing and highlights a number of counter-intuitive and interesting issues in its synchron...

Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of CMS:Setting an Agenda for Action and Activism

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018

This panel symposium will be of interest to members of the CMS Division, as this year marks the 2... more

We Are Boiling: Management Scholars Speaking Out on COVID-19 and Social Justice

Journal of Management Inquiry

COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deep... more COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare. Contributors to this article draw attention to the way that the pandemic has highlighted long-standing examples of injustice, from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves. They consider the fact that few management scholars have raised their voices in protest, at least partly because of the ideological underpinnings of the discipline, and the fact these need to be challenged.

$Research paper thumbnail of On the knowledge making enterprise in OMT:the significance of reflexivity and diffraction$

On the knowledge making enterprise in OMT:the significance of reflexivity and diffraction

Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethno... more Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethnographic work. Through reflexivity one can account as a researcher and author of the ethnographic practice, and acknowledge one’s responsibilities in knowledge-making and the impact this work has on others. Yet, it has been suggested that same practice has a darker side, as it tends to ‘overshadowing participants’, producing a ‘warped narcissism’, and ‘self-indulgence’. We explore these argumentative positions on reflexivity in ethnography, and clarify that the premise of a “narcissism” critique is an ontology of separateness that the concept embeds. We suggest and illustrate empirically how an ontology of inseparability of participants and researchers, such as one engrained in diffraction, can contribute in extricating narcissist tendencies of those ethnographic works weighting more on the left side of the “Self-Other” continuum. Our theoretical contribution is to elaborate a framework enabling a politically responsible ethnographic practice, which takes differences as methodological premise for grasping a phenomenon

$Research paper thumbnail of From a Reflexive to a Diffractive Ethnographic Enquiry in Management Research: An Outline for a Promising Methodological Approach$

From a Reflexive to a Diffractive Ethnographic Enquiry in Management Research: An Outline for a Promising Methodological Approach

Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethno... more Reflexivity is often considered fundamental for the ‘production’ of responsible and ethical ethnographic work. Through reflexivity one can account as a researcher and author of the ethnographic practice, and acknowledge one’s responsibilities in knowledge-making and the impact this work has on others. Yet, it has been suggested that same practice has a darker side, as it tends to ‘overshadowing participants’, producing a ‘warped narcissism’, and ‘self-indulgence’. We explore these argumentative positions on reflexivity in ethnography, and clarify that the premise of a “narcissism” critique is an ontology of separateness that the concept embeds. We suggest and illustrate empirically how an ontology of inseparability of participants and researchers, such as one engrained in diffraction, can contribute in extricating narcissist tendencies of those ethnographic works weighting more on the left side of the “Self-Other” continuum. Our theoretical contribution is to elaborate a framework e...

Philosophy and Organizational Research

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016

In this symposium, the presenters will collectively discuss ways in which organizational research... more

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

On the Notion of Exchange Within the Voluntary Work Circuit: Insights from Pop Music Festivals

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014

This paper offers reflections on exchange relations in markets by exploring the concept of volunt... more

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies

Organization, 2017

The Hybrid Nature of Volunteering

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 2016

This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges invo... more This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges involved and their precise meanings. The context for this analysis is the U.K. music festival industry, where volunteers are offered specific “exchange deals” for providing their work efforts. The article argues that it is in such exchanges, and in their inherent meanings, that the nature of volunteering can be appreciated as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. By theorizing volunteering as possessing Janus-face features represented by its symbolic and economic faces, this research demonstrates that the practice of volunteering is inherently hybrid. This article advances conceptual knowledge on volunteering by showing the irreducibility of the concept to either of these symbolic or economic dimensions. It offers a new perspective that addresses apparently incompatible readings of volunteering, recognizing volunteers’ different experiences and how they feel about the nature of their e...

The Docudrama: A Situated Learning Experience

Does the social theory of hegemony allow us to rethink the labour-capital relationship?

In praise of holistic scholarship: A collective essay in memory of Mark Easterby-Smith

Management Learning, 2021

This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smit... more This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smith, a founder of the Management Learning community. To do this, we invited community members to share their experiences of working with Mark. The resulting narratives remember Mark as a co-author, co-researcher, project manager, conference organizer, research leader, PhD supervisor, and much more. The memories cover many different aspects of Mark’s academic spectrum: from evaluation to research methods to cross-cultural management, to dynamic capabilities, naming but a few. This space for remembrance however developed into a space of reflection and conceptualization. Inspired by the range and extent of Mark’s interests, skills, experiences, and personal qualities, this essay became conceptual as well as personal as we turned the spotlight on academic careers and consider alternative paths for Management Learning scholarship today. Using the collective representations of Mark’s career as a...

On Boundaries and Differences: Communities of Practice and Power Relations in Creative Work

Tensions and struggles are a usual occurrence when knowledge ‘to get the job done’ needs to be pr... more Tensions and struggles are a usual occurrence when knowledge ‘to get the job done’ needs to be produced at the boundaries of different disciplines and skills. Yet, power struggles have been often overlooked, and a deeper understanding of power dynamics in, and between, communities of practice is needed. An ethnographic study of the work practices of a digital media agency is utilised as a basis for the conceptual work of addressing tensions and struggles evident in creative design work. The approach developed here reactivates the critical and relational perspectives of communities of practice theory rearticulating it with the insights of Laclau and Mouffe’s site ontology. This study offers a transformative redefinition of communities of practice’s existing theoretical kit. It also shows how creative abrasions are situated in the broader politics of management and organisation of creative design work.

Macht, Lernen und Organisation (Power, Learning and Organization)

Rappresentare il lavoro" in azione": potere e capacit�� di apprendimento

NGOs management and the value of 'partnerships' for equality in international development: What's in a name?

Human Relations, 2014

Partnership' is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation str... more Partnership' is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation strategies for effective international development. We call such an ensemble of policies and practices the 'partnership discourse'. We explore the value of the term 'partnership' in international development with an empirical focus on the African context and issues of equality in relations between international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are routinely characterized as partnerships. The results of our research in Uganda indicate that a hiatus exists between the rhetoric and reality of such partnerships. Partnerships on the ground reproduce relations of inequality characterized by subordination and oppression. The retroductive explanation we offer for such an emergent picture is to recast partnerships not as neutral management tools, but as political processes actualized in a terrain that is contested and uneven. Our theoretical contribution is to develop a political theorization of interorganizational relations that allows us to explore the social consequences, specifically on inequality, associated with the partnership discourse. Our substantive contribution is to elaborate the value of the term 'partnership' in the international development domain. Its value is to smooth over antagonism and co-opt dissent by proposing a solution to effective development that is both ethically and managerially good. Downloaded from Contu and Girei 3 NGOs managers) by management scholars (Murphy and Zhu, 2012). Finally, we elaborate the substantive implications of our theorization of IORs as a political process. The substantive final contribution suggests that the discourse of partnership is better understood with reference to the notion of inclusive neo-liberalism , hence as a strategy for building consensus around the neo-liberal transnational historic bloc, that is, the historical conjuncture of material/ideological/organizational forces shaping the ID domain . While potentially progressive, the discourse of partnership − mostly driven by institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/ Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) − reproduces in subtle ways, which we show, the entrenched unequal political-economic North/South relations.

The Hybrid Nature of Volunteering Exploring Its Voluntary Exchange Nature at Music Festivals

by Maria Laura Toraldo, alessia contu, and gianluigi mangia

This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges invo... more This article discusses the nature of volunteering by exploring the features of the exchanges involved and their precise meanings. The context for this analysis is the U.K. music festival industry, where volunteers are offered specific “exchange deals” for providing their work efforts. The article argues that it is in such exchanges, and in their inherent meanings, that the nature of volunteering can be appreciated as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. By theorizing volunteering as possessing Janus-face features represented by its symbolic and economic faces, this research demonstrates that the practice of volunteering is inherently hybrid. This article advances conceptual knowledge on volunteering by showing the irreducibility of the concept to either of these symbolic or economic dimensions. It offers a new perspective that addresses apparently incompatible readings of volunteering, recognizing volunteers’ different experiences and how they feel about the nature of their exchange.

L'apprendimento situato e la semiotica della pratica:" nuovi vocabolari" per l'apprendimento organizzativo

Answering the crisis with intellectual activism: Making a difference as business schools scholars

Human Relations, 2019

Should business school scholars engage in intellectual activism? This article explicates the orig... more Should business school scholars engage in intellectual activism? This article explicates the origin, the intellectual tradition and politics of intellectual activism, making a case for why management scholars might want to become intellectual activists. Intellectual activism has been elaborated in Patricia Hill Collins' contributions and the work of other black feminist intellectuals and activists such as Angela Davis. Together with the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Judith Butler, intellectual activism is reframed here as a particular type of critical performativity to help scholars make a difference in the world. This article invites scholars to answer the challenges posed by the crisis of neoliberalism, and to re-articulate the values of equality, freedom and solidarity by embodying an academic praxis that is progressive, intersectional, critical and concretely engaged in the service of social, economic and epistemic justice. The article also provides examples of intellectual activism by showcasing the activities of the critical management association, Vida.

'… The point is to change it' – Yes, but in what direction and how? Intellectual activism as a way of 'walking the talk' of critical work in business schools

This article is a call to embrace and work towards a specific form of intellectual activism in bu... more This article is a call to embrace and work towards a specific form of intellectual activism in business schools. Based on the inspiring work of Professor Patricia Hill Collins and other Black feminist and post-colonial scholars, intellectual activism is here defined as 'the myriad ways in which people place the power of their ideas in service to social justice'. This article calls for and delineates a positive response to the current crisis by identifying key features and areas of work that scholars can engage with in 'walking the talk' of critical work in business schools. In 2016, I was invited to give one of the keynotes at the Latin American and European Organization Studies (LAEMOS) conference and then to the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) sub-plenary five. Both were an honour and an opportunity. What you are reading is a short version of those talks. 1 My interventions focused on the concerns I (arguably with many in our field) had been chewing over for a while about critique and our role and position as management educators and business school academics in doing more than just offering sophisticated interpretations based on various forms of critical theories, something that I have been doing for about 20 years. These interpretations, while important, often do little more than build our professional identities and

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies

In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze ... more In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze the rising awareness, both within the critically oriented and the broader organization studies community , that we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political, and environmental realities we live in in unforeseen and unimaginable ways. For many of us, the financial crisis of 2008 had crystallized the notion that capitalism in its very nature is in continuous crisis, as shown by four decades of persistent decline in economic growth rate and rise in overall indebtedness and economic inequality (Streeck, 2014, 2016). Yet the political debacle of party politics in the United Kingdom and the United States together with the rampant populism in various European countries have highlighted that this is not just another installment of a crisis-prone economic system. These 'electoral mutinies' suggest that what is under crisis is the governance system of neoliberalism itself (Fraser, 2017). The responses to this crisis have been proved severely wanting, leading to the weakening of all social and political institutions that offer a semblance of protection to the vulnerable (Wahl, 2017).

Corporate Robespierres, ideologies of management and change

by Steffen Boehm and alessia contu

Journal of Organizational Change …, Jan 1, 2009

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more

On Doing Academic Work: Critical Performativity as Intellectual Activism

This paper is an invitation to embrace intellectual activism in business schools. Based on the wo... more This paper is an invitation to embrace intellectual activism in business schools. Based on the work of Patricia Hill Collins intellectual activism is defined as ‘the myriad ways in which people place the power of their ideas in service to social justice’. Intellectual activism is a particular type of critical performativity that allows us to answer the challenges of the hegemonic crisis we are undergoing by changing the terms of our academic praxis in business schools. The intellectual activist praxis outlined here invests the key dimensions of the way we do academic work. In a systematizing effort I indicate that such academic praxis has four key features. It is progressive, critical, engaged and concrete. I elaborate these features and then I introduce specific tactics/practices for engagement offering examples. In summary I suggest that intellectual activism in business schools is i. a form of political work; ii. a form of ‘building work’; and iii. not easy. I argue that given our current historic juncture intellectual activism is extremely urgent. I exhort you all to examine its meaning and discern ways in which you can work to advance social/economic and epistemic justice in your daily academic praxis.

IA in short Feb10 2017.pdf

This paper is a call to embrace and work towards a specific form of intellectual activism in busi... more This paper is a call to embrace and work towards a specific form of intellectual activism in business schools. Based on the inspiring work of
professor Patricia Hill Collins, and other black feminist and post-colonial scholars, intellectual activism is here defined as ‘the myriad ways in which people place the power of their ideas in service to social justice’. This paper calls for and delineates a positive response to the current crisis by identifying key areas of work that scholars in business schools can engage
with. This intellectual activist praxis invests the key dimensions of our work: teaching, research activities, and our work as employees and managers in business schools. In a systematizing and pro-positive effort I
indicate that such academic praxis has four key features. It is progressive, critical, engaged and concrete. These features are elaborated and then I introduce specific tactics/practices for engagement and offer examples. In summary, intellectual activism in business schools is (i) a form of political work; (ii) a form of ‘building work’; and (iii) not easy.