Rethinking Politics in Organization

I was in Copenhagen last week (March 28-29, 2019) to give a presentation on “Politics and Organization in the Eurozone Crisis: Does the Politicization of Organizational Interaction make for more or less legitimacy?” at an inaugural workshop on Rethinking Politics in Organization at the Copenhagen Business School. 

I was one of three keynote speakers to present work relevant to questions pertaining to politics in organization studies, how politics organizes an electorate in ways that produce populist leaders, nationalisms, etc. 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?The workshop launches a three-year program of activities devoted to the development of politics in organization studies, or ‘organizational politics’. The purpose of the gathering was to make connections between people interested in the broad area of politics and organization and to explore joint interests, develop concepts and novel perspectives, and build topics and reading lists for research and future seminars.