Rethinking organizational futures and alternatives with Walter Benjamin (ICMS 2025: Regenerative Critical Management Studies)
Manchester UK
Organization: Manchester Metropolitan University
Event: ICMS 2025: Regenerative Critical Management Studies
Call for Papers
Organization studies has long accommodated critical approaches to dominant management practices, yet recently there has been increasing acknowledgement of the importance of understanding and promoting alternative forms of organizing in society (Zanoni, 2020, Dahlman et al., 2022; Schiller-Merkens, 2024). Against the backdrop of growing mass consumerism and deepening ecological breakdown, researchers are attempting to understand how new forms of social transformation occur in and through organizations (DeJordy et al., 2020) enlisting novel theorizations of how different futures can be imagined and pursued (Thompson & Byrne, 2022). This has included concepts of real or imagined ‘utopias’ as well as the promotion of the idea that academics should become more involved in the articulation of different and more ‘desirable’ organizational futures (Gümüsay, & Reinecke, 2022, 2024). Such (re)engagement with future alternatives opens up important theoretical but also empirical questions about the interface between the organizational imagination and practical lived reality (Levitas, 2017, Beckert, 2016), where there are myriad examples of everyday utopias prefiguring alternatives in society such as cooperatives, artistic interventions, subcultures, environmental or political activism, and historical reinterpretations of the past, all of which can provide us with rich organizational material to re-read (and re-imagine) our present and futures.
These developments make important contributions to moving critically informed studies of organization beyond a ‘one-dimensional critique which [is] focussed on negation’ (Spicer & Alvesson, 2024, p 1). However, the double-bind of critical performativity that we find often ascribed to alternative organizations means that they face the continuous threat of degeneration; always risking becoming ‘doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform’ (Shanahan, 2024, p. 1). Furthermore, questions surrounding the efficacy and ethical foundations of prescriptive theorizing that informs much future-orientated or utopian thinking has generated profound disagreement about what sort of future we as organization scholars can or should be promoting (Hanisch, 2024; Horner, Cornelissen & Zundel, 2024). There is also robust debate surrounding what sort of methods we should be using for this form of work (Barin-Cruz et al., 2017, Del Fa & Vasquez, 2019).
The focus of this stream proposal/call for papers is to explore the potential of Walter Benjamin’s thinking and writing for a “regenerative” agenda of critical and alternative organizational scholarship. Benjamin’s published works explored cultural production and consumption through the lens of aesthetic philosophy taking in themes of materiality, architecture, history, technology, media, and art. Across these diverse topics, he outlined a style of scholarship for investigating phenomena in ways that ‘favour simultaneity and constellation over continuity, similitude over representation or sign, and the detail or fractionary over the whole’ (Weigel, 2015, p. 345). We see in Benjamin’s writing a critical but also transformational potential, which holds promise to ‘open up a space where new possibilities for the future can be imagined and where we can read our present condition other than simply as the continuation of a preceding series; what history could have been yet did not become’ (De Cock & O’Doherty, 2017, p. 145).
Such radical potential is demonstrated in the scattered convolutes that make up the unfinished Arcades Project. In this text, Benjamin pursues myriad ways of exposing the illusion of historical continuity that resides in visions of the future, engineering what he calls the “destructive momentum” of critique (2002, p. 475, N10a,2) – through examinations of wide-ranging ideas and materials that include fashion, gambling, iron-construction, salesclerks and lighting. Benjamin’s principal concern is how we might turn our attention to how different ‘objects [and themes] speak, revealing cabalistic layers of significance’ (Higonnet, Higonnet & Higonnet, 1984, p. 393). For this, he employs the analytical technique of letting ‘the rags, the refuse … come into their own: by making use of them’ (Benjamin, 2002, p. 460, N1a,8), which embodies the idea that ‘all existing objects have a kind of specter that can be captured and perceived’ (p. 688, Y8a,1). It is through this process of turning to the periphery of society and culture that meaning is most clearly elucidated, which is an idea that Benjamin carried from his earliest works, such as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (2009 [1928], p. 35) and into his latter texts including Theses on the Philosophy of History (1970/1999, p. 248). Across this diverse corpus we can identify the careful and consistent cultivation of a method where historical meaning is continually (re)worked on and understood as something that is not co-opted by but rather capable of interrupting dominant narratives (O’Doherty, 2013); akin to the “hauntological” (re)awakening of latent ghosts of the past (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2019).
Engaging with Benjamin’s ideas offers clues for how we might re-encounter the past to imagine and pursue a different future, but without providing explicit conceptual guard-rails or analytical templates (Buck-Morss, 1989). Like the diverse convolutes that make up his sprawling study of the Parisian arcades, organizational scholarship creatively engaging Benjamin’s ideas is, for the most part, fragmented and diffuse taking in themes of ruination (De Cock & O’Doherty, 2017), aesthetics (De Cock & Beyes, 2017) as well pedagogical concerns (Beyes & Steyaert, 2021), but also informing empirical investigations into festival thresholds (De Molli et al., 2020), industrial schools (Kenny, 2013), and the 2008 financial crash (De Cock et al., 2011). Against recent reappraisals of the Frankfurt School (Cluley & Parker, 2023) – an organization that Benjamin maintained a tangential and often complex relationship with throughout much of his professional life – there has not been a sustained or collective engagement with Benjamin’s work by organization scholars since De Cock et al.’s (2013) special issue in Management and Organizational History, published over a decade ago.
Our intentions are to build on this work by providing a space from which to further develop a constellation of topics relating to Benjamin and the study of critical or alternative approaches to management and organization. We welcome any papers engaging with the work of Benjamin, particularly on questions of method and critique, but some indicative topics might include:
History as a ‘generative field’, exploring how historical work can generate new understandings, imaginaries, and provide the soil for growing more diverse, even sustainable, forms of organizing.
Literature and image in montage: drawing on Benjamin’s methods to repurpose, or recycle, elements of the past and present to generate critique of the status quo.
Rethinking revolution as regeneration. Whilst Marx thought of revolution as a locomotive’, tying progress and revolution together, Benjamin suggested that “revolutions are the act by which the human race travelling in the train applies the?emergency brake”. Can this motif be developed to re-think sustainability, digitalisation, and organizational change?
Benjamin’s idea and practices of storytelling as a mode for regenerating organizational imaginaries.
Messianic time, ‘now time’, ‘dialectics at a standstill’: how can Benjamin’s idiosyncratic concept of time be used to the benefit of organizational temporality?
The dialectical image as method in studying organizational pasts and generating organizational futures.
The limits of ‘redemption’ in critical management studies: what can we learn about emancipation, even ‘micro-emancipations’, from Benjamin’s ideas of messianism?
Temporalities of change and revolution in and after Walter Benjamin.
Uncovering the emancipatory in capitalism and the commodity form.
Exploring the latent potential of outmoded organizational spaces.
How lived experience and memory become implicated in perceptions of past, present and future in urban contexts.
This should not, of course, be considered as a comprehensive or restrictive list and we would welcome all submissions that engage with Benjamin’s thought to rethink futures and methodologies for organization studies. We welcome papers that experiment with form or ideas, and this includes papers which are work-in-progress or include tentative readings of Benjamin. We wish to create a friendly and inclusive intellectual space to work through Benjamin’s thought and its application to management and organization studies, which includes the discussion of ideas that may not be in their final form.
Submission Instructions
Please submit an extended abstract of 1,500 words (excluding references) to rethinkingfutures@gmail.com by 31st January 2025. We are interested in receiving essays, conceptual and empirical submissions, including interdisciplinary work, with contributions from PhD students and ECR’s particularly encouraged.
Kathleen Hughes