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The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory
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Böhm, Steffen (2003) The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b1746454~S1
Abstract
In this thesis I outline a political problem of positioning organisation theory. I
maintain that there are projects of positioning, depositioning and repositioning,
which articulate organisation in different political ways. To dialectically critique
the politics of these projects I discuss the way philosophers of destruction,
deconstruction and impossibility conceptualise the political event. I argue that
these speculative philosophies share a political belief in the need to question and
show the limits of the ways social reality is positioned in the realms of modernity,
capitalism and `Empire', and explore possibilities of how the world might look
different. I maintain that the politics of the positioning project is to turn
organisation into the hegemony of management, which I show by engaging with
the particular discourse of knowledge management. The politics of the
depositioning project is to resist the hegemony of management in multiple ways; I
discuss particularly how organisation theorists emphasise the precariousness,
plurality and locality of processes of organising. Although the political resistances
by the depositioning project are of great importance, I argue that there is a
tendency to not link their politics to questions of hegemony, which I show to have
certain depoliticising effects. In response to these failures, the politics of the
repositioning project aims to repoliticise organisation theory by speculating about
a new hegemony of social organisation. My engagement with the so-called 'anticapitalist
movement' and questions of its organisation and politics shows,
however, that such an attempt of repositioning is itself an impossible or
undecidable event. Nevertheless, I argue that it is precisely this political event of
impossibility that calls for a speculative decision to be made; a decision, however,
which will always fail to fully represent social organisation.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Organizational sociology, Organizational sociology -- Research | ||||
Official Date: | September 2003 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Warwick Business School | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Burrell, Gibson; Dale, Karen | ||||
Extent: | xxii, 300 leaves. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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