Anarchism and Management

Martin Parker (Leicester) Thomas Swann (Loughborough), and Konstantin Stoborod (Leicester) are editing a book on ‘Management and Anarchism’ for Routledge for publication in late 2018. We have a contract, and are now looking for authors to be part of this project. We want this to be a book that treats anarchism as a theory of organization, and hence takes ‘conventional’ business school topics and shows how variants of anarchist thinking might help us understand them differently. In sense, we want to create a sort of counter-text, a book that could be used as supplementary reading along with a conventional general management text. This means that we want clear and accessible writing aimed at readers who aren’t familiar with anarchist ideas, as well as chapters that are oriented to orthodox topics in a subversive way.

This will be a book which takes ‘organization’ as its central problem but all the chapters will also necessarily engage with wider phenomena, since they are also ‘case studies’ of the effects of management logic. Examples might include the effects of global warming, the forms of accumulation by dispossession exemplified in the mining sector and the activities of pharmaceutical and agricultural firms, patterns of global labour migration, the emergence of trans-national governance institutions and agreements and so on. Our argument will be that the forms of organization which are now globally dominant produce consequences which are damaging for people and planet. To address such global challenges, we suggest that one place to begin is with the subject matter of the contemporary Business School.

Our provisional chapter structure contains an introduction and conclusion, and then a series of chapters with the following themes –

Leadership

Managers and management

Employees and empowerment

Strategy, power and decision-making

Markets, finance and accounting

Technology and work

Production and consumption

Diversity and globalization

Business ethics

The environment

We anticipate each chapter being 8000 words long, beginning with a brief outline of the ‘common sense’ in the area you have chosen, and then moving to use a form of anarchist thinking – classical or contemporary – in order to reframe the central assumptions of the orthodoxy in provocative ways.

So, if you are interested in being involved, could you contact one of us – Martin Parker (m.parker@le.ac.uk), Tom Swann (T.Swann@lboro.ac.uk), or Konstantin Stoborod (ks459@le.ac.uk) with a one page proposal as to what your chapter would look like? We are not assuming that the chapter themes that we have above will necessarily be the final ones, and welcome a dialogue with all our authors – perhaps suggesting some co-authorship too if we can see clearly overlapping themes. We also want to try to cover as many different forms of anarchist thought as we can, so might well make editing suggestions in that direction too.

In terms of deadlines, we would like the proposals by the end of Jan 2017, and then (after discussions with authors about the exact shape of the chapter) will want a first draft by the end of 2017. Final drafts by Easter 2018, so hopefully publication in late 2018.

We are looking forward to hearing from you, and email one of us if you want more clarification about our ideas.

All the best!

Martin, Tom and Kostya.