Riding populist storms: Brexit, Trumpism and beyond, Special Paper Series Editorial

Abstract

In this editorial, we aim to introduce the diverse set of 21 papers we have curated over the past 2 years, to review their collective contribution to the knowledge base in critical management and organisation studies, and to reflect on how they add to and challenge existing debates within our field. These papers speak about populism in a wide range of voices from multiple perspectives. The geographical reach is wide, with populism discussed in relation to the contexts of India, Latin America, France, the United Kingdom and the United States by authors working in the latter three countries as well as Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden and the Netherlands. The papers cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, drawing on political science, history, sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Methodolotgical approaches include ethnography, historical narrative, discursive approaches and autoethnography. As such, these papers raise important questions and offer perspectives and ways forward that are in urgent need of attention and discussion by critical management and organisation studies communities, challenging readers’ understandings of populism at macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Here we tie the whole series together by highlighting emergent themes and identifying future research directions that these papers have opened up.

Uncanny Organization and the Immanence of Crisis: The public sector, neoliberalism and Covid-19

“…Brown (2019) observes that, ‘Neoliberalism – the ideas, institutions, the policies, the political rationality – has, along with its spawn, financialization, likely shaped recent world history as profoundly as any other nameable phenomenon in the same period’ (p. 17). Organization studies scholars have provided insights into how the public sector is in the grip of neoliberalism (Lopdrup-Hjorth & du Gay, 2020; Robinson & Bristow, 2020; Zanoni, Contu, Healy, & Mir, 2017). Public sector organizations have undertaken decades of institutional change driven by neoliberal ideas, including the marketization of services; efficiency targets; and the rise of managerialism in unrelenting expressions of new public management (du Gay, 2003; Hood, 1991; Spicer & Fleming, 2007).…”

La relevancia del discurso gerencial para los estudios organizacionales: reflexiones durante un evento pandémico

“…Pese a la potente crisis económica que afectó al mundo en el periodo 2008-2013, y cuyos efectos están todavía muy presentes no solo en el terreno económico, social y político (Du Gay & Morgan, 2013;Piketty, 2014;Alonso & Fernández Rodríguez, 2018;Robinson & Bristow, 2020), sino en el creciente desafío del cambio climático (Urry, 2008;Koch, 2013), en general el discurso del management no se ha alejado de las recetas anteriores: la crisis siempre podría ser superada mediante el recurso a más innovación o emprendimiento, aunque como novedad también se ha destacado la posibilidad de aprovechar las ventajas de la economía colaborativa (para no solamente capear la crisis reduciendo gastos sino, además, verla como una buena oportunidad de negocio) y apostar por una nueva economía verde que, pese a las buenas intenciones en algunos de los discursos, encuentra importantes limitaciones por la gran dependencia de las energías fósiles para el funcionamiento de la producción industrial y su logística de distribución (Koch, 2013).…”

Organising populism: From symbolic power to symbolic violence

“…Thus, although populism has become a growing area of interest in MOS since 2016 (see Robinson and Bristow, 2020), MOS researchers, in dealing with politics in general, have tended to focus more on the politics of organising (e.g. Levy and Reiche, 2018) than on the organising of politics (Husted et al, 2022).…”

“…This means that a deeper understanding of how populism – and more broadly, the politics of campaigns and campaigning – is organised has yet to be developed within MOS. To quote Robinson and Bristow (2020: 367), we need to study ‘the organisation of populist movements, looking at political parties as organisations’.…”