Christian De Cock
Biographic Data
| ID | 200194 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian De Cock |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | De Cock |
| SIGNATURE | DE COCK C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8152-1523 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Disrupting climate change futures: Conceptual tools for lost histories
Considering the worsening climate crisis, we argue that our present conditions require a particular approach to the past in order to disrupt current intellectual trajectories. We enrol Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, via the writings of Svetlana Alexievich and Margaret Atwood, with the aim of bringing a criticality to the present to make us reconsider the ways we think about and act in our present world. Based on Alexievich and Atwood’s wor…
From antagonists to allies? Exploring the critical performativity of alternative organization
In this introduction to the special issue on critical performativity and alternative organization we provide a brief historico-theoretical sketch of the key concepts involved and point to ongoing pertinent debates in the field of critical management studies. We also present the articles included in the issue, which all explore aspects of how critical performativity and alternative organization may cross-fertilize each other. In doing so, this col…
Processes of domination in the contemporary workplace: Managing disputes in the Swedish healthcare sector
The aim of this article is to explain how forms of consent-driven domination are produced over actors with critical capacity to question the processes of domination to which they are subjected. Drawing on observations of meetings during which actors evaluated employee sick leave, we show how domination is locally achieved in situated interactions by (a) constructing a specific situational reality, (b) transferring responsibilities in accordance w…
What’s he building? Activating the utopian imagination with Trump
Can one sell any positive value of Trump’s presidency to an academic audience? The editors of this special series invited polemical essays, but maybe asking readers to consider the merit of Trump is going a little too far? We put forward the argument here that as critical scholars we simply cannot allow ourselves to be swept up in the bien-pensant tide of Trump-trashing, which has almost become as addictive as the current reality-TV quality of th…
Adorno's grey, Taussig's blue: Colour, organization and critical affect
In this article, we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of 'critical affect'. We then trace colour's affect in conditioni…
Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future
Our article deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of 10 important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market ec…
The possibility of critique under a financialized capitalism: The case of private equity in the United Kingdom
In this article, we examine the theoretically constructed case of private equity in the UK anno 2007. The theory at play is the theoretical edifice Luc Boltanski has been developing for more than two decades and which concerns the underlying architectonics of how social reality is constituted, challenged and stabilized. We thus interweave the story of private equity with the evolution of Boltanski’s work: from the six-world model to the widening …
Voices from the front lines of the climate wars
Future imaginings: Organizing in response to climate change
Climate change has rapidly emerged as a major threat to our future. Indeed the increasingly dire projections of increasing global average temperatures and escalating extreme weather events highlight the existential challenge that climate change presents for humanity. In this editorial article we outline how climate change not only presents real, physical threats but also challenges the way we conceive of the broader economic, political and social…
Specters, ruins and chimeras: Management & Organizational History 's encounter with Benjamin
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. © 2013 Taylor & Francis
Putting into question the imaginary of recovery: A dialectical reading of the global financial crisis and its aftermath
In this article, we put into question the discourses that emerged during the global financial crisis (GFC) and that coalesced around a particular socio-economic imaginary of ‘recovery’ over the period 2009–2012. Our reading of these discourses is very much guided by the notion of the dialectic as developed by Fredric Jameson, and as such this paper can be read as an attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. Through our dialectical reading, we…
Finance capitalism's perpetually extinguished pasts: Exploring discursive shifts 2007–2011
Financial phantasmagoria: Corporate image-work in times of crisis
Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ‘image-work’ of financial institutions. Over the period January—December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the glob…
Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger
This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger’s work points to a writing that can break free from the c…
Crisis, critique and the construction of normality: Exploring finance capitalism's discursive shifts
‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean
Organization Studies: The Sixth Organization Studies Summer Workshop “Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In” 25—28 May 2011, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, Paris, France
The Body Dances: Carnival Dance and Organization
Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty we seek to open up traditional categories of thought surrounding the relation `body-organization' and elicit a thought experiment: What happens if we move the body from the periphery to the centre? We pass the interlocking theoretical concepts of object-body/subject-body and habitus through the theoretically constructed empirical case of `carnival dance' in order to re-evaluate suc…
Liberalist Fantasies: Žižek and the Impossibility of the Open Society
In this paper we engage with the liberalist project in organization and management studies. The first `face' of organizational liberalism is expressed through post-bureaucratic discourses which very much define the mainstream of management thought today, highlighting the need for organizational openness which can only come through a liberation of management from the closed structures of the bureaucracy. The second face of organizational liberalis…
Organizing revolution
Consuming the Bauhaus
The “large conglomerate of changing ideas behind the name ‘Bauhaus’” (Kentgens‐Craig 1998 Kentgens‐Craig, Margret. 1998. “Art and politics: no “new unity”. In The Dessau Bauhaus building 1926–1999, Edited by: Kentgens‐Craig, M. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Birkhaeuser. [Google Scholar], 67), provides an ideal ground around which to explore notions of art and oppression. The closure of the original Bauhaus in 1933 was among the first of the Nazi suppressi…
Everything You Wanted to Know about Organization Theory … but were Afraid to Ask Slavoj Žižek
Introduction: An encounter, not a dialogueSlavoj Z ˇiz ˇek has produced a plethora of books over the past 15 years (at the rate of over one a year), many of which are all curiously alike, as he recycles compulsively a limited number of key themes.Yet, one never feels any sense of sterile repetition.In revisiting a topic, he often sheds new light on it, and so continues the conversation he seems to be having with himself.Z ˇiz ˇek is not much inte…
Of Philip K. Dick, Reflexivity, and Shifting Realities: Organizing (Writing) in Our Post-Industrial Society
After introducing the problematic from the perspective of organisation studies - the growing awareness of the tenuous nature of organisational reality and the difficulty we have in constructing texts that deal with this tenuous reality in a reflexive way - I explore the key characteristics of Dick's novels and the essence of his writing techniques. This is followed by a discussion of Ubik to give the reader a flavour of a typical Dickean novel. I…
From antagonists to allies? Exploring the critical performativity of alternative organization
In this introduction to the special issue on critical performativity and alternative organization we provide a brief historico-theoretical sketch of the key concepts involved and point to ongoing pertinent debates in the field of critical management studies. We also present the articles included in the issue, which all explore aspects of how critical performativity and alternative organization may cross-fertilize each other. In doing so, this col…
Adorno's grey, Taussig's blue: Colour, organization and critical affect
In this article, we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of 'critical affect'. We then trace colour's affect in conditioni…
Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future
Our article deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of 10 important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market ec…
Putting into question the imaginary of recovery: A dialectical reading of the global financial crisis and its aftermath
In this article, we put into question the discourses that emerged during the global financial crisis (GFC) and that coalesced around a particular socio-economic imaginary of ‘recovery’ over the period 2009–2012. Our reading of these discourses is very much guided by the notion of the dialectic as developed by Fredric Jameson, and as such this paper can be read as an attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. Through our dialectical reading, we…
Finance capitalism's perpetually extinguished pasts: Exploring discursive shifts 2007–2011
Organizing revolution
Processes of domination in the contemporary workplace: Managing disputes in the Swedish healthcare sector
The aim of this article is to explain how forms of consent-driven domination are produced over actors with critical capacity to question the processes of domination to which they are subjected. Drawing on observations of meetings during which actors evaluated employee sick leave, we show how domination is locally achieved in situated interactions by (a) constructing a specific situational reality, (b) transferring responsibilities in accordance w…
Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger
This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger’s work points to a writing that can break free from the c…
Crisis, critique and the construction of normality: Exploring finance capitalism's discursive shifts
‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean
Consuming the Bauhaus
The “large conglomerate of changing ideas behind the name ‘Bauhaus’” (Kentgens‐Craig 1998 Kentgens‐Craig, Margret. 1998. “Art and politics: no “new unity”. In The Dessau Bauhaus building 1926–1999, Edited by: Kentgens‐Craig, M. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Birkhaeuser. [Google Scholar], 67), provides an ideal ground around which to explore notions of art and oppression. The closure of the original Bauhaus in 1933 was among the first of the Nazi suppressi…
Everything You Wanted to Know about Organization Theory … but were Afraid to Ask Slavoj Žižek
Introduction: An encounter, not a dialogueSlavoj Z ˇiz ˇek has produced a plethora of books over the past 15 years (at the rate of over one a year), many of which are all curiously alike, as he recycles compulsively a limited number of key themes.Yet, one never feels any sense of sterile repetition.In revisiting a topic, he often sheds new light on it, and so continues the conversation he seems to be having with himself.Z ˇiz ˇek is not much inte…
Of Philip K. Dick, Reflexivity, and Shifting Realities: Organizing (Writing) in Our Post-Industrial Society
After introducing the problematic from the perspective of organisation studies - the growing awareness of the tenuous nature of organisational reality and the difficulty we have in constructing texts that deal with this tenuous reality in a reflexive way - I explore the key characteristics of Dick's novels and the essence of his writing techniques. This is followed by a discussion of Ubik to give the reader a flavour of a typical Dickean novel. I…
Consuming the Bauhaus
The “large conglomerate of changing ideas behind the name ‘Bauhaus’” (Kentgens‐Craig 1998 Kentgens‐Craig, Margret. 1998. “Art and politics: no “new unity”. In The Dessau Bauhaus building 1926–1999, Edited by: Kentgens‐Craig, M. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Birkhaeuser. [Google Scholar], 67), provides an ideal ground around which to explore notions of art and oppression. The closure of the original Bauhaus in 1933 was among the first of the Nazi suppressi…
Liberalist Fantasies: Žižek and the Impossibility of the Open Society
In this paper we engage with the liberalist project in organization and management studies. The first `face' of organizational liberalism is expressed through post-bureaucratic discourses which very much define the mainstream of management thought today, highlighting the need for organizational openness which can only come through a liberation of management from the closed structures of the bureaucracy. The second face of organizational liberalis…
Organizing revolution
The Body Dances: Carnival Dance and Organization
Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty we seek to open up traditional categories of thought surrounding the relation `body-organization' and elicit a thought experiment: What happens if we move the body from the periphery to the centre? We pass the interlocking theoretical concepts of object-body/subject-body and habitus through the theoretically constructed empirical case of `carnival dance' in order to re-evaluate suc…
Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger
This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger’s work points to a writing that can break free from the c…
Crisis, critique and the construction of normality: Exploring finance capitalism's discursive shifts
‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean
Organization Studies: The Sixth Organization Studies Summer Workshop “Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In” 25—28 May 2011, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, Paris, France
Financial phantasmagoria: Corporate image-work in times of crisis
Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ‘image-work’ of financial institutions. Over the period January—December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the glob…
Finance capitalism's perpetually extinguished pasts: Exploring discursive shifts 2007–2011
Voices from the front lines of the climate wars
Future imaginings: Organizing in response to climate change
Climate change has rapidly emerged as a major threat to our future. Indeed the increasingly dire projections of increasing global average temperatures and escalating extreme weather events highlight the existential challenge that climate change presents for humanity. In this editorial article we outline how climate change not only presents real, physical threats but also challenges the way we conceive of the broader economic, political and social…
Specters, ruins and chimeras: Management & Organizational History 's encounter with Benjamin
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. © 2013 Taylor & Francis
Putting into question the imaginary of recovery: A dialectical reading of the global financial crisis and its aftermath
In this article, we put into question the discourses that emerged during the global financial crisis (GFC) and that coalesced around a particular socio-economic imaginary of ‘recovery’ over the period 2009–2012. Our reading of these discourses is very much guided by the notion of the dialectic as developed by Fredric Jameson, and as such this paper can be read as an attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. Through our dialectical reading, we…
The possibility of critique under a financialized capitalism: The case of private equity in the United Kingdom
In this article, we examine the theoretically constructed case of private equity in the UK anno 2007. The theory at play is the theoretical edifice Luc Boltanski has been developing for more than two decades and which concerns the underlying architectonics of how social reality is constituted, challenged and stabilized. We thus interweave the story of private equity with the evolution of Boltanski’s work: from the six-world model to the widening …
Adorno's grey, Taussig's blue: Colour, organization and critical affect
In this article, we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of 'critical affect'. We then trace colour's affect in conditioni…
Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future
Our article deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of 10 important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market ec…
What’s he building? Activating the utopian imagination with Trump
Can one sell any positive value of Trump’s presidency to an academic audience? The editors of this special series invited polemical essays, but maybe asking readers to consider the merit of Trump is going a little too far? We put forward the argument here that as critical scholars we simply cannot allow ourselves to be swept up in the bien-pensant tide of Trump-trashing, which has almost become as addictive as the current reality-TV quality of th…
Processes of domination in the contemporary workplace: Managing disputes in the Swedish healthcare sector
The aim of this article is to explain how forms of consent-driven domination are produced over actors with critical capacity to question the processes of domination to which they are subjected. Drawing on observations of meetings during which actors evaluated employee sick leave, we show how domination is locally achieved in situated interactions by (a) constructing a specific situational reality, (b) transferring responsibilities in accordance w…
Disrupting climate change futures: Conceptual tools for lost histories
Considering the worsening climate crisis, we argue that our present conditions require a particular approach to the past in order to disrupt current intellectual trajectories. We enrol Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, via the writings of Svetlana Alexievich and Margaret Atwood, with the aim of bringing a criticality to the present to make us reconsider the ways we think about and act in our present world. Based on Alexievich and Atwood’s wor…
From antagonists to allies? Exploring the critical performativity of alternative organization
In this introduction to the special issue on critical performativity and alternative organization we provide a brief historico-theoretical sketch of the key concepts involved and point to ongoing pertinent debates in the field of critical management studies. We also present the articles included in the issue, which all explore aspects of how critical performativity and alternative organization may cross-fertilize each other. In doing so, this col…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)