عنوان

The political event :

Number

TLets403143

Title Proper

The political event :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Böhm, Steffen

Title Proper by Another Author

impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Warwick

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2003

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Warwick

Text preceding or following the note

2003

Text of Note

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.

HD Industries. Land use. Labor

HM Sociology

Böhm, Steffen

University of Warwick

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y