Stockholms universitet
This page in English

Torkild ThanemProfessor

Om mig

Professor i management och organisation.

 

Undervisning

Jag har lång erfarenhet från att undervisa och handleda studenter på grundnivå, masternivå och doktorandnivå, samt MBA-studenter och universitetskollegor.

Forskning

Min forskning fokuserar på kroppens roll i arbetet och organisationen: Hur relaterar vi till den egna kroppen, till andras kroppsliga identiteter, och till arbetsgivarens förväntningar om hur vi bör ta hand om våra kroppar? Hur uttrycker vi oss med våra kroppar på jobbet och i vardagslivet? Hur känns det, på kroppen, att arbeta i en modern organisation? Detta reser en rad politiska och etiska frågor om hur våra liv och kroppar styrs, och hur vi kan skapa goda relationer i samhörighet med, eller i motsats till, organisatoriska kulturer och strukturer. I tidigare prosjekt har jag utforskat dessa frågor genom att bl.a. studera hälsofrämjande insatser i konsultbranschen och offentlig verksamhet, och genom att studera transpersoners arbetslivserfarenheter. Med finansiering från Vetenskapsrådet genomförde jag nyligen en etnografiskt fältstudie i ett svenskt klädföretag för att förstå hur det är att leva och arbeta i organisationer där ledningen antar att fysiskt starka medarbetare presterar bättre på jobbet. Min senaste bok är Embodied Research Methods (med David Knights).

Forskningsområden: Prestationskultur; hälsofrämjande insatser i arbetslivet; ledarskap; transpersoner i arbetslivet; kroppslig forskningsmetod; etik i företag och organisationer.

Publikationer

Thanem, T, & Knights, D. (2019) Embodied Research Methods. London: Sage.

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • From stress to resistance: Challenging the capitalist underpinnings of mental unhealth in work and organizations

    2022. Torkild Thanem, Hadar Elraz. International journal of management reviews (Print)

    Artikel

    The worldwide spread of work-related mental unhealth suggests that this is a major problem affecting organizations and employees on a global scale. In this paper, we therefore provide a thematic review of the literatures that address this issue in management and organization studies (MOS) and related fields. While these literatures examine how employee mental health is affected by organizational and occupational structures and managed by organizations and employees, they have paid relatively little attention to the capitalist labour relations which underpin the unhealthy conditions of contemporary working life. They have paid even less attention to how these conditions may be resisted. To help future scholarship in MOS challenge this state of affairs, we draw on some of the most basic but central notions of exploitation, alienation and resistance in classic and current critiques of capitalism, optimistic that this may help strengthen the field's capacity to confront mental unhealth in settings of work and organization.

    Läs mer om From stress to resistance

  • The humanities are not our patient

    2021. Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg. Management Learning 52 (3), 364-373

    Artikel

    When inviting contributions to a special issue of this journal titled ‘Management Learning and the Unsettled Humanities’ the guest editors did not simply encourage contributors to explore possibilities ‘for reciprocal integration’ between the two realms. Stressing that ‘the humanities . . . [are] facing a complex crisis on their own’, they stated that ‘the humanities . . . need to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through . . . the ideas and perspectives of organisational research’. While we may agree that all is not well in the humanities and share their scepticism towards ‘just prescribing the value of the humanities to ameliorate the ills of management education’, we are less confident that the humanities need management learning as much as we need them. As long as learning and scholarship in management and organisation studies continues to suffer from too much management, we doubt that ‘management education [may help] . . . unsettl[e] . . . the human within the . . . humanistic . . . disciplines’. Rather, students of management and organisation still have plenty to learn from the humanities, not least from its rich portrayal of human lives. It is on this basis we draw the conclusion that the humanities are not our patient.

    Läs mer om The humanities are not our patient

  • Care without Leaders: The Collective Powers of Affective Leadership

    2020. Iain Munro, Torkild Thanem. Paradox and Power in Caring Leadership, 198-209

    Kapitel
    Läs mer om Care without Leaders

  • Dissensus! Radical Democracy and Business Ethics

    2020. Carl Rhodes (et al.). Journal of Business Ethics 164 (4), 627-632

    Artikel

    In this introductory essay, we outline the relationship between political dissensus and radical democracy, focusing especially on how such a politics might inform the study of business ethics. This politics is located historically in the failure of liberal democracy to live up to its promise, as well as the deleterious response to that from reactionary populism, strong-man authoritarianism, and exploitative capitalism. In the context of these political vicissitudes, we turn to radical democracy as a form of contestation that offers hope in an affirmative, inclusive and sustainable alternative. On this basis we introduce the papers in the special issue as a collective exploration of the ethics and politics of radical democracy as manifesting in dissensus and the subversion of corporate and elite power by alternative democratic practices and realities.

    Läs mer om Dissensus! Radical Democracy and Business Ethics

  • Deleuze and the deterritorialization of strategy

    2018. Iain Munro, Torkild Thanem. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 53, 69-78

    Artikel

    Mainstream ideas of strategy are aimed at gaining and maintaining power. In contrast, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is directed against the concentration of corporate and state power and capitalist forms of exploitation. Their writings provide us with valuable concepts for understanding the workings of strategy and exploring creative ways through which strategy can be re-evaluated and subverted. This paper develops three of Deleuze and Guattari’s main concepts for understanding the strategic movements within contemporary capitalism: i) nomadic strategy, ii) deterritorialization, and iii) the occupation of smooth space. It then uses these concepts to explain the rise of new strategies in the domains of the news media, the music industry and the Occupy movement, which attempt to subvert corporate forms of exploitation. This radically challenges existing processual notions of strategy that have an underlying conservative bias, as well as other popular conceptions of strategy like Porter’s management of “barriers to entry”.

    Läs mer om Deleuze and the deterritorialization of strategy

  • The Ethics of Affective Leadership: Organizing Good Encounters Without Leaders

    2018. Iain Munro, Torkild Thanem. Business ethics quarterly 28 (1), 51-69

    Artikel

    This article addresses the fundamental question of what is ethical leadership by rearticulating relations between leaders and followers in terms of affective leadership. The article develops a Spinozian conception of ethics which is underpinned by a deep suspicion of ethical systems that hold obedience as a primary virtue. We argue that the existing research into ethical leadership tends to underplay the ethical capacities of followers by presuming that they are in need of direction or care by morally superior leaders. In contrast, affective leadership advocates a profoundly political version of ethics, which involves people in the pursuit of joyful encounters that augment our capacity to affect and be affected by others. Instead of being led by people in leadership positions, we are led by active affections that enhance our capacity for moral action.

    Läs mer om The Ethics of Affective Leadership

  • Affective politics in gendered organizations

    2017. Alison Pullen, Carl Rhodes, Torkild Thanem. Organization 24 (1), 105-123

    Artikel

    Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.

    Läs mer om Affective politics in gendered organizations

  • What’s Wrong with Queer? Between Queer Dialogue and Separatist Safe Spaces

    2017. Louise Wallenberg, Torkild Thanem. Feminists and queer theorists debate the future of critical management studies, 195-201

    Kapitel

    In this short piece we take issue with the current separatist tendencies that are being expressed in certain parts of the queer community. We illustrate how this compares with central ideas in proto-queer thought and queer theory, and how it risks undermining the possibility of a queer dialogue and queer politics. 

    Läs mer om What’s Wrong with Queer? Between Queer Dialogue and Separatist Safe Spaces

  • Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work

    2016. Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg. Organization 23 (2), 250-271

    Artikel

    While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qualitative study from a Northern European country to investigate how male-to-female transvestites do and undo gender in everyday life and work. In contrast to extant research, we found that participants did transgender and undid gender by underdoing gender, that is, by combining feminine, masculine and ungendered practices and attributes in ways that made passing and drag insignificant. As transvestites simultaneously expressed masculine and feminine forms of embodiment, we argue that they may more obviously challenge, though not dismantle, dominant forms of gender and identity than suggested by previous accounts. We conclude by discussing broader implications for the understanding of gender, identity, power and resistance in organizations.

    Läs mer om Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work

  • Monstrous ethics

    2015. Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg. The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organization, 433-446

    Kapitel
    Läs mer om Monstrous ethics

  • The Body

    2015. Torkild Thanem. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies, 276-284

    Kapitel
    Läs mer om The Body

  • What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

    2015. Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg. Organization 22 (2), 235-250

    Artikel

    Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and “im/possible” ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethics of organizational life through Spinoza’s affective ethics. Neither a moral rule system nor an infinite duty to recognize the other, Spinoza offers a theory of the good, powerful and joyful life by asking what bodies can do. Rather than an unrestrained, irresponsible and individualistic quest for power and freedom, this suggests that we enhance our capacities to affect and be affected by relating to a variety of different bodies. We first scrutinize recent attempts to develop an ethics of recognition and embodiment in organization studies. We then explore key concepts and central arguments of Spinozian ethics. Finally, we discuss what a Spinozian ethics means for the theory and practice of embodied ethics in organizational life.

    Läs mer om What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

  • More passion than the job requires?

    2013. Torkild Thanem. Leadership 9 (3 (SI)), 396-415

    Artikel

    Despite Weber’s early emphasis on passionate emotions in charismatic leadership and a recent but broader interest in the embodied and emotional aspects of leadership, we still know relatively little about how passions are embodied in leadership. We also know little about how such passions may transgress formally and socially defined limits of leadership in organizations. Through a case of workplace health promotion this paper therefore investigates how people in organizational leadership roles passionately – and corporeally – transgress the limits of these roles whilst pursuing organizational change. Going beyond extant research, the paper argues that the leaders’ pursuit of health was driven by their own embodied passions as well as by organizational rationales, but that their passions were expressed in largely non-charismatic ways that de-motivated rather than motivated employees.

    Läs mer om More passion than the job requires?

  • All talk and no movement? Homeless coping and resistance to urban planning

    2012. Torkild Thanem. Organization 19 (4), 441-460

    Artikel

    Privileging the discursive expression of micro-resistance while exploiting spatial metaphors such as cynical distancing and escape, recent work in Critical Management Studies (CMS) has tended to find resistance everywhere without actually examining its spatial whereabouts. Utilizing a spatial approach, this article therefore investigates how homeless people in Stockholm not only resisted but also coped otherwise with two urban planning projects that intended to drive them away from two public places. Whereas some of the homeless subverted the planners’ intentions by returning, others confirmed their intentions by leaving. The article further discusses the nomadic nature of these movements and how they were related to homeless discourses of apathy, cynicism and contentment. Finally, it discusses what implications this may have for homeless people and urban planning organizations, and for the understanding of resistance in CMS.

    Läs mer om All talk and no movement? Homeless coping and resistance to urban planning

  • Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization

    2007. Stephen Linstead, Torkild Thanem. Organization Studies 28 (8), 1483-1501

    Artikel

    Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true — that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive — not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.

    Läs mer om Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization

  • Living on the edge

    2006. Torkild Thanem. Organization 13 (2), 163-193

    Artikel

    Following the recent curiosity for monsters in social and organizational research, this paper questions the power, purity and boundaries of organization by accentuating its risky encounters with heterogeneous, monstrous bodies. In an attempt to problematize organization theory’s implicit dissociation of monsters from organization, the understanding and treatment of monsters is traced across a variety of discursive formations in Western history—from Medieval and Renaissance theology and medicine, via Classical life science, freak shows and contemporary performance art, to recent social science and organization theory. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) work on creative involution, the paper goes beyond previous social and organizational research in thinking the radicality of monsters, and it concludes with an argument for a monstrous organization theory that: (i) encourages organizational researchers to critically reflect about their own monstrosity; (ii) challenges the stigmatization of monstrous embodiment; and (iii) delves into bodies that live on the edge and disrupt organizational boundaries

    Läs mer om Living on the edge

Visa alla publikationer av Torkild Thanem vid Stockholms universitet

Redigera profilen