Stockholm university

2021 Best Critical Dissertation Award to Yashar Mahmud and his thesis Organizing Refugees

Yashar Mahmud has received the "2021 Best Critical Dissertation Award" for his thesis Organizing Refugees. The award is presented by the Critical Management Studies Department of the Academy of Management. Yashar Mahmud defended his thesis at Stockholm Business School in 2020 and today he is an assistant professor at the Management Section.

Yashar Mahmud
Yashar Mahmud with his thesis Organizing Refugees.

The Best Critical Dissertation Award

Each year, the Critical Management Studies division of the Academy of Management awards a prize to an outstanding doctoral dissertation that draws on and contributes to CMS. The award is sponsored by the journal Organization (the major forum for dialogue and innovation in organization studies, addressing significant current and emergent theoretical, meta theoretical and substantive developments in the field).

Diploma Best Critical Dissertation Award
Certificate Best Critical Dissertation Award

Critical Management Studies division of the Academy of Management

The CMS Division serves as a forum within the Academy of Management (a leading professional association for scholars dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge about management and organizations) for the expression of views critical of established management ideologies and practices, the taken-for-granted social or economic orders surrounding organization and business, and mainstream management theorizing/theories. Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society encourage organizations and their managers towards domination and exploitation. Driven by a shared desire to change this situation, we aim in our research, teaching, and practice to develop critical interpretations of management and society and to generate radical alternatives.

Summary of the Dissertation Organizing Refugees

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Finland, Greece, and Bulgaria during 2015-2019, this dissertation is a step towards enhancing management and organization studies' (MOS) engagement with one of the greatest challenges of our time – refugees. The theoretical contribution of this monograph is in its attempt to challenge MOS' taken-for-granted approach of engaging with, seeing, and writing about reality. Furthermore, conceptually, it offers a time-multiple approach to organizing. Moreover, it shows that, methodologically, organization studies can benefit from experimenting with and learning from other disciplines' methods of expression.