• Identify and explain core concepts related to politics and organization 

• Analyze empirical cases based on core concepts from the course  

• Discuss the assumptions that guide studies on politics and organization and, where appropriate, their enmeshment with AI   

• Reflect on one’s own role as a researcher in studies of politics and organization  

• Critically and generously evaluate other people’s work on politics and organization  

Course content

Within organization studies, politics has historically been treated as either a narrow, ’small-p’ matter of competing for internal resources, or an assumed, taken-for-granted ’big-P’ context in liberal democracies. Recent debates in our field, and the social sciences more broadly, make this simple bracketing untenable. Polarization and populism, shifting state–market boundaries and ‘patriotic capitalism’, social movements, and the rise of data-driven governance have all made visible the political stakes of organizational life. This course addresses that gap head-on by equipping doctoral researchers with conceptual and methodological resources to study politics as organization and organization as political.  

The course is directly relevant to PhD students in organization studies for four reasons. First, it deepens conceptual literacy across classic and contemporary strands of political thought that are now unavoidable in organizational research (e.g., sovereignty, representation, legitimacy, biopolitics, neoliberalism, algorithmic governmentality). Students learn how these ideas travel into the analysis of firms, public agencies, platforms, and hybrid collectives, and how to mobilize them to craft stronger theoretical contributions. Second, it strengthens methodological reflexivity. Political phenomena complicate sampling, access, safety, and ethics; they also challenge what counts as ’data’ (from archival traces and policy documents to digital footprints and model outputs). The course supports students in designing feasible studies and defending their choices: conceptually, empirically, and normatively. Third, it expands empirical imagination by connecting research on everyday organizational politics with work on parties, movements, bureaucracies, and emergent technopolitical infrastructures. Finally, it fosters scholarly voice: learning to write and review politically informed research with clarity and generosity is itself a professional competence in our field. 

The three modules covering a day each (the politics of organization, the organization of politics, and the reorganization of politics by AI) are designed to speak to one another in a progression from micro/meso practice to macro institution and back through contemporary infrastructures that recombine them.

1. The politics of organization foregrounds how power, voice, and contestation are entangled with everyday organizing. Politics is not a deviation from rationality but a constitutive mode of organizing: who gets to define problems, set agendas, and legitimize decisions? By situating these practices within wider political imaginaries (e.g., market rule, managerialism, post-bureaucracy), students see that organizational politics both reflects and reproduces broader projects of governance. The day aims to address a fundamental question: What are the politics at stake in organization studies and how can we help politicize the objects of our concern in ways that extend the sense of possibility and choice about the (organizational) worlds we inhabit.  
   
   
2. The organization of politics reverses the vantage point: how are political activities organized? Parties, social movements, NGOs, and activist networks are not merely ’contexts’; they are organizing projects with distinctive architectures, routines, and accountability relations. Studying their repertoires, coalition-building, platforming, campaigning, coordinating dispersed publics, reveals continuities with and differences from business and public organizations. This reframing helps students understand what it means to articulate and coordinate political activities, and to analyze how political logics travel into corporations, universities, and cultural institutions. 
   
   
3. The reorganization of politics by AI ties the first two together by focusing on the infrastructural transformations that machine learning, datafication, and digital platforms catalyze. AI reshapes organizational politics internally (algorithmic management, scoring and surveillance, automated decision-support) and reorganizes politics externally (targeted campaigning, content moderation, mobilization and misinformation, regulatory governance). In both domains, questions of legitimacy, accountability, expertise, and representation are reconfigured: who designs and audits models; how are publics and stakeholders constituted; what counts as evidence or explanation; where is discretion located and contested? Students learn to analyze AI not simply as a tool but as a political technology that reorders what the political can be, and with which organizational forms it resonates. 

The three days connect because the small-p politics inside organizations can only be understood in relation to the institutional architectures and public controversies of capital-P politics; meanwhile, AI-mediated infrastructures entangle the two by creating new arenas, actors, and asymmetries that cross organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. The course therefore enables PhD researchers to move analytically across levels (micro–meso–macro) and across sites (firm–political party–movement–platform), tracing how power is organized, justified, and resisted. 

For doctoral work, the payoff is clear: more incisive problematizations, stronger theoretical framing, richer data strategies, and publications that speak beyond siloed subfields. Participants leave with a vocabulary and set of exemplars to diagnose and research organizational phenomena as political through and through: precisely the kind of scholarship the field of organization studies needs now. 

Teaching methods

A combination of lectures, workshops, dialogues, exercises, student presentations and discussions. The course also contains so-called ‘paper bazaars’ where participants will present course literature to each other and outline key arguments in the syllabus. 

Lecture plan

A note on day 1:  

We kick off the first day with an exploration of the politics of organization. Drawing on classic and contemporary work in organizational politics, governmentality, and critical management studies, this session asks participants to locate politics within their own empirical settings: boardrooms, bureaucracies, NGOs, start-ups, or digital platforms. By tracing struggles over meaning, expertise, and belonging, we expose how organizational forms sustain or subvert broader political projects such as neoliberal governance, professional domination, or managerial populism. Day 1 thus grounds the course by showing that politics is not external to organization, but embedded in its routines, vocabularies, and technologies of control. 

 A note on day 3:
We conclude the course by looking at a significant set of epistemic and political transformations that are taking place as states and organizations begin to understand themselves and their problems through the paradigm of deep neural network algorithms.  We treat deep learning as an epistemic order that renders social and organizational life as features, clusters, and functions, collapsing plural claims into the single, actionable output of a model. We will explore how legitimacy, accountability, and representation are being reconfigured and will analyze how AI makes politics thinkable and actionable in particular ways, and with what consequences for collective claims, discretion, and contestation. We finally ask how AI architectures reorder authority, representation, and discretion, and how that, in turn, reshapes everyday organizing and political institutions in our field.

Course literature

The course is based on journal articles and book sections that focus on the intersection of politics and organization and extends to their recent enmeshment with AI. The syllabus contains both classical and contemporary texts, which aim to provide students with an overview of main debates within organization studies but also help them identify core concepts to use in their own research. 

Day 1: The politics of organization 

Burns, T. (1961). Micropolitics: Mechanisms of institutional change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 6(3): 257-281. 

Mintzberg, H. (1985). The organization as political arena. Journal of Management Studies, 22(2): 133-154. 

Thomas, R. & Davies, A. (2005). Theorizing the micropolitics of resistance: New Public Management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5): 683-706. 

Fleming, P. & Spicer, A. (2007). Contesting the corporation: Struggle, power and resistance in organizations (chapter 1-3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Courpasson, D. (2017). The politics of everyday. Organization Studies, 38(6): 843-859. 

O’Doherty, D., & De Cock, C. (2024). Politics in organization studies: Multi-disciplinary traditions and interstitial positions. Organization Studies, 45(5), 745–766. 

Day 2: The organization of politics 

Michels, R. (1915). Political Parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy (foreword by Lipset, S. M.). New York: Dover Publications.

Freeman, J. (1972). The tyranny of structurelessness. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17: 151-165.

Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V. & Land, C. (2014). The question of organization: A manifesto for alternatives. ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 14(4): 623-638.

Reinecke, J. (2018). Social movements and prefigurative organizing: Confronting entrenched inequalities in Occupy London. Organization Studies, 39(9): 1299-1321.

Husted, E., du Plessis, E. M., & Dahlman, S. (2025). A processual perspective on alternative organization: Reorienting critical research through a study of two political parties. Human Relations, 0(0): 1-27.

Husted, E. (2025). What is political organization? A typology of organized and atomized responses to climate change. Working paper: 1-35.

Day 3: The re-organization of politics by AI

 Amoore, L. (2023). Machine learning political orders. Review of International Studies, 49(1), 20–36.

Amoore, L., Campolo, A., Jacobsen, B., & Rella, L. (2024). A world model: On the political logics of generative AI. Political Geography, 113, 1-9.

Cloutier, C., Desjardins, F., & Rouleau, L. (2025). Grand Challenges Viewed through the Pragmatist Lens of the Economies of Worth: A Multidisciplinary Review and Framework for the Conduct of Moral Work in Pluralistic Settings. Journal of Management Studies, 62(2), 923–953.

De Cock, C. & Nyberg, D. (2026). From Alignment to Apocatastasis: For a Political AI. 6th Colloquium on Philosophy and Organization Studies (PHILOS).

Scott, S. V., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2025). Exploring AI-in-the-making: Sociomaterial genealogies of AI performativity. Information and Organization, 35(1), 1-11.

Exam
Four weeks after the course, participants must submit a short paper (11-15 pages) where they reflect on the relationship between politics and organization, and, where appropriate, AI. Furthermore, each participant will have to review another participant’s paper (max 2 pages) and submit the review no less than eight weeks after the course. EH and CDC will read half the papers each. More information about the assignment will be provided during the course.

Note: In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have seats, seats will be filled based a first come first serve. CBS PhD students will have priority.’