Professor Bogdan Costea

Head of Department, Professor of Management and Society

Research Interests

In my research, I pursue three main lines of investigation and analysis: subjectivity, work and managerialism in the context of modernity. These three areas of concern are underlaid by a common thread that directly yet ambiguously connects the growth and empowerment of Human Resources Management during the past quarter-century with wider developments in the social sciences and the humanities. On the one hand, the societal power of the HRM project has increased as the managers’ “right to manage” has been emancipated from previous constraints. On the other hand, however, this increase in power, the right not simply to absorb agency but to develop and control the social reproduction of identity, results in a situation in which HRM is in principle called upon to assume ethical responsibilities that extend far wider beyond the institutional and cultural boundaries of work. The three core topoi of subjectivity, work and managerialism are points d'appui, fulcra through which I seek to explore the ways in which core philosophical arguments about the nature of the self, the meanings and implications of work, and human organisation reappear encoded in management studies. This type of investigation necessarily correlates my relevant field research of exemplary management ideas and practices with the relevant academic theorisations and analyses in management studies. My research frames this immanent correlation located in the HRM project within the broader context of the history and present state of social sciences and the humanities (the full manifold of les sciences humaines). The aim of this inquiry is to open up essential lines of communication with this latter wider community. My research involves collaboration with practitioners and theorists in both spheres in order to grasp the complex and inadequately understood relationship between ever-growing managerial power and a social order that seeks to renew itself in democratic terms.

The Future of Work - A CHRO Forum for the Twenty-First Century
Symposium

The Future of Work - A CHRO Forum for the Twenty-First Century
Types of Business and Community - Hosting of external, non-academic visitor

The Unsettled Humanities
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Reclaiming Good Government in the face of the Competition State, Neoliberalism and Managerialism
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Anna Yeatman
Hosting an academic visitor

8th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

University of Exeter
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Oxford University Press International Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

8th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Conference of the Management History Research
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

The Subject is Work The Time of the Will to Power or the future for Hegel and Marx
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

The Danger of Potentiality: Who Speaks HRM?
Invited talk

JUSTINE GRONBAEK PORS’ PHD THESIS: NOISY MANAGEMENT – A HISTORY OF THE DANISH SCHOOL GOVERNING FROM 1970-2010
Invited talk

Critical Management Studies 2011
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Managing To Avoid The Danger
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

7th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

EGOS Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

The Vitality of Managerialism: Images of Work in the 21st Century
Invited talk

Is human resourcefulness infinite? Notes on the human morphology of managerialism
Invited talk

Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

EFMD Conference on Undergraduate Management Education 2010
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Michel Foucault: Summer School
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

EGOS Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

HR Research Network
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Experimentality: Workshop 1, Programme Launch
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Beyond Chandler – Intellectual Impulses for Business and Management History Tomorrow
Invited talk

Imagining the political / The politics of imagination The Sociological Review 100th Anniversary Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Subjectivity in the Foundation of Contemporary Thinking
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Critical Management Studies 2009
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Critical Management Studies 2009
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Inner-Life Spirituality
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Heidegger’s Last God: who now can still save us?
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

RETHINKING LABOUR: LABOUR AFFECT AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Play, Work and the Modern Sense of Self - with Norman Crump
Invited talk

Management and Organizational History (Journal)
Editorial activity

Ethics and Information Technology (Journal)
Editorial activity

Centre for Scholarship and Innovation in Management Education, Pentland Centre

Centre for Productivity & Efficiency

WP E063, E - Floor, Management School
  • Centre for Technological Futures
  • Management and Society
  • People, Work and Organisation