My work is concerned with the ways by which management pracitioners, people with leadership responsibilities and change agents enable spaces of action in organizational settings, often beyond organisational boundaries.
My work seeks to foster an systemic understanding of human agency in the context of management, leadership, change work and careers. A systemic lens situates human agency in constantly changing, emergent, contradictory and partially unconscious fields. Thus, agency is always inter-active. It is entwined and in relation to our personal biography, as well as to other people, groups, institutions, technologies, social practices, material stuff, circumstances and the narratives, with which organisations make sense of their existence in the world.
This lens extends a traditional understanding of organisations, which tends to focus on the formal functions of the organisation, and thereby seeks to control the living aspects of organising, people, work, projects, and organisational culture in terms of corporate goals. - Anyone surprised, that organisational efforts to control these living aspects do not work according to plan?!
From a systemic perspective its illusionary to control action in rather messy, contradictory fields. Thus, while we come to realise that heroic images of management, leadership, careers and change work have their limits, we can become better in "reading" the field. Stress, tensions, resistance, breakdowns and crises are important prompts for action. Systemic approaches of management, leadership, careers and change work seek to bring our action in a more elegant and meaningful alignment with other elements. They also encourage us to engage co-creatively with the opportunities of our fields of action.
My teaching and research examines the practice, with which actors construct strategic action and caeers at the interaction of organisations, networks, society and nature. Themes comprise:
- Knowledge-based and creative work
- Shortage of qualified labour
- 'New Work'
- Project-based careers
- Responsible management - incl. social innovation, Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility
- Approaches to transformational change in the context of societal challenges
