In this introductory chapter, a debate is instigated about the different ontological assumptions that scholars in the fields of management and organization make about themselves, and the consequences and implications these assumptions have in practice. In this regard, the debate is positioned in relation to one of the major conversation topics within the fields of management and organization: self-fulfilling prophecies, i.e., the phenomena in which unsubstantiated, unethical, or dysfunctional assumptions about humans can lead to adverse practical consequences. In contrast to the dominating debating tradition in academia—the eristic struggle to defeat the opponent, not for the sake of good arguments, but for the sake of the victory in itself (as sarcastically outlined by Arthur Schopenhauer)—the instigated debate follows Socrates’ somewhat forgotten maieutic tradition in which debates are seen as vehicles for advancing the speaking partner’s arguments. The eleven contributions presented in this book are therefore presented as posts in an ongoing conversation through which discursive positions on the subject are made visible, reflected upon, and (possibly could be) altered. They form a collage of ontological assumptions and practical consequences to promote self-reflexivity in a quest-like manner. It is argued that this collage entails two superimposed debates. On the one hand, a debate about the extent to which scholars in the fields of management and organization are assumed to be—and should be—independent of social pressures, normative expectations, conventions, and institutional logics; on the other hand, a debate about the extent to which scholars in the fields of management and organization are assumed to speak—and should speak—from a position endowed with obligations and privileges. Through the different ways in which the book’s contributors tackle these interrelated issues, three more or less distinct argumentative themes and ontological assumptions emerge: Homo moralis, Homo reflectivus, and Homo mutatus. These themes form the narrative structure of the book but in themselves represent heuristic devices to even further stimulate a self-reflexive debate on Homo academicus within the fields of management and organization.

Musiklivets entreprenörskap utgörs av de många olika initiativ som tas på musikens område i syfte att etablera nya former av organiserade praktiker. Hur manifesteras ett sådant entreprenörskap i en region som Småland? Vilka är utmaningarna – och möjligheterna? Och vad händer när praktiker och forskare tar sig för att tillsammans skapa kunskap om de strategier som står till buds, här och nu, och in i framtiden?

Mot bakgrund av fyra empiriska fall framträder en tankefigursom både möjliggör och begränsar musiklivet i Småland. Vad utmärker denna tankefigur? Och vad får den för konsekvenser för de affärsmodeller som utvecklas i musiklivet?

For many, the question who do we think we are? connotes a very specific moral, the Law of Jante: You are not to think that you are anything special. As formulated by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933/2010), this law was once a satirical description of the social norms that Sandemose meant governed the behaviours and attitudes of working-class Norwegians and Danes into conformity and hostility towards individual success in the fictional village of Jante. Over the years, however, it has come to depict the egalitarian Scandinavian cultures as well as to acquire a kind of proverbial resonance both within and outside these cultures. In this chapter, it is argued that life in academia historically has represented quite the opposite of the Law of Jante, but that it is increasingly imbued by the moral of Sandemose’s satire. This development is fuelled by an assemblage of different ideas and phenomena such as the postmodern demise of science as a grand narrative, the expansion of higher education, the neoliberal university, and the Bologna reform. Each and every one of these changes, we argue, in different ways and to different extents, forms a fertile soil for the Law of Jante, and together contribute to the vulgarization of the academic scholar’s (dis)position. We then trace how the Law of Jante has been enacted by business schools, struggling to strike a balance between business and academia or, as (Engwall, Mercury meets Minerva: Business studies and higher education: The Swedish case. Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, 2009) has put it with reference to Roman mythology, between Mercury and Minerva. Finally, we problematize the Law’s (de)moralizing consequences for scholars in the fields of management and organization.

The Netflix rom-com series Emily in Paris revolves around Emily Cooper, who has been assigned by her Chicago-based employer to work for Savoir, a subsidiary marketing agency in Paris. In this paper, Emily in Paris is approached as a showcase of cultural entrepreneurship, and the existentialist reading of the series reveals a distinct symbolic universe that harbours the characters’ existential conundrums as they organize themselves and others in the course of their everyday lives. The revelation of this symbolic universe, it is argued, adds to the conversation about cultural entrepreneurship issues of power/resistance, management hierarchies, and technology.

In the fields of management and organization, there is an ongoing debate about different ontological assumptions about people in and around organizations, and the dangers of self-fulling prophecies, i.e., the phenomena in which unsubstantiated, unethical, or dysfunctional assumptions about people can lead to adverse practical consequences. This open access book advances this debate, but in a self-reflexive direction, asking: Who do we, as scholars in the fields of management and organization, think we are? What ontological assumptions about ourselves do we live by? Do we think we are something “special”, a 'Homo Academicus', distinctively separated from the life-world of managers and employees but linked with other academics such as, say, philosophers and sociologists? If so, what are the consequences and implications of such assumptions?Part of the popular Palgrave Debates in Business and Management series, each of the chapters disclose, problematize, and criticize different ontological assumptions about 'Homo Academicus' that underpins research in the fields of management and organization. It will be of great interest to management and organization scholars and students, as well as those with a broader interest in methodology and critical studies.

In this paper, we advance the conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as a method, learning goal, and methodology. The scenario is informed by our personal experiences of teaching management and art expressed in terms of three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul; and it is presented as an ethnography from the future. This future is envisioned to be characterized by four assumptions: that students are co-creators of knowledge; that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students’ learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges.

Revision is deeply rooted in academic norms and values regarding the importance of critical reflection and transparency of arguments, and not the least regarding the notion of research as a collective accomplishment. Over the last couple of decades, however the practice of revision has increasingly become interwoven with the institutionalized academic field logic of publish or perish, turning revision into a matter of opportunistically relating to normative editorial decisions based on blind peer reviews to be able to stay in the business. In this article, the aim is to destabilize the notion and practices of revision by questioning some of its taken-for-granted assumptions and challenging these assumptions by introducing an alternative approach to revision. Instead of talking about revision, I propose the use of devision, and instead of revising texts, I propose engaging in devising texts. Devision is conceptualized as a process consisting of four aspects of textual meaning exploration ‚ intentio auctoris, intentio opus, intentio opera, and intentio lectoris; and the art of devision is presented and problematized as a constellation of four interpretative actions: self-reflexivity, distancing, composing, and projection. In the last section, the art of devision's relation to meaningfulness is addressed in a normative and somewhat idealistic manner.

In this chapter the ongoing reconfigurations of the cultural and creative sectors, in which the dichotomy between producers and consumers is being repealed, and new prosumer (dis)positions are being installed, is explored through the Foucauldian lens of ‘technologies of the self’. According to Foucault, ‘technologies of the self’ are epistemological processes that permit individuals to affect their bodies, minds, and souls by certain operations so that they can reach a preferable state of being. The argument here brought forward is that such technologies are currently being transformed from a focus upon self to commune, and that such transformations have profound spatial consequences: Technologies of the self are being replaced by ‘space technologies’ of the commune. To illustrate my argument and outline the concept of ‘space technologies’ two empirical case studies are reflected upon: The British singer-songwriter Francis Dunnery’s house concert performances and the enacting of an opera house in a rural setting in Sweden.