“Fascism as a management philosophy”
by Dirk Matten
York University
Place: MA-330
Abstract
This paper analyses the advent of fascism as a management philosophy, and its growing influence in the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary business practice. While many contemporary management practices identified as fascist in nature have existed isolated and been analysed for considerable time the paper delineates the threshold of characterizing the thought and practice of fascist management by the criterion of conformity with enlightenment principles. On this basis, some dominant practices in contemporary management are analysed and their fascist nature is identified. The paper closes with some observations around the implementation of fascism as a new management philosophy.
Bio
Dirk Matten is a Professor at the Schulich School of Business, where he holds the Hewlett Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility and is the Associate Dean of Research, a role he previously served from 2014 to 2018. He is also the founding director of Schulich’s Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business. He has a doctoral degree and the habilitation from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in Germany. In 2019/20 he was the Gourlay Visiting Professor of Ethics in Business at Trinity College of the University of Melbourne. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of London, the University of Nottingham, Copenhagen Business School and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. He has taught and done research at academic institutions in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Turkey, and the USA.
He has published 29 books and edited volumes as well as more than 90 journal articles and book chapters, which have won numerous prestigious awards. In August 2018, his paper with Jeremy Moon on ‘Implicit and Explicit CSR received the highly prestigious “Academy of Management Review Paper of the Decade Award”. In the same year he was also ranked #44 in the ‘Top 100 Corporate Social Responsibility Influence Leader’ ranking (next to CEOs and CSR leaders of Unilever, Google, Apple etc. He is the only academic scholar on the list). In 2019 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from his school as well as the York Research Leader Award.
