Marianna Fotaki

University of Warwick · Warwick Business School (WBS)

Despite crowdfunding platforms’ growing involvement in financing welfare, related ethical issues have received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we focus on GoFundMe, the leading welfare crowdfunding platform in the US, to examine whether it facilitates the establishment of a just society that democratizes access to funding. Informed...

Take a deep breath. Although nothing is more natural or essential to human bodies than breathing, this simple yet vital act is the critical result of complex organizational, material, and political processes. We suggest that breathing can be thought of as a political model of organizing insofar as it shapes questions of life and death while rooting...

This piece reflects on the untapped potential of feminist theories and activist practices to address vital organizational issues and societal challenges such as inequality, sustainability, and care for the environment. While we recognize and briefly review the progress on gender issues in organization studies achieved over the last decades, our foc...

Care—concern for and attending to the needs of the particular other we take responsibility—requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the industrial ‘clock time’ dominating our lives. Ethicists of care have highlighted the tensions between the temporalities involved in caring as a situated, relational and processual practice and the organiza...

This paper draws on feminist geographies of space, proposing a feminist critical spatial practice approach to study social movement organizing. Inspired by the work of Jane Rendell, a feminist theorist and architectural historian, we propose embodiment, materiality, affectivity, and alterity as co‐constitutive of feminist organizing. Specifically,...

Care is a human need and capacity without which we cannot survive and flourish. However, care is often underpaid and considered an excessive burden in the economy despite being socially valued. Philosophical and political perspectives on vulnerability are essential for understanding the continuous undermining of care in organizations and society. T...

Abstract Psychosocial research, which explores the unconscious and affective dynamics of organizational and social phenomena from critical perspectives, often adopts ethnographic methods. However, its locus, the unconscious, has an obscure, diffuse and dynamic nature that calls into question two central assumptions of conventional organizational et...

In examining how reform-leading supranational institutions respond to public criticism, this article advances current theory on their institutional accountability mechanisms and extends research on this topic by focusing on their responses to public criticism of alleged reform failures. We consider the case of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF...

This psychoanalytic study of affective labour focuses on its two central elements: human contact and love. It is based on a multi-sited organizational ethnography of the fine-dining sector in Istanbul, Turkey, where new restaurant areas known as ‘show kitchens’ place chefs in face-to-face contact with patrons. To understand the psychosocial process...

This chapter draws on feminist theories, and specifically the idea of feminist ethics, to propose embodied relational care based on interconnectedness, cohabitation and compassion for each other. Τaking inspiration from feminist thinking, it offers an eclectic proposal for a new ethics for management concerned with the situatedness of embodied ethi...

Whistleblowers are a vital means of protecting society because they provide information about serious wrongdoing. And yet, people who speak up can suffer. Even so, debates on whistleblowing focus on compelling employees to come forward, often overlooking the risk involved. Theoretical understanding of whistleblowers’ post-disclosure experience is w...

Despite the obvious link between spirituality, religiosity and ethical judgment, a definition for the nature of this relationship remains elusive due to conceptual and methodological limitations. To address these, we propose an integrative Spiritual-based model (ISBM) derived from categories presumed to be universal across religions and cultural co...

This article examines the question of solidarity in light of recent refugees’ and forced migrants’ arrivals on Greek island shores as the first point of entry to the European Union. It focuses on various community solidarity initiatives emerging in 2015 and how they unfolded over time, until replaced by hostility and indifference following the EU–T...

This article interrogates the idea of leadership in a decentralized organization, using Extinction Rebellion (XR) as a case study. Through close observation of this environmental movement, we problematize the notion of leaderless organizations and question whether the idea of a hierarchy- and power-free ‘decentralized organization’ is a fantasmatic...

This Special Issue encourages academic debate around how social and gendered inequalities exacerbate under times of bio-political and socioeconomic crises-such as the COVID-19 pandemic-in an increasingly globalized and transnational world. Exploring interconnections between feminist philosophy, art and activism, we call for a wide range of methodol...

This article extends current theorizations of the ethics of the commons by drawing on feminist thought to propose a relational embodied ethics of the commons. Departing from abstract ethical principles, the proposed ethical theory reconsiders commoning as a process emerging through social actors’ embodied interactions, resulting in the development...

Achieving Person-Centred Health Systems - edited by Ellen Nolte August 2020

Feminist research has produced important insights into the causes and forms of, and impediments to overcoming, gender-based discrimination in the workplace and society. Yet the impact of such work is rarely acknowledged or evaluated in the various research assessment exercises on which neoliberal universities increasingly rely to appraise the quali...

The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hours contracts and, most importantly, periods of prolonged unemployment for most of the working population, especially women. We o...

Organization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted...

Gender in management and organizations is an ever-present, though somewhat marginalized, topic. Unlike sex, which is linked to biology and reproduction, gender is a social category, though the two terms are closely connected, and the latter is seen as a social expression of the former. Gender is often raised in the context of persisting inequalitie...

Although organization and management scholars are beginning to research opposition and dissent emerging in response to the global financial crisis, there are few accounts or feminist analyses of social movements and women’s mobilizations as an important part of these movements. We address this gap by considering a case of women activists opposing e...

This article proposes an alternative sociological framework for dealing with the imaginary constitution of financial crises. Theorisation of financial crises is often limited by dualistic juxtaposition of the rational and irrational, moral and immoral, calculative and intuitive, thus neglecting the imaginary structuring of such dyads in the constru...

What form does power take in situations of retaliation against whistleblowers? In this article, we move away from dominant perspectives that see power as a resource. In place, we propose a theory of normative power and violence in whistleblower retaliation, drawing on an in-depth empirical study. This enables a deeper understanding of power as it c...

Care is a human ability we all need for growing and flourishing. It implies considering the needs and interests of others, and the quality of how we relate to each other is often defined by care. While the value of care in private life is widely recognized, its role in the public sphere is contested and subject to political debates. In work organiz...

While various forms of corruption are common in many health systems around the world, defining wrongdoing in terms of legality and the use of public office for private gain obstructs our understanding of its nature and intractability. To address this, I suggest, we must not only break the silence about the extent of wrongdoing in the health sector,...

This article introduces the Special Issue concerned with organizational spirituality, symbolism and storytelling. Stressing the growing scholarly interest in these topics, the article makes a two-fold contribution. First, it critically assesses their development over time while identifying the emerging trends and new ways in which spirituality, sym...

The public debate on whistleblowing needs to be changed. There is a persistent contradiction in how whistleblowers are perceived. On the one hand, whistleblowing is a vital way in which corruption comes to light. Yet, society does little to support the real-life struggles of the many whistleblowers who find themselves without a source of income and...

While there is a widespread acceptance of the link between religiosity and ethics, there is less certainty how this influence occurs exactly, necessitating further research into these issues. A main roadblock to our understanding of this influence from an Islamic perspective is the absence of a validated measurement tool. The purpose of this study...

A shift towards encouraging effective speak‐up arrangements in organizations has been visible in the activities of key actors across a range of institutional settings. Where there is little or no effective support available within organizations for speaking up about risky, illegal or dangerous activities, people who do so can be at risk of retaliat...

This chapter analyses common types of wrongdoing, the state of speak‐up systems in each sector, and how internal speak‐up arrangements for each industry case relate to the political and economic context. It draws lessons and outlines best practices based on evidence. The chapter also analyses the banking sector, in which “creative accounting”, rule...

This chapter aims to serve as a practical guide for professionals on how to design and implement effective speak‐up arrangements. It provides illustrative examples alongside clear practical recommendations. The chapter includes benefits of operating effective speak‐up arrangement. It addresses different types of speak‐up channels, their strengths a...

This chapter discusses the challenges and obstacles faced by those who operated the speak‐up arrangements. It presents research findings on how people speak‐up and how many times they do so. The chapter argues that it is important to distinguish between different internal speak‐up recipients. It utilizes the research by Muel Kaptein that shows stro...

Having initially welcomed more than a million refugees and forced migrants into Europe between 2015 and 2016, the European Union’s (EU’s) policy has shifted toward externalising migration control to Turkey and Northern Africa. This goes against the spirit of international conventions aiming to protect vulnerable populations, yet there is widespread...

This essay, and the speical issue it introduces, seeks to explore leadership in a post-truth age, focusing in particular on the types of narratives and counter-narratives that characterize it and at times dominate it. We first examine the factors that are often held responsible for the rise of post-truth in politics, including the rise of relativis...

Why do social entrepreneurs retain their faith in social entrepreneurship despite the organizational tensions and anxieties inherent to this field of practice? In this article, we employ the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to advance knowledge on social enterprise creation. The research analyses qualitative data relating to the adoption of the Co...

This occurs against the revelations about the widespread sexual harassment and persisting inequalities in the workplace such as gender pay gap and the absence of women and minoritized others from positions of power. Simultaneously, there has been a powerful backlash against women’s empowerment taking the form of anti-gender and postfeminist discour...

Bringing together research from critical diversity studies and organization theory, this edited collection challenges unspoken norms and patterns of discrimination in organizational bodies. The authors problematize the management of diversity by focusing on the differentiations between racialized, aged, gendered and sexed bodies. By taking a fresh...

What is the nature of whistleblower subjectivity? In this article, we depart from current scholarly depictions of this figure as a fearless truth-teller who is fully independent of the organization. We argue for a new framing that sees the self-construction of the whistleblower as infused with passionate attachments to organizational and profession...

This Chapter traces the effects of New Public Management (NPM) reform in various public organisations introduced in Thailand in the early 2000s. It portrays the realities of several bureaucratic organisations in the Thai civil service by investigating how far the concept of the impersonal, inflexible and rule-bound institution is a characteristic o...

This article explores the intersections of gender and centre–periphery relations and calls for theoretical and political involvement in gendered struggles against colonial and capitalist forces across different national contexts. The article raises questions about the possibility of resisting inequality and exploitation arising from capitalist expa...

Abstract This article discusses solidarity economy initiatives as instances of grassroots organizing, and explores how ‘values practices’ are performed collectively during times of crisis. In focusing on how power, discourse and subjectivities are negotiated in the everyday practices of grassroots exchange networks (GENs) in crisis-stricken Greece,...

The article explores how spaces aimed at improving accountability in health systems are socially produced. It addresses the implications of an initiative to promote patient involvement in government-funded research in the context of a large cancer research network in England. We employ a socio-spatial theoretical framework inspired by insights from...

Critical Management Education (CME ) provides a strong pedagogical background to provoke and unsettle viewpoints and strongly problematize “mainstream” views of sustainability and management . This chapter aims to contribute to this “de-naturalizing” agenda by helping management and sustainability instructors to design learning experiences aimed at...

The article explores how spaces aimed at improving accountability in health systems are socially produced. It addresses the implications of an initiative to promote patient involvement in government-funded research in the context of a large cancer research network in England. We employ a socio-spatial theoretical framework inspired by insights from...

Discussions of feminism and gender in organizations and management studies, have, with some notable exceptions, become stuck in something of a time-warp. This lies in stark contrast to the developments in the fields of feminism and gender theory more generally. Management and organization studies needs new applied topical gender theories that chall...

Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s while demonstrating the differential impact of such inequality generating structures and relationships on lives and bodies. Their argument about the process of social repr...

Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoreticall...

Market-based freedom of choice and user autonomy occupies a prominent position on the policy-maker agendas in many countries, increasingly more so than equity of access or equality of opportunity. The essay discusses how the introduction of market logic and consumerism in public health care services relies on, and taps into, unconscious dynamics an...

Let me first start by thanking everyone who responded to my editorial entitled: ‘Why and How is Compassion Necessary to Provide Good Quality Healthcare?’1 It is both a humbling and deeply gratifying experience, to receive so many thoughtful and valuable comments from colleagues whose work I know and respect. And it is in equal measure, rewarding an...

The burgeoning economic inequality between the richest and the poorest is a cause of concern for social, political, and ethical reasons. While businesses are both implicated and affected by growing inequality, business schools have largely neglected to subject the phenomenon to sufficient critique. This is, in part, because far too many management...

The involvement of users in the co-production of public services is of increasing importance as fiscal and financial crises put pressure on public spending in many countries around the world. The role of co-production in public policy is also important as it creates opportunities for users’ empowerment through their greater involvement in the key a...

Recent disclosures of failures of care in the National Health Service (NHS) in England have led to debates about compassion deficits disallowing health professionals to provide high quality responsive care. While the link between high quality care and compassion is often taken for granted, it is less obvious how compassion – often originating in th...

At a time when organizations are asked to imagine themselves anew in order to survive, organizational treatments of ‘imagination’ lack engagement with its profound political and generative nature. To address this gap, the paper draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and proposes a politically situated theory of imagination for orga...

In addressing the notion of women’s role and status and their subsequent participation in economic activities, the place of Islamic feminism within Islamic theology has been a controversial one and there are many for whom Islamic feminism is completely unacceptable. The purpose of this paper is to make evident in the midst of this diversity that th...

In this article, we propose a new way of approaching the topic of ethics for management and organization theory. We build on recent developments within critical organization studies that focus on the question of what kind of ethics is possible in organizational contexts that are inevitably beset by difference. Addressing this ‘ethics of difference’...

Trust has long been regarded as a vitally important aspect of the relationship between health service providers and patients. Recently, consumer choice has been increasingly advocated as a means of improving the quality and effectiveness of health service provision. However, it is uncertain how the increase of information necessary to allow users o...