The Scholar’s Responsibility in a Collapsing World

Our field, Management and Organization Studies, is marked by a deep and pervasive depoliticization. We strip contexts of their political content, treat them as neutral backdrops for empirical inquiry rather than as sites of struggle, power, and morality, and we do this in the name of value-neutrality and rigor. Over the past few years, I have heard countless times: “We are academics; we should not be doing politics.” Every now and then, there are calls to return to ‘conventional’ scholarship and teaching[1], as if those conventions were themselves apolitical. The question at the heart of this special issue, “Can and should science be free from ideology?”, forces us to confront that assumption. My answer is that the pretense of neutrality is itself an ideological position, one that carries increasingly serious moral consequences.

A world that we cannot keep in the background

Our field has long treated context as backdrop. But that backdrop is now burning, and it can no longer be ignored. We are living through an accumulation of crises that cannot be bracketed: Accelerating ecological collapse, the resurgence of authoritarian and fascist movements, the erosion of public institutions and constitutional norms, and the growing politics of dehumanization of migrants, racialized and religious minorities, and other targeted communities – through policies, policing, and everyday organizational practices. And – most searingly – the genocide in Gaza (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2025) and the broader normalization of mass violence unfolding in plain sight, with the active complicity of states, corporations, and international bodies. These are not separate misfortunes. They are interconnected expressions of extractivist and militarist logics that our field has, by and large, treated as background noise – or not treated at all.

For me and for many colleagues, these cumulative ruptures have made it impossible to sustain the fiction of value-neutral scholarship. When universities are defunded and instrumentalized, when academic freedom is under direct political attack, when organizations play documented roles in enabling dispossession and violence – how can we continue researching them as if harm were marginal rather than structural? How can we be asked to revert to ‘conventional’ teaching when those conventions have so often normalized precisely the systems that brought us here?

The politics of pretending there are no politics

The claim to neutrality is never neutral. This is not a new insight, even within our own field. Willmott (1997) argued that our knowledge of management and organizations is inescapably normative, showing that the field has been overwhelmingly captured by a technical interest in prediction and control, while the emancipatory interest – concerned with exposing domination and alleviating unnecessary suffering – has remained marginal. The illusion of ethically neutral, value-free knowledge, he warned, is not just mistaken but ‘calamitous’ (p. 334). And yet, nearly three decades later, little has changed. Mainstream management scholarship continues to orient itself toward efficiency and optimization, while sustaining the fiction that such priorities are ‘value neutral’. In sustaining this fiction, it systematically refrains from asking whose interests it serves, whose suffering it renders invisible, and what forms of power it helps to reproduce. This is not an innocent inheritance. As Hamann et al. (2020) – and so many others – have argued, the global spread of management knowledge has been a strategic project, advancing Western and American conceptions of business centered on market competition, private property, and extractive logics, while disregarding alternative forms of organizing based on communal norms and respect for nature.

Banerjee (2008) uses the concept of necrocapitalism to describe contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death – from the privatization of war to the destruction of Indigenous livelihoods by extractive industries. His work makes visible what our field’s dominant frameworks have been designed to render invisible: That organizations are not merely sites of coordination and value creation but also, routinely, instruments of harm. When we bracket that out in the name of scientific neutrality, we are not being rigorous. We are being complicit.

Engagement is not the enemy of scholarship

None of this is a call to collapse scholarship into activism or to abandon the careful, patient work of inquiry. But it is a refusal to remain enclosed within an academic bubble, detached from public debate and collective struggles, while the world crumbles at our doorstep.

Stuart Hall (1992: 287) drew a critical distinction between ‘academic work’ and ‘intellectual work’: “they overlap, they abut each other, they feed off one another, the one provides you with the means to do the other. But they are not the same thing.” For Hall, academic work – the institutional, disciplinary, methodological labor – provides the means, but is not the end. On the other hand, intellectual work matters insofar as it is a practice that always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference – but he was equally insistent on intellectual humility, on understanding the politics of intellectual work without substituting intellectual work for politics. Within our own field, Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009) made a similar case: That critical scholarship must move beyond “righteous” critique and actively engage with the debates and practices that shape organizations and the lives entangled with them. We need both, in a reciprocal loop: Rigorous, evidence-based scholarship and intellectual engagement that intervenes in public debates. I do believe it would be disastrous – for our profession and for society – if we refused to look beyond publications and citations. We become obsolete the moment we decide the world’s crises are someone else’s business.

What is needed is a reimagining of our role: An intellectual project aimed at understanding and intervening in the social and structural crises that define our present, animated by what Ien Ang (2016) calls an “ineluctable longing for a better world.” In a moment when crises are cumulative and the institutions we once trusted are buckling under their weight, neutrality is not a principled stance. It is a choice – and one we can no longer afford.

[1] See, for example, the December 2025 Le Figaro report on a CERU study denouncing French business schools as “hotbeds of radical ecology” for integrating sustainability and critical perspectives into their curricula. https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/hec-essec-em-lyon-quand-l-ecologie-radicale-infiltre-les-ecoles-de-commerce-20251223