Fredrik Weibull

Fredrik Weibull teaches and researches at the Department of Management & Organisation. His research focuses on understanding the history of management, work and organisation theory and draws on political and social theory, continental thought, history of ideas, war studies and military history.

Supervision at Bachelor and Master levels
I am interested in supervising thesis projects written in either Swedish or English and in the field(s) of Management and Organisation Studies (MOS). I am particularly disposed to guide inquiries which approach the study of work, organisation, management and technology by way of being informed by the manifold interpretive, cultural, critical and historical approaches from within the broader context of the present and historical state of the social sciences and humanities. This means broadly the diagnosing and analytical deconstructing of the historically ongoing processes in which the contemporary human subject ‘at work’ is being made up. In this way I encourage investigations which move to grasp the work organisational, managerial and entrepreneurial subject of late capitalist societies through entertaining ‘critical history of thought’, ‘governmentalization’, and ‘history of the present’ vocabularies and viewpoints. Such studies also include framings from within the epistemological, substantive and methodological considerations of:
- Classical and modern sociology
- Continental thought
- History of ideas and thought, as well as cultural and conceptual history (such as those associated with Foucault, Deleuze, Skinner, Koselleck, and Mark Poster)
- Discourse analysis of work and management
- The relevance of political science, security and war studies for MOS
- History of political thought and the administrative state

Indicative examples of a range of broadly conceived topics include:
- Culture and History of managerialism
- Historical and contemporary constitution of Human Resource Management
- Governmentality and subjectivation processes of the State, workplace and martial contexts
- The interdisciplinary relationships between security, martial organisation and management
- The role of emotions and affect in the workplace
- History of the human sciences at work
- Relations of work and the ‘military dimension of society’
- Spiritualism, re-enchantment and religion in and of capitalism, leadership, work, and management
- Practices of ‘Soft Capitalism’ and ‘Self-work’ in transatlantic cultures
- The constitution of the entrepreneurial self via Organisational, Cultural and Alternative Entrepreneurship Studies
- Sociology of translation of cultures of self-work
- Normative imperatives and maxims of Creativity and Innovation
- Pedagogical approaches in management education
- Programmes of therapeutic orders at work: 'wellness', 'happiness', ‘meaningfulness’
- The significance of fiction for studying organisations
- Rediscovering and reinterpreting classical texts for the study of work, management and leadership (such as the work of Max Weber, Schumpeter, Werner Sombart, Ernst and Friedrich Jünger, Hannah Arendt, David Riesman)
- History of ideas of accounting, auditing and risk management
- The mutability and immutability of Bureaucratic and Post-bureaucratic organisational forms
- The managerialist subject of production/destruction and entrepreneurial subject in contemporary late capitalist societies.
- The role of distance in managerialism
- Algorithmic governmentality and People Analytics
- The re-engineering culture of mass information systems
- Workplace cultures of surveillance and permanent records