Professor Bogdan Costea
Head of Department, Professor of Management and SocietyResearch Interests
In my research, I pursue three main lines of investigation and analysis: subjectivity, work and managerialism in the context of modernity. These three areas of concern are underlaid by a common thread that directly yet ambiguously connects the growth and empowerment of Human Resources Management during the past quarter-century with wider developments in the social sciences and the humanities. On the one hand, the societal power of the HRM project has increased as the managers’ “right to manage” has been emancipated from previous constraints. On the other hand, however, this increase in power, the right not simply to absorb agency but to develop and control the social reproduction of identity, results in a situation in which HRM is in principle called upon to assume ethical responsibilities that extend far wider beyond the institutional and cultural boundaries of work. The three core topoi of subjectivity, work and managerialism are points d'appui, fulcra through which I seek to explore the ways in which core philosophical arguments about the nature of the self, the meanings and implications of work, and human organisation reappear encoded in management studies. This type of investigation necessarily correlates my relevant field research of exemplary management ideas and practices with the relevant academic theorisations and analyses in management studies. My research frames this immanent correlation located in the HRM project within the broader context of the history and present state of social sciences and the humanities (the full manifold of les sciences humaines). The aim of this inquiry is to open up essential lines of communication with this latter wider community. My research involves collaboration with practitioners and theorists in both spheres in order to grasp the complex and inadequately understood relationship between ever-growing managerial power and a social order that seeks to renew itself in democratic terms.
Current Teaching
Undergraduate courses: Convenor of OWT.223 Human Resource Management (Cultures of Employability and Performativity in the 21st Century); and of MNGT321 Management in the 21st Century (Central Questions of Employability, Globalisation and Ethics)
Graduate Programmes: Convenor of the MA module OWT.506: Human Resource Management
Doctoral Programme: supervisor of doctoral students; external and internal PhD and MPhil examiner (London School of Economics; Lancaster University; etc.)
Professional Role
Director, European BBA
Qualifications
MA (Bucharest), PhD (Lancaster)
Profile
Bogdan Costea has joined the department in 1998, after working for four years in the Management Development Division of LUMS. He has an MA from Bucharest, Romania, and a PhD from Lancaster. Previously, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an HR Director for the Romanian Development Agency in Bucharest.
Research Grants
British Academy Small Grant, 2006-2007 - Play and Work in Contemporary Organisational Cultures
Current Research
1. The history and current constitution of Human Resource Management
2. 'Play@work' in contemporary management practices
3. Programmes of 'wellness' and 'happiness' at work
4. New workplace architectures
5. Diversity management
6. Business ethics and its teaching using novels of the 19th and 20th centuries
7. Pedagogical approaches in management education
Work in Progress: Nietzsche, Jünger and the Problem of Work
01/05/2023 → 30/06/2025
Research
Finitude as a critical device for management pedagogy: the example of an undergraduate module
15/01/2023 → 31/12/2023
Research
Business, Ethics and the Question of Value
01/06/2022 → 31/12/2026
Research
Ernst Junger's Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt - first translation in English
01/08/2011 → 01/01/2017
Research
The Movement of Nihilism: Heidegger's Thinking After Nietzsche
28/01/2010 → 30/06/2010
Research
The Ethics of Finitude: Subjectivity, Responsibility and Nature
01/01/1900 → …
Research
The Future of Work - A CHRO Forum for the Twenty-First Century
Symposium
The Future of Work - A CHRO Forum for the Twenty-First Century
Types of Business and Community - Hosting of external, non-academic visitor
The Unsettled Humanities
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Anna Yeatman
Hosting an academic visitor
Reclaiming Good Government in the face of the Competition State, Neoliberalism and Managerialism
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
8th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
University of Exeter
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Oxford University Press International Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
8th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Conference of the Management History Research
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
The Subject is Work The Time of the Will to Power or the future for Hegel and Marx
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
The Danger of Potentiality: Who Speaks HRM?
Invited talk
JUSTINE GRONBAEK PORS’ PHD THESIS: NOISY MANAGEMENT – A HISTORY OF THE DANISH SCHOOL GOVERNING FROM 1970-2010
Invited talk
Critical Management Studies 2011
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Managing To Avoid The Danger
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
7th International Conference on Critical Management Studies
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
EGOS Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
The Vitality of Managerialism: Images of Work in the 21st Century
Invited talk
Is human resourcefulness infinite? Notes on the human morphology of managerialism
Invited talk
Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Michel Foucault: Summer School
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
EGOS Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
EFMD Conference on Undergraduate Management Education 2010
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
HR Research Network
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Experimentality: Workshop 1, Programme Launch
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Beyond Chandler – Intellectual Impulses for Business and Management History Tomorrow
Invited talk
Imagining the political / The politics of imagination The Sociological Review 100th Anniversary Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Subjectivity in the Foundation of Contemporary Thinking
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Critical Management Studies 2009
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Critical Management Studies 2009
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Inner-Life Spirituality
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Heidegger’s Last God: who now can still save us?
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
RETHINKING LABOUR: LABOUR AFFECT AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Play, Work and the Modern Sense of Self - with Norman Crump
Invited talk
Management and Organizational History (Journal)
Editorial activity
Ethics and Information Technology (Journal)
Editorial activity
Centre for Scholarship and Innovation in Management Education, Pentland Centre
Centre for Productivity & Efficiency
- Centre for Technological Futures
- Management and Society
- People, Work and Organisation