• Explain how contemporary environmental, social, political, and technological pressures challenge dominant business logics and create conditions for alternative forms of organizing.
• Analyse how organizations respond to sustainability dilemmas, material constraints, socio-political tensions, and AI-mediated transformations across creative and materially intensive industries.
• Discuss the role of craft, materiality, and embodied practices in shaping organizational culture, identity, and strategic decision-making.
• Evaluate principles such as circularity, repair, slowness, care, and sufficiency, and assess their implications for innovation, leadership, and long-term value creation.
• Apply relevant theoretical frameworks to diagnose organizational challenges and propose grounded alternatives that reflect sustainability-oriented, socio-material, and post-growth perspectives.

This course examines how contemporary organizations confront pressures that destabilize dominant business logics of growth, efficiency, and acceleration. Climate breakdown, material scarcity, exploitative supply chains, political instability, and widening social and cultural tensions expose the limitations of established organizational models. At the same time, the expanding presence of AI and digital infrastructures is reshaping work, coordination, and decision-making, raising new questions about agency, expertise, and organizational control. In response to these interconnected challenges, organizations are experimenting with alternative ways of working, producing, and coordinating action.

Throughout the course, students will investigate these emerging forms of organizing, how they take shape, what problems they seek to address, and how they reconfigure assumptions about value, resources, and organizational futures.

The course is structured in three interconnected parts. The first part introduces key theoretical foundations from organization studies, innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and post-growth perspectives. Students also engage with current debates on how AI, automation, and digital infrastructures interact with organizational routines, labour processes, and socio-material practices. This conceptual grounding ensures that students from diverse academic backgrounds can engage with the empirical and analytical work that follows.

The second part examines empirical cases from industries, such as fashion, design, and other creative or materially intensive sectors, that serve as early testing grounds for experimental organizational models. Here, the course draws explicitly on the teachers´ research on craft, materiality, and embodied practices to analyse how craft-based knowledge, material engagement, and forms of making influence organizational culture, identity, and strategic decision-making. Students explore how circular and regenerative design, repair practices, localised production, community-based initiatives, and alternative ownership structures attempt to address ecological and social dilemmas while challenging established norms of speed, scale, and efficiency. These cases illustrate how socio-material relations shape possibilities for organizational change and innovation.

The third part focuses on the implications of these developments for leadership and organizational practice in times of environmental uncertainty, socio-political crisis, and technological change. Students examine leadership approaches that foreground relational responsibility, care, imagination, and long-term thinking, qualities increasingly required to navigate sustainability challenges and crisis conditions. The course investigates how leaders mobilize diverse forms of expertise, including craft-based and community knowledge, to support organizational resilience, experimentation, and more sustainable modes of value creation.

The pedagogical approach is interactive and research-based. Teaching combines short lectures, case discussions, group work, and problem-oriented exercises that engage students with contemporary examples and expert insights. Students apply theoretical frameworks to empirical material and develop analytical and interpretive capacities central to understanding emerging organizational forms. Feedback is provided throughout the course through discussions, group activities, and preparatory work for the final presentation. The course includes group presentations that synthesise conceptual insights with practical analysis, demonstrating students’ ability to connect theory and practice in the study of new ways of organizing grounded in socio-material, sustainability-oriented, and post-growth perspectives.

• New theory
• Teacher’s own research

• Analysis
• Discussion, critical reflection, modelling

These indicative literature. The literature will be provided at the beginning of the course 

Alternative forms of organizing 

Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (2014). The Routledge companion to alternative organization. Routledge.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A postcapitalist politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Dale, G. (2019). Climate, capitalism and degrowth. Polity Press.

Kleinhans, R., & Aernouts, N. (2022). Community-based initiatives and urban socio-economic transformations. Urban Studies, 59(12), 2479–2496.
 

Craft, Materiality & Making

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Yale University Press.

Adamson, G. (2013). The invention of craft. Bloomsbury Academic.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

Rosner, D. (2018). Critical fabulations: Reworking the methods and margins of design. MIT Press.

Sustainability, Circularity & Regenerative Practices

Fletcher, K. (2016). Craft of use: Post-growth fashion. Routledge.

Fletcher, K., & Tham, M. (2019). Earth Logic: Fashion action research plan. The JJ Charitable Trust.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Bocken, N. M. P., Short, S. W., Rana, P., & Evans, S. (2014). A literature review on sustainable business model innovation. Journal of Cleaner Production, 65, 42–56.

Evans, D. (2019). Food waste: Home consumption, material cultures and everyday life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Leach, M., Scoones, I., & Stirling, A. (2021). Sustainability transformations: An integrated framework. Environmental Science & Policy, 115, 1–11.

Creative Industries & Design

Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press.

Gwilt, A. (2020). Fashion design for sustainability (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Khan, M., & Watson, M. (2020). Metabolism: The material turn in design and architecture. Routledge.