Organization article wins Imagination Lab Foundation Award for Innovative Scholarship

We’re delighted to congratulate Mark Stein, Chair in Leadership and Management at Leicester University’s School of Management, who was yesterday awarded the Imagination Lab Foundation Award for Innovative Scholarship for a paper published in the journal Organization, published by SAGE.

The award was presented at the 2012 EURAM conference in Rotterdam. Established in 2006 as a long-term collaboration between Swiss-based Imagination Lab Foundation and EURAM, it recognises innovative scholarly activity. Stein’s paper, “A culture of mania: a psychoanalytic view of the incubation of the 2008 credit crisis”, was lauded by the judges for its innovative approach to theorising in the field of organization studies.

The judges commented:

“The recipient of the 2012 Imagination Lab Foundation Award for Innovative Scholarship has distinguished himself by bringing insights from psychoanalysis to bear on the organizational challenges associated with leadership, teamwork, and risk management.  He has consistently sought to shed light on the ‘dark side’ of organizational life, and his numerous publications have appeared in journals such as Human Relations, Organization Studies, and Organization.  In particular, his work on the mania surrounding the 2008 financial crisis exemplifies the award criteria­ – bridging theoretical boundaries to develop an innovative approach to a problem that has considerable economic and social impact.  For these reasons, the members of the selection committee are happy to confer the 2012 award to Dr. Mark Stein.”

This insightful and topical paper explores, through a psychoanalytic framework, the broad cultural changes which laid down the conditions for the credit crisis of 2008 and suggests that a manic response was created out of a series of major ruptures in capitalism.

The article will be free to download for a limited period from:

http://org.sagepub.com/content/18/2/173.full.pdf+html