Reimagining Capitalism: Applying Negative Dialectics for a Better Future

The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the perception that capitalism is in crisis, that the future is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and that, increasingly, our thinking about it and ability to manage and organize ourselves within it, are challenges we are ill-equipped for. Despite the efforts of many writers, and a surfeit of manuscripts concerning the need to rethink capitalism, questions concerning the struggle for social and economic justice remain unanswered.

While some suggest that with corrective action, businesses can save the world, there is an acceptance that they cannot do so alone. However, while governments might strengthen their institutions, enacting more effective policies, the challenge is simply laid bare at the feet of industry and commerce. Is the challenge to confront the establishment just too big to face?

Government institutions and the barons of industry and commerce are but interrelated, interconnected, interplaying components in one socio-economic system. This book offers readers a progressive, radical and academic provocation of that system; it also proposes a field of Applied Negative Dialectics.

In 'Reimagining Capitalism', Atkinson confronts the need to rethink capitalism and presents an integrated range of thinking through a lens of applied negative dialectics, questioning how and why things might have occurred, and where and how we might begin to improve them.

David Atkinson is the author of 'Thinking the Art of Management' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), based on his multi-award-winning PhD research in critical management studies. David is presently a part-time lecturer in management and organisation at York St John University and a founding member of the university's Futures and Foresight Research Group. As a lecturer at postgraduate and undergraduate level, his subjects have most recently covered Business, Creativity and Opportunism, Industrial Economics, Labour Economics, Entrepreneurship and Society and Mastering Strategic Consulting. David is openly autistic and is currently the founder of a technology start-up for the neurodiverse community. In his largely self-funded, independent academic writing, he uses critical management thinking to develop provocations grounded in the philosophy of immanent critique. Also qualified as a Chartered Engineer and European Engineer, David combines his academic insight with over 40 years of enterprising socio-economic practice, from public sector behemoths to small, award-winning start-ups in various market sectors. It is the wide range of personal experiences that David can draw on that provides a rich seem of (auto)ethnographic inspiration for his (often) reflective style of writing. This is coupled with an openly autistic mindset to explore and provoke critique from unexpected angles, while maintaining a necessary academic rigour.