The Anthropocentric Dilemma of Democracy: Posthuman Openings for Organizational Theory
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2025-07
Author(s)
Abstract
Organizational democracy is often bound to humanist assumptions—rational agency, procedural equality, and individual rights—while sidelining the ecological and material entanglements that sustain organizations and life itself. This article reimagines democratic organizing through reading Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman feminist theory. Suggesting an “Anthropocentric Dilemma of Democracy,” the paper theorizes beyond the limitations of dominant, humanist models. A speculative vignette set in 2050—featuring posthuman democratic organizing with formerly ignored others, such as a heatwave, an extinct bee, or a future child—illustrates how organizations might explore material interfaces, embodied and affective attunement, and ethical responsiveness to and with forgotten kin. The paper theorizes three terrains of posthuman organizing that reorient the democratic subject into posthuman interdependence and vulnerability: (I) acknowledging “heterogeneous assemblages,” (II) attuning “zoe/geo/technobodies,” and (III) cultivating “affirmative relational ethics.” Moving beyond humanist equality and rights-based inclusion, it reconceives democracy as ecologically embedded, techno-materially entangled, and in a state of constant, yet asymmetrical, becoming. This contribution advances new materialist and posthuman organization theory by offering a decisively critical and feminist exploration of how democratic praxis can conceive itself as part of planetary fragility and answer to the ethical demands of naturecultural and technological interdependence.
Additional Information
41th European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Athens