Cybernetics and Organization
2025-04-29 29.04.2025, 14:00-19:00, C40.256, Workshop with Timon Beyes, Jan Müggenburg, and Claus Pias (Leuphana University Lüneburg) with Melissa Gregg, Robin Holt (University of Bristol), and Mike Zundel (University of Liverpool)
The workshop will reconsider the fundamental relation between cybernetic thought and experiment and how organization is understood and technologically shaped. Eschewing grand accounts of organization's cybernetic constitution (and cybernetic's organizational register or hypothesis), participants will present historically situated and conceptually specific investigations of the intimacies of cybernetics and organization.
Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organization and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is working on cultural theories of organization and on media technologies, arts, spaces, publics and politics of organizing. Recent publications include Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social (Stanford UP, 2024).
Melissa Gregg is an author, ethnographer and sustainability consultant to the tech industry. Her research provides guidance on carbon emissions reduction and circular economy initiatives given the broader challenges of climate change. She is advisor on sustainability strategy at Meta Reality Labs. She is also incoming Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol Business School and the Bristol Digital Futures Institute.
Robin Holt is Professor of Strategy and Aesthetics at the University of Bristol Business School. He has investigated the condition of value and evaluation, and of organizational form, latterly from the perspective of making, technology and trading goods and services. Currently he is completing a book on craft. Monographs include The Poverty of Strategy: Organization in the Shadows of Technology (with Mike Zundel, Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Judgement and Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Jan Müggenburg is Professor of Digital Cultures at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Cultures at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and speaker of the Leuphana Center for Digital Cultures (CDC). Main research interests: Dis/Ability Media Studies, media history of digital cultures, history of cybernetics).
Claus Pias works on the history of (digital) media and the knowledge and cultural history of digitization. He was director of the DFG research group on “Media Cultures of Computer Simulation” and co-founder of the Center for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Mike Zundel is Professor for Organization Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School. He is interested in processual and ecological approaches to strategy, entrepreneurship, and organization theory, with a particular interest in cybernetics and media theory. With Robin Holt, he recently published a monograph, The Poverty of Strategy, investigating the influence of technology on organization and the possibility of an open and authentic way of being.