Michał Pałasz

Kill Marketing, Death to Management!

The aim of the paper is to show that management and marketing, in terms of their interpretations dominating in the Polish higher education, are structurally unsustainable in a world that attempts to respond to the climatic and ecological challenges. The subject and starting point of the article is the critique of two popular definitions of management and marketing. The research problem relates to the incompatibility of social practices, such as contemporary management and marketing, with the scale of the challenges of the Anthropocene and the need to search for new, even utopian, ways of organizing reality. The main research questions are: are management and marketing practices in their current shape sustainable in a world that has decided to face the climatic and ecological challenges, and why is so.

Museum as a temple of eroticism culture as a source of delight the origin and causes of existence of the european museums of erotic art

The first museum similar to those we know today, was founded in the late seventeenth century. Half a century later archeologists discovered collections of erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, lying for centuries under the ashes of Vesuvius, which surprised the scientific Enlightenment enthusiasts with its sensuality. There was a problem, what to do in a museum with exhibits, of undoubted historical value, or artistic, but obscene?
The first response was to create secret museums in which objects with erotic connotations would be stored, or even concealed. The need to separate objects that could not be shown to the public from the rest of the collection, led to the modern understanding of the word pornography, which was adopted for the determination of uncomfortable harvest of Vesuvian cities.
For the second response we had to wait for over 200 years – sex themed museums. Over the past 25 years, 16 institutions of this kind were created in Europe, out of which 11 continue to operate until today. One of them is located in Warsaw. Another may soon arise in Krakow. All of these are private initiatives, most of them with non-profit intentions, and the primary motivation for their creation was the passion of the founders and their possession of a collection of sexually marked objects, often collected by them over a few decades.
The elaboration of this article constitutes the subject-matter of the author’s thesis which he defended in 2010 in the department of culture management at the Jagiellonian University; the thesis was titled Museum of eroticism, eroticism of museum. Historical context, review and analysis of European sex themed museums, which was created under the supervision of Professor Emil Orzechowski Ph.D.

Posthumanistic management

The article introduces the concept of posthumanistic management as a result of exploring the relationships between the Anthropocene, management and contemporary humanities. Posthumanistic management is a response to the pressing need of management reform in the context of a swirl of crises of what is called Generalized Anthropocene (and described as brutal adulthood of humanity), especially concerning the anthropogenic climate-ecological and derivative crises. The author argues that the culture of management (dominant activity of the modern world) based on greed is the reason to make management at least co-responsible for the crises of the Anthropocene next to the pathological actions and inactions of business and political actors and the dominant socio-economic system of capitalism itself. The text summarizes the attempts to humanize management (business ethics, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory, sustainable development, critical management studies, humanistic management) and makes an effort of posthumanistic correction of one of the dominant definitions of economic management. A posthumanistic correction of management is based on assigning agency and dignity to all, also non-human resources of management processes, and on transformation of the purpose of organizational practices from focused on particular goals of the organization towards the pursuit of the heterogeneous common good. The posthumanization of management implies, the author argues, pansolidarity, radical empathy, the fall of the mean-end dualism, redistansation and cyclization. The article ends by highliting some of the flaws of the introduced concept and some possible ways of overcoming them.

Managing a More-Than Human Team in the Cat Cafe „Kociarnia”

The article in the form of organizational ethnography explores managing feline-human team, and this way becomes part of animal turn in social sciences, especially management. Research problem is managing the team built with various actors, in management studies known as resources, which is placed in the space of Cat Cafe „Kociarnia”. Objects of research are the employees of the cafe, and purpose is exploring the principles of animal participation in the team under the hypothesis that animals are workers of the cafe. The research checks in which way and to what extent are animals part of the team, what roles are they performing, what relationship is occurring between them and other teams members – both human and non-human (for example cats but also the place) – and how their membership is perceived by human coworkers. Getting to know cats as the group of workers is only possible by looking at them (with interviews) through the eyes of their human coworkers. The research discovers ways of cats participation in the work team and demonstrates the importance of creating the team along the (non-essentialistically understood) cats nature. There seem to be just one main rule of cats participation in the researched team: to be a cat and to feel good in cat cafe.