Charles Barthold

Dr Charles Barthold is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University. Charles employs a variety approaches to organisation studies and leadership in relation to contemporary economic, environmental and social issues. Firstly, he is interested to study how organisations and leadership reproduce power relations. This includes different types of organisational power relations such as organisational control; anthropocentrism in relation to the environment; and organisational logics informed by gender, racialisation and precarious work. Secondly, his project is to analyse how resistance, politics and ethics in organisations can bring about novel forms of democratisation and emancipation. Thirdly, Charles is interested about organisational discourses. Methodologically, his work is qualitative (ethnography, film analysis, discourse analysis) or conceptual. It is linked in particular to studying discourse and visual culture.

More recently Charles has looked at political organising and how it is discursively constituted by different forms of leadership. From that perspective, he has operationalised the political theory of Laclau and Mouffe in order to analyse contemporary forms of neoliberal political processes, including the Macron phenomenon.