UTS Business School authors: 2019

Academic staff from the UTS Business School have been busy researching, writing and publishing a range of books in 2019.

Whether its taking an unconventional and enlightening approach to taking a personal journey on the ethical thinking and practice of the fundamental tensions in our world to lead us to exploring what we may face in a post capitalism meltdown (and more), the books from UTS Business School academics challenge and encourage our intellectual curiosities.

Some of the books published by UTS Business School in 2019 are:

Addressing Modern Slavery by Dr Martijn Boersma and Associate Professor Justine Nolan

Long after slavery was officially abolished, the practice not only continues but thrives. An estimated 40 million people are modern-day slaves, more than ever before in human history. Whether they are women in electronics or apparel sweatshops, children in brick kilns or on cocoa farms, men trapped in bonded labour working on construction sites, or girls forced into domestic servitude or sex work, millions of people are forced to perform labour through the use of force, intimidation or deceit.

Modern slavery is an integral part of the global economy. It even becomes part of our daily lives when we use or buy products that are made through exploitative labour practices. In a world of growing inequality, consumers and business are both part of the problem and the solution. While we have all become accustomed to fast fashion and cheap consumer goods, we must take responsibility for exploitation at different points along complex supply chains. This important book examines slavery in the modern world and outlines ways it can be stopped.
(Publisher: NewSouth Publishing)

 

The Worst Is Yet to Come – a post-capitalist survival guide by Professor Peter Fleming

Capitalism is about to commit suicide and is threatening to take us down with it. But will it give way to a grand social utopia or the beginning of a new dark age... albeit WiFi enabled?

The Worst is Yet to Come explores the disturbing possibility that the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism isn’t going to spawn an emancipatory renaissance, but a world that is much, much worse.

Wealthy CEOs see it. They’ve been purchasing isolated bunker-retreats in New Zealand for when the shit goes down. Our politicians know it too, and are frantically transforming the liberal state into a militarized machine. Scientists are either uselessly decrying the looming eco-catastrophe or jumping on the opportunity to conduct ever-reckless experiments with the human genome. The animal kingdom is retreating from the scene in terrible silence, preferring the swift demise of the abattoir’s bolt-gun than witnessing what is about to happen.

Yet some of us are still ignoring the warning signs, choosing instead to remain cheerfully optimistic, believing that society has probably hit rock bottom and the only way is up. This book argues the opposite. What if we haven’t hit rock bottom and are on the precipice of something much worse? And what if were too late?

But this grim prospect isn't submitted in the name of millennial fatalism or hopeless resignation. On the contrary, if our grandchildren are to survive the implosion of capitalism – for the chances we will are fairly slim – then a realistic picture of the nightmare to come is crucial. Only an unwavering attitude of “revolutionary pessimism” will help us to prepare accordingly. For the apocalypse will almost certainly be disappointing.
(Publisher: Repeater)

 

Redeeming Leadership: an anti-racist feminist intervention by Dr Helena Liu

How might imperialist, masculinist and white supremacist grips on leadership be loosened?

In this thought-provoking and accessible new study, Helena Liu suggests that anti-racist feminism can challenge conventional models and practices of power.

Combining a critical review of leadership theory with enlightening examples from around the world, the book shows how the intellectual and activist elements of feminist movements provide antidotes to contemporary leadership research and practice.

For those interested in management, organisation, feminism, race and many more studies, it sets the agenda for a radical reimagining of control and leadership in all its forms.
(Publisher: Bristol University Press)

 

Western Fundamentalism – democracy, sex and the liberation of Mankind by Associate Professor Gordon Menzies

Have you ever felt out of step with your own culture? Or even simply wondered where the tensions in our world are going to lead us, and if there is still time for the West to help determine the direction? Events over recent decades have brought ‘fundamentalism’ – both Islamic and Christian – to the fore.  Yet when Gordon Menzies was a doctoral student at Oxford, he noticed that the debaters at the Oxford Union seemed not to question their own basic beliefs – something fundamentalists are often accused of.  Eventually it was explained to him that the Oxford debaters uncritically believed in democracy, free market liberalism (i.e. economic rationalism) and sexual freedom.  This seems important, because environmental degradation and the Global Financial Crisis speak of the limits of the free market system. You might also feel, like Menzies does, that the sexual revolution has left victims in its wake. 

Associate Professor Menzies has a deep interest in fundamental assumptions we all make about life, and he is regularly inspired to discuss them with others.

This book aims to articulate his views in a thought-provoking yet respectful way whilst also offering an appropriate amount of personal disclosure.  For example, Menzies can see the sexual revolution from both sides – the increase in women’s rights helped his mother escape an abusive relationship with his father, yet it also encouraged the end of many tolerable-yet-challenging relationships that could have provided an adequate relational world for the children and spouses involved. 

Gordon Menzies is an Associate Professor in Economics at UTS and holds numerous teaching awards along with an international research prize in economics.
(Self published – available at https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0817QK9KR)

Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the politics of organization by Professor Carl Rhodes

21st century Western neoliberalism has seen the transformation of self-interest from an economic imperative to a centrally constitutive part of dominant modes of subjective existence. Against this celebration of competitive individualism, Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy stands as a haunting reminder of an ethics that passively disturbs the self from its egoistic slumber, awakening it to the incessant demands of the other. Ethics stands as an anxious affective state of being where one is held to account by others, each one demanding care, attention and respect. Focussing on business activities and organizations, this book explores how this ethical demand of being for the other becomes translated, in a necessarily impure way, into political action, contestation and resistance. Such a response to ethics invokes a disturbance of organizational order, including an order that might itself be labelled 'ethical'. On these grounds, the book offers an explication of an ethics for organizations which disturbs the selfishness of neoliberal morality, and can inform a democratic politics rested on a genuine concern for the other and for justice.

Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization offers an unconventional and enlightening approach to ethical thinking and practice in politics and organisations, and will be of interest to students of business, management, leadership, political science and organizational theory.
(Publisher: Routledge)

If you have a book or article to share with your UTS Business School alumni friends and peers, please contact the Alumni Relations Office (engagement.business@uts.edu.au or p: +61 2 9514 3154).