INDEP online Talk with Paul Adler – What Socialist Planning can Learn from Business Management

This event will take place in English.

In order to participate, please register here.

Description:

In his work, Paul Adler has been exploring how large capitalist firms deal with the challenges of corporate planning, and indeed of democracy in planning, aiming to understand what they might teach us about how socialism could deal with similar challenges (albeit at a much wider level and in the context of new relations of production). In his 2019 book, The 99% Economy, he reviewed four principles that he sees operative in leading firms which suggests ways of overcoming four of these challenges—centralization, specialization, standardization, and incentives. In this talk, he will review that argument and dive deeper into centralization, and what we can learn from capitalist firms efforts to combine high levels of centralization with high(er) levels of participation.

Paul Adler is Professor Emeritus at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He began his education in Australia and completed his graduate studies in France. His research and teaching focus on organization theory and comparative political economy. He has published widely in academic journals, and has edited or co-edited several volumes, the more recent being The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy (2006), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents (2015). He co-authored Healing Together: The Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente (2009), and most recently published The 99% Economy: How Democratic Socialism can overcome the Crises of Capitalism (2019).