Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion

Abstract

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the invasion of a democratic European country by an authoritarian regime. But why does authoritarianism continue to spread, not only as an alternative to liberal democracy, but also within many liberal democracies where authoritarian leaders continue to gain strength and popularity? In this curated piece, contributors discuss some of the potential contributions of management scholarship to understanding authoritarianism, as well as highlight a number of directions for management research in this area.

‘Does Our Work Matter?’ The Role of Organizational Researchers in Extreme (War)Times

“…A literature review recently published in The Lancet on extreme events and genre-based violence showed that when a disaster strikes, whether it is a flood, drought or famine, or a major fire, women (and all minorities) are particularly vulnerable to situations of abuses and exploitation (van Daalen et al, 2022). Beyond these extreme events, we can see an authoritarian drift specifically impacting vulnerable populations and minorities (Adler et al, 2023). This is even more true in (war)times.…”

The Social Effects of Entrepreneurship on Society and Some Potential Remedies: Four Provocations

“…Shifting our research focus is even more important given the current state of world affairs, where the confluence of a dogmatic reliance on entrepreneurship as a panacea continues to grow while world problems become more urgent in this historical moment of polycrisis (Adler et al, 2022;Eberhart et al, 2022b). The purpose of the present article is to showcase the rich opportunities that arise from scrutinizing the social effects of entrepreneurship on society while identifying potential remedies in pursuit of reinvigorated research and pedagogy that go beyond the narrow economic-focused conceptions of entrepreneurship.…”

“…These days, it seems commonplace to talk about our planet as a grand dystopia. We face many grand challenges regarding climate change, food security, and poverty, in addition to growing geopolitical uncertainty driven by war, authoritarianism, and populism (Adler et al, 2022). Of course, the growth of these maladies has coincided with the concomitant hegemony of neoliberalism and the embrace of economic growth (and entrepreneurialism)—often at the expense of societal well-being.…”

“…To move toward a new research agenda, scholarly work needs to move beyond the traditional model of examining the effect of sets of independent variables on entrepreneurship, studying, for instance, how regulatory and/or cultural changes affect the levels or types of entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurial strategies affect venture performance. We suggest that there is a need to “reverse the arrow” in entrepreneurship research and begin to understand entrepreneurship as a phenomenological object—a socially constructed context in and of itself—to study the social effects of entrepreneurship (Swedberg, 2005, p. 3; Weiss et al, 2021, 2023): how entrepreneurship affects the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes (Eberhart et al, 2022b; Rahman et al, 2023); how entrepreneurship contributes to reproducing and generating social problems (i.e., the recent popularity of authoritarianism, the rise of surveillance capitalism, neocolonialism, and the enduring nature of gender discrimination) (Adler et al, 2022; Kacperczyk et al, 2022; Palmer & Weiss, 2022); how entrepreneurship transforms and anchors systemic inequities (Atkins et al, 2022; Fairlie et al, 2022; Kwon & Sorenson, 2023); how entrepreneurship legitimates new organizing templates (Davis, 2016); and how entrepreneurship facilitates class and power struggles (Bruton et al, 2023; Gorbatai et al, 2021). In other words, new research on entrepreneurship is emerging that embraces an organizational sociology-inspired agenda with an interest in understanding how entrepreneurship alters the fabric of society.…”

The Problem of Institutional Trust

“…But there is much more we can do! While we need to continue to grow our scholarly corpus on problems such as climate change and poverty, the global resurgence of populism and authoritarianism (e.g., see Adler et al, 2023) that we have witnessed in the early 21st century, inflected by the recent pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests the pressing need to also direct our attention to issues related to the decline of faith in democracy, capitalism, expertise, the media, and many other aspects of the liberal world order (Lounsbury & Wang, 2020). I argue that a core aspect of these interrelated dynamics has to do with the problem of institutional trust that merits much more sustained theoretical development and empirical attention.…”