I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, I worked at the University of Technology in Sydney as associate professor in design and management, and as research director of the Australian Creative Industry Innovation Centre; at Copenhagen Business School as professor for strategy and organization; and at EM Lyon, France. I am also a research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

With a background in the Humanities and an eclectic bookshelf behind me, my research focuses on strategies for distributed and collective action. Departing from the two main forms of coordinating collective action (the visible hand of the manager (hierarchy) and the invisible hand of the market), the central question that I want to answer is how new forms of collective action can combine both goal-directedness and the ability to scale.

The aim of my work is to develop a critical vocabulary to understand such distributed and collective action, how it is organized and how it can be governed strategically. Theoretically this is relevant because it extends current research in strategy and organization theory as well as related fields; practically it is significant because it provides a better understanding of how we can collaborate when addressing complex problems.  

I’d like to stretch the organizational imagination of practitioners and scholars through my writing. My work has been published across a number of scientific journals, including Academy of Management  Discoveries, Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations, Accounting, Organization and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Strategic Organization, Theory, Culture and Society, Sociological Review, Urban Studies and others. I also write books, including Brand Society (Cambridge University Press), Making Things Valuable (Oxford University Press) and Plan B (Murmann), which are experiments in what is possible, rather than descriptions of what is probable (to paraphrase Albert O. Hirschman).