Dr. Kapteina involved in two symposia at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting

From 31 July to 4 August 2026, Dr. Benedikt D. S. Kapteina, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management, at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau, attended the 86th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. He was involved in two symposia, both held on 3 August: as organiser and moderator of a panel symposium, and as co-organiser and presenter in a presenter symposium.

Significance of the conference

With more than ten thousand participants and over 2,500 sessions, the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management is the largest gathering of management and organisation scholars worldwide. Symposia go through a review process and are sponsored by individual divisions; the number and mix of sponsoring divisions indicates how broadly a topic is anchored in the discipline. Both symposia were sponsored by three divisions each.

Panel symposium: Democratic Backsliding as a Global Management Issue

Dr. Kapteina organised and moderated the panel symposium "Democratic Backsliding as a Global Management Issue", sponsored by the Social Issues in Management, Strategy and Organization and Management Theory divisions. The symposium treats threats to democratic institutions not as a peripheral political topic but as a condition of organising itself. It distinguishes two dimensions: democracy as an institutional environment structuring accountability, legal predictability and market coordination, and democracy as an organisationally mediated order produced within firms through governance, authority relations, platform infrastructures and political practices.

The venue was more than a backdrop: the proposal explicitly invokes Philadelphia as the historical birthplace of constitutional democracy in republican form and accordingly treats democracy not as a settled achievement but as a historically contested organisational condition.

Three questions structured the discussion: under what conditions corporate engagement stabilises rather than distorts democratic capacities; how organisational structures, governance arrangements and power asymmetries shape responsibility under democratic backsliding; and where the normative and practical limits of legitimate corporate involvement in democratic processes lie. The format was dialogical, with short statements from the panellists, a moderated discussion designed to surface tensions between positions, and an open discussion with the audience.

The panel: Amy J. Hillman (Arizona State University) on corporate political activity and the strategic choice between voice, silence, coalition building and withdrawal; Renate E. Meyer (WU Vienna) on organisational fragmentation and how polycentric governance undermines the capacity to act in concert; Andreas Georg Scherer (University of Zurich) on digital platforms as political actors and their responsibility for the deliberative capacities of the public sphere; Eric W. Orts (Wharton School) on business authority as a distinctive form of social and political power; and Thomas P. Lyon (University of Michigan) on corporate political responsibility in the context of grand societal challenges, particularly climate policy.

Presenter symposium: Democratic Organizing and Pragmatist Practices of Responsibility

Together with David A. Jarrett (Henry W. Bloch School of Management, University of Missouri-Kansas City), Dr. Kapteina also organised the presenter symposium "Democratic Organizing and Pragmatist Practices of Responsibility", sponsored by the Critical Management Studies, Organization and Management Theory and Social Issues in Management divisions. The symposium asks how democratic organising can be studied, drawing on classical American pragmatism in the tradition of Dewey, James, Mead and Follett. Its four contributions combined ontological questions about alternative organising, a historical case of self-managed work, a critique of evidence-based management, and the question of the limits of corporate involvement in democratic processes.

There Dr. Kapteina presented the paper "Drawing the Line: Democratic Orientation in Corporate Electoral Engagement", written with Iwan Alijew (University of St. Gallen), which analyses corporate interventions around the 2019 European Parliament elections and develops the concept of democratic orientation along the dimensions of outcomes, reflection, publicity and neutrality. Christopher Gohl (Global Ethic Institute, University of Tübingen), who works on pragmatist business ethics and learning democracy, acted as discussant.

This symposium was also scheduled for ninety minutes: four presentations of twelve minutes each, followed by the discussant’s remarks and a group discussion in two rounds, addressing first the papers and then the underlying ontological and epistemological questions. The format thus mirrored its subject: the discussion of democratic organising was itself designed as an open, participatory procedure.

What the research shows

Dr. Kapteina studies how companies act politically when democratic institutions come under pressure, and when such action has an effect. The concept of Corporate Democratic Action sets out the conditions under which companies act as democratic actors: what matters is less the visibility of a commitment than its anchoring in structures, responsibilities and routines. Earlier stages of this work appeared in the Academy of Management Proceedings 2024 and 2025.

This field is studied at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau as a team, together with, among others, Prof. Dr. Markus Scholz and PD Dr. Eckhard Burkatzki.