Public Sphere, Crowd Sentiments and the Brain - a public lectures series

Public Sphere, Crowd Sentiments and the Brain -  a public lectures series

sponsored by the CBS Public-Private Platform

Recent discussions in both strategic management and critical management studies have hailed the coming of a new era of democratized forms of the co-creation of value within business systems, an era of democratic participation of consumers and citizens as professional consumers (‘prosumers’) and co-creators of innovation. Behind this reassessment of value-creation structures lies the justified frustration with contemporary forms of capitalism and its lack of attention to social justice and environmental sustainability. Many contributors to these debates, like Eric von Hippel, Adam Arvidsson, C. K. Prahalad, and Russell L. Ackoff, suggest that the restructuring of capitalism around modes of public deliberation stands a higher chance of meeting future needs for more sustainable, responsive, flexible, and globally inclusive forms of economic organizing.

Curiously, these visions rely on the notion of ‘productive pubatual crowds. The production of an open-access software, the targeting of a misbehaving corporation through a Facebook campaign, and the emergence of a crowd-sourced service or product through the interaction between firms and twitter- and wiki-communities all have in common the assumption that there exists what James Surowiecki has called the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.

The remarkable return of ‘the crowd’ and its wise foolishness is the subject of this public lecture series which aims to bring together researchers and activist to discuss the themes of public sphere, crowd behaviour, economic organizing, and recent advances in neuroeconomic and neuromarketing research. The lecture series aims at widening the conversation about how much crowd psychology there is in current neuroeconomic and neuromarketing research, and what the return of fin-de-siècle crowd psychology means for the ontology, methodology and axiology of theorizing in contemporary management and organization research. In the same vein, our guest lecturers will raise the question whether the rapidly growing interest in neuroscientific methods in economics, marketing and management might provide the stimulus for the integration of social and natural sciences.

Download the lecture program here: brain_poster_v2.pdf

Your can also find specific information on the different lectures at our event page.

The public lectures series is organised by associate professor Christian Borch, Head of the Decision Neuroscience Research Group Thomas Z Ramsøy and associate professor Stefan Schwarzkopf