Robin Holt

Guest of the Principal, SCAS.
Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.
Visiting Professor, Nottingham Business School

Prior to joining the Copenhagen Business School in 2015, Robin Holt held a variety of academic
positions, including at the University of Bath, the Manchester Metropolitan University, the University
of Leeds and the University of Liverpool. He was editor of the journal Organization Studies during
2013–17. Since graduating from the London School of Economics, he has, in serpentine ways,
studied the creation of organisational form, as an aesthetic, ethical, political and economic phenomenon.

His publications include: The Poverty of Strategy: Decision Making in Shadows of Technology (Cam-
bridge University Press, forthcoming, with Mike Zundel), The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology
and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020, with Timon Beyes and Claus Pias), Judgment
and Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Strategy Without Design (Cambridge University Press,
2009, with Robert Chia).

As a Fellow at the Collegium, Holt will be writing a book on craft as a technology of organising, based on
an ongoing study of craft objects, craft practices, and craft ventures undertaken in Scandinavia, the UK,
and Japan. This work takes its cue from Marx’s observation: ‘It is a common characteristic of all capitalist
production that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make
use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form.’ In the current
age of machination in which this ‘making use’ has emptied the worker of all distinction, Holt is investigating
the possibilities for deviation and difference being encountered in the disciplined spontaneity of craft.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2021-22.