Dr Matteo Mandarini

Profile

Roles:

• Member of the Department of Business and Society

Biography

Matteo is Senior Lecturer in Organisation and Politics at the School of Business and Management, a position he has held since 2007. He holds a BA in Philosophy from University College London, an MA in Continental Philosophy, and a PhD from University of Warwick.

His research develops conflict as a conceptual and analytical lens for examining the dynamic relationship between business strategy and processes of social change. Situated at the intersection of organisation studies, political philosophy, and economic history, his work investigates how forms of contestation shape institutional development, managerial practices, and state–business relations.

In addition to his research in organisation and political theory, Matteo has translated numerous philosophical works from Italian into English, contributing to the cross-national circulation of contemporary and post-war European thought.

He is currently completing a monograph that examines the period from Italian post-war reconstruction to the 1980s, tracing the evolving interaction between industrial organisation, the state, and mechanisms of conflict management. He is also developing a new research agenda exploring the emergence and institutionalisation of ‘mental health’ discourse within the governance and management of labour.

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• BUS156 Current Challenges in Business and Management
• BUS107 Business and Society
• BUS262 Business and History

Research

Research Interests:

Business strategy; the state; labour conflict; the discourse and governance of ‘mental health’

Over more than two decades, his research has advanced a sustained inquiry into conflict as an analytical framework for understanding the coordination of business strategy and state institutions. His work examines how corporate decision-making, public authority, and institutional arrangements are shaped by, and responsive to, forms of social and labour contestation. By situating strategy within broader political and historical dynamics, he demonstrates how organisational order is continuously constituted through processes of negotiation, dispute, and regulation.

More recently, his research has turned to the institutional, political, and discursive dimensions of ‘mental health’ in relation to labour management. This emerging strand of work investigates how the language and practices of mental health have become embedded in managerial governance, organisational policy, and regulatory frameworks, and how they function within broader strategies of workforce management and control.

Across these areas, his scholarship emphasises the structural precarity of organisational and institutional order. He argues that order is never stable or self-grounding but persistently marked by the possibility of its own dissolution. This condition generates proliferating practices of control and accompanying ideological formations that seek to obscure or manage the tensions produced by the enduring presence of conflict. Through original research and extensive translations of major theoretical works, he has explored the conceptual aporias of action, authority, and institutional stability, contributing to debates in organisation studies, political philosophy, and critical management scholarship.

Centre and Group Membership:

• Member CLASP:  Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP)

Publications

Selected Publications

• ‘Mario Tronti, 1931-2023’, Radical Philosophy, 2.17, winter 2024
• ‘The Aporias of Action’, in M. Cacciari, Hamletics Seagull (Calcutta 2023)
• ‘The Marxism of Crisis and the Political Morphology of Capital’ in the The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Morphology of the Political, by G. Marramao, edited with extensive critical introduction by M. Mandarini, Brill / Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021)
• ‘Planning for Conflict’, with Alberto Toscano, South Atlantic Quarterly, 119, 1, 2020 (January).
• ‘Periphery and Centre in Comparative Perspective: opportunities for accounting praxis’, with S. Harney and G. Hanlon, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (online May 2020)
• ‘The Vicissitudes of Representation’, Jus Cogens: A Critical Journal of Philosophy of Law and Politics (2020)

Selected Translations

• The Labour of Spirit: An Essay on Max Weber, M. Cacciari, edited, translated, and introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (2025)
• The Twilight of the Political, M. Tronti, edited, translated introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (forthcoming 2024)
• Hamletics, M. Cacciari, edited, translated, and introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (2023)

Articles

• ‘The Left out of History’, with A. Toscano, Etica e politica – Ethics and Politics (forthcoming 2020)
• ‘The Vicissitudes of Representation’, Jus Cogens: A Critical Journal of Philosophy of Law and Politics (2020)
• ‘Periphery and Centre in Comparative Perspective: opportunities for accounting praxis’, with S. Harney and G. Hanlon, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (online May 2020)
• ‘A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political’, with Andrew Anastasi. Viewpoint (February 2020)
• ‘Planning for Conflict’, with Alberto Toscano, South Atlantic Quarterly, 119, 1, 2020 (January).
• ‘Notes on the Political Over the Longue Durée’, in Viewpoint, 4, 2014 
• ‘Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence’, in Historical Materialism, 18.4, 2010
• ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Communist Thought,’ in Cosmos & History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009 and in The Italian Difference, edited by A. Toscano and L. Chiesa, Melbourne: re.press
• ‘Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse’ in Ephemera, 8.2, May 2008
• ‘Marx and Deleuze: Money, Time, and Crisis’ in Polygraph, 18, January 2007
• ‘Antagonism vs. Contradiction: Conflict and the Dynamics of Organisation in the Thought of 
• Antonio Negri’ in The Sociological Review, Oct. 2005, vol. 53, s.1 and in Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. C. Jones and R. Munro, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005

Edited collections

• The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Morphology of the Political, by Giacomo Marramao, edited with extensive critical introduction by M. Mandarini, Brill / Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021)

Handbook chapters / Book chapters / Scholarly introductions

• ‘Politics Against History’ in The Twilight of the Political, M. Tronti, Seagull Books (a Chicago University Press imprint), London/Chicago (forthcoming 2021)
• ‘The Marxism of Crisis and the Political Morphology of Capital’ in the The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Morphology of the Political, by G. Marramao, edited with extensive critical introduction by M. Mandarini, Brill / Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021)
• ‘Il recupero di un tradimento: la critica del politico di Mario Tronti’ (with A. Anastasi), in La rivoluzione in esilio. Scritti su Mario Tronti, edited by A. Cerutti, G. Munoz and M. Tarì. Quadlibet, Bologna (forthcoming 2020).
• ‘On the impossibility of Business Ethics: leadership, heterogeneity, and politics’ (with G. Hanlon), in The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organization, ed. A. Pullen and C. Rhodes (2015)
• ‘Organizing Communism’ in Communists like Us by F. Guattari and A. Negri, Autonomedia, New York (2010)
• ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Communist Thought,’ in The Italian Difference, edited by A. Toscano and L. Chiesa, Melbourne: re.press and in Cosmos & History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009 
• ‘Towards a Worker’s Society?: New Perspectives on Work and Organization’ (with P. Fleming) in Handbook of Critical Management Studies, edited by H. WIlmott, M. Alvesson, and T. Bridgman, Oxford University Press, 2009
• ‘Antonio Negri and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ (with A. Toscano) in The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, by A. Negri, Verso, London, 2007
• ‘Antagonism vs. Contradiction: Conflict and the Dynamics of Organisation in the Thought of Antonio Negri’ in Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. C. Jones and R. Munro, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005 and in The Sociological Review, Oct. 2005, vol. 53, s.1
• ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Time for Revolution, A. Negri, Continuum, London, 2003
• ‘Neoliberalism or Totalitarianism: a Reply to Malcolm Bull’ at http://www.generation-online.org/p/pnegri.htm 2003 
• ‘From Epidermal History to Speed Politics’ in Virtual Futures, ed. J. Broadhurst Dixon and E. J. Cassidy, Routledge, London, 1998

 

Supervision

Areas of Supervision Expertise:

Dr Mandarini has supervised PhDs in political theory and philosophy, and in heterodox political economy.

He is interested in supervising PhD candidates with an interest in questions of political, socio-economic, and workplace conflict and with the strategies developed and implemented to produce systemic change.

PhD Supervision Completions:

• Clair Quentin, 'A materialist political economy of international corporate tax reform’. Awarded 2020.
• Bue Hansen, 'Atoms organised : on the orientations of theory and the theorisations of organisation in the philosophy of Karl Marx.' Awarded 2015.
• Rashné Limki, 'Postcolonial excess(es) : on the mattering of bodies and the preservation of value in India.' Awarded 2015
• Toni Prug, 'Hacking the economy and the state: towards an egalitarian and participatory conception of production and allocation.' Awarded 2014 (With Laws, Queen Mary University of London)
• Clayton Chin, 'Pragmatism, liberalism and the conditions of critique : the connection between philosophy and politics in the work of Richard Rorty. Awarded 2012. (With the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London)

Grants

Leverhulme Small Grant 2025:

The challenges of effecting systemic change in advanced economies: the case of Italy in the 1970 and

‘80s

The aim of this research is to grasp the structural limitations (e.g., institutions of government, party structures, economic interests, etc.) that hinder systemic change at a time when radical change is necessary. This project takes a historical case study of a modern European economy to explore the ways political groups formed

outside or in the margins of mainstream parliamentary parties have attempted to bring about structural change. My focus will be on the role, in the 1970s, of Italian Workerists (Operaismo) within the Italian Communist Party (the PCI was the second largest parliamentary party in Italy from 1947-1991), their aims, activities, and what ultimately stood in the way of effecting the changes they sought.