Riding populist storms: Brexit, Trumpism and beyond, Special Paper Series Editorial

Abstract

In this editorial, we aim to introduce the diverse set of 21 papers we have curated over the past 2 years, to review their collective contribution to the knowledge base in critical management and organisation studies, and to reflect on how they add to and challenge existing debates within our field. These papers speak about populism in a wide range of voices from multiple perspectives. The geographical reach is wide, with populism discussed in relation to the contexts of India, Latin America, France, the United Kingdom and the United States by authors working in the latter three countries as well as Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden and the Netherlands. The papers cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, drawing on political science, history, sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Methodolotgical approaches include ethnography, historical narrative, discursive approaches and autoethnography. As such, these papers raise important questions and offer perspectives and ways forward that are in urgent need of attention and discussion by critical management and organisation studies communities, challenging readers’ understandings of populism at macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Here we tie the whole series together by highlighting emergent themes and identifying future research directions that these papers have opened up.