Ghislain Deslandes

Academic and professional positions

At ESCP Europe, he is a member of the Social Sciences department and he is best known as the academic director of the advanced Media Management program since 1997, a pioneer in Europe in the domain of media economics and management created ten years before. With the help of a sponsoring committee made up of professionals such as Jean Drucker, Jacques Rigaud and Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the pedagogical content has focused on editorial transformations and economic changes in both new and traditional media.

He has occupied various senior positions in the media and digital industries from 1994 until 2007, when he sold a news publishing company that he had run four years before deciding to devote himself full-time to academia.

He is also an Editorial Board member of Business and Professional Ethics Journal (BPEJ) and of International Journal on Media Management (JMM) since 2010.

Media management

His research has contributed to the consolidation of a European orientation, especially through his involvement at EMMA, to media organization studies. His initial work presents media management less as a new academic discipline than as a multi-paradigm field of research that challenges the universalist approaches to management science.

In such a “sector studies” approach, management is inconceivable without a plurality of disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, which bring their theoretical and methodological contributions to a better understanding of the agents and of the structures. From the model suggested by Kung, management in media activities cannot avoid a “contextualist” approach to study the media in their constantly changing historical, sociological and economic specificities, and “pluralistic”, i.e. recognizing the complexity of specific media organizations at the editorial, political and identity levels.

Business ethics and continental philosophy

Scientific management claims to be axiologically neutral. In Management Ethique (2012), he shows instead that managerial practice includes ethical and political questions not only at the meso (the organization) and macro (societal and environmental) but also at the micro level (relation to oneself and to others).

Drawing on various sources of European continental philosophy his work highlights, beyond the efforts of the traditional stream of research in business ethics, the fact that ethics cannot be taught or understood as any other management “knowledge”. The notion of protomanagement, as one can conceive it through discussion between Socrates and Ischomachus in Xenophon’s Economics is then reactivated. In the Ancient Greece, Protomanagement is first conceived as a political art inseparable from a form of virtue; the ancient “Mesnager” is that dedicated to mastering his/her self -Sophrosyne- and concern for the society as a whole.

Philosophy of management

At the International College of Philosophy, he develops a research program which aims to extend the efforts made by critical and phenomenological researchers in order to discuss the commonly-held epistemic and political aspects of modern management. The program emphasizes "the crisis of the foundations faced by management science in its ethical/philosophical aims". A crisis that can be defined as desaffectio societatis, and which seems to touch the managers themselves more and more.

The program aims to develop some new ontological and aesthetic approaches to the administration of "business", suggesting a new definition of management expressed as “a vulnerable force, under pressure to achieve results and endowed with the triple power of constraint, imitation and imagination, operating on subjective, interpersonal, institutional and environmental levels”.

Phenomenology of life and organizations

From an interpretation of Blaise Pascal and Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of power, he builds new concepts around the question of managerial responsibility, rethinking the usual way of considering management-as-practice: practical wisdom, skeptical humanism or “double thought”.

Then he looks at the necessary conditions for joy at work, following different routes: the first is based on the radical phenomenology of Michel Henry which allows him to pay attention to the impetus of life at work in relation to subjectivity, a little discussed theme in the management literature. The second one concerns field of leadership where power cannot be separated from a dialectic of abilities and disabilities. This approach is at the root of several contributions about the strategic “vision” and gender issues using the works of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, developments about “blended leadership” in the media, and about the beau geste as a critical behavior in organizations.