Ghislain Deslandes
Ghislain Deslandes is a French philosopher born in Angers (France) on the 16th of August 1970. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as Media management, Leadership studies and Postmodern theology. He is a full professor at ESCP Business School and a former program director at the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh). He received the EFMD-FNEGE Best Essay Award in 2015 and the first ESCP Research award in 2019. Academic and professional positions. At ESCP Business School Europe, he is a member of the Law, Economics and Humanities 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 media 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. Before entering academia, he has occupied various senior positions in the media and digital industries from 1994 until 2007, when he transferred a news publishing company that he had run four years. He is now an  editorial board member of Business and Professional Ethics Journal (BPEJ), of International Journal on Media Management (JMM), of Journal of Media Business Studies, and a regular contributor to Xerfi Canal. He is also a Board Member of the Société des Amis de Port-Royal. Research work. Media management. His research has contributed to the consolidation of a European orientation, especially through his involvement in the activities of 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 . Hence his special interest for the place of ethics, CSR and organizational identity in managing media companies and entertainment businesses. Philosophy of management. Drawing on various sources of continental philosophy his work highlights the fact that ethics in business 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, the "oikonomos" was not only dedicated to take advantage of existing assets but also to master his/her self and to care for the  society as a whole. At the Collège international de philosophie, he developed a research program which aimed 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 emphasized "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 affect managers more and more. Leadership studies. From an interpretation of Blaise Pascal and Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of power, he suggests new concepts to discuss the question of  leadership responsibility, rethinking the usual way of considering it : practical wisdom, skeptical humanism or "double thought". It leads him to show that 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, and about the "beau geste" as a critical behavior in organizations. Continental philosophy of religion. In this field, he applies the notion of antiphilosophy as defined by Alain Badiou to a comparative philosophical analysis of Kierkegaard and Pascal. He examines the  unique position occupied by these two authors that he defines as an "antiphilosophy of christianity" in light of their idiosyncratic understanding of the relationship between faith and philosophical doubt. He also explores the connections between this position and more recent currents of thought, with particular reference to John Caputo, Gianni Vattimo and Michel Henry. This perspective is also largely discussed in his essay focusing on the idea of "beginning" in Lequier's philosophy