Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces the work of a person who combines feminism and eugenic social engineering, but this is precisely what is on offer when Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem consider Swedish politician and intellectual Alva Myrdal. It presents a range of concepts through which Hannah Arendt interrogates our ways of being in the world. Power and politics are an inescapable part of organizing. Organizations are political arenas infused by power, where authority and influence reside in the ways in which relationships are negotiated and formed. Power is increasingly read as embedded within and reproduced by deep structures and discrete processes that both constitute and are constituted by interacting agents. The scholarship of Hannah Arendt provides a sustained critique of sovereign power and how to challenge and transcend traditional and patriarchal forms of governance linked to values of control.