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Dr David Atkinson

Lecturer

York Business School

Postgraduate Research Supervisor

Contact details

I am a part-time Lecturer in Business and Management at York St John University. Alongside my university role, I maintain independent entrepreneurial projects exploring applied and technological implementations of my long-standing work in judgement under uncertinty. These activities are undertaken separately from my academic employment.

Before entering academia, I served as a Royal Air Force Communications Engineering Officer, specialising in software engineering management and operational systems. I subsequently founded and led ventures across multiple sectors. This combination of operational, commercial, and academic experience informs a practice-oriented approach to business education.

I completed my PhD in Critical Management Studies at Lancaster University Management School in 2006, winning two international awards for research excellence, including First Prize in the 2007 European Doctoral Association for Management and Business Administration Outstanding Thesis Awards. My current research develops Material Entropic Dynamics (MED), a framework examining judgement, responsibility, and institutional behaviour in technology-enabled and high-stakes environments.

I am openly autistic and committed to fostering inclusive and supportive learning environments for neurodivergent students in Higher Education.

I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in industrial economics, entrepreneurship, and institutional analysis. My academic work develops and applies critical theory to examine the imaginative structures through which socio-economic organisation becomes possible.

My research examines the relationship between imagination, organisation, and socio-economic order. I work within the tradition of critical management studies, developing an approach grounded in applied negative dialectics to interrogate how institutions, markets, and technologies structure the possibilities of work and enterprise.

My early work explored aesthetics, rhythm, and the performative dimensions of management practice. More recent publications extend this trajectory toward questions of institutional judgement, narrative formation, and technological transformation, culminating in my book Reimagining Capitalism: Applying Negative Dialectics for a Better Future (Vernon Press, 2023).

I am currently developing Material Entropic Dynamics (MED), a framework examining how responsibility, constraint, and institutional behaviour operate in complex and technology-enabled environments. This research builds on my longstanding interest in the imaginative dimensions of economic life, while situating them within a more formal account of structured possibility and organisational decision-making.
Across these projects, I am concerned with how alternative socio-economic futures are conceived, stabilised, and enacted through institutional practice.

Research student supervision:

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students interested in critical, philosophical, and qualitative approaches to organisation, enterprise, and socio-economic transformation.
I supervise projects exploring:

  • Critical management and organisational theory
  • Imagination, narrative, and institutional sense-making
  • Aesthetics and entrepreneurship
  • Technology, responsibility, and organisational change
  • Post-capitalist or alternative economic imaginaries

I particularly value intellectually independent and theoretically ambitious projects that seek to rethink the foundations of work and enterprise.
As an openly autistic academic, I am committed to supporting neurodivergent students and recognise the distinctive analytical strengths that different cognitive styles can bring to critical scholarship.

I am a Fellow of the HEA (FHEA).

I am a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET).