Dr David Atkinson

Teaching

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.

Research

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.

Publications

• Atkinson, D. (2025) ‘Pictures at an Exhibition—AI-Driven Surrealist Futures: The Case of Reimagining Higher Education through Aesthetic Critique’. In Aesthetics of Human-AI Collaboration in Creative Activities Art, Cultural Heritage, and Academic Research Practice, pp.59-81. Brill.
• Atkinson, D. (2024) ‘Kitsch in entrepreneurship: meal kits, taste and the art of socio-economic enterprise’. In Management Aesthetics (pp. 178-192). Routledge.
• Atkinson, D. (2023) ‘Reimagining Capitalism: Applying Negative Dialectics for a Better Future’, Malaga: Vernon Press, ISBN: 9781648895951
• Atkinson, D. (2022) ‘The shape of space: on the possible conscious properties of elementary particles, and their application to social and economic theory’, Project working paper: A provocation of Postcapitalism, Work and Aesthetic Enterprise, ResearchGate DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34779.08486
• Atkinson, D. (2020) ‘Dancing the VUCA’, Project working paper: A Provocation of Postcapitalism, Work and Aesthetic Enterprise, ResearchGate, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25121.43369
• Atkinson, D. (2020) ‘From experts to (tall) story tellers—On the functional interchangeability of technology and institutions and the projected and emergent nature of employment and skills in a post Covid-19 future’, Project working paper: A provocation of Postcapitalism, Work and Aesthetic Enterprise, ResearchGate DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34057.67680
• Atkinson, D. (2020) ‘From growing pains to wrangling unicorns—Science fictioning futures narratives of an emergent, indeterminate entrepreneurship’, Project working paper: A provocation of Postcapitalism, Work and Aesthetic Enterprise, ResearchGate DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34692.55688
• Atkinson, D. (2020) ‘Storying the entrepreneurial call—On motivation, resurfacing Maslow and the nomothetic promise of entrepreneurial idiographies’, Project working paper: A provocation of Postcapitalism, Work and Aesthetic Enterprise, ResearchGate DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30078.82242
• Waehning, N., Hemmings, M., Atkinson, D., Koukpaki, S., Weir, D. and Gold, J., (2020) 'Social Justice in York, 2030', Institute of Social Justice Report, York, UK
• Atkinson, D. (2008) ‘Dancing “the management”: on social presence, rhythm and finding common purpose’, Management Decision, Vol. 46, No. 7, 1081-1095
• Atkinson, D. (2007) ‘Thinking the Art of Management: stepping into 'Heidegger's Shoes', Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 9780230553743

Conferences and presentations

• Atkinson, D (2022), ‘Growing crystals in the classroom: Negative dialectics and the emergent learning of inclusive enterprise’, 16th International Enterprise Educators Conference (IEEC2022), Swansea University (Awarded Best in Track 5: Enterprise for the 21st Century Workforce)
• Atkinson, D (Forthcoming, 2022), ‘The shape of space: on the possible conscious properties of matter—agency, causality and ethics within the ethnography of quantum socio-economic organisation’, 15th Annual Ethnography Symposium, Ipswich (University of Suffolk)
• Atkinson, D (Forthcoming, 2022), ‘From Citizen X to Citizen N: A quantum socio-economic provocation of social innovation—toward an ethic(s) of the imagination’, International Social Innovation Research Conference ISIRC 2022 Halifax, NS Canada.
• Gold, J. and Atkinson, D. (2020), ‘Workshop: Futures and Foresight Post Covid-19’. ‘TEFI 11: What’s Tourism Got to do it?’, Tourism Education Futures Institute Virtual Conference
• Atkinson, D. (2018), ‘Motivating Hermaphroditus’ Quest – Towards Storying Entrepreneurship’s Nomothetic Premise in the Ideography of The Entrepreneur’, Storytelling conference, Norwich
• EDAMBA (2007), ‘Thinking the Art of Management’, Proceedings EDAMBA 5^th Thesis Competition, Bratislava
• AoM (2006), ‘A Portrait of the Manager as an Artist (After Degot)’, Proceedings, 3rd Art of Management Conference, Krakow
• AoM (2004), ‘Art & Management’, Proceedings, 2nd Art of Management Conference, Paris

Expert contributions

• UK Parliament's Knowledge Exchange Unit (2022), ‘Evidence submitted to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry on ‘Diversity in STEM’. Available online at https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/42410/html/.
• APPG Entrepreneurship (2022), Submission to APPG Inquiry on Entrepreneurship Education, April 2022

Professional activities

I am a Fellow of the HEA (FHEA)

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