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 Business ethics, Leadership studies and Postmodern theology.

He is a full professor at ESCP 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 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 sold 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 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.

Business ethics

Drawing on various sources of 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 and care for the society as a whole.

Philosophy of management

At the International College of Philosophy, 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 touch the managers themselves more and more.

Leadership studies

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". He also shows 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, developments about "blended leadership" in the media 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. Firstly 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.