For over a century, management theory has catalogued organisational forms—Weber’s bureaucracy, Mintzberg’s archetypes, coops, B Corps, social enterprises, DAOs. Yet this proliferation masks a remarkable evasion: virtually no mainstream framework systematically uses philosophical tools to analyse how power is legitimated within organisations. We classify governance codes, ownership structures, and culture, but consistently ignore political analysis that explains whose interests prevail, whose voices matter, and how compliance is enforced.

This is no innocent oversight—Management science has deliberately severed itself from political theory to conveniently evade foundational questions of legitimacy. The result? We fail to ask by what right any organisation commands, excludes, allocates resources or value, thereby encoding systemic injustice into the architecture of organisational life.

Imperium—the capacity to command and enforce rules—becomes “hierarchy” or “leadership style,” shorn of questions about what legitimates organisational sovereignty. Dominium—control over productive resources—becomes “fiduciary duty”, “minimum wage” or “business case,” occluding property as a social relation structuring power and exclusion through contracts. Potestas—the capacity for collective self-determination—shrinks to “employee engagement” or “empowerment”, while true constituent power is foreclosed.

But every organisation is a political order. Just as societies struggle over state power, market dominance, and popular sovereignty, organisations mirror these tensions internally. State-owned enterprises concentrate imperium, suppressing both market discipline and democratic voice. Shareholder corporations prioritise capital’s dominium, reducing labour to disposable input. Cooperatives and NGOs attempt to maximise potestas—collective agency—but often suffer fragility without broader regulatory and legal scaffolding.

Hybrids proliferate—social enterprises, platform cooperatives, steward-ownership, self-managed partnerships—each seeking to rebalance structures of authority, ownership, and agency. Yet even these “innovations” rarely confront core political questions. Most power distributions remain historically contingent, ethically incomplete, and open to manipulation.

By mapping organizational forms onto the Political Triangle we can deploy rigorous political analysis to ask: What constitutes legitimate organizational authority? How do property regimes structure possible distributions of power and surplus? When does constituent power get captured by its own ideology?

This is no mere academic exercise—it is the precondition for business to be a force for good. Only by reintegrating political theory with management and economics can we link macro justice to meso organisational design. Until we reckon with the legitimacy of power, management theory cannot become a genuine engine of societal transformation.

#leadership

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