Dr Sideeq Mohammed

Dr Sideeq Mohammed is the Associate Dean of Education at Kent Business School. He leads the Education and Student Experience team, which comprises Directors of Studies, Assessment Leads, the Employability Lead, the Student Experience Lead, and the Chair of the Academic Misconduct Committee. As a member of the School’s Senior Leadership Team, Sideeq holds strategic responsibility for the quality and success of all undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes currently offered by Kent Business School.

Sideeq is also a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. Sideeq joined Kent Business School in 2017 after completing his PhD in Business and Management at the University of Manchester.

Sideeq’s research is broadly located within the tradition of Critical Management Studies, a research group within management and organisation studies that is concerned with issues surrounding the moral defensibility and ecological sustainability of the dominant paradigms of business and management practice. Specifically, Sideeq’s work draws on the writings of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in order to critically reflect on the social, political, and ethical problems of “organisation” in the contemporary milieu. 

His doctoral thesis, titled “In the shopping centre: At the limits of ethnography”, engaged with Deleuze and Guattari’s work in order to rethink the lines that are drawn between “the theoretical” and “the empirical” through a methodological exploration of an ethnography of everyday life at a shopping centre. Through this work he explored key concepts in Deleuze and Guattari's work, developing new ways of thinking about time, memory, the body, the subject, and writing, that were immanent to the shopping centre. Ethnographic research remains one of Sideeq’s major ongoing interests.

Sideeq’s recent monograph, “Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene: A Critical Look at the Impossibility of Sustainability”, continued his conceptual work by tracing the different stories that we can see in academic and popular literature that relate to sustainability and the global ecological crisis that we now face. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of capitalism, the book argued that contemporary ways of thinking about sustainability often fail to appreciate the ability of capitalism to capture and colonize forms of resistance or alternative organization and turn these to the ends of profit maximization.

Sideeq has a number of ongoing papers and projects which seek to continue this work and critically reflect upon how sustainability is thought about and taught in the contemporary Business School. In particular, strands of this work seek to theorize the moral necessity of “hopelessness” in the building of sustainable futures, and the challenges that the “inhuman” poses to contemporary organization studies.  

Sideeq’s pedagogic practice draws heavily on the traditions of Critical Management Studies in order to advance a highly sceptical and reflexive way of thinking about managing and management’s relationship to society. Sideeq’s classes ask students to critically reflect on whether management, broadly speaking, exerts a positive impact on the world and encourages them to consider the broader social and political tensions in which organizational actors are embroiled.

Sideeq is interested in supervising projects that fall into the traditions of Critical Management Studies. Critically oriented projects on sustainability, storytelling, ethnography, or cognate areas within organization studies (e.g. time and temporality, or embodiment and spatiality) would be particularly welcome.