Organization Development and Change ODC

 View Only
Back to discussions
Expand all | Collapse all

On the Cusp: Iran and the Danger of Conspiracy Theories

  • 1.  On the Cusp: Iran and the Danger of Conspiracy Theories

    Posted an hour ago

    On the Cusp is hosted by Alfred Marcus, Professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. His recent book is Comeback: Can Great Companies Rise Again? 

    In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it. Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see how systems break, Amin traces the chain that led to catastrophe. Iran's thwarted democracies. The 1953 coup. The architecture of sanctions was designed to inflict economic pain rather than produce diplomacy-the destruction of the JCPOA while the IAEA was certifying Iranian compliance.

     

    In Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) by Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R Greve offer a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, they analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, they show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage. People tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat.


     Other Recent Podcasts


    Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market

    Andrew J. Hoffman

     

    What Do You Want Out of Life?

    Valerie Tiberius

     

    Geostrategy By Design:

    Courtney Rickert McCaffrey, Witold J. Henisz and Oliver Jones

     

    Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century

    Gerald F. Davis

     

    The Vision of the Firm

    Timothy Fort and Suneal Bedi

     

    The Employee Advantage

    Stephan Meir

     

    Adam Smith and Modern Economics

    Stephen B. Young ed.



    --
    Alfred Marcus
    Professor and Spencer Chair in Strategy and Technological Leadership
    Carlson School of Management
    Minneapolis, MN. 55416
    612 224 4533

    See my podcasts On the Cusp Between Strategy and Ethics on the New Books Network

     https://newbooksnetwork.com/hosts/profile/f5500881-5c35-4e6c-8b9a-0d7f59bae0d4

     

    Also see my currently available book from University of Toronto Press Rotman School of Business

     

      https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487547974


    On Amazon

    https://www.amazon.com/Comeback-Great-Companies-Rise-Again/dp/1487547978r=1-1


    In addition, see my articles in Seeking Alpha

    https://seekingalpha.com/author/alfred-marcus




Related Content