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They have no leader, no party chairman, and not even an official spokesperson. Since protests erupted in response to the deadly collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, Serbia’s student movement has repeatedly been described as “leaderless”. Decisions are made in plenums, student assemblies at individual university faculties, complemented by working groups and coordination between universities. Public statements are issued collectively, and those speaking to the media regularly change.
Yet, movements rejecting charismatic leaders and personality cults are nothing new. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street similarly emphasized horizontal decision-making through general assemblies, refused to appoint leaders and mobilized around the collective identity of the “99%.” While this way of organizing succeeded in changing political discourse, the various Occupy movements that adopted consensus decision-making and decentralized autonomy struggled to translate its mobilization into enduring political institutions.
Turning protest mobilization into electoral success
The Serbian case is different. What started as a student protest movement gradually developed into a nationwide political organization, capable not only of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people but also of contesting elections. On 25 October 2026, its Student List – Students Win defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s political camp, winning just over 52% of the vote and a projected parliamentary majority. Remarkably, the movement accomplished this without abandoning its commitment to leaderlessness. An old political saying insists that “you can’t beat somebody with nobody.” Serbia’s students have just demonstrated that this is not necessarily true.
Read the rest of this entry »Let me point to two calls for papers for Special Issues relating to topics regularly covered on this blog that I am involved with as a guest editor.
“Creativity and copyright in the shadow of GenAI: Managing and organizing creative content in the digitalization frenzy” in the journal “Innovation: Organization & Management,” co-edited with Konstantin Hondros (HSU Hamburg), Astrid Mager (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Patricia Aufderheide (American University Washington) and Patrick Cohedent (HEC Montréal). Deadline for submission of full papers is September 30, 2026.
“Collective actorhood and organizationality: Recalibrating responsibility in business-society relations” in the journal “Business & Society,” co-edited with Dennis Schoeneborn (Copenhagen Business School), Héloïse Berkowitz (LEST, CNRS, Aix Marseille), Frank de Bakker (IÉSEG School of Management) and Consuelo Vásquez (Université du Québec à Montréal). We will be supported in the editorial work by consulting editor Devi Vijay (IIM Calcutta) as well as Business & Society editor Colin Higgins (Deakin University.
(leonhard)
Logo of “Anonymous”
It all began with a blog post back in 2012 entitled “Anonymous’ Boundaries: Expelling by Exposing” that I had prepared prior to a workshop on “organization as communication“. It describes how the so-called “hacker collective” Anonymous had expelled one of its self-identified members by exposing its full name, address and other contact information. The closing paragraph of this post reads as follows:
Of course, Anonymous is an extreme case. But exactly because of its distinctiveness I think there is a lot to learn about organizing practices in general.
After the workshop I teamed up with Dennis Schoeneborn and together we tried to harvest the explanatory potential of the case. Our joint efforts resulted in the paper “Fluidity, Identity and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous”, which is now available as a pre-print version at Journal of Management Studies: Read the rest of this entry »
