Organization studies of inequality, with and beyond Piketty

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century did much to bring discussions of economic inequality into the intellectual and popular mainstream. This article indicates how business, management and organization studies can productively engage with Piketty’s book. It does this by deriving practical consequences from Piketty’s proposed division of intellectual labour in general and his account of ‘super-managers’ in particular. There are organizational specificities to inequality which Piketty’s framework does not address, however. His account of corporate governance, of tax avoidance policy and of financialization, in particular, requires significant conceptual and empirical supplementation. We argue that business, management and organizational scholars should contribute to the cross-disciplinary inequality research project which Capital in the 21st Century proposes not despite these limitations but because of them.