Strategic Ignorance

This book develops a comprehensive theory of strategic ignorance in organizations, showing how not-knowing is actively produced, distributed, and maintained as a resource that shapes decision-making.

Readers will gain a rigorous conceptual toolkit for identifying ignorance as a structured phenomenon rather than an unfortunate absence of knowledge. The book equips them to diagnose why this ignorance persists, and how it serves particular interests. It offers a novel framework that integrates organizational theory alongside concrete analytical dimensions that can be applied across empirical settings. Through carefully developed concepts, illustrative cases, and a structured set of research questions, the book enables readers to move from recognizing instances of ignorance to systematically interrogating their production and effects. It also advances methodological guidance for studying ignorance, making visible dynamics that often remain obscured in conventional analyses of knowledge and decision-making.

This book is intended for scholars and advanced students in organization studies, management, sociology, and political economy, as well as researchers interested in knowledge, power, and institutions. It also speaks to practitioners who seek to better understand the role of ignorance in shaping organizational outcomes and public life.

Meghan Van Portfliet is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her PhD from Queen's University of Belfast in 2019. Her research centers on the topics of whistleblowing and organizational ignorance, and she has been invited to speak on her research in Canada, Indonesia, the UK, the US South Africa and Ireland. Mahaut Fanchini is Assistant Professor at the University of Paris-Est Créteil, France.

Mahaut Fanchini is Associate Professor at Université Paris-Est Créteil and a member of the Institut de Recherche en Gestion (IRG). Her research examines whistleblowing and the circulation of information in organizations from a critical perspective, with a focus on the dynamics of power, voice, and silence.