A note on Romanticism in the context of dissertation projects (information from perplexity.ai)
My question: "In the context of doing MBA and Housing Studies dissertation projects, does Romanticism has any relevance or useful ideas to inform the dissertation project works? Please highlight 6 main ideas of Romanticism and then offer your discussion on the topic raised here."
The reply: "Romanticism can be a useful “counter-tradition” to draw on in MBA and Housing Studies dissertations, especially for questioning technocratic, purely rational or market‑centric approaches to management, planning and housing.
Six main ideas of Romanticism
Here are six core Romantic ideas, simplified and synthesized from standard accounts.
Emotion over cold rationality
Feelings, passions and affect are treated as legitimate sources of understanding, not just noise to be controlled.
Subjectivity and individual experience
The inner life, personal perception and lived experience of individuals matter more than abstract, universal rules.
Imagination and creativity
Imagination is seen as a way of grasping truths that rational calculation alone cannot reach, including moral and social possibilities.
Reverence for nature and the non‑market world
Nature, the simple and the mundane are endowed with intrinsic value, often in protest against industrialization and commodification.
Critique of progress and alienation
Romantics question the idea that economic or technological “progress” automatically improves human life, and highlight alienation, loss of community and meaning under capitalism.
Individualism, authenticity and resistance to convention
Emphasis on being true to oneself, originality, and resistance to oppressive social norms or bureaucratic systems.
Relevance for MBA dissertations
In management research, Romantic ideas can help you interrogate the limits of purely rationalist or positivist models of organizations.
Emotion and subjectivity: You can frame research questions around how managers’ and employees’ emotions, narratives and identities shape strategic decisions, rather than treating decisions as purely rational responses to data.
Authenticity and meaning at work: Romanticism’s concern with authenticity and the “infinite value of the mundane” aligns with contemporary interest in meaningful work, burnout, and value conflicts in organizations.
Critique of progress: You might critically study how “efficiency” or “innovation” discourse masks losses in worker autonomy, community or purpose, linking to Romantic critiques of modernity and alienation.
Imagination in strategy and leadership: You can justify qualitative, interpretive attention to stories, metaphors and visions in leadership as expressions of imaginative work rather than mere “soft” factors.
For methodology, Romanticism supports interpretivist or critical approaches that foreground lived experience, narrative, and value conflict, instead of purely instrumental hypothesis testing.
Relevance for Housing Studies dissertations
Housing and urban questions sit right inside Romantic concerns about industrial modernity, nature, community and alienation.
Place, attachment and lived experience: Romantic attention to subjectivity and emotion supports studying residents’ sense of home, belonging, stigma, or loss in redevelopment, using interviews, ethnography or narrative methods.
Nature and the city: Romantic reverence for nature invites critical analysis of how green space, landscape and non‑market values are treated in planning and housing policy, beyond land values and densities.
Critique of technocratic “progress”: You can frame a dissertation that questions whether large‑scale housing “upgrading” or smart‑city projects improve residents’ perceived quality of life or instead intensify alienation and displacement.
Authenticity, heritage and community: Romanticism’s idealization of the past and the “organic” community can help you interrogate heritage conservation, displacement of long‑standing communities, and the commodification of “authentic” neighborhoods.
Conceptually, Romanticism offers a vocabulary for housing beyond units, tenure and price: home as meaning, memory, feeling and moral value, not just a commodity.
How you might concretely use Romanticism
You do not need to label your dissertation as “Romantic,” but you can use Romantic ideas strategically in three areas.
Theoretical framing paragraphs
Position your work as balancing “classical” rationalist traditions in management or planning (optimization, control, calculation) with a more Romantic sensitivity to emotion, imagination and lived experience.
- Cite social science discussions that treat Romanticism and classicism as deep structures in research cultures, then explain how your project attends to the Romantic side often suppressed in business and housing research.
Choice and justification of methodology
Use Romantic emphases on subjectivity and authenticity to support qualitative, interpretive or critical methods: in‑depth interviews, narrative analysis, phenomenology of home, etc.
Argue that to understand leadership, organizational culture, or lived experience of housing, you must access inner worlds of feeling and imagination, not just observable behavior or numeric indicators.
Critical discussion and implications
In your discussion chapter, relate findings about stress, loss of community, or environmental degradation to Romantic critiques of alienation, commodification and the cult of progress.
Reflect on non‑pecuniary values—dignity, beauty, tranquility, belonging—that emerge in your data but are invisible in dominant managerial or policy metrics, echoing Romantic defense of “the infinite value of the mundane.”
A possible integrative angle
One way to operationalize this is to treat Romanticism and rationalism as two ideal‑typical lenses: one highlighting calculability, control and efficiency, the other highlighting emotion, meaning and nature.
For an MBA project, you might compare how an organization’s official strategy documents (rationalist lens) and employees’ narratives of their work (Romantic lens) construct very different pictures of what “success” and “good work” mean.
For a Housing Studies project, you could contrast a redevelopment project’s economic and planning rationale with residents’ emotive accounts of home, loss, and place attachment, showing how Romantic concerns are systematically sidelined.
Used this way, Romanticism does not replace your main theories (e.g., institutional theory, governance, gentrification, housing policy), but it provides a powerful critical and interpretive backdrop that enriches your conceptual framing and your reading of empirical data."
** a video on Romanticism
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