Dr Marco Checchi

Assistant Professor

School: Newcastle Business School

I am an Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Newcastle Business School. My research explores resistance, organisational democracy, and the cooperative, mutualist, and solidarity-economy practices through which people organise themselves outside, alongside, and against dominant managerial and market logics. My monograph The Primacy of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2021) develops an account of resistance as constitutive rather than reactive.

Much of my recent empirical work focuses on community-led and democratically organised healthcare. I co-founded and coordinate the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC), a European network of solidarity clinics that emerged in response to austerity and now provides a comparative basis for ongoing research on mutualism, organisational democracy, and community self-management in health and social care.

I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in alternative, self-managed, and activist organisations — including cooperatives, social and solidarity economy initiatives, mutual aid networks, community-led healthcare, occupied workplaces, and grassroots collectives.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

My research sits at the intersection of critical organisation studies, political economy, and continental political philosophy. I am particularly interested in the everyday forms of resistance, refusal, and disobedience that shape — and are shaped by — organisational life, and in the cooperative, mutualist, and solidarity-economy practices through which people organise themselves outside, alongside, and against dominant managerial and market logics.

A long-standing strand of my work draws on Étienne de La Boétie, Michel Foucault, and Mark Fisher to develop an account of resistance as constitutive rather than reactive — an argument set out in my monograph The Primacy of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2021) and continued in current work on voluntary servitude, capitalist realism, and the politics of organisational subjectivity.

Empirically, much of my recent research focuses on community-led and democratically organised healthcare, particularly the European network of social clinics that emerged in response to austerity. I co-founded and coordinate the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC), which provides a comparative basis for ongoing work on mutualism, organisational democracy, and community self-management in health and social care.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Rethinking mental healthcare: operationalising intersectionality through a community-driven social clinic model, Kapilashrami, A., Kokkinidis, G., Checchi, M. 19 Sep 2025, In: Journal of Global Health
Conscientisation and Communities of Compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises, Dallyn, S., Checchi, M., Prado, P., Munro, I. 1 Feb 2024, In: Management Learning
From stakeholders to communities of care, Checchi, M., Kokkinidis, G. 19 Aug 2024, The Handbook of Organizing Economic, Ecological and Societal Transformation, Berlin, Germany, De Gruyter
Occupy as repair for returning: the case of the occupied hospital in Cariati, Checchi, M., Kokkinidis, G. 1 Aug 2024, In: Ephemera
Building communities of Health: The experience of European Social Clinics, Da Mosto, D., Vallerani, S., Kokkinidis, G., Checchi, M., Giaimo, S., Adami, E., Mammana, L. 28 Oct 2023, In: Community Development Journal
Everyday micro-resistances and horizons of radical solidarity, care and mutualism, Checchi, M., Kokkinidis, G. 1 Aug 2023, Social Movements and Everyday Acts of Resistance, London, UK, Taylor & Francis
Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic, Kokkinidis, G., Checchi, M. 1 Mar 2023, In: Organization
Resistant recycling and recycling (r-)existences: self-organizing collective subjectivations of waste pickers in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Carbonai, D., Checchi, M., Lentz Junior, L. 1 Jun 2023, In: Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
Ri-Maflow: Des-pair, Resistance and Re-pair in an Urban Industrial Ecology, Checchi, M. 15 Feb 2023, Ecological Reparation, Bristol, UK, Bristol University Press
Dissensual leadership: rethinking democratic leadership with Jacques Rancière, Barthold, C., Checchi, M., Imas, M., Smolović Jones, O. 1 Jul 2022, In: Organization