Professor Hannele Seeck

Professor Seeck has published about 100 academic and professional publications. She leads the Disinformation, Propaganda & Soft Power Research Lab.

The research conducted, for example, at University of Cambridge, LSE and LUT—which is global, interdisciplinary and critical with the profound aim of making the world a better place to live—has always been vital to Professor Seeck because those are her underlying reasons for conducting research and being an academic in the first place.

The UK university system, particularly the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has greatly influenced Prof. Seeck’s intellectual history. She completed her MSc, PhD and postdoc at The London School of Economics in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and has previously served as a Senior Visiting Fellow (2010–2015) in the Department of Media and Communications, where she is currently a Visiting Professor. She is also a Research Fellow (Honorary Appointment), Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge

In terms of positions of trust and societal impact, she has led several research projects, for example, for major global corporations and for the Prime Minister’s office. She led the well-recognised investigation commissioned by the Prime Minister’s office of management and communication in Finland of responses to the Asian tsunami disaster. She is familiar with both private and public sector research and practice. For a number of years, she was a fellow of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA), the main business think-tank in Finland. She is also a member of the Boardman Management Study Group. She has also been an Adjunct Professor at the National Defence University in the Department of Leadership and Military Pedagogy since 2010. She is Vice-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for Defence, as appointed by the government.

Professor Seeck has published about 100 academic and professional publications on organisational studies, media and communications and critical management studies. She has authored several books. Her recent publications include contributions to Organization, Media, Culture & Society, Management Learning and IJMR. Please see a list of publications for more information.

Prior to becoming a Professor in Communication Sciences at the School of Engineering, she was a Professor of Management and Organising (full, tenured) at the School of Economics, for a number of years, Thus, her research is deeply interdisciplinary, combining for example, social theory, political science, history and management and organisational studies with media and communication studies and more recently, also with computational methods. However, in terms of theory building, her research often has a sociological twist. Prof. Seeck’s work reflects her interest in soft power, power relations and control mechanisms in the workplace and society at large, their historical development, new forms of materialisation and their interplay with subjectivity. Her research focuses on the global and local travel of ideas, ideologies and discourses, as well as on agency, power and governance.

In her current research on ideology and propaganda (joint research with LSE colleagues), Prof. Seeck focuses on: (1) theories of ideology and propaganda and their different functions (2) how they have been previously researched methodologically and (3) what kinds of materials are needed to study them empirically. Rather than concentrating on the content of ideology and propaganda, the research will focus on the functions of ideology and associated propaganda in different societal contexts. The interest is in ideological propaganda particularly in the context of AI, as AI systems need to be able to recognise and detect different forms of propaganda and ideological propaganda.

Expertise: Organisational communications; Crisis communications; Global communications; Soft Power; Ideology; Discourse; Propaganda; Foucault; Governmentality; Critical Management Studies. Current interests: Ideology, propaganda & AI; Democracy, news & AI; Soft power & South Korea.