We have been studying Critical Management Studies (CMS). CMS analyses management and organisations from a ‘critical’ perspective, which often critiques management rather than praising it, and draws attention to overlooked and ignored aspects of organisations and the way they are managed.
Task:
Choose ONE of the Critical Theories (CT) we have studied, or ONE CT from the longer list in our main textbook by Tadajewski.
Choose ONE UK-based Public Limited Company (PLC), preferably a creative one (e.g. a media / broadcasting company, a publishing company, a fashion company, or a music company, etc.)
Using, applying, and referring to your chosen Critical Theory (CT), your task is to explain the CT further, demonstrate how it can be used to analyse management in the wider world, and show how our CT relates closely to the PLC of your choice.
Highly visual, with images, charts, graphs, tables, and hyper-links to websites, video, or audio.
Critical Management Studies: An Introduction From “Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies” (2001), by Mark Tadajewski (SAGE Publications) Critical management studies (CMS) as a distinctive brand name is usually traced to the publication of Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott's edited collection of the same name (1992). Falling under this banner are a range of perspectives including Marxism, critical theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and feminist approaches to name but a few. What perhaps unites such a disparate group when they are mobilised by CMS scholars is their role in contesting the traditional imperatives of mainstream management research and practice (Fournier and Grey, 2000; Parker, 2002). Put simply, the plurality of perspectives that constitute CMS are not used by CMS activists to help managers run their businesses more efficiently, nor to render employees more docile or customers more amenable to the constellations of products and services offered by business enterprises. Rather, there is a belief amongst the CMS community that something is wrong with the narrowly instrumental way in which management, marketing and accounting are taught to each new generation of students (Brownlie et al., 1999). Each discipline, so we are told, offers a set of ostensibly neutral techniques that supposedly enable us to rationally manage, predict and control a variety of organisational and social phenomena. Yet, from politics to popular culture, there is a widespread suspicion about the effectiveness of management techniques, and the ideologies that they sustain. The concerns of CMS with the way profit-motivated goals structure organisational practice and how this affects the wider social environment are not, it must be said, a new phenomenon. Religious texts have long bemoaned the credit practices that oil the gears of the economy (Crane, 2000). The Romans and Greeks were extremely aware of the problems that accompanied one faction gaining monopoly power in the marketplace (Dickson and Wells, 2001). And with the onset of the industrial revolution, criticism of business continued apace. Parker (2009), for example, draws attention to the various forms of critique that have been levelled at managerial and bureaucratic practices for at least the last 250 years. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moreover, were characterised by the massive growth in industrial power that was exerted by a small number of individuals. This economic power was a worry precisely because the so-called ‘Robber Barons’ managed to translate it into political influence that was believed to corrupt government policy and legislative intent (Dickson and Wells, 2001). In the early twentieth century, business people were labelled ‘Babbitts’, following Sinclair Lewis’ (1932/2003) popular book, and their conservatism, self-promotion and commitment to consumer culture varyingly satirised or grudging praised (Gramsci, 1985). But it was not just academics writing about these subjects. Similar ideas and calls for action were articulated by union leaders, journalists, feminists and others who had experienced or witnessed marginalisation in the economic and social order. They highlighted discrepancies between what advocates for capitalism claimed it provided for workers (e.g. fulfilling employment; freedom; a vast range of products) and what many felt the political-economic system really offered (deskilled and precarious employment; alienation from family and social relations). Frequently, there were gestures made to the fact that business education and practice served the needs of the industrial system and some vague ‘power elite’ (Mills, 1956), rather than improving the general quality of life experienced by many, or offering opportunities for meaning and community, but this did not develop into a consistent body of work critical of managerialism and the business school. However, by the late 1960s, groups of academics and practitioners in the business school and related disciplines (e.g. sociology, heterodox economics, political economy) were devoting considerable energy to questioning a largely uncritical mainstream of business theory or practice. They offered their own critiques of the industrial system and the values and theoretical positions that worked to structure free-market capitalism, leading to inequitable distributions of wealth and marketplace access, as well as status and reward distinctions which stretched from the skyscraper's corner office to the industrial ‘accidents’ on the shop floor (Braverman, 1974). Very broadly speaking, then, we can say that people writing and thinking about CMS tend to agree with a number of key ideas. Along the lines articulated by Fournier and Grey (2000), CMS is dedicated to some type of ‘denaturalisation’, which might involve questioning the taken-for-granted nature of work, the value of job enrichment schemes, the ethics of employing cheap labour in export processing zones, or the use of financial statements to represent organisational ‘reality’. Put simply, CMS supporters argue that we must register the power relations that structure and reaffirm the social, political and economic environment. Complementing this commitment to denaturalisation is the ‘epistemological reflexivity’ that CMS advocates adopt. What this means is that they believe scholars should fully appreciate and document how their own interests and those of influential funding organisations such as universities, corporations and the government drive the production of knowledge in certain ways and not others (Whittle and Spicer, 2008). This has implications for the types of research that are conducted, the questions that are deemed appropriate for study, and often the methods that we utilise in producing research, textbooks and other materials. Because scholars are involved with the production of knowledge, then it can be argued that they should also be responsible for its influence in and on the social world beyond their ivory towers. The above ways of thinking about CMS are quite widely supported. More contentious is the notion that CMS research and teaching should be ‘non-performative’. This term is used to indicate that management research and teaching should not necessarily be driven by the narrow needs of business or current government demands for efficiency (Fournier and Grey, 2000). Neither must it be undertaken in the interests of making practice more efficient and effective unless, and this is the problem, it concerns the governance of ‘alternative’ organisations - such as worker co-operatives, local mutuals and so on. The key political and ethical issue here is perhaps not performativity as such, but the question of ‘performative for whom?’. Another comment that is often made about CMS research is that it is undeservedly critical of management or business practice. The majority of managers are not all nefarious characters who actively seek to affect the world in detrimental ways. Popular culture and the news media notwithstanding, many managers have to work within the constraints imposed by the existing political-economic system which holds maximising shareholder returns, or some other notion of efficiency, as its central goal. This has an impact on everyday business practice in that middle managers may lack substantive power, and are often deeply focused on trying to perform their own organisational role effectively which, in turn, limits critical reflection on corporate practices (e.g. the operation of sweatshops) that may be cognitively and spatially far removed from the managers’ own corporate and social existence (Desmond, 1998). Such factors are all too easily forgotten and can lead to the unfair representation of managers, accountants, marketers and so forth, who are subject to blanket critique, rather than actually spoken to and made active participants in CMS research. This has led to calls for CMS to be more critically, but affirmatively, performative. This means listening to practitioners, as well as all other groups affected by management practices, rather than dismissing their concerns or motives outright (Spicer et al., 2009; Voronov et al., 2009). Indeed, CMS and the various concepts that are found in this book are directly relevant to most practising managers (Grey, 2004). The world of business practice is shot through with power relations: between staff members inside an organisation seeking to control resources, between the organisation and its customer base, or between the organisation and government (Svensson, 2007). Most employees and managers already know this, and CMS could provide a way of voicing what they know, rather than assuming that they are dupes suffering from ‘false consciousness’. CMS is not merely an academic project. The Key Concepts found in the pages that follow can help us all make sense of the complex social world we inhabit, offering the promise of allowing us to question the way the world is structured, and why certain ways of thinking are taken-for-granted, thereby enabling us to move beyond the conventional limits of business education and management practice. USING THIS BOOK We have edited this text in the hope of encouraging others to examine the growing body of research associated with CMS. What we would like to make clear at the outset is that we do not feel that this book is a replacement for exploration of the primary texts associated with CMS. In short, this book should not be considered an easy way of avoiding reading the academic articles, books and textbooks that the contributors to this volume draw upon. Nevertheless, we recognise that students and teachers alike often need more information than textbooks alone can provide, at the same time as they would like pointers to the appropriate intellectual resources associated with a given research speciality. It is all too easy for academics to forget how difficult it can be to orient oneself to a completely new programme of study. We realise this and fully appreciate that intellectual signposting is necessary and useful, and that is what this book seeks to achieve. We have tried to pick what we believe to be the fifty or so most important ideas within the area, though this inevitably means that we will have omitted certain issues in order to produce a useable text. Moreover, like other specialist academic subjects, the language of ‘paradigms’, ‘ideology’ and ‘neoliberalism’ used in this text is quite difficult to understand. With this in mind, the contributors of Key Concepts in this collection have been tasked with making the ideas, theoretical traditions and concepts that they discuss comprehensible to any motivated person confronting CMS and its sister disciplines of Critical Marketing Studies and Critical Accounting for the first time. Our contributors have tried to avoid impenetrable jargon (Grey and Sinclair, 2005) in anticipation that the ideas discussed will reach the largest possible audience. These Key Concepts and the further readings that the contributors provide should therefore be especially useful when students are starting a new course. In much the same way, the discussions found here will be useful for revision purposes and in the preparation of coursework. Finally, we would just add that the resources provided on the CMS (www.criticalmanagement.org/) and the CMS Division of the Academy of Management (http://group.aomonline.org/cms/) webpages will also provide useful supporting resources. REFERENCES Alvesson, M.; Willmott, H. (eds) (1992) Critical Management Studies. Sage London. Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. Monthly Review Press New York. Brownlie, D.; Saren, M.; Wensley, R.; Whittington, R. (1999) ‘Marketing Disequilibrium: On Redress and Restoration’, in Brownlie, Saren, Wensley and Whittington (eds) Rethinking Marketing: Towards Critical Marketing Accountings, pp. 1-22. London: Sage.