3 Critical Management Studies

Abstract

Critical management studies (CMS) offers a range of alternatives to mainstream management theory with a view to radically transforming management practice. The common core is deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing conceptions and forms of management and organization. CMS's motivating concern is neither the personal failures of individual managers nor the poor management of specific firms, but the social injustice and environmental destructiveness of the broader social and economic systems that these managers and firms serve and reproduce. This chapter reviews CMS's progress, main themes, theoretical and epistemological premises, and main projects; we also identify some problems and make some proposals. Our aim is to provide an accessible overview of a growing movement in management studies.

Acknowledgments

We thank Jim Barker, Todd Bridgman, Marta Calás, Bill Cooke, Peter Edward, Peter Fleming, David Jacobs, Steve Jaros, John Jermier, Kate Kenny, David Levy, Richard Marens, David O'Donnell, Craig Pritchard, Linda Smircich, Paul Thompson, and Tony Tinker for their comments, even if we did not find space to incorporate them all and there remains much about the chapter with which they may disagree. We also thank the two Annals editors, Art Brief and Jim Walsh, for their support and suggestions.

Notes

1. Positivism is a particularly slippery term, so it is useful to explicate what we mean by it, namely an approach which assumes that (a) there is an objective external reality awaiting discovery and dissection by science; (b) scientific method gives privileged access to reality; (c) language provides a transparent medium for categorization, measurement and representation; (d) the observer scientists occupies a position outside and above reality from which he (rarely she) develops and validates robust theories about reality (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000, p. 61; see also Hacking 1981; Adorno et al., 1976).

2. Since these terms recur frequently in CMS work and in this review, we should define them. Capitalism is a form of society characterized by wage employment (thus domination by the class of owners, as distinct from cooperative owner ship) and competition between firms (thus domination by the anarchy of the market, as distinct from democratic planning). Patriarchy is a form of society characterized by the gender dominance of men over women. Racism is a structure of domination of one racially denned group over others. Imperialism is a structure of power relations in which the dominant class in one country exploits economically and dominates politically the population of other countries, even if the latter preserve formal independent sovereignty. Productivism is a structure of relations between humanity and the rest of the natural world in which the former destroy the latter in pursuit of their narrowly conceived self-interests, sacrificing both nature and noneconomic human values. CMS proponents often debate the nature of these structures and their interrelations but usually agree that they are all simultaneously operative today.

3. In this nuanced relation to classical Marxism, LPT is just one of several contemporary approaches that should be noted, albeit the one with the greatest impact to date on management research. We do not have space to address others, such as the anarchist Italian Autonomists (see Wright, 2002) and the efforts of the scholars around the journal Rethinking Marxism to develop a nondeterminist, nonreductionist form of Marxism.

4. CMS standpoint proponents, like other ST theorists, are divided on whether standpoints play similar or different roles in social versus natural sciences. Arguably, standpoints play qualitatively different roles in two domains, although even skeptics acknowledge that the case for ST in the critique of natural sciences is not easily dismissed.