Making ‘Critical Performativity’ Concrete: Sumantra Ghoshal and Linkages between the Mainstream and the Critical

Abstract

AbstractCritical performativity (CP) advocates direct engagement with managerial practice to promote social change while being subversive of a focus on efficiency. Its critique of efficiency needs to be reconsidered: there can be a common real interest in efficiency, and addressing efficiency does not entail an uncritical acceptance of a managerial agenda. Taking this step allows CP to engage with more conventional views. Two kinds of such views can be distinguished, the unitarist, which stresses common interests, and the pluralist, which allows for diverging interests. The work of the mainstream scholar Sumantra Ghoshal illustrates an effort to move beyond unitarism towards a more pluralist position. He developed a ‘good theory of management’ that aimed to address efficiency, but also the quality of jobs. Appraisal of this theory from the perspective of real interests points to limitations, but also ways in which it can be given a critical edge. The result is an analysis that advances that strand of CP that seeks to make specific interventions in concrete organizational practice.