The Prospects for Critical Management Studies in the American Academy of Management

Abstract

Over the past four years a very diverse group of scholars have gathered at the ‘Critical Management Studies Workshops’ at the National Academy of Management meetings. While attending the sessions and participating in doctoral student and junior faculty consortia, we noticed that many people seemed surprised by the mix of delegates attending these events. Participants seemed to wonder just what they had in common with each other. This kind of sentiment lies behind Mayer Zald’s off-handed reference to ‘this thing loosely called Critical Management Studies’ (p.??). The gathering of people across the theoretical and methodological spectrums, as well as across elite and not-so-elite institutions, is both invigorating and a little unnerving. Invigorating and unnerving, the phenomenon is gathering momentum. Indeed, it is poised to be formally welcomed into the Academy of Management this year as an Interest Group. Zald has done us a great service by identifying who defines this group, where it comes from, and how it fits into the wider ‘university of disciplines’. CMS is a home to people from the left who ‘challenge the dominant authorities and the distribution of power, status, and material claims surrounding the field of play’ (p.??) and a home to those who embrace the ‘methodologies derived from hermeneutics and deconstruction (p.??). He points out that this is not your typical homogeneous scholarly community and, so, he alerts us to inevitable growing pains within this group of ‘schizoid mavericks’ (p.??). Grounded in a fine analysis of general change dynamics in academic disciplines and the history of Critical approaches in professional schools, he muses about the future of the CMS enterprise. We would like to add a few words to his vision for the future for CMS, focusing on CMS’s prospects in North America. First, we will comment on the two trajectories that Zald identifies for CMS, more clearly drawing out the implications of his own arguments. Our conclusion is that absent Volume 9(3): 402–410 Copyright © 2002 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)