Who and what counts? Understanding work and workers that matter dialogically

Foreword (Stewart Clegg) Part I: Introduction 1. Debating Knowledge: Rethinking Critical Management Studies in a Changing World (Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills) Part II: Critique and its (Dis-) Contents 2. Critical Management Scholarship: A Satirical Critique of Three Narrative Histories (Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills) 3. An Ethic of Care within Critical Management Studies? (Emma Bell, Susan Merilainen, Scott Taylor and Janne Tienari) 4. Critical Performativity: The Happy End of Critical Management Studies? (Sverre Spoelstra and Peter Svensson) 5. A Rebel without a Cause? (Re)Claiming the Question of The 'Political' in Critical Management Studies (Ajnesh Prasad) Part III: Difference, Otherness, Marginality 6. Fringe Benefits? Revisi(ti)ng the Relationship between Feminism and Critical Management Studies (Karen Lee Ashcraft) 7. Humility and the Challenge to De-Colonize the 'Critical' in Critical Management Studies (Janet L. Borgerson) 8: Sexualities and/in 'Critical' Management Studies (Jeff Hearn, Charlotte Holgersson and Marjut Jyrkinen) 9. Power Failure: The Short Life and Premature Death of Critical 'Diversity' Research (Roy Jacques) Part IV: Knowledge at the Crossroads 10. Towards Decolonizing Modern Western Structures of Knowledge: A Postcolonial Interrogation of (Critical) Management Studies (Anshuman Prasad) 11. Debating Critical Management Studies and Global Management Knowledge (Gavin Jack) 12. Rethinking Market-ing Orientation: A Critical Perspective From an Emerging Economy (Alexandre Faria) 13. Social Movements and Organizations through a Critical Management Studies Lens: Metaphor, Mechanism, Mobilization, or More? (Maureen Scully) 14. The Usual Suspects? Putting Plagiarism 2.0 in its Place (J. Michael Cavanaugh) 15. Teaching Management Critically: Classroom Practices under Rival Paradigms (Gabriela Coronado) Part V: History and Discourse 16: History of-in-and Critical Management Studies (Terrance Weatherbee) 17. Let them Eat Ethics: Hiding behind Corporate Social Responsibility in the Age of Financialization (Richard Marens) 18. Towards a Genealogy of Humanitarianism:Revealing (Neo-) Colonialism in Organizational Practice (Adam Rostis) 19. Deconstructive Criticism and Critical Management Studies (Steve McKenna and Amanda Peticca-Harris) Part VI: Global Predicaments 20: The 'Iron' in the Iron Cage: Retheorizing the Multinational Corporation as a Colonial Space (Raza Mir and Ali Mir) 21: We're not talking to people, we're talking to a nation: Crossing Borders in Transnational Customer Service Work (Kiran Mirchandani) 22. Microfinance: A Neoliberal Instrument or a Site of the 'Other's' Resistance and Contestation? (Nimruji Jammulamadaka) 23. Exceptional Opportunities: Hierarchies of Race and Nation in the United States Peace Corps Recruitment Materials (Jenna N. Hanchey) 24. American Soft Imperialism and Management Education in Brazil: A Postcolonial Critique (Rafael Alcadipani)

Judith Butler, a hugely influential but also controversial theorist, is a philosopher whose writings are not often found on the bookshelves labelled 'philosophy'. An avowed feminist, her early, major books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter are seminal within queer theory. Butler's work has provoked significant interest in management and organization studies, both through its influence on feminist or gender theories of work but also because her thesis of performativity offers ways of understanding management, organizations and work more generally. This chapter tracks how Butler has developed her theory of performativity since Gender Trouble. It devotes little attention to the still-developing theory of precarity because of the relevance of the former theory to 'critical performativity', a theory of political practice developing in critical management studies that draws, somewhat loosely, on Butler's theory of performativity.

This article presents a review of the book “Critical Management Studies,” edited by Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott.

Alternative work communities encompass various organizing forms, including democratic organizing practices, participative decision making, feminist organizing principles, and technological alternatives, such as telecommuting and Internet businesses. These nontraditional organizing practices discursively construct identity and community in the day-to-day negotiation of the tensions of technological empowerment and organizational control. This review of literature pulls together varied, multidisciplinary sources from organizational communication, critical management studies, feminist theory, and gender studies, as well as business, organization studies, and sociology to aid in the development of future research in gender and organizational communication studies or, as Martin and Collinson (2002) referred to this growing area of study, gendered organizational studies.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalysis to an emerging sub-field known as “critical healthcare management studies” (CHMS).Design/methodology/approachBuilding upon a wave of critical scholarship in the broader field of management, scholars and practitioners of healthcare management have begun to forge a critical scholarly movement of their own. CHMS, short for “critical healthcare management studies,” formally denotes a new subfield of inquiry dedicated to challenging entrenched assumptions, exposing power relations, and cultivating critical praxis, all the while serving as a vital counterpoint to mainstream scholarship. This paper seeks to augment the CHMS movement with psychoanalysis, and particularly the critical vein of organizational psychoanalysis already well-established in critical management studies.FindingsThe argument is made that a greater engagement with psychoanalysis offers novel avenues for critical theorizing and practice in healthcare management. Specifically three areas are considered: 1) the exploitative role of guilt in the caring professions, 2) the resurgence of authoritarianism and its implications for unconscious organizational dynamics, and 3) the potential for a psychoanalytically informed critical healthcare praxis.Originality/valueWhile there remain wide differences of opinion about the utility of psychoanalysis outside of the clinical arena, this paper reveals just how psychoanalysis can inform today's healthcare organizations, and more broadly the social and political organization of health in society.

PurposeThe purpose of this conceptual‐theoretical review article is to examine two claims made by critical management studies (CMS): that CMS is emancipatory and that it has critical theory (CT) as its origin and prime theoretical base.Design/methodology/approachTwo theories are contrasted: CT and CMS. The paper analyses one of CMS' newest key publications: theOxford Handbook of Critical Management Studiesin great detail focusing on epidemiology and philosophy.FindingsThe main finding is that CMS is a critical representation of mainstream MS. CT focuses on emancipation while CMS provides a system‐conforming interpretation of traditional MS that rarely presents alternatives to mainstream MS.Research limitations/implicationsThe key implication is that CMS assists mainstream MS as a corrective but, in general, does not enhance emancipation.Practical implicationsThe paper assists researchers in the field of management studies (MS) and its “critical” offspring of CMS in understanding the role CMS plays for traditional MS.Social implicationsIt makes scholars aware that research conducted from within CMS provides system‐conforming solution to issues such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental issues. CMS scholarship is not a critical evaluation of, for example, CSR and environmental issues directed towards emancipation from present structures of managerial domination.Originality/valueThe value of the paper is threefold: for the first time, CMS has been measured against its own claims; the article provides clarity on three issues: MS, CMS and CT; and it assists research in the area of CMS and CT because it shows that the former is about improving mainstream MS while the latter is about emancipation.

Purpose Drawing upon the concepts of transmodernity, pluriversality and border thinking the author stands in a more practical fashion for the co-creation of an-other performative CMS which fosters the decolonization of (critical) management studies – as a way to contribute “to concretely changing the world(s) for the better” (as claimed by the organizers of the symposium “should critical management studies get anything done?” held at the Academy of Management Meeting in 2012 in Boston). Methodology/approach From a more practical and less opaque perspective on border thinking it is shown how and why border thinking can both enable and constrain critical scholars and people to move across the borders of the colonial difference and from Eurocentric modernity toward transmodern pluriversality. Findings The current performative turn of CMS fails to address the agency of critical knowledge as a potential reworking of Occidentalism which can be mobilized to “manage” the rise of alternatives and knowledges from the rest of the world in general and from emerging economies in particular. Originality/value of chapter Border thinking as a crucial concept from the coloniality/modernity research program from Latin America is taken as an important contribution from the colonial difference to the co-creation of decolonial management studies (DMS), an-other performative CMS which fosters the construction of a world in which many worlds and knowledges can coexist as a way to change it for the better.

Fournier and Grey (2000) suggest that those inhabiting the contested terrain of Critical Management Studies (CMS) share a commitment to identifying inequality and subordination in organizations and to the associated possibility of emancipation, however this is conceived. Despite their additional claim that one crucial distinction between critical and non-critical management studies is the `philosophical and methodological reflexivity' of the former (Fournier and Grey 2000: 19), our review indicates limits to this reflexivity in CMS's empirical practices — indeed, we argue these may even be counter-productive with regard to its political allegiances. To encourage wider discussion of these issues, we provide a tripartite framework of understandings of research ethics drawn from within and outside the management academy, and interrogate the opportunities and limitations of each for enriching CMS research.

Introduction – Critical Theory and its Contribution to Critical Management Studies – Critical Realism in Critical Management Studies – Poststructuralism in Critical Management Studies – Perspectives on Labor Process Theory – Organizations and the Natural Environment – Power at Work in Organizations – Critical Management Studies on Identity: Mapping the Terrain – Managing Globalization – Discourse and Critical Management Studies – Culture: Broadening the Critical Repertoire – Critical Approaches to Organizational Change – Ethics: Critique, Ambivalence, and Infinite Responsibilities (Unmet) – Critical Management and Organizational History – Gender and Diversity: Other Ways to “Make a Difference” – Towards A Workers' Society? New Perspectives on Work and Emancipation – Critical Management Methodology – Marketing – Information Systems – Strategy – Communication – Human Resource Management – Accounting – Challenging Hierarchy – On Striving to Give a Critical Edge to Critical Management Studies – Critical Reflections on Labor Process Theory, Work, and Management – Critical Management Education – Handbooks, Swarms, and Living Dangerously.

In this editorial, we aim to introduce the diverse set of 21 papers we have curated over the past 2 years, to review their collective contribution to the knowledge base in critical management and organisation studies, and to reflect on how they add to and challenge existing debates within our field. These papers speak about populism in a wide range of voices from multiple perspectives. The geographical reach is wide, with populism discussed in relation to the contexts of India, Latin America, France, the United Kingdom and the United States by authors working in the latter three countries as well as Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden and the Netherlands. The papers cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, drawing on political science, history, sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Methodolotgical approaches include ethnography, historical narrative, discursive approaches and autoethnography. As such, these papers raise important questions and offer perspectives and ways forward that are in urgent need of attention and discussion by critical management and organisation studies communities, challenging readers’ understandings of populism at macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Here we tie the whole series together by highlighting emergent themes and identifying future research directions that these papers have opened up.

PurposeUsing intersectionality and introducing newer developments from critical cross-cultural management studies, this paper aims to discuss how diversity is applicable to changing cultural contexts.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a conceptual paper built upon relevant empirical research findings from critical cross-cultural management studies.FindingsBy applying intersectionality as a conceptual lens, this paper underscores the practical and conceptual limitations of the business case for diversity, in particular in a culturally diverse international business (IB) setting. Introducing newer developments from critical cross-cultural management studies, the authors identify the need to investigate and manage diversity across distinct categories, and as intersecting with culture, context and power.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper builds on previous empirical research in critical cross-cultural management studies using intersectionality as a conceptual lens and draws implications for diversity management in an IB setting from there. The authors add to the critique of the business case by showing its failures of identifying and, consequently, managing diversity, equality/equity and inclusion (DEI) in IB settings.Practical implicationsOrganizations (e.g. MNEs) are enabled to clearly see the limitations of the business case and provided with a conceptual lens for addressing DEI issues in a more contextualized and intersectional manner.Originality/valueThis paper introduces intersectionality, as discussed and applied in critical cross-cultural management studies, as a conceptual lens for outlining the limitations of the business case for diversity and for promoting DEI in an IB setting in more complicated, realistic and relevant ways.

This essay proposes a reflection on the themes of organization and organizational studies, taking the propositions of Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s philosophy of praxis as the foundation. The author’s propositions are systematized in the first part of the text, what refers to the definitions of praxis and teleology - what defines the proper human activity - to the inseparable relationship between theory and practice in praxis; to the levels and forms of praxis - repetitive and creative, spontaneous and reflexive; to the philosophy of praxis. Based on these foundations, a reflection is made on Administrative Theories, Organizational Theories, Management as the hegemonic version in Administration and Organizational Studies (OS), Organizational Analysis understood as a predominantly interpretive and constructionist theoretical activity, and Critical Management Studies. It ends with a discussion about OS as a space with the potential for a creative praxis in relation to the organization of liberating social struggles. The challenge is to think about organization as a category with possibilities of content developed based on creative dialogues and learning processes with the knowledge produced in the praxis of organizing liberating concrete struggles embedded in material socio-historical relations.

This article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. This claim has most significantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Indefinite Detention”, presents a more differentiated account of power that registers the significance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more pragmatic critical management studies (CMS), by exploring the emancipatory intent of organizational (re)design concepts and ideas from the modern sociotechnical approach integral organizational renewal (IOR). Design/methodology/approach This paper is of a conceptual nature in that it engages with relevant literature from the fields of CMS and IOR, guided by a focused conceptualization of emancipation from CMS literature. Findings It is found that although IOR can to a large extent be considered as an emancipatory project, it contains a number of dangers which jeopardize its emancipatory potential. Complemented with other sociotechnical approaches and ideas, however, it appears that IOR could make some valuable contributions to a pragmatic CMS. Originality/value This paper is unique in engaging in an exchange of ideas between CMS and IOR. By doing so, it contributes, first, to the debate on a more pragmatic CMS; second, to the dialogue between CMS and “mainstream” organization science; third, to the field of organizational (re)design.

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities’ processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves.