The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion of Ethos in Critical Management Studies

The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments – is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.     

Power‐base Research in Marketing Channels: A Narrative Review

This paper provides a contemporary and comprehensive review of work in the marketing channel field that is based on French and Raven's power‐base theory. It traces the development of theoretic, conceptual and methodological orthodoxies from the 1970s. Mirroring the movement towards the relationship marketing paradigm, the paper considers the theory's empirical contribution to knowledge of power, conflict, trust and commitment in marketing channels. Limitations relating to inconsistency of treatment, contradictory findings and the simplification of complex phenomena are identified. Nevertheless, current work extends power‐base theory to other cultures, other styles of research and to the area of supply chains. The review raises questions about the value of contribution made using this theory and notes the surprising absence within the channels literature of the broader, current debate about power. To illustrate, the paper shows how Clegg's (1989. Frameworks of Power. London: Sage) circuits of power framework, if applied to channel contexts, could address forms of power that are invisible, anonymous and not necessarily negative. Applications and methods are discussed, opening a space wherein a broadened understanding of power is integrated within a focus upon cooperative channels.     

Who is it that Would Make Business Schools More Critical? A Response to Tatli

Our short paper, as a response to Tatli's recent comment on our work, provides the opportunity to develop further an exploration of problems that both Tatli and ourselves identify in critical management studies (CMS). Here, we articulate ideas that we shied away from in our original paper, notably regarding an unreflexive masculinity that dominates some aspects of CMS. We suggest that many of Dr Tatli's concerns resonate with our own. This response therefore aims to generate further debate about CMS and how it may be perpetuating some of those very practices it abhors in management and organizations.     

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.     

Critical context and international intrafirm best-practice transfers

The sharing and transfer of knowledge and best practices across the organization have long been recognized as a critical driver of a firm's capabilities and performance. In fact, Gupta and Govindarajan (1991) maintained that MNCs exist primarily because of their superior ability to transfer knowledge internally relative to the ability of markets. This paper examines factors that influence the success of intrafirm, cross-border knowledge transfers. We investigate the critical context similarity between best-practice source and recipient units and the impact of critical context similarity on transfer eventfulness. We argue that best practices are embedded within a set of 5 central contextual elements, which are critical to the firm's ability to utilize them. A model is developed and tested that explains the impact of context in enabling or inhibiting best-practice transfers. Our findings suggest that critical context dissimilarity inhibits best-practice transfers. The impact of congruence among the source and recipient units along the dimensions of culture, strategy, decision-making, environment and technology affects the eventfulness of the transfer in terms of time, budget and satisfaction. Additionally, the effect of the fit between the practice characteristics, and the transfer mechanisms employed, is examined.     

Critical Realism,Managers and Information

Many accounts of contemporary management raise the issue of the effective use of information, but little is said about how this is to be achieved. This paper sets notions of ‘information literacy’, drawn from higher education, against the reflections of a small group of managers. This indicates that there are a number of dimensions, notably the relationship of information use to organizational power, that are not adequately catered for in current conceptions of information literacy. It is argued that existing accounts focus excessively on the construction of meaning without taking into account the constraints on such construction. Drawing on resources from critical realism, these constraints are taken to relate both to the individual's embodied nature and to the structural dimensions of their practice. Exploration of these constraints is felt to require attention to the temporal dimension of social analysis and to an examination of the interrelationships between structure and agency.     

Anxiety, Politics and Critical Management Education

The focus of this paper is a discussion of anxiety and politics as they relate to business school pedagogy. Using ideas from critical management education (CME), the paper explores why and how to engage with the anxiety mobilized through attempts to learn. The aim is to discuss emotional and political dynamics that are generated, and too often avoided, in management education. Making these dynamics overt in the classroom can help managers to comprehend the political context within which management takes place. Examples informed by CME are presented, as well as reflections from the author on the anxiety and politics that emerge for the critical management educator in a business school context. The contribution in the paper is to show the way that anxieties and politics within the business school classroom offer opportunities to change how business schools approach the teaching of managers. CME adds value to management education because it challenges what and how individuals and groups expect to learn, and consequently it challenges assumptions about how learning takes place within business schools. Such challenges are seen as an important and integral part of 'making the business school more critical'.     

Reordering Spatial and Social Relations: A Case Study of Professional and Managerial Flexworkers

Research on flexible work practices has focused primarily on social relationships, individual identity, work/work–life balance experience and performance. This paper aims to add another dimension by focusing on space and, specifically, the performance of space by professional flexworkers as they reorder their home and work lives through the process of becoming flexworkers. Drawing on Law's ‘modes of ordering’ and Latourian actor network theory, as well as on Beyes and Steyaert's recent contribution on ‘performing space’, the paper considers how flexworkers themselves reorganize space(s) as an ongoing accomplishment. The purpose and contribution is to offer an alternative to the view that the home and work are rigid containers fixed in social structure, to one that views them as self‐referential space(s), reordered by flexworkers as they seek to ‘keep the social moving’. The paper is based on an empirical study of employees in a Canadian subsidiary of a large hi‐tech multinational corporation. It examines organizational policy documents and interviews with managerial and non‐managerial flexworkers to identify how social and spatial relations are reordered and performed.     

Critical research and entrepreneurship: A cross-disciplinary conceptual typology

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship research's epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, with a view to offering a range of alternatives. Critical research in entrepreneurship has remained fragmented, however, due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and compartmentalized and niche interests. Addressing this situation, our objective is to intensify the space of critique in entrepreneurship research by offering a theoretically informed typology that delineates different manifestations of ‘criticalness’. Our overarching contribution is to advance a typology distinguishing four ideal types of critical entrepreneurship research based on evaluative emphases (referred to as ‘valence’) and the meta-theoretical assumptions informing its critical operation (called ‘paradigmatic orientation’). By demonstrating the variegated political, ethical and ideological interests and preoccupations that critical studies serve within different management sub-disciplines, the typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for making sense of and synthesizing critical perspectives across scholarly boundaries. Also, it helps to reposition understandings of critique as gestures of negativity by stimulating a greater appreciation of the generative potential of critique and the theoretical and philosophical possibilities that this can bring to our scholarly community.     

Elusive Critical Elements of Transformative Risk Assessment Practice and Interpretation: Is Alternatives Analysis the Next Step?

This article argues that “game‐changing” approaches to risk analysis must focus on “democratizing” risk analysis in the same way that information technologies have democratized access to, and production of, knowledge. This argument is motivated by the author's reading of Goble and Bier's analysis, “Risk Assessment Can Be a Game‐Changing Information Technology—But Too Often It Isn't” (Risk Analysis, 2013; 33: 1942–1951), in which living risk assessments are shown to be “game changing” in probabilistic risk analysis. In this author's opinion, Goble and Bier's article focuses on living risk assessment's potential for transforming risk analysis from the perspective of risk professionals—yet, the game‐changing nature of information technologies has typically achieved a much broader reach. Specifically, information technologies change who has access to, and who can produce, information. From this perspective, the author argues that risk assessment is not a game‐changing technology in the same way as the printing press or the Internet because transformative information technologies reduce the cost of production of, and access to, privileged knowledge bases. The author argues that risk analysis does not reduce these costs. The author applies Goble and Bier's metaphor to the chemical risk analysis context, and in doing so proposes key features that transformative risk analysis technology should possess. The author also discusses the challenges and opportunities facing risk analysis in this context. These key features include: clarity in information structure and problem representation, economical information dissemination, increased transparency to nonspecialists, democratized manufacture and transmission of knowledge, and democratic ownership, control, and interpretation of knowledge. The chemical safety decision‐making context illustrates the impact of changing the way information is produced and accessed in the risk context. Ultimately, the author concludes that although new chemical safety regulations do transform access to risk information, they do not transform the costs of producing this information—rather, they change the bearer of these costs. The need for further risk assessment transformation continues to motivate new practical and theoretical developments in risk analysis and management.     

Planning reform beyond planning: the debate on an integrated Environment and Planning Act in the Netherlands

Land-use plans serve a dual function. On the one hand, they are programmes for future development, plans for action. On the other hand, they have a regulative function in relation to construction and land use. This paper investigates how the interplay between these functions is playing a role in the current debate about the new integrated Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet) in the Netherlands. Initially, the government proposed abolishing local land-use plans and replacing them with a system of by-laws. However, this proposal did not survive the debate on this bill. This paper will shed light on the relationships between planning and regulation by analysing that debate.     

Learning and development experiences of self-initiated expatriate women in the United Arab Emirates

The article explores self-initiated expatriate women's experiences of working and learning in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Adler's (Adler, N. 1987. Pacific basin managers: A Gaijin, not a woman. Human Resource Management 26, no. 2: 169–91) seminal study and Tung's (Tung, R.L. 2004. Female expatriates: The model of the global manager. Organizational Dynamics 33: 243–53) research suggest that expatriate women operating in a foreign host culture are categorized as a ‘Third Gender’: host nationals would perceive them as ‘foreign’ first and ‘women’ second, consequently according them different privileged treatment inworkplaces than host national women colleagues. This qualitative study of self-initiated expatriate women highlights how the women's constructions of themselves as ‘foreign’ and ‘female’ in the UAE provide a lens through which they reflect upon their own experiences of learning and development. In the absence of support from their own organizations and/or driven by their own aspirations, the women embarked upon their professional development initiatives; networking, coaching and formal qualifications. Key themes of vulnerability in being a foreigner, gendered workplaces, informal learning and women's agency in their own learning and development emerge from the analysis. The women's experiences suggest that their ‘Third Gender’ identity frames both constraints and opportunities within their social and work environment. The research focus on self-initiated expatriate women developing their professional practice, without the organizational Human Resource Development (HRD) support normally provided for assigned expatriates, is a key contribution to HRD, expatriate and international management literature where gender has tended to be ignored.     

Understanding the Participation of Critical Task Specialists in Strategic Decision Making*

This paper explores the role of critical task specialists in strategic decision making and presents a theoretical model relating critical task specialist participation in decision making to the organization's overall strategy and the nature of the decision. This exploratory study examines scope and intensity of physician participation in hospital decision making. Intensity of critical task specialist participation is explained by content of the decision and by the organization's strategy, while scope of participation is explained by decision content. The findings suggest the need for more complex models of participation than are normally used in decision-making research. The findings also suggest that executives, in managing strategic decision-making processes, should pay attention to questions of both scope and intensity of participation. The results suggest that critical task specialists play a different role in the decision process, depending on specific decision content and organization strategy.     

Should Firms Go “Beyond Profits”? Milton Friedman versus Broad CSR1

When attempting to articulate the nature and scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a variety of opinions emerge. The primary CSR issue appears to be: Should firms go “beyond profits”? In order to address this normative question, this article will explore the theoretical underpinnings of CSR and its practical application. Part one of the paper begins by discussing common CSR definitions. Part two outlines the CSR debate in terms of the “narrow view” of CSR (as represented by Milton Friedman) versus the “broad view” (i.e., beyond profits). Part three applies both the narrow and broad approaches to CSR in analyzing two classic business and society cases: (1) the Ford Pinto; and (2) Merck's river blindness pill. The article concludes with a proposed synthesis of the CSR approaches discussed.     

Distances in Organizations: Innovation in an R&D Lab

The distance between actors in an organization affects how they interact with each other, and particularly whether they will exchange (innovative) knowledge with each other. Actors in each other's proximity have fewer conflicts, more trust towards each other, for example, and are thus more involved in knowledge transfer. Actors close to others thus are believed to perform better: by being more innovative, for instance. This theory of propinquity's claim resonates widely in the literature and has intuitive appeal: ‘people are most likely to be attracted towards those in closest contact with them’ (Newcomb, Th. (1956). American Psychologist, 11, p. 575). Knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are close is more readily accessed, better understood and more readily useable. At the same time, however, and in contrast to the what the theory of propinquity suggests, knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are at a greater distance may be more diverse, offer unexpected and valuable insights, and therefore give rise to innovation. In order to understand these opposing expectations, scholars have indicated that distance must be conceived of as multifaceted: individuals can be close to each other in one way, while at the same time distant in another. No prior paper has extensively studied the effects of distance as a multifaceted concept, however. This study offers two distinct contributions. It argues, first, why some instances of distance affect the opportunity to interact with alters, potentially lowering an actor's performance, while other instances of distance affect the expected benefits from interaction. The latter would increase an actor's performance. Secondly, this paper is the first study to test empirically the expectations about how seven different measures of distance affect an actor's innovative performance. Innovative performance is measured as both creative contribution and contribution to knowledge that has immediate commercial use (patents). In the setting of a large research lab, it is found, contrary to expectations, that distance does not hurt individual innovative performance and sometimes helps it in unexpected ways.     

Pension Fund Trustees:: Role and Contribution

Although Boards of Trustees have statutory authority over pension fund investment, how these boards exercise their responsibility is considered to vary unduly. Recently, pension fund trustees have been under pressure from government, sponsors and beneficiaries. The question being asked is, ‘What is the trustee’s role and contribution?’. In response, a UK-based study conducted at Cranfield School of Management explores, from the trustees’ perspective, the nature of their role and contribution.The results of the study highlight that in addition to pension fund trustees being mindful of their fiduciary duties, under trust law, by acting at all times in their beneficiaries’ best financial interests, they also make a valuable contribution to seven key areas of activity considered as critical to pension fund management. It is concluded that trustees are well capable of positionally responding to the challenges they face within the financial markets environment and utilize external resources, such as financial services consultants, effectively.     

Reframing Relevance as ‘Social Usefulness’: A Comment on Hodgkinson and Starkey's ‘Not Simply Returning to the Same Answer Over and Over Again’

This is a commentary on Hodgkinson and Starkey's (British Journal of Management, 22 (2011), pp. 355–369) proposal to reframe the relevance of business and management research by combining design science with critical realism. Their proposal is welcomed for its advocacy of a ‘social usefulness’ agenda and for commending the insights of the social sciences, rather than emulating a professional (e.g. medical school) model. However, the advocacy of critical realism is not consistent with the commended conception of design science; and it also risks devaluing the contribution of other progressive, emancipation‐oriented approaches to research. Despite substituting ‘social usefulness’ for ‘relevance’, Hodgkinson and Starkey's proposal does not challenge the established, comparatively narrow, research agenda. The counterproposal prioritizes a conception of relevance/social usefulness that broadens what is studied by business school researchers as well as changing how established topics are researched.     

The Principal Statistical Sources for the Labour Market in Italy

ABSTRACT: The state of disequilibrium which the labour market in Italy (as in all the major industrialised countries) presents, has been the centre of debate in political and economic circles for many years now. How should this disequilibrium be interpreted, considering the complexity of the phenomena found in the labour area? Can they be modeled into global explanatory schemas of general economic theory? The authors believe the complexity of these phenomena can neither be ignored nor simplified, but accepted as a distinguishing feature of the labour market, and thus have to be interpreted on the basis of numerous and often contradictory control variables. This paper hence outlines the principle sources of Italian labour market data available, in order to provide a rational and critical guide to interpreting the available indicators. The sources examined are both institutional (the ISTAT and Ministry of Labour surveys) and private (the employers associations of Confindustria, Assolombarda and Federmec-canica). The paper outlines the areas covered, the methodology, and the qualities and drawbacks that these surveys present.     

Decision Makers as Statisticians: Diversity,Ambiguity, and Learning

I study individuals who use frequentist models to draw uniform inferences from independent and identically distributed data. The main contribution of this paper is to show that distinct models may be consistent with empirical evidence, even in the limit when data increases without bound. Decision makers may then hold different beliefs and interpret their environment differently even though they know each other's model and base their inferences on the same evidence. The behavior modeled here is that of rational individuals confronting an environment in which learning is hard, rather than individuals beset by cognitive limitations or behavioral biases.