Who is it That Would Make Business Schools More Critical? Critical Reflections on Critical Management Studies

We suggest in this paper that whilst exploring how to make business schools more critical we must also turn a critical and reflexive lens upon ourselves, critical management thinkers. Our endeavour is outlined here as a 'reflexive journey' in which we turn upon ourselves, academics who identify as 'critical' thinkers, the theories we use to analyse others. Our focus is upon critical management education. We use three vignettes drawn from our previous research. One is of graduands from the postgraduate programmes on which two of us teach, the second an analysis of knowledge transfer programmes in which we have participated, and the third a study of the construction of academic identities. The first study shows the academic teacher may become an internalized, judgemental gaze, the second that what we see as a critical approach may be construed by our students as another 'truth' that fails to encompass the complexities of organizations and management, and the third encourages us to ask some questions about our own positions. This causes us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our own positions as critical management scholars and the ways in which we conceptualize business schools and our colleagues who work in them.     

Assigned and Felt Status in Relation to Observer-Coded and Participant-Reported Smiling

Three experiments examined the relation of smiling to experimentally assigned interpersonal status and, within status groups, to self-reported feelings of status/power. In two of the experiments, participants' reports of own and partner smiling were also gathered and examined in relation to assigned status. In Studies 1 and 2, assigned status had no impact on smiling. In Study 3, lower-status participants smiled more than their higher-status partners in one experimental task; in the other task, lower-status participants smiled more than their higher-status partners only when the higher-status person was instructed to be controlling. In none of the experiments was self-reported status/power significantly related to actual smiling. Participant-reported smiling revealed a status effect that was much stronger than that found for actual smiling. Women smiled more than men, and this effect could not be accounted for in terms of status roles nor self-reported feelings of status/power.     

BLACK ATTITUDES AND THE 1960s BLACK RIOTS:

Nearly all aggregate-level studies of political violence use objective indicators to assess an aggrieved group's dissatisfactions and deprivations. Critics of this research often note that there are no necessary connections between perceived grievances and their objective counterparts. Moreover, even if such correlations do exist, detractors contend there is no inherent relation between felt grievances and participation in—or support of—collective violent protest. The 1968 Kerner Commission's 15-Cities Study provides a unique set of data to test both of these objections. Correlational analyses of aggregated subjective reports of black grievances and their objective counterparts reveal a weak relation; however, such reports do not correlate with riot activity in directions that would be predicted by conventional wisdom or much of current social science theory.