studying management critically

edited by

mats alvesson and hugh willmott

studying management critically 

OSAGE

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Notes on Contributors

Mats Alvesson

got his PhD in 1984 and works currently at Lund University in Sweden. Apart from critical theory, major research interests include cultural perspectives on organizations, gender, leadership (or rather `eadership'), identity, knowledge work, professional organizations and qualitative methodology. Recent books include Reflexive Methodolgy (2000, with Kaj Skoldberg), Doing Critical Management Research (2000, with Stan Deetz), Postmodernism and Social Research (2002), Understanding Organizational Culture (2002) and Knowledge work and Knowledge-intensive Firms (in press).

Gibson Burrell

is Professor of Organisation Theory and Head of the Management Centre at the University of Leicester. He was previously employed at the Universities of Lancaster, Warwick and Essex, which all allowed him spaces and places to do what he wanted. Some of his material has even been read. He has returned to the University of Leicester in which he was a student a la recherche du temps perdu. There is no escap­ing, for some, the draw of 1960s architecture.

David Cooper

is the Certified Accountants of Alberta Chair in Accounting in the Department of Accounting and MIS at the University of Alberta, and Director of the School of Business PhD Program. He obtained a BSc (Econ) from LSE and his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1979. David has written or edited seven books and about fifty articles in academic and professional journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society, Administrative Science Quarterly, Contemporary Accounting Research, Organisation Studies, Accounting Management and Information Technology and Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. He is interested in power and rationality in organizations and society and these issues have been explored in a variety of contexts: management con­trol systems in mining, implementation of new budgeting, information and costing systems in hospitals, the history of the accounting profession and their codes of ethics, the regulation of the accounting profession, and strategic and performance measurement in government. He is a joint editor of the international research journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and a member of the Editorial Boards of seven other journals.

Karen Dale

is a Lecturer at the University of Essex. She was previously at Warwick University, and has worked in the National Health Service and local government. She has published a number

of articles in the areas of gender and equality, and the body and organisation. Her book, Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory, was published in 2001. Currently she is working on a book on architecture, space and organisation with Gibson Burrell, and has already published on the topics of space, utopias, aesthetics and anaesthetics.

Stanley Deetz

Ph.D., is Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he teaches courses in organizational theory, organizational communication and com­munication theory. From 1984-97 he was a professor at Rutgers University, chairing the department during the 1980's. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and served as its President, 1996-97. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Texas, Arizona State University, the University of Iowa, and the Copenhagen Business School. He is co-author of Leading Organizations through Transition (2000) and Doing Critical Management Research (2000); and author of Transforming Communication, Transforming Business (1995) and Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization (1992); as well as editor or author of eight other books. He has published nearly one hundred essays in scholarly journals and books regard­ing stakeholder representation, decision making, culture, and communication in corporate organizations and has lectured widely in the U.S. and Europe.

Linda C. Forbes

is Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management at Franklin & . Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Her interests include cultural stud­ies and organizational symbolism, environmental philosophy and history, and varieties of qualitative inquiry. Her current work draws on symbolic organization theory as a framework for analyzing the greening of organizational cultures. She recently pub­lished: 'The Institutionalization of Voluntary Organizational Greeting and the Ideals of Environmentalism: Lessons About Official Culture From Symbolic Organization Theory' in Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment (2002). She is a Feature Editor for the journal, Organization & Environment. International Journal for Ecosocial Research where she recently published an article on the legacy of the early conserva­tionist and first Chief of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot.

John Forester

is Professor and immediate past Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. A Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, his research inter­ests include the micro-politics and ethics of planning practice, including the ways planners work in the face of power and conflict. His most recent books include The Deliberative Practitioner.^- Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes, (1999), co-edited with Raphael Fischler and Deborah Shmueli, and A collection of oral histories, Israeli Planners and Designers: Profiles of Community Builders (2001). For the past decade he has been producing first person voice 'profiles' of planners, mediators, and participatory action researchers in the US and abroad. Along with several edited collections on planning, policy analysis, and critical theory, his earlier work includes Planning in the Face of Power(1989), Making Equity Planning Work: Leadership in the Public Sector (with Norman Krumholz, 1990), and Critical Theory, Public Policy, and Planning Practice (1993).

John M. Jermier

is Professor of Organizational Behavior and of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. Most of his work has focused on critical studies of organization and management and his current interests include power and politics in organizations, environmental philosophy and literary ecology, and research methodology. He is founding editor and current senior editor of the jour­nal, Organization & Environment: International Journal for Ecosocial Research. He served as guest editor (with Steve Barley) of a special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly (1998) concerned with critical perspectives on organizational control and is past chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Interest Group of the America Academy of Management.

Richard Laughlin

M.Soc.Sc. Accounting (Birmingham) 1973, Ph.D. Accounting (Sheffield) 1985, F.C.A. (Chartered Accountant-Associate 1969, Fellow 1979), F.R.S.A. (Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, 1993). He worked as a trainee and manager in a professional accounting practice and as a consultant accountant before joining the University of Sheffield in 1973. He worked at the University of Essex 1995-1998 and is currently a Professor of Accounting in The Management Centre at King's College, London, University of London where he has been Head of Department until recently. He has a range of publications in accounting, management, organisation and political science, related to methodological issues and to understanding the organisational and human effects of changes in accounting, finance and management system in organisations and society with particular emphasis on the health and education sectors of the public sector. He is on the Editorial Boards of a number of journals as well as being Associate Editor of the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

David L. Levy

is Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research examines the intersection of business strategy and politics in the development of international governance. Recently, he has studied the response of multinational corporations in the oil and automobile industries to the emerging greenhouse gas regime, and is co-editing, with Peter Newell, a book on the political economy of inter­national environmental governance (forthcoming). He is an advisor in the develop­ment of the Massachusetts Climate Change Action Plan and works with a state program to support the development of the renewable energy sector.

Joanne Martin

is the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. She holds a B.A. from Smith College, a Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University, and an Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from the Copenhagen Business School. She recently received the Distinguished Educator award from the Acaqemy of Management and the Centennial Medal for contributions to society from

the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She serves on the Board of Directors of CPP, Inc., a test and book publisher, and on the Advisory Board of the International Centre for Research in Organizational Discourse, Strategy, and Change for the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, London, and McGill. She has published many articles and five books including Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspective (1992) and Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain (2002). Her current work focuses on gender and culture.

Glenn Morgan

is Reader in Organizational Behavior at Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick. He has previously worked at Manchester Business School and the Manchester School of Management, UMIST. His current research interests lie in the comparative study of economic organisations and multinationals. Recent edited collections included G. Morgan, P.H. Kristensen and R. Whitley eds. (2001) The Multinational Firm, with S. Quack. G. Morgan and R. Whitley (eds) (2000), National Capitalisms, Global Competition and Economic Performance. He has published in a range of journals including Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Sociologyand Work Employmentand Society. He is currently Co-Editor of the Journal Organization.

Martin Parker

is a Professor in the Management Centre at the University of Leicester. He holds degrees in authropology and sociology from the Universities of Sussex, London and Staffordshire and previously taught at Staffordshire and keele Unversities. His writing is usually concerned with organisational theory and the sociology of culture. His most recent and relevant books for his chapter are the edited Ethics and Organisation (1998), Utopia and Organisation (2000), the authored Organisational Culture and Identity (2000) and Against Management (2000).

Michael Power

is P.D. Leake Professor of Accounting and a Director of the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics, where he has worked since 1987. Holding degrees from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London, he is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and an associate member of the UK Chartered Institute of Taxation. He has been a Faculty member of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels and a Coopers & Lybrand Feilow. He has acted as an advisor to the National Audit Office and the Cabinet Office in the UK, and has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (1996/6) and All Souls College, Oxford (2000). Research interests focus mainly on the changing relationship between financial accounting, auditing and risk management. In addition to The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (1999), recent publications include Accounting and Science (1996) and The Audit Implosion: Regulating Risk from the Inside (2000). He is currently working on Visions of organizational control: constructing the new risk management (forthcoming).

Hugh Willmott

is professor of organization theory at Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University and a visiting professor at the University of Lund. He is currently working on a number of projects whose common theme is the changing organization and management of work, including projects in the ESRC Virtual Society and ESRC Future of Work programmes and an ICAEW funded study of strategic reorientation. He has published widely in social science and management journals including Sociology, Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Accounting, Organizations and Society and Journal of Management Studies. His more recent books include Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction (1996, co-authored), Management Lives (1999, co-authored), The Re-engineering Revolution (2000, co-edited), The Body and Organizations (2000, co-edited) and Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning (2000, co-edited). He has served on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Administrative Science Quarterly. Organization, Organization Studies and Accounting, and Organizations and Society.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott

This collection presents a series of critical reflections upon key themes, topics and emergent issues in management studies. Written by specialists in their respective fields, it provides an informed overview of contemporary contributions to the study of management. Shared by its contributors is a concern to interrogate and challenge received wisdom about management theory and practice. This wisdom is deeply coloured by managerialist assumptions - assumptions that take for granted the legitimacy and efficacy of established patterns of thinking and action. Knowledge of management then becomes knowledge for management in which alternative voices are absent or marginalized. In contrast, critical perspectives on management share the aim of developing a less managerially partisan position. Insights drawn from traditions of critical social science are applied to rethink and develop the theory and practice of management.

The predecessor to this volume - Critical Management Studies (1992) - arose from a small conference held in 1989. This event brought together scholars from Europe and North America to connect critical work that was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. Since then, the field has grown and diversified, spawning various conferences (notably, the biennial Critical Management Studies Conference) and workshops and the establishment of journals (e.g. Organization, Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory, Tamara) that are supportive of Critical Management Studies as well as spe­cial issues (e.g. Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly) and regular contributors to longer established journals (e.g. Journal of Manage­ment Studies, Human Relations, Management Learning). In North America, the Critical Management Studies Workshop (CMSW) has met annually at the Academy of Management Meetings and is now a special interest group of the Academy. In recent years, Critical Management events have been held in Japan, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere and there have been conferences, journals and collections that provide vehicles for Critical Management in different specialisms (e.g. accounting, marketing).

CRITICAL THEORY AND BEYOND

The tradition of Critical Theory, established in Frankfurt in the 1930s (see Alvesson and Willmott, 1996: Ch. 3, for a brief history and discussion), was, in the earlier volume, the chief, though by no means exclusive, inspiration for its contributors. Influential thinkers in this school include Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm and, most recently, Jurgen Habermas. The influence of the Frankfurt School tradition is apparent in the work of writers such as Lasch (1978, 1984) and Sennett (1998). Critical Theory (CT) proceeds from an assumption of the possibilities of more autonomous indi­viduals, who, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, in principle can master their own destiny in joint operation with peers - possibilities that are under­stood to be narrowed, distorted and impeded by conventional managerial wisdom. CT aspires to provide an intellectual counterforce to the ego admin­istration of modern, advanced industrial society. CT apprehends how employees in large bureaucracies, and consumers of mass goods, are affected by corporations, schools, government and mass media; and how personali­ties, beliefs, tastes and preferences are developed to fit into the demands of mass production and mass consumption, thereby expressing standardized forms of individuality. CT challenges the domination of this instrumental rationality, which tends to reduce human beings to parts of a well-oiled societal machine (Alvesson, 2003; Steffy and Grimes, 1992).

Critical Theory provides a (not the) critical-constructive intellectual coun­terpoint to mainstream management studies. In Parker's (2002: 9) words, it contributes to 'a cultural shift in the image of management, from saviour to problem'. The prLlcipal strength of Critical Theory resides in its breadth, which offers an inspiration for critical reflection on a large number of central issues in management studies: notions of rationality and progress, technoc­racy and social engineering, autonomy and control, communicative action, power and ideology as well as fundamental issues of epistemology. In com­parison to orthodox Marxism, CT has been rather more alert to the cultural development of advanced capitalistic society, including the growth of admin­istration and technocracy (Alvesson and Wilimott, 1996) and offers an incisive perspective for the understanding of consumerism and ecological issues (see, for example, the chapters by Morgan, and Jermier and Forbes in this volume).

During the 1990s, other streams of critical and disruptive thinking (e.g. varieties of feminism) - many of them collected under the umbrella headings of 'postmodernism' and 'poststructuralism' - have emerged and developed within the field of management to complement and challenge analyses guided by Critical Theory. Notably, the thinking of Michel Foucault has been important in providing an alternative, critical voice - in both style and sub­st,ance - to the vision of Critical Theory. His ideas have, for example, ques­taoned the humanist concept of autonomy ascribed to subjects and challenged the assumption that knowledge can be cleansed of power

(Foucault, 1980). Given the diverse critical traditions of analysis that are now being deployed to interrogate management theory and practice, then the current challenge is perhaps to appreciate com.monalities and continuities in different strands of critical thinking rather than becoming preoccupied with differences and detained by schisms. The unqualified dismissal of rival approaches in favour of a single, 'enlightened' conception of Critical Management Studies is, in our view, likely to be diverse and counterpro­ductive in terms of any aspiration to scrutinised and change the theory and practice of management.

Critical Theory comprises an important, but by no means a single dom­inant, strand of Critical Management Studies (CMS) that continues to be an inclusive, pluralistic 'movement' wherein a diversity of critical approaches - from non-orthodox forms of labour process analysis, through varieties of Critical Theory to deconstructionism (Derrida) and approaches that have broader affinities with many contemporary social movements (e.g. femi­nism, environmentalism, postcolonialism, etc.) - is accommodated. This diversity has grown during the past decade (see Fournier and Grey, 2000 for a discussion of this). This volume does not try to cover all varieties of Critical Management Studies, but incorporates some of its most influential currents. So, rather that being religiously attached to Critical Theory, in the sense of the Frankfurt tradition, a way forward could involve recognizing and even celebrating, rather than minimizing, key and very probably irreconcilable differences in the conception of what it means to 'think critically'. These dif­ferences are evident in the respective writings of Critical Theorists, such as Habermas, and poststructuralists like Foucault. In principle, they provide a rich and diverse source of inspiration that can enrich rather than confound critical studies of management (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). If this tack is taken, then it is acknowledged that CT has limitations that should be con­fronted, rather than be regarded as remediable or inescapable shortcomings. More specifically, it is relevant to recognize the tenuousness of efforts to establish secure foundations for CT's truth claims - in the consciousness of autonomous individuals or in the structure of language. Challenging the normative ideals to which Critical Theory appeals, and that it seeks to provide with rational foundations, Foucault has commented that

Foucault, of course, has a point, but inspiration from Foucault as well as Habermas may be a way of avoiding either Utopia or Dystopia - by main­taining a potentially productive tension between scepticism and inspiration for the development of alternative management practices. The difference

between Foucault and Habermas is substantial, but their ideas seem to encourage productive debates (Kelly, 1994). There are arguably shared inter­ests between Foucault and a large part of the Frankfurt School, in particular Adorno (Bernstein, 1994). It is worth noting that Foucault himself late in life, when he learned about German Critical Theory, expressed himself very posi­tively about the Frankfurt School and emphasized his affinity:

ihiloso Frankfu ~ tried towo

We refrain here from commenting more extensively upon the relationship, critiques and debates between CT and other forms of critical analysis (see Alvesson and Willmott, 1996). Instead, we underscore our belief that there is less point in stressing theoretical rigour and orthodoxy than W welcoming inspiration from a variety of theories and ideas that share 'enough' affinities to advance and extend critical studies of management.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS VOLUME

More than half of the present volume comprises commissioned chapters that cover new topics and themes (see table below). The inclusion of more new rather than revised chapters is signalled by a modification of the book's title, rather than its replacement or just labelling it the second edition.

The collection has a number of potential readerships and uses. For researchers committed to studying management critically, it provides m overview of work from a variety of perspectives and across a range of topics, subdisciplines and themes. For academics interested to learn more about the field, the collection offers a comparatively accessible point of entry into a range of areas so that specialists can readily appreciate what is distinctive about studying management critically. For teachers, it provides a series of resources that could be used to complement established courses by providing students with a taste of non-mainstream approaches to particular topics. It could also be

Revised and updated from                                            Commissioned Contributions for

Critical Management Studies                                                Studying Management Critically

Introduction Deetz: HRM

Forester: Methodology

+ Morgan: Marketing Power, Laughlin and Cooper: Accounting

Burrell and Dale: Space Jermier and Forbes: Environmentalism Levy, Alvesson and Willmott: Strategy Martin: Feminism Parker: Ethics

_

adopted selectively as a supplementary text for advanced studies of areas covered by the collection. Or it could provide the basis for advanced under­graduate or postgraduate courses and modules in Critical Management Studies. For more reflective practitioners (including researchers and teachers in their organizational work), the collection offers access to ideas and perspectives that, by providing alternative, non-managerialist frameworks of interpretation, can be valuable in broadening their repertoire of theoretically informed ways of making sense of their experiences and moving in directions that are informed by the concerns addressed by critical studies of management.

A brief overview of each of the following chapters provides an outline of the volume's scope and focus. Stanley Deetz (Chapter 2) addresses how modern corporations have a variety of stakeholders with competing interests within and between each of them. Many have documented the way arbitrary advantages are given to management and the questions this raises for a democratic society. Deetz argues that a productive analysis of these issues must consider the politics involved in the construction of the human subject and his/her knowledge. He contends that the basic democratic issue is not the representation of stakeholder interests, but the social production of stakeholders and their interests. Human resources management is seen to provide the most explicit treatment of the recruitment, development and regulation of the human subject in the workplace. Drawing upon Foucault's analysis of power as discipline, this chapter offers insights into the everyday, practical manner by which power is deployed and potential conflicts sup­pressed through human resources management.

John Forester (Chapter 3) probes a transcript from a staff meeting of urban planners in a small municipality's city hall to challenge/refute the view that Critical Theory, and especially Habermas's theory of communica­tive action, has little relevance for the analysis of empirical cases and has less to say about how we might explore the work of managers and administra­tors. Forester shows how we might develop an empirically grounded, pheno­menologically sensitive, and politically critical sociology by appropriating and building upon Habermas's action theory and his analysis of speech acts in particular. Much more than claims about any 'truth' of the matter is at stake in organizational and political interaction. Actors construct and contest agendas and identities alike; they use humour and irony to do actual work; and they not only continually negotiate relations of status and authority, but they shape each other's imaginations and commitments as well.

Joanne Martin's contribution (Chapter 4) explores the affinities and divergences between feminist theory and Critical Theory. Although they both focus on social and economic inequalities and share an agenda of promoting system change, these fields of inquiry have developed separately and sel­dom draw on each other's work. This chapter identifies areas of common interest and assesses the validity of critiques of feminist theory - such as claims that it focuses on privileged women and does not challenge existing

hierarchical arrangements. It is suggested that these critiques fail to recognize and address much contemporary feminist scholarship, and it is argued that synergies between Critical Theory and feminist theory could and should be better appreciated and further explored.

David Levy, Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott (Chapter 5) present a critique of strategic management, contending that it needs to be taken seri­ously as the exercise of power in contested social networks of firms, govern­mental agencies, and non-governmental actors such as labour and environmental groups. Building on prior critiques of the strategy literature, the chapter draws from Gramsci to offer a historical materialist perspective on struggles for influence within social and economic networks. The Gramscian perspective is seen to facilitate and enrich attempts to integrate strategy, dynamics and agency within institutional theory and social movement theory. If power lies in the strategic coordination of resources rather than mere posses­sion of them, then a strategic conception of power offers the opportunity for subordinate groups to develop coalitions capable of challenging dominant groups and effecting change at the corporate, industry or issue level.

Glenn Morgan's chapter on marketing (Chapter 6) notes how the domi­nant paradigm in marketing embraces various versions of positivism and, ethically, has identified itself with 'the needs of the consumer'. Marketing aims to provide a scientific approach to uncovering what consumers as indi­viduals 'really, really want'. An effect of this, Morgan contends, is to corrode other potential forms of collective identity, particularly around ideas of citizen­ship. Critiques of marketing emanating from the Frankfurt School, post­modernism and Foucault-inspired research are then reviewed before commending an approach that conceives of marketing as a set of practices and technologies with specific origins and effects which constitute the sub­jectivity of the 'consumer' and the objectivity of the 'market' in distinctive ways. Such an approach, Morgan contends, offers the possibility of devel­oping an empirical and theoretically informed critique of marketing.

Michael Power, Richard Laughlin and David Cooper (Chapter 7) iden­tify accounting as a pervasive force in modem society that is strongly con­nected to pressures for globalization and economic rationalization as it affects decision-making by governments, corporations and individuals. Accounting claims to represent reality - to tell us `;rue costs' and 'the bottom line' - and, in so doing, it helps to constitute what is seen as legitimate performance. It would seem that if control of complex modern societies is to be secured, then ever more elaborate forms of economic calculation are required, of which accounting is a dominant instance. In this chapter, some central elements of Habermas's work are reviewed in order to explore the role and function of accounting. In particular, its role as a steering medium and its potential for enabling or distorting communication is considered. Critical Theory, it is sug­gested, can play a part in recovering the public dimension of accounting's , legitimacy and to comprehend its possible effects on society.

John Jermier and Linda Forbes (Chapter 8) note how negative environmental trends are, in unprecedented ways, 'spiking'- simultaneously and in combinations - adding credence to the hypothesis of a looming, global environmental crisis. The crisis has many causes and few apparent solutions but increasingly responsibility for solving environmental problems is being placed in the domain of organizations and their managers. The chapter examines existing approaches to organizational greening and to help generate more systematic, critical thinking in this emerging and crucial area of management studies. Critical Theory is deployed to analyse the con­ceptual adequacy and political content of existing approaches to greening. Jermier and Forbes conclude that existing approaches to greening do not go far enough in addressing concerns for nature. While they do not seem to undermine other forms of green politics, they should not be seen as the van­guard of the environmental movement or as a substitute for regulatory and adversarial initiatives.

Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale (Chapter 9) explore the relationship between real material architectures and the creation of social, specifically organizational, spaces. Through the work of Critical Theorists such as Adorno and Benjamin, they go further than considering the power relations embedded in architectural and spatial arrangements. Drawing in particular on the concepts of `representational space', as delineated by Lefebvre, along with Benjamin's writing on 'phantasmagoria', they consider how spatial arrangements have been central to the construction of certain organizational categories and of the life experiences of these groups. The focus is upon the development of factory design for mass production, giving special consider­ation to the influence of Albert Kahn, and on the growth of large-scale bureaucracy, taking the buildings of the architectural practice of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) as an exemplar. They conclude by asking, if we can recover the material and embodied conditions of organization, whether it is possible to create emancipatory organizational spaces.

Martin Parker (Chapter 10) notes how the rise of business ethics has involved making a series of claims about expertise and legitimacy. Does this mean that businesses were not ethical before business ethics? What expertise do professional ethicists have that ordinary mortals do not? And, perhaps most importantly, will business ethics actually make ousinesses ethical? These questions are addressed in this chapter, but there is a further question: What is 'Critical Management Studies' to make of business ethics? Business ethics texts are interrogated in order to expose some of their conventional assumptions, and absences. Business ethics is re-viewed through the lens of Horkheimer's Critical Theory and Adorno's quasi-deconstructive 'negative dialectics', as well as a more conventional form of economic determinist Marxism. It is argued that these approaches are critical in some sense, and Marxist in some sense, yet they position the subjects and objects of criticism in very different ways. Finally, these understandings are returned to Critical

Management itself to open up the possibility that the differences between business ethics and Critical Management Studies are not so great as is often assumed, or perhaps hoped.

RETHINKING MANAGEMENT DISCIPLINES

How are the disciplines of management and the activities of management academics commonsensically understood? We suggest that this understanding typically assumes a devotion to the (scientific) improvement of managerial practice and the functioning of organizations. In this vision of management practice and theory, questions directly and indirectly connected to efficiency and effectiveness are made central; and knowledge of management is assumed to be of greatest relevance to managers. Accordingly, in the main­stream literature on management, exemplified in its door-stopping, jaw­dropping textbooks, managers are routinely presented as carriers of rationality and initiative (for example, in many versions of strategic manage­ment and corporate culture). ‘Better management’ – by which is meant the transfer of responsibility for 'getting things done' to an elite of technocrats - is increasingly commended as the solution to diverse political and social, as well as economic, problems. Other agents - employees, customers, citizens - are then cast as objects or instruments of managerial action. Where technoc­racy is in the ascendancy, knowledge based on science and placed in the hands of an army of engineers, administrators, managers, psychologists and com­puter specialists is viewed as the best or even the only possible way of effec­tive problem-solving. Images and ideals of 'professional management' which emphasize the skilled employment of neutral and objective techniques - from accounting and personnel appraisal to conflict and knowledge management - exemplify this technocratic understanding of knowledge and social affairs. Against this, Critical Management insists on the political nature of what is seemingly neutral or technological, and highlights the dangers of technocracy for human autonomy and responsibility.

In the conventional narrative of management, the assumption is that managers perform valuable functions, and proceed in a (professional, impar­tial) way that fulfils the common interests of workers, employers, customers and citizens alike. Absent from this rosy picture is an appreciation of how managerial action is embedded in wider, politico-economic institutional arrangements that operate to steer and constrain as well as enable manager­ial action. Contributors to this collection survey and advance a body of knowledge that questions the wisdom of taking the neutrality or virtue of management as self-evident and unproblematical. Critical thinking about management reflects and advances the understanding that management is too potent acui potentially corrosive in its effects upon the lives of employ­ees, consumers and citizens to be represented through, guided by, and

shrouded in, a narrow, instrumental form of means-ends rationality. By drawing upon critical traditions of social theory, it is possible to advance a different, broader understanding of the work of administrators and man­agers. For example, in his study of planners, Forester notes how

In this way, the insights of critical thinking may then be taken into account in counteracting communicative distortions in the private sector. Profit motives and the more contradictory relations between participants in corpo­rations may of course amplify and compound the difficulties that constrain its application. Even so, Forester's analysis of planning is informed by the insights of Critical Theory (CT) -'pragmatics with vision' (1985: 221; see also his chapter in this volume) - and demonstrates how CT has much relevance for everyday organizational action.

Critical Management Studies draw and build upon numerous earlier contributions that have addressed management as a historical and cultural phenomenon that merits serious critical examination (e.g. Anthony, 1977; 1986; Bendix, 1956; Child, 1969; Jackall, 1988; Knights and Willmott, 1986; Maclntyre, 1981; Reed, 1989; Watson, 1994). In general, these works have derived their inspiration from Weber, from moral philosophy or from Marx's analysis of the labour process, and make limited reference to Critical Theory. Yet, it was Horkheimer, a highly influential Director of the Frankfurt-based Institute of Social Research, the institutional origin of the School, who iden­tified white-collar employees, among which may be included many man­agers and supervisors, as a social group that demanded urgent critical examination (Horkheimer, 1989). In setting out his vision of Critical Theory, Horkheimer contrasts it with a view of scientific study that assumes a seem­ingly objective, instrumental relationship to its 'objects' (e.g. managers), and that contrives to reserve the exercise of value judgements for conduct in other spheres (e.g. politics). Rejecting this (bourgeois) division of science and politics - which fuels a technocratization of management based upon the understanding that 'good practice' can be objectively determined by using scientific methods - Horkheimer contended that