Derrida reappraised : deconstruction, critique and emancipation in management studies

Derrida has been significantly misread by many management scholars. The paper argues that his work is not ‘postmodernist’; further, that Habermas’ (1987) influential critique of Derrida’s views on truth and politics have led to widespread but misleading views of his critical credentials. Although Habermas is not entirely misguided, a defence of Derrida is provided that sets out the potential for his work to inform management scholars who wish to provide emancipatory critique

Critical management education in action: personal tales of management unlearning

In this essay I explore personal experiences while a practicing manager. I offer autobiographical stories from this time that emphasize, in particular, management's political and emotional dimensions. These narratives are used to illustrate shortcomings in management education that exclude critical perspectives, and to illustrate the potential value of receiving critical management education (CME), a value I feel to be important, in spite of the practical difficulties, for those with the desire to aim toward becoming critically informed managers

Who doesn't want to be a leader? Leaders are such wonderful people: Comment on “Leadership and leadership development in healthcare settings - a simplistic solution to complex problems?”

Leadership, as McDonald (1)argues, is a phenomenon which many people involved in healthcare around the globe put great emphasis on today; some even see the improvement of leadership as a panacea for all the ills of their healthcare system. This brief commentary on her work seeks to supplement the points she makes by emphasising the personalattractions leadership enjoys, at least in the eyes of many of those who exercise power in healthcare. It also endeavours to highlight some of the ironies and absurdities which arise as a result of the conflicts about what terms we should use to describe the “leaders” (or, alternatively perhaps, those who seek to enjoy supremacy) within healthcare

"Is there such a thing as “Evidence-Based Management”?": A commentary on Rousseau’s 2005 presidential address

The article provides the author's thoughts on research by D. M. Rousseau and others about the use of academic management evidence in the workplace. The author discusses how the health care profession has used evidence-based management. The article discusses the pros and cons of managers using evidence-based management and provides an overview of the key research that has been done on evidence-based management

Autoethnography and academic identity: glimpsing business school doppelgangers

Throughout our adult lives we have both been haunted by a certain sense of doubleness—a feeling of dislocation, of being in the wrong place, of playing a role. Inspired by Stevenson’s novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we explore this doubleness through evocative, dual, autoethnographic accounts of academic conferences. By analysing our stories in an iterative process of writing, reading, rewriting and rereading, we seek to extend the reach of much recent autoethnographic research. Presenting ourselves as objects of research, we show how, for us, contemporary academic identity is problematic in that it necessarily involves being (at least) ‘both’ Jekyll and Hyde. In providing readings of our stories, we show how autoethnography can make two contributions to the study of identity in organizations. The first is that autoethnographic accounts may provide scholars with new forms of empirical material—case studies in identity work. The second contribution highlights the value of experimenting with unorthodox approaches—such as explicitly using novels and other literary sources to study identity

Against evidence-based management, for management learning

Evidence-based management has been widely advocated in management studies. It has great ambition: all manner of organizational problems are held to be amenable to an evidence-based approach. With such ambition, however, has come a certain narrowness which risks restricting our ability to understand the diversity of problems in management studies. Indeed, in the longer term, such narrowness may limit our capacity to engage with many real-life issues in organizations. Having repeatedly heard the case for evidence-based management, we invite readers to weigh up the case against. We also set out an alternative direction - one that promotes intellectual pluralism and flexibility, the value of multiple perspectives, openness, dialogue, and the questioning of basic assumptions. These considerations are the antithesis of an evidence-based approach, but central to a fully rounded management education

From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing

We explore the lexical choices made by authors published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), a major academic journal in business and management studies. We do so via a corpus constructed from all the articles published in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 up until the end of 2018. Specifically, our focus is on lexical items that represent social actors. Our findings suggest that, compared to earlier work, recent articles typically ascribe greater status and prestige to organizational elites. Relatively contemporary papers are also more likely to use language that obfuscates or ignores unpalatable aspects of organizational life, such as power asymmetries, hierarchy and control through identity regulation. We suggest that these changes in word choices can be understood to reflect a wider trend towards neo-liberal rhetoric – a rhetoric increasingly pervading contemporary social life more generally

‘Leadership’ as a Project: Neoliberalism and the Proliferation of ‘Leaders’

It is increasingly common for anyone with formal, hierarchical status at work to be called a ‘leader’. Though widespread, this relatively recent change in day-to-day discourse is largely passing by unnoticed. We argue that using ‘leader’ in this way is not simply fashion or empty rhetoric; rather it can be understood in relation to neoliberalism. We argue that the language of ‘leadership’ represents a particularly subtle but powerful opportunity for the pursuit of individual elite interests to be disguised so that it look as if it is for the benefit of all. This opportunity has arisen because using ‘leader’ has tangible effects that reinforce implied values and assumptions about human relationships at work. In terms of implied values, the label ‘leader’ is celebratory and predisposes us to see elites in overly positive ways. In terms of implied assumptions, referring to executives as ‘leaders’ draws a veil over the structured antagonism at the heart of the employment relationship and wider sources of inequality by celebrating market values. Making ‘leadership’ recognizable as a political project is not intended primarily to suggest intentionality, but to help challenge representational practices that are becoming dominant. ‘Project-ing’ leadership also helps us to emphasize the risks inherent in taking this label for granted; which, we argue, is an important contribution because the language of leadership is increasingly used but is hardly questioned within much contemporary organizational life as well as organization theory

Whistle while you Work? Disney Animation, Organizational Readiness and Gendered Subjugation

This paper introduces the concept of ‘organizational readiness’: socio-cultural expectations about working selves that prepare young people (albeit indirectly and in complex and multi-faceted ways) for their future life in organizations. This concept emerges from an analysis of Disney animations and how they constitute expectations about working life that may influence children through their representations of work and gendered workplace roles. The paper’s exploration of Disney’s earlier animations suggests they circulated norms of gender that girls should be weak and avoid work. In contrast, its contemporary productions circulate gender norms that suggest girls should be strong and engage in paid work. In this reading, the continued circulation of earlier alongside contemporary animations may convey to young viewers a paradox: girls must and must not work; they must be both weak and strong. We thus offer new insights into the puzzle of the continued relegation of women to the sidelines in organizations; more optimistically, we also point to ways in which future generations of employees may forge ways of constituting forms of gendered selves as yet hardly imaginable

Organizational Readiness: Culturally Mediated Learning Through Disney Animation

This article develops the notion of organizational readiness, a construct that describes the anticipatory expectations about future organizational life that children develop as they imbibe the cultural influences to which they are exposed. We conduct our analyses through an exploration of the depictions of work in Disney's 56 'Classic' feature-length animations (from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937] to Moana [2016]). We can, of course, make no direct cause and effect claims about the effects of the animations. However, we argue that Disney animations are likely to shape children's learning about organizations significantly. This is because the Disney animated canon regularly provides children with consistent and vivid impressions of the nature of working life; impressions that will have important implications for them, and the staff who teach them, when they eventually enter business schools as undergraduates