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School papers selected for four volume collection of landmark papers in Critical Management Studies
Two papers from the School of Management’s staff are included in Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott’s four volume collection of key texts in Critical Management: Stephen Wood’s paper with John Kelly “Towards a Critical Management Science”, and Valérie Fournier’s paper with Chris Grey “At the Critical Moment: Conditions and Prospects for Critical Management Studies”.
The growth in the amount and diversity of work placed under the umbrella of critical management studies has increased exponentially in the last 50 years, and the editors of these volumes, Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, are two of the founding fathers of modern critical management studies. These collections guide the reader through the theoretical schools that have been seminal to the critical examination of the culture, subjectivity and meanings of management studies.
Stephen Wood’s 34-year old paper with John Kelly (Birkbeck College) attempted to rebalance the emphasis in radical management writings in favour of the importance of the economic effects of management theory and techniques. The current stress at the time was on the role of management theory and techniques in legitimizing management and more generally the status quo, with an associated dismissive attitude towards their study. Wood and Kelly emphasised the need to study management methods in depth precisely because of their contradictory nature: on the one hand, they may increase the rate of exploitation of labour power; whilst on the other hand, they may represent a progression of, or reform in, the labour process. Moreover, management techniques are not simple reflections of “economic laws” to direct (assumed passive) workers. Hugh Willmott commented that he regarded Wood’s article with John Kelly as a highly important precursor to CMS.
Valérie Fournier’s paper with Chris Grey (Warwick Business School) is a highly cited landmark paper which painted critical management studies as being in a cleft stick, arising from concern that to champion the cause of the oppressed ran the risk of further contributing to their domination.
M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (Eds), Critical Management Studies, Four-Volume Set, (2011) Volume 1, Critical management studies: overviews, origins, developments and debates, London: Sage.
S. Wood and J. Kelly’s paper was originally published as: ‘Towards a Critical Management Science’, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1978, 1–24.
V. Fournier and C. Grey’s paper was published as: ‘At the Critical Moment: Conditions and Prospects for Critical Management Studies’, Human Relations, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2000, 1–32.
