Professor Carl Rhodes
Professor of Management
Contact Details
- Tel: +44 (0) 116 252 1266
- Email: c.rhodes@le.ac.uk
- Office: Room 325, Level 3, Ken Edwards Building
- Office Hours: By appointment
Biography
I joined the School of Management in 2012 having formerly worked at Swansea University and The University of Technology, Sydney. The overarching ethos to my teaching and reserch is to contribute to the rigorous and critical questioning of what we understand organizations to be about, as well as a reformulation, expansion and democratization for how we go about understanding them and working in them. This is an ethos that hopes to counter and offer alternatives to tendencies that seek to ossify knowledge and practice into the kind of static normalcy that breeds injustice and complacency. While my work can located in a ‘critical’ tradition, it is my goal to perform an affirmative critique that avoids ‘finger pointing’, ‘nay saying’ and ‘wowserism’ in favour of a kind of positive cynicism for the possibilities for more ethically alive ways of working in, and studying, organizations.
I serve as Senior Editor of the journal Organization Studies, and Associate Editor of Organization as well has having formerly been Associate Editor of The International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies (Sage, 2008). I also sit on the editorial boards of The Journal of Change Management, and The Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal.
Research Interests
My work focuses on three different, yet sometimes overlapping areas of inquiry:
1. Ethics and politics in organizations – My interests centre on the vexed relationship between ethics and politics as they relate to the everyday goings on in organizations. Key areas of inquiry have been on the meaning of ethics in organizational practice, the ways that managerial subjectivity is informed by ethics, and the ethics of surveillance and resistance in organizations. My current research in this area works with the ethical and political philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in order to consider how ethics is translated into politics and justice in organizations.
2. Organizations in popular culture – My work in this area has been devoted to an exploration of the critical representations of work and organizations in popular culture. I am interested in the notion of popular critique as it is located in various types of narratives that can be found in the mass media – especially television, popular music and cinema. My approach eschews a ‘critique of culture’ in favour of connecting with the ‘critique in culture’ that challenges and undermines the often hubristic and idealistic ways that organizations try to represent themselves.
3. Theory and method in organization studies – I have a long standing interest in exploring writing and storytelling as it relates to both organizations and the writing of organizations studies. Informed by the interventions of poststructuralism in organization studies, my research in this area has explored how narrative structures inform writing in organizations studies, the relationship between genre and meaning in organizational texts, and understanding research reflexivity as an ethical practice. This work has also attended to, and tried to exemplify, how experimental and non-conventional writing can open up the possibilities for an avant-garde organization studies.
PhD Supervision
I am interested in supervising PhDs that relate to any areas of the areas of research activity described above.
Administrative Responsibilities
MBA Programme Leader (Distance Learning, semester one)
Most Recent Publications (since 2011)
Rhodes, C. (2013, in press) ‘Ethics, Alterity and the Rationality of Leadership Justice’, Human Relations.
Rhodes, C. and Pullen, A. (2013, in press) ‘Parody, Subversion and the Politics of Gender at Work: The Case of Futurama’s ‘Raging Bender’, Organization.
Rhodes, C. and Wray-Bliss, E. (2013, in press) ‘The Ethical Difference of Organization’, Organization.
Rhodes, C. and Lilley, S. Eds. (2012) Organizations and Popular Culture: Information, Representation and Transformation, London; Routledge.
Rhodes, C. and Pullen, A. (2012) ‘Commercial Gender: Fracturing Masculinity in the Case of OzRock’, Culture and Organization, 18(1): 33-50.
Rhodes, C. and Bloom, P. (2012) ‘The Cultural Fantasy of Hierarchy: Sovereignty and The Desire For Spiritual Purity’, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 35: 141-169.
Rhodes, C. and Lilley, S. (2012) ‘Studying Organizations Through Popular Culture’, in C. Rhodes and S. Lilley (Eds.) Organizations and Popular Culture: Information, Representation and Transformation, pp. 1-15, London; Routledge.
Rhodes, C. (2012) ‘The Moral of the Story: Ethics, Narrative and Organizational Change’, in D. Boje, B. Burnes and J. Hassard (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change, pp. 506-518. London: Routledge.
Rhodes, C. (2012, in press) ‘Justice and the Ethical Quality of Leadership’, in R. By and B. Burnes (Eds.) Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics: Leading Organizations Toward Sustainability, London: Routledge.
McMurray, R., Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (2011) ‘Ethical Subjectivity and Politics in Organizations: A Case of Health Care Tendering’, Organization, 18(4): 541-561.
Rhodes, C. and Price, O. (2011) ‘The Post-bureaucratic Parasite: Contrasting Narratives of Organizational Change in Local Government’, Management Learning, 42(3): 241-260.
Rhodes, C. (2011) ‘Organizational Justice’, in M. Painter-Morland and R. ten Bos (Eds.) Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy, pp. 141-161. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boje, D., Pullen, A., Rhodes, C. and Rosile, G-A. (2011) ‘The Virtual Leader’, in Bryman, A., Collinson, D., Grint, K., Jackson, B. and Uhl-Bien, M. (Eds.) The Sage Handbook of Leadership, pp. 518-530. London: Sage.
Rhodes, C. and Pullen, A. (2011) ‘Gender, Work and Organizations in Popular Culture Narratives: Patriarchy, Politics and Parody’, in E. Jeanes, D. Knights and P.Y Martin (Eds.) Handbook of Gender, Work and Organization, pp. 51-64. Oxford: Blackwell/Wiley.
Rhodes, C. (2011) ‘The Gift of the World: Writing as Openness and Responsibility’, in J. Dutton and A. Carlsen (Eds.) Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments of Qualitative Research, pp. 190-193. Copenhagen: CBS Press.
