Critical Management Studies At Work
Negotiating Tensions between Theory and Practice
‘This is an excellent text. It covers an impressive range of salient topics.
Moreover, it provides a nuanced, considered and balanced treatment of both conceptual and
practical aspects of critical management studies.’
– Cliff Oswick, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
This book is the first of its kind to reflect on what it means to actually
perform critical management studies (CMS): how consultants, researchers, teachers and
managers negotiate the tensions they experience in their everyday practice.
Critical management studies seeks to expose the hidden workings of power, as well as to
identify and reform the mundane and frequently unnoticed practices that privilege some
groups and individuals at the expense of others, creating injustices in organizations and
in the society at large. The authors show how CMS draws on a variety of approaches to
translate its insights into practice.
Combining rich theoretical and empirical contributions with reflections on CMS practice in
various forms, this unique book is essential reading for critical researchers, educators
and graduate students in business and management fields.
Edited by Julie Wolfram Cox, Chair in Management, School of Management
and Marketing, Deakin University, Australia, Tony G. LeTrent-Jones,
Independent Consultant and Educator, US, Maxim Voronov, Brock University,
Canada and David Weir, Professor of Intercultural Management, Liverpool
Hope University, UK and Affiliate Professor of Management, Ecole Supérieure de Commerce,
Rennes, France
Contents:
Introduction: Intersections of Critical Management Research and Practice: A
Multi-Domain Perspective
Maxim Voronov, Julie Wolfram Cox, Tony LeTrent-Jones and David Weir
PART I: CRITICAL MANAGEMENT RESEARCH IN ACTION: CHOICE AND CONSTRAINT IN THE
GENERATION AND TRANSLATION OF ACTIONABLE KNOWLEDGE
1. Taking the Employee’s Perspective: Negotiating Critical Research in an
Organization in Conflict
Amanda Roan, Rebecca Loudoun and George Lafferty
2. The Phantom Menace: Conducting Practitioner-Informed Research Without Losing
Academic Liberties
Alexander Styhre
3. Emancipatory Practice and Information Systems Implementation: An Action Research
Project in an NHS Acute Trust
Teresa Waring
4. Footless and Fancy Free? On Some Means to Move Beyond the Self-induced and
Institutional Constraints of CMS
Neil Clarke
5. Practical Pushing: Creating Discursive Space in Organizational Narratives
Joyce K. Fletcher, Lotte Bailyn and Stacy Blake Beard
6. Discourse and Policy in the Learning and Skills Sector
Ron Kerr and Steve Fox
PART II: CRITICAL TEACHING AND LEARNING: RESPONSIVENESS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN
CONTEMPORARY MANAGEMENT EDUCATION
7. Muckraking Novels: The Search for Another Paradigm
Stephen Sloane
8. Journeys into Critical Thinking: Intersecting Foucault into the Organizational
Practice Debate
Daniel King
9. Extending the Repertoire of Research Approaches in a Professional Doctoral
Program: The Place and Shape of a Critical Perspective
Jan Priest and Erica Hallebone
10. Supervising Action Research: A Space for Critical Influence on Organizational
Practice
Marion Macalpine and Sheila Marsh
11. Paradoxes of Academic Practice: Managerialist Techniques in Critical Pedagogy
Torkild Thanem and Louise Wallenberg
12. Experiences of Living and Doing Critical Management Education in Canadian
Business Schools
Gina Grandy and Jane Gibbon
PART III: CRITICAL IDENTITIES: THE CRITICAL TURN IN EVERYDAY DOMAINS OF
PRACTICE
13. Caught in ‘No-Man’s Land’? Consultancy and Critique
Brendon Harvey
14. ‘I Didn’t Have the Balls for It’: How a ‘Feminine’ Discourse of
Consulting Opens a Critical Space
Sheila Marsh
15. Silences and Disappearing Acts: The Politics of Gendering Organizational
Practice
Margaret L. Page
16. The Trouble with the Glass Ceiling: Critical Reflections on a Famous Concept
Yvonne Benschop and Margo Brouns
17. Racial Inequality in the Workplace: How Critical Management Studies Can Inform
Current Approaches
Brenda Johnson
18. Critical Social Entrepreneurship – An Alternative Discourse Analysis
James Latham, Robert Jones and Michela Betta
19. Power, Control and the Protean Career: A Critical Perspective on Multinational
Organizations’ Permanent International Assignees
Marian Crowley-Henry and David Weir
Index
352 pages, Hardcover
