Abstract
Reviews of edited collections inevitably fail to do justice to the range of contributions and multiple lines of argument, and this one is no exception. The overarching theme, however, is clear: what is the practical purpose of critical management studies (CMS)? How should it go about ‘getting things done’?
The volume is structured as a dialogue, with each of the three sections containing contributions and commentaries upon them. The structure is applied quite variably, though. Thus, the first section has two contributions and two fairly substantial commentaries, whereas the third section has four contributions but just one, fairly brief, commentary. While there is no particular merit in insisting on a rigid formula, this did seem to me to be a mistake. In particular, section 3 contributions, which are all interesting and challenging, deserved more extensive commentary than they got. Moreover, whereas some of the commentaries (e.g. Jacobs’ in section 1) are more or less direct responses to the contributions, others are much less focussed. In short, the structuring of the book as a form of dialogue is a nice idea but needed perhaps a bit more discipline and consistency to reap the rewards. Moreover, a concluding editorial chapter would have helped to bring together the threads, but this is absent.
Turning now to some specifics: the first section seeks to establish a contextual and historical basis for debates about CMS. For me, it is not entirely successful in this. The Weir chapter is full of fascinating observations about the UK scene in particular, but it is somewhat rambling and idiosyncratic. It is engaging, but eccentric. Marens’ chapter is much more tightly focussed, on CMS and the American Academy, and is also engaging, but cynical. Eccentricity and cynicism are fine, but the breadth of the one chapter and the tightness of the other mean that their purchase on overarching debates about what CMS can do is limited. What these two chapters share, as Jacobs’ commentary on them notes, is a kind of anger—which in some way permeates much of this volume.
In section 2, Parker’s chapter picks up on this almost morbid sense of self-loathing, in a typically elegant essay filled with both wit and wisdom. Focussing on what a CMS party would look like (i.e. a political party—a social party would, if he is right, be a miserable affair), he uses this thought experiment to identify what a politics of CMS can and can’t be expected to do. Along the way, he rapidly dismisses the idea of CMS as a social movement, an idea that another chapter, by Willmott, champions in a scholarly, subtle and closely argued contribution, again typical of the author. Of all the chapters, Parker’s was the one with which I had most sympathy, perhaps unsurprisingly as a footnote observes that it is based on conversations he has had with various people, myself included, over many years. Yet, it left me feeling slightly queasy, as if it let us all off the hook a little bit too easily.
Something of that sense seems to be articulated in Sorsa’s thoughtful commentary on the section, where he reminds us, contra Parker, that ‘business schools are not all about operating within “warm and double glazed offices”’ (p. 192) and points approvingly to the section contributions by Stookey and Alajoutsijärvi et al. I think he is right, and Stookey’s chapter in particular is for me the most successful of the volume in articulating some of the things that CMS should, plausibly can, and sometimes does ‘get done’, namely curriculum reform. That maybe limited and unheroic, but CMS can hardly be expected to change the world: if it can have some significant effect on business schools that may be the most it can achieve, and even that will not be easy.
Section 3 is perhaps the most challenging of the book in terms of mobilising critique into various forms of practice and engagement, especially Faria et al.’s contribution on ‘anthrophagy’. Yet, this and the chapters by Jammulamadaka and by Cukier et al. left me with the perhaps disquieting thought that much of what they talk about could be achieved without any particular recourse to CMS, as opposed to some of the broader sets of critical ideas, such as those of the Frankfurt School, from which CMS drew inspiration. Which is fine, but I’m not sure where it leaves CMS itself. Within this section, Faria’s essay on border thinking is the most powerful and provocative chapter of the whole book and operates at what is emerging as a really productive debate about CMS and ‘Decolonial Management Studies’ (DMS), inspired especially by the work of Ibarro-Coloda. There are problems, here, for sure. On the one hand, there is a danger of positioning CMS as irredeemably and monolithically Eurocentric, so that it can be accused in circular fashion as being exclusionary if it speaks of limited experiences and universalist if it seeks to speak more widely. On the other hand, Faria’s proposal for border thinking has its own dangers, the well-worn ones of liberal pluralism being the most obvious. But this is an intriguing and, in my view, important proposal, which deserved more extensive commentary than it received in the volume.
Lurking throughout the book, and frequently explicitly referenced, is the debate about CMS and performativity which is typically presented as if Fournier and Grey (2000) sought to position CMS as anti-performative only to be corrected by Spicer et al.’s (2009) call for critical performativity. For me that misreads the article, of which I was co-author, in that anti-performativity meant something very specific—a rejection of instrumentally rational action, not a rejection of all forms of action. Perhaps, though, the very attempt in that article to define CMS was part of the problem that exists in this volume, too—a kind of reification of CMS so that it is treated not as a broad set of intellectual resources to frame and inform action but as a ‘thing’ to be—well, what? On the evidence of this book, largely something to be angry with or about. Anger is an important part of politics; it mobilises action. But the anger here is not focussed much on such things as global poverty, inequality, war or exploitation but mainly upon CMS itself. Reading this volume, it seems as if most of the world has not heard of CMS and that it has had little influence, but that those who have heard of it and are influenced by it rather dislike it. Ultimately, ‘getting things done’ requires that we look outward, not inward.