Abstract
Many have sought to puncture the balloon of management studies in today’s universities, but the balloon has proven remarkably resilient. If anyone is going to succeed, it is Dennis Tourish. This devastating book is not another jeremiad on the failure of management scholarship but a systematic critique of a field built on corrupt practices and vacuous theorizing since its very beginnings, and of the cynicism, disenchantment and burnout of those who inhabit it. Tourish is not critical of the scholars who for different reasons make their livings and careers in the area of management; he is very critical of the practices, institutions and products (including research outputs) that characterize the field.
The book starts with a crushing review of the two ‘theoretical’ pylons on which management established its credentials as an academic discipline, meriting the respect accorded to physics or law, Scientific Management and Human Relations. These two traditions are endlessly reproduced by every textbook as foundational theories in management. Yet, as Tourish demonstrates, they are both built of entirely fictitious premises, false assumptions, substantially fabricated findings and wishful thinking. The work of Taylor, Mayo and Co are parts of the field’s mythology and should be read as such rather than as anything meriting the label of theory. Mythologies, however, have consequences and they frequently come to play a vital part in what follows. What followed Scientific Management were ever more rigorous attempts to control, deskill and dominate the worker; what followed Human Relations were ever more systematic attempts to infantilize and patronize him or her. This chapter alone should be mandatory reading to anyone entering this field as student, academic, administrator or policy-maker.
The chapters that follow offer a critique of management scholarship for much of the last hundred years that essentially falls in two categories, a constant stream of managerialist recipes aimed at increasing efficiency and a separate stream of virtually meaningless research that either states the obvious or is mystifyingly abstruse. The former invariably seeks to increase profitability by enhancing organizational controls over employees or eliminating workers altogether through automation, mechanization and precarization. Some of these management recipes, in Tourish’s view, can be spuriously effective, though at a cost to the workers. Others like those that have fuelled the audit society are entirely counter-productive and dysfunctional. The triumph of metrics, including performance indicators, best practice and the like, in business has resulted in a variety of games, including the publishing game that so obsesses academics. The net result is a growth of different methods and skills for gaming the different metrics and more generally for improving image as against substance. Indeed, in many games played by organizations today, image becomes substance.
When applied to academic work, especially to what is carried out in Business Schools, the triumph of metrics, rankings, impact factors and the like results in thoroughly vacuous research, corrupt practices and empty verbiage. Tourish diligently exposes a number of dubious or downright immoral practices for boosting publications, citations, impact factors and standings in different rankings. These include plagiarism, data falsification, selective presentation of evidence and harking (post-facto hypothesizing). He devotes an entire chapter to retractions, the withdrawal of published articles that are shown to be based on fraud or professional malpractice of some sort. Most readers, like myself, will be unfamiliar with the little-known or carefully hushed scandals in academic publishing that Tourish brings to light, but one is left with the impression that they represent the tip of a large iceberg.
However, the biggest dysfunction of academic publishing in management studies is in the quality of the research itself which is poorly written, esoteric in content, infinitesimally original and virtually meaningless to anyone who does not inhabit the different academic microdisciplines. If many quantitative researchers are guilty of offering trivial additions to the literature, often deploying formidable mathematical resources to demonstrate the obvious, qualitative researchers are guilty of obfuscation, repetition, faddishness and, frequently, a total indifference to the real problems that afflict organizations, societies and even the planet. In many cases, they are seen debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or, more appropriately, fiddling while the Earth heats up.
Tourish reserves some of his strongest criticisms for scholars in his own field of leadership studies and also in Critical Management Studies, which represent the opposite sides of the problem – the former coming up with an endless stream of panaceas to the problem of leadership (the latest one of which is authentic leadership), the latter obstinately refusing to get their hands dirty by addressing any of the concerns of real managers and real organizations. Tourish’s trenchant critique does not content itself with anonymous generalizations but is at times directed at prominent scholars and even stars in these fields, though to his credit he does not exempt himself from some of the faults he finds in others. He is particularly severe in his condemnation of academic language that is meant to impress by obfuscating and confusing and offers several good examples of the genre. In the tradition established by C. Wright Mills (1959) in The Sociological Imagination, he offers several translations of pretentious jargon demonstrating that when something is meaningful, it can be expressed in plain English and when it cannot it is almost certainly vacuous.
Unlike many other critics of management studies, Tourish dedicates an entire chapter on the suffering inflicted by the current state of affairs on many of the practitioners, especially the younger scholars. The publishing game may create a few winners but also a far greater proportion of losers. Reading through the testimonies of some of the researchers quoted by Tourish, one is left with the impression that the human body inhabiting academia is a walking wounded one, bombarded by unreasonable requests, enticed to engage in dubious practices in producing meaningless verbiage and insulted along the way by unending criticism and censure.
Despite its penetrating criticism, Tourish’s tone is neither strident nor destructive. Unlike some of our professional colleagues, he does not call for the closing down of business schools, nor for the abolition of all metrics and research assessments. Instead, he offers a wide range of measured recommendations for reforming the system at different levels and across different institutions, including departments, universities, journals, publishers and policy-makers. What he maybe fails to indicate is that unless the system is reformed, it is likely to implode sooner rather than later as it creates many more losers than winners. Above all, the losers include the students whose fees pay for the time academics spend on research aimed only at boosting their departmental rankings and their career prospects but of little benefit to society or to the students themselves. It is time that other scholars in the area of management studies joined Tourish in calling for a root and branch reform of a system that has far outlived its usefulness.
