New Publication: Grey/Huault/Perret/Taskin (Eds.) (2016): Critical Management Studies: Global voices, local accents

Critical Management Studies (CMS) is often dated from the publication of an edited volume bearing that name (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). In the two decades that have followed, CMS has been remarkably successful in establishing itself not just as a ‘term’ but as a recognizable tradition or approach. The emerging status of CMS as an overall approach has been both encouraged and marked by a growing range of handbooks, readers and textbooks. Yet the literature is dominated by writings from the UK and Scandinavia in particular, and the tendency is to treat this literature as constituting CMS. However, the meaning, practice, constraints and context of CMS vary considerably between different countries, cultures and language communities. This volume surveys fourteen various countries and regions where CMS has acquired some following and seeks to explore the different ways in which CMS is understood and the different contexts within which it operates, as well as its possible future development.

Table of content and intro:

https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415749497

It was a honour to contribute to this volume with a chapter on „Critical Scholarship in Management and Organization Studies in German-speaking Countries: An Overview and Historical Reconstruction“. Beside a short overview about critical scholarship I focus on three distinct strands of thinking: ‘labour-oriented business administration’ (Arbeitsorientierte Einzelwirtschaftslehre), the ‘critique of the political economy of organisation’ (Klaus Türk), and the development of gender studies, exemplified through the pioneering work of Gertraude Krell. The chapter ends up with some general reflections about some discursive mechanism of the exclusion of critical thinking, that is the distinction between truth and ideology, a rejection of societal issues and the questioning of legitimate authorship.