Organisation and Management Studies
• Critical Management Studies

References for Theme: Critical Management Studies

• Albert, Michael; Hahnel, Robin
• The Political Economy of Participatory Economics (1991)

• Alvesson, Mats; Willmott, Hugh
• Critical Management Studies (1992)

• Barratt, Edward
• "The later Foucault in organization and management studies" (2008)

  (p.516) The reception of Foucault has nonetheless tended to bifurcate between narrow readings (Knights, 2002) in which the metaphor of the panopticon has been widely – some might argue excessively – deployed, as a way of characterizing practices of control in the contemporary workplace and broader readings which draw more extensively on the familiar power, knowledge, subjectivity triad, commonly put to use in exploring the practical dynamics of power and resistance through ethnographic enquiry. More recently Foucauldianism has taken another turn, with an increasing interest in the later writing and particularly Foucault’s interest in the ethics of pagan antiquity (Chan &...

• "The later Foucault in organization and management studies" (2008)

  (p.519) The idea of a politicized history of management has perhaps been taken furthest by those working within the loosely coupled Foucauldian genre of governmentality studies (e.g. Miller & O’Leary, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1990). The abstract sense of ‘government’ here highlights the diversity of powers and governing authorities which regulate the subject’s space of freedom (Rose, 1999). Histories in this style begin explicitly and selfreflectively with a diagnosis of the problems of the present, seeking to explore the complex and contingent process by which that present took shape. Less an attempt to apply Foucault’s methods as to work...

• "The later Foucault in organization and management studies" (2008)

  (p.523) Turning now to the possibilities of a Foucauldian politics of the workplace, it is never clear in the later writing where Foucault wants to take the idea of freedom and autonomy. At times it is as if he wants to give only the basic outlines of an alternative since anything more always runs the risk of implying a definitive position (Foucault, 1996a). Yet there are other – less frequent times – when Foucault alludes to the possibility of elaborating on what autonomy might mean for the present (Foucault, 1996a). Such a project evidently remained uncompleted at the time of his...

• "The later Foucault in organization and management studies" (2008)

• Bloom, Peter; Rhodes, Carl
• CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life (2018)

• Bonet, Rocio; Salvador, Fabrizio
• "When the Boss Is Away: Manager–Worker Separation and Worker Performance in a Multisite Software Maintenance Organization" (2017)

• Burrell, Gibson
• "Modernism, Post Modernism and Organizational Analysis 2: The Contribution of Michel Foucault" (1988)

• Carter, Chris
• "A Curiously British Story: Foucault Goes to Business School" (2008)

  (p.26) The story of the rise of Foucault in British organization studies is one of the remarkable stories in the discipline. Consecrated as one of the major thinkers in the field, promoted and debated by a number of key theorists, and routinely appearing in prestigious journals, the star of Foucault is one that has shone brightly over the past twenty years. It is perhaps interesting to speculate what organization studies might look like now had another philosopher, for instance, Baudrillard, Derrida, or Habermas, been adopted? Skeptics who see mere ornamentation when they read Foucauldian organizational analysis would argue that very little...

• Clegg, Stewart
• "Foucault, power and organizations" (1998)

  (p.30) Foucault writes concretely and descriptively on power, much as did Weber. The ontological foundations of modern institutions, the institutional sources of power, are his topic. Foucault (1977) sees the methods of surveillance and assessment of individuals that were first developed in state institutions such as prisons, as effective tools developed for the orderly regimentation of others as docile bodies, techniques that achieve strategic effects through their disciplinary character. This is so, he maintains, even when they provoke resistance. Resistance merely serves to demonstrate the necessity of that discipline that provokes it. It becomes a target against which discipline may justify...

• "Foucault, power and organizations" (1998)

  (p.38) ‘Obedience’ is central to an analysis of the production of power in organizations, an insight shared by major precursors such as Weber (1978) and Etzioni (1961). Moreover, it is a focus that has received historical endorsement not only through the corpus of Weberian research (Matheson, 1987) but also through that recent and related work on the origins of disciplined obedience through ‘disciplinary practices’ in monastic organizations (see Assad (1987); Keiser (1987)). The concept of ‘disciplinary practice’ derives, as we have seen, from Foucault (1977) but is implicit in Weber (1978). It renders those micro-techniques of power that inscribe and normalize...

• "Foucault, power and organizations" (1998)

• Clegg, Stewart R; Courpasson, David; Phillips, Nelson
• Power and Organizations (2006)

• Crane, Andrew; Knights, David; Starkey, Ken
• "The Conditions of Our Freedom: Foucault, Organization, and Ethics" (2008)

  (p.300)  In our view, Foucault's ethics offer some important, though necessarily limited, contributions to the business ethics literature, which deserve our attention. First, he offers some alternative ways of thinking about freedom as a concept relevant to business ethics. Rather than seeing freedom as an entitlement to be acknowledged by managers, he posits freedom as a condition of being human that can never be absolute but can only ever be exercised within a field of discipline and control. As such, we can discern a little more clearly some of the conditions of our freedom in organizations. Foucault's ethics also offer a...

• "The Conditions of Our Freedom: Foucault, Organization, and Ethics" (2008)

• Curtis, Rowland
• "Foucault beyond Fairclough: From Transcendental to Immanent Critique in Organization Studies" (2014)

  (p.1755) Since having been formally introduced to the field of organization studies by Cooper and Burrell in this journal (1988; Burrell, 1988), Foucault’s ideas – or rather what we might call various ‘Foucauldianisms’ – have been among the most significant and oft-cited intellectual influences in the field (see Carter, McKinlay, & Rowlinson, 2002, pp. 515–16). This was originally most notable with regard to innovations within labour process studies, and in particular the work of Knights, Willmott and associates (especially Knights & Willmott, 1989; see also Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). These studies took early inspiration from Foucault as part of attempts...

• "Foucault beyond Fairclough: From Transcendental to Immanent Critique in Organization Studies" (2014)

• Dalgliesh, Bregham
• "Foucault and creative resistance in organisations" (2009)

  (p.45) There is a common misperception that Michel Foucault was oblivious to the relationship between the subject and the other, if not hostile to its very possibility in as much as he conflated them together in his notion of power. In the pages that follow, I want not only to counter such a fallacy but to argue that, in the context of organisations seeking to balance control with creativity for the purposes of fostering innovation, Foucault offers a solution to this conundrum. Insofar as theory ought to be deformed for the analytical purpose on hand (Burrell, 1988, p. 229), his vision...

• "Foucault and creative resistance in organisations" (2009)

  (p.46) Ironically, reading Foucault qua philosopher of a dominating and subjecting form of biopower is often the preferred interpretation of his partisans in organisation studies, too, who to some extent have followed fashion in introducing him to this academic field (Carter, 2008). Here, organisation theory is equated to a discourse on the disciplinary techniques and practices most likely to render employees docile (Clegg and Palmer, 1996), or to constitute individuals into objects of corporate control (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998) for whom Foucault offers no solace (Haunschild, 2003, pp. 56-7). However, there is a tendency underway to think critically about power and...

• "Foucault and creative resistance in organisations" (2009)

• Dashtipour, Parisa; Vidaillet, Bénédicte
• "Introducing the French Psychodynamics of Work Perspective to Critical Management Education: Why Do the Work Task and the Organization of Work Matter?" (2020)

  (p.132) As with Frankfurt School theorists (e.g., Honneth, 2009), health from this perspective is seen as the capacity for the development of autonomous subjectivity and a sense of self-worth (Dejours, 2015b). In this context, therefore, health does not mean the absence of illness, but rather the constant struggle to maintain a stable conception of the self, which can be derived from being able to do proper and good quality work, and from recognizing oneself in the product of one’s work, as well as having one’s work recognized by peers (Dejours, 2015b). The extent to which workers are able to develop this...

• "Introducing the French Psychodynamics of Work Perspective to Critical Management Education: Why Do the Work Task and the Organization of Work Matter?" (2020)

• Feldman, Alex J
• "Power, labour power and productive force in Foucault’s reading of Capital" (2019)

  (p.312) The key to the articulation of surveilling and punishing will be found in the conjunction of two problems: the problem of a new management of illegalisms and the problem of disciplining bodies to produce and direct the productive force. What, then, are the disciplines? The 17th century marks ‘a discovery of the body as object and target of power’.30 This ‘discovery’ has both a philosophical and a technological or techno-political register. The philosophy pole aims to explain the body as a machine. The technology pole aims to rationalize a certain practice of intervening upon the body – to produce a...

• "Power, labour power and productive force in Foucault’s reading of Capital" (2019)

• Findlay, Patricia; Newton, Tim
• "Re-Framing Foucault the Case of Performance Appraisal" (1998)

  (p.214) The emphasis upon discipline and surveillance in Foucault's earlier conceptualization of power (most especially in Discipline and Punish, 1979) finds an easy application in performance appraisal. Appraisal can be seen as epitomizing a desire for observation and surveillance, to make the employee a ‘knowable, calculable and administrable object’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 5). It appears as one tactic working towards the notion of disciplinary power enshrined in Foucault's reference to Bentham's ‘Panopticon’, the model prison in which prisoners can always be seen, yet cannot see themselves. It is easy to see the panoptic power of appraisal in the plethora of...

• "Re-Framing Foucault the Case of Performance Appraisal" (1998)

• Fournier, Valerie; Grey, Chris
• "At the Critical Moment: Conditions and Prospects for Critical Management Studies" (2000)

• Gerard, Nathan
• "Reparation Compulsion: Theorizing the pitfalls of guilt-driven labor" (2020)

• Graeber, David
• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015)

• Grey, C
• "We Are All Managers Now; We Always Were: On the Development and Demise of Management" (1999)

• Grey, Christopher
• "Towards A Critique of Managerialism: the Contribution of Simone Weil" (1996)

• Harley, Bill
• "Managing labour and the labour process" (2019)

• Hollinshead, Keith
• "Surveillance of the worlds of tourism: Foucault and the eye-of-power" (1999)

  (p.15) Thus by introducing Foucault’s concept of surveillance into tourism, Urry does not so much enable or encourage ‘host’ or ‘foreign’ populations to be studied, but he enables and encourages tourism administrators, tourism managers and tourism ‘professionals’ to be studied almost as if they were a foreign population acting with the domain of tourism.

• "Surveillance of the worlds of tourism: Foucault and the eye-of-power" (1999)

• Ibarra-Colado, Eduardo; Clegg, Stewart R; Rhodes, Carl; Kornberger, Martin
• "The ethics of managerial subjectivity" (2006)

  (p.46) Specifically, we use Foucault’s work in order to develop an understanding of ethics and management in a way that mediates between an understanding of ethics as an individual responsibility and ethics as organizationally determined. The means through which a manager acts in relation to both ethics and organizations are the central issue. Thus, in this perspective, the subjectivity of managers is located at the centre stage of ethical discussion. Subjectivity is a means through which to think of individual people not as being distinct or self-contained but as necessarily social; however a person might consider themself to be an ‘‘individual’’,...

• "The ethics of managerial subjectivity" (2006)

• Jackson, Norman; Carter, Pippa
• "Labour as Dressage" (1998)

• "Labour as dressage" (1998)

  (p.53) One arena of control of deviance to which Foucault did not devote much concentrated attention is that of work, but, in some ways, work can be recognized as a persistent sub-text, and he clearly had interests in developing this more directly.

• "Labour as dressage" (1998)

• Jensen, Nathan; Lyons, Elizabeth; Chebelyon, Eddy; Bras, Ronan Le; Gomes, Carla
• "Conspicuous monitoring and remote work" (2020)

  (p.489) The importance and difficulty of monitoring workers in order to properly reward and punish them is an important motivation for the existence of organizations (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972).1 As remote work becomes more common (e.g. Bloom et al., 2015) and as monitoring technology advances, firms are increasingly using IT-based solutions to monitor worker inputs and outputs (Bernstein, 2017, Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, Hitt, 2002). However, some task types may be difficult to track through IT programs. For example, monitoring remote work not performed online is logistically challenging. As a result, even when optimal inputs are definable, input-based incentive pay may not be...

• "Conspicuous monitoring and remote work" (2020)

• Jones, Campbell
• "Foucault's Inheritance/Inheriting Foucault" (2002)

• Klikauer, Thomas
• "Organisational Reasons for the Holocaust" (2020)

• Knights, David
• "Writing Organizational Analysis into Foucault" (2002)

  (p.576) Throughout his intellectual career, Foucault was concerned with the epistemological rules of disciplines formation, the disciplining of populations and subjects through power–knowledge relations and the selfformation of the ethical subject. However, it does not constitute too great a violation to perceive his work as having been broadly about how human life organizes itself and is organized. Similarly, once we reject the notion of perceiving the subject matter of organization theory exclusively as the bounded entity that commonly attracts the label ‘organization’,3 the two forms of study can be seen as having parallel, if not identical, concerns. In this sense, organization analysis...

• "Writing Organizational Analysis into Foucault" (2002)

• Knights, David; Willmott, Hugh
• "Power and Subjectivity at Work: From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations" (1989)

  (p.550) Whereas Marxists concentrate on the exploitation of labour through capital's appropriation of surplus value, and feminists are concerned with the domination of women through patriarchal legacies, Foucaulťs analysis complements and qualifies these perspectives by focusing upon power-infused processes of subjugation. Contrasting it with previous forms of power - such as domination where groups were subordinated by virtue of their race or ethnicity, and exploitation where labour is deprived of the full return on its production - subjugation is seen as more economical in as much as it is a technique of the 'social' and of the 'self' which produces a...

• "Power and Subjectivity at Work: From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations" (1989)

• Koch, Richard; Godden, Ian
• Managing Without Management: A Post-management Manifesto for Business Simplicity (1996)

• MacIntyre, Alasdair
• After Virtue (1981)

  (p.71) Among the central fictions of the age we have to place the peculiarly managerial function embodied in the claim to possess systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality. And this thesis may at first sight seem surprising for two quite different kinds of reason: we are not accustomed to doubt the effectiveness of managers in achieving what they set out to achieve and we are equally unaccustomed to think of effectiveness as a distinctively moral concept, to be classed with such concepts as those of rights and utility. Managers themselves and most writers about management conceive of themselves...

• Marx, Matt
• "The Firm Strikes Back: Non-compete Agreements and the Mobility of Technical Professionals" (2011)

• McKinlay, Alan; Starkey, Ken
• "Managing Foucault: Foucault, management and organization theory" (1998)

• Parker, Martin
• Against management: Organization in the age of managerialism (2002)

• "Organisational Gothic" (2005)

• "The Counter Culture of Organisation: Towards a Cultural Studies of Representations of Work" (2006)

• Raffnsøe, Sverre; Gudmand-Høyer, Marius; Thaning, Morten S
• "Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research" (2016)

  (p.272) As in many other fields of research, the legacy of Michel Foucault has become almost ubiquitous in management and organization studies (Carter et al., 2002; Rowlinson and Carter, 2002; McKinlay and Wilson, 2012; Välikangas and Seeck, 2011). This overarching presence appears to be especially marked within British organization studies (Carter, 2008) and within Critical Management Studies in particular (McKinlay and Wilson, 2012). Across this reception, one particular attraction to Foucault’s philosophical style has been its ability to push organizational analysis in new directions and beyond a preoccupation with already established categories. Foucault is regarded as a way to ‘reject the notion...

• "Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research" (2016)

  (p.274) Foucault’s dispositional analysis can be articulated as a history and a typology of connected social technologies, as well as a potent analytical approach to social reality. As an interconnecting, broad, and diversified analytical tool, the notion permits an alternative access to the circumstances under which organizing and organizations take place. Deferring attention from the organization as an entity to a larger social field, without reducing the former to a given, even more fundamental entity (e.g. society), dispositional analysis elucidates conditions for organizing and organizational processes, which managers and concrete organizations as well as organizational theory need to address and take...

• "Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research" (2016)

• Raffnsøe, Sverre; Mennicken, Andrea; Miller, Peter
• "The Foucault Effect in Organization Studies" (2019)

• Rhodes, Carl
• Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization (2019)

• Rowlinson, Michael; Carter, Chris
• "Foucault and History in Organization Studies" (2002)

  (p.527) For English-speaking Foucauldians, any questioning of Foucault or his influence is ‘demonstrative of the worst excesses of Anglo-Saxon empiricist small-mindedness’ (O’Farrell, 1989: 20). In assessing Foucault’s influence on the treatment of history in organization studies we knowingly court accusations of an excessive commitment to empiricism. But our argument is that the invocation of Foucault has exacerbated the separation of organization studies from history, both as empirical research using documentary traces from the past, and as historiography.

• "Foucault and History in Organization Studies" (2002)

• Vanek, Jaroslav
• Self-management: Economic Liberation of Man: Selected Readings (1975)

• Välikangas, Anita; Seeck, Hannele
• "Exploring the Foucauldian interpretation of power and subject in organizations" (2011)

  (p.13) According to the Foucauldian stance, it is essential to study ethics as a form of practices, i.e. what managers and workers actually do in their everyday activities (Clegg et al. 2007; Starkey & Hatchuel 2002). This viewpoint is very similar to the idea which Foucault expressed. He pointed out that in order to understand subjectivity, it was crucial to study practices: “[I]t is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. […] It is constituted in real practices – historically analyzable practices” (Foucault 1997a, 277). Thus study ethics should not, according to Foucault, begin by...

• "Exploring the Foucauldian interpretation of power and subject in organizations" (2011)

  (p.8) Another key feature, by which Foucault sees power as functioning in his genealogical writings, is the theme of pastoral power, a power relationship often found in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Foucault 2007, 175, 130). Foucault addressed this topic in greatest depth in his lectures at Collège de France 1977–1978 (see Foucault 2007). Pastoral power is a power relationship, where the pastor aims to modify the spirit and will of the guided person in a certain direction with the help of spiritual guidance and subjects’ confessions (Foucault 2007, 181; Foucault 1981; Elden 2005). During the confessions, the pastor aims to gain more...

• "Exploring the Foucauldian interpretation of power and subject in organizations" (2011)

• Wang, Jing
• "Power, accommodation and resistance: A Foucauldian perspective on how internal management controls are compromised in Chinese hotels" (2018)

• Westwood, Robert; Rhodes, Carl
• Humour, Work and Organization (2013)

• Willmott, Hugh
• "Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: Managing culture in modern organizations" (1993)