Critical Management

Studies
BMAN10970
Dr Jasmine Folz
8 December 2022
 WORKLOAD
ALLOCATION LIMIT
Lecturers are allocated three (3) hours to prepare a lecture, and this includes all the reading,
thinking, and slide preparation. If I only did what I was being officially paid to do the lecture would
stop here. This is because the university is managed under an assumption of rational efficiency that is
not based on how intellectual work is done.
 Rationalization of Intellectual Work

 Does it make sense for management to say it should take 3 hours to create a lecture ? Why/why
not?
 Can you link the time allocation for this task to any of the theories we have looked at so far this
semester?
 What does it say about lecturers that they do not keep to this timeframe, and instead end up
doing a lot of extra work? What does it say about the university’s management strategy?
 Why would lecturers agree to contracts that have unrealistic expectations?
 Can you imagine another way of organising this kind of task?
 Today we will explore some of these questions through the lens of Critical Management Studies
Lecture Outline
• Where did Critical Management Studies Come From?
• What is Critical Management Studies?
• Critical Management Studies Case Studies
• Critiques of Critical Management Studies
Questions from last week

• If Marx was right, why didn't workers unite and

change their conditions?
• Is Labour Process Theory leaving out something
important?
• Are there other forms of resistance? 
 • Hegemony (Gramsci)
• Ruling class use ideology rather than violence to maintain control – people
‘buy in’ to exploitation through accepting capitalist cultural norms as
common sense
• Learning to Labour (Wills 1979) ; Ain't No Makin' It (MacLeod 1987)
Some • Children are socialised into raced, classed and gendered subjectivities and
attitudes to work through the education system – are more likely to accept
Answers… exploitation as expected
• Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy 1979)
• Workers compete and gamify piece rate work to earn incentives,
consenting to their exploitation
• The Professional Managerial Class (Ehrenreichs 1977)
• The emergence of liberal middle class that exploit/are exploited
complicates traditional class analysis
• Men and Women of the Corporation (Kanter 1977)
• Professional work constructs/is constructed by gender
• The Managed Heart (Hochschild 1983)
• Introduced 'emotional labour' and exploitation
• Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985)
• Resistance can be subtle and covert: false compliance, sabotage, foot-
dragging, pilfering, feigned ignorance
TLDR: Exploitation is
complicated!
• To better understand how exploitation takes
place and why people do/do not resist it, we
need to account for subjectivity
• Identity, emotions, desires, being in the
world
• Psychology and beyond
• Includes social concerns- how
subjectivities are formulated within
constellations of power
• Qualitative research may be best
approach
 • There have always been
critiques of management
• The emergence of the
‘military industrial
complex’ and ‘power
elites’
• The Frankfurt School &
Critical Theory
• Critiques of positivist
research
• Influx of social scientists
to UK business schools
• A pragmatic reaction to
CMS emerged from a There Is No Alternative
(TINA)
confluence of factors
Critical Management
Studies
“…management is too potent in its
effects upon the lives of employees,
consumers and citizens to be guided
by a narrow, instrumental form of
rationality.”
(Alvesson and Wilmott 1992: 1)
“The common core is deep skepticism
regarding the moral defensibility and
the social and ecological sustainability
of prevailing conceptions and forms of
management and organization.”
(Adler, Forbes & Willmott 2007: 119)
 Foundations of CMS
(Fournier & Grey 2000)
De-Naturalising assumptions that hierarchy, competition, greed,
inequality, and exploitation are necessary to organise people and things
is questioned
Anti-Performativitity – upending the idea that social relations are
exclusively instrumental & that efficiency and growth are necessary or
desirable 
Reflexivity – questioning the implied neutrality and universality of
pervious management studies by demonstrating that the researchers’
biases impact how studies are conducted and results interpreted
CMS is a Big Tent,
Theoretically
Speaking
• Critical Theory (emancipation, social psychology)
• Feminist Theory (gendered exploitation/redress)
• Neo Marxism/LPT (updated to take account of
changes in production)
• Post Colonial Studies (understanding
historic/contemporary global exploitation)
• Post Structuralism (power, discourse)
• Environmentalism (critique of CSR)
Case Study 1: Suma Foods (Parker 2018)
• A Worker Co-operative founded
1977
• Expansion strategy is creation of
new, independent co-ops, not
growth of core organisation
• ‘Ethical’ products – vegetarian,
fair trade, mostly organic
• Low carbon footprint – sales
people share hybrid car…
Suma Continued
• Everyone makes the same salary – in 2016 £40k/year for
161 full time employees, £11/hour for temps – pay raises
are voted on
• Self-Management is the underlying principle of this
organisation, represented by job rotation – all workers do
whatever needs to be done, which means everyone
understands how the org runs and everyone does what
would traditionally be considered less prestigious work
How is Suma different from traditional
management assumptions?

• Equally values (££) all work

• Flat hierarchy/equal access to information
• No permeant division of labour
• Democratic decision making re pay, changes
to org
• Questions traditional concepts of business
growth
Case Study 2:
Tightening the Iron
Cage (Barker 2005)
• Ethnographic study of a small circuit
board manufacturing company
switched from a traditional
bureaucracy with strict hierarchy to
self-managed teams
• Teams were given everything they
needed to manage the task of
making, testing, packaging circuit
boards: control of equipment,
coaches, training and only offered
advice if asked – final decisions
were theirs to make
• 3 years after shift to self-managed
teams, the company became more
productive/profitable
 Less Bureaucracy/More Control

• Phase 1: Teams committed to the values of personal/team responsibility and created what Weber called a
substantive rationality of consensus that shaped behavioural norms and informal rules
• Phase 2: When new people joined the teams, the rules became formalised and not adapting was punished
• Phase 3: Team member control increased with constant surveillance of by/of team members. Attendance
and performance on visible charts. Prior to self management, supervisors would tolerate some slackness or
mistakes, however self managed teams were intolerant of mistakes or poor attitude
• Most workers found the new system more stressful but did not want to revert back because they also
found this system more fulfilling, even though they were under more control they had designed the system
of control themselves: "the team members had become their own masters, their own slaves"
• Concertive control is more powerful than bureaucratic control in 2 ways:
• 1 workers have developed rules they strongly identify with so enforce on themselves & others
• 2 this kind of control is more subtle – they have created this system so see it as natural and right thus
are happy to submit to harsher conditions than they would from an outside manager 
 • Case study 1 demonstrates that we do not have
to accept ‘performative’ assumptions about
Insights from economic rationality as natural or inevitable:
a CMS there are alternative ways to run a successful
business
approach
• Case study 2 demonstrates that looking beyond
metrics of ‘success’ can uncover the ways in
which management practices that are presented
as emancipatory may be more exploitative
• Remember these insights as we explore
contemporary management theory in semester 2
• BUT do not accept CMS uncritically!
 Critiques of CMS
Focus on identity neglects • Lessens its power to make meaningful change
political economy and class

• Self obsessed and theoretical

Overly academic/Elite • Is not really doing Critical Theory because it is not focussed on human
emancipation (Klikauer 2015)

Not useful for management  • Only critiques, does not offer advice

Becoming too affirmative and • Parker and Parker (2017) suggest a middle ground of ‘agonism’ wherein there is an
being co-opted by management   on-going dialogue to change management to be more emancipatory & sustainable