The “mainstream” that dominates management studies conceives research and knowledge production as functional to the improvement of management practices in a capitalist economy and market environment. Management is proposed as a neutral task promoting ideals such as quality, competitiveness, control and transparency that are seen as “good” across organizations, cultures and societies. By adhering, often implicitly, to these views, management scholars tend to adopt approaches that seem as well neutral and practical. The methods and languages of formalization, reductionism, experimentation and quantification borrowed from the hard sciences thus become the preferred way to express managerial knowledge in a “scientific” way in order to increase both its legitimacy and usefulness. Ethical and political questions concerning the value of the ends, or even the unintended consequences of pursuing a means-ends calculus, are assumed to be resolved, if not excluded or suppressed.

Learning Objectives
Course Outline

1. Some epistemology: learning to ask the “why” question in management research

1. What we tend to take for granted: management as the natural way of sorting things out

1. Who are we writing for ?: management studies as a fragmented ad-hocracy

1. Modernity and its consequences: the scientification of management

1. Post-modernity and its consequences: management as a cultural artefact

1. Postcards from Frankfurt: management and Critical Theory

1. Ideology and Hegemony: Marxist analysis of management

1. Management as a text: the discursive production of reality

1. Masculinity and rationality: a gendered understanding of management

1. Conducting the conduct of others: Michel Foucault and Govermentality

Course Material

However, an alternative view is possible.

Management can be seen as a cultural artefact, a phenomenon that is embedded in the social and political contexts in which it operates. Management practices are social constructs around which power and interests are negotiated and political processes enacted. As such, management loses its neutrality and claims to objectivity to gain in terms of cultural significance. This shift towards the interpretive and critical dimensions requires alternative forms of understanding that question precisely those implications of management that are often taken for granted in mainstream management studies. Alternative ways of conducting management research suggest that in practice managerial tools function in diverse and often unintended ways related to the social and political processes that exist in contemporary organizations and societies. The interpretation offered within alternative management studies draws on an understanding of managerial theories and tools as mediating and reinforcing the particular cultures, values and meanings instituted in organizational practices.

The course challenges received wisdom about management and offer alternatives via its unorthodox treatment of established topics and/or its attention to marginalized issues. It encompasses the analysis of a breadth of approaches that provide heterodox insights into the social and political nature of management. The course is concerned with showing how what appears to be neutral is actually constructed as such with power, in various forms, as the principal medium of such construction. The aim is to equip doctoral students with the capacity to recognize how accounts of how organizations function are mediated by the producers of these accounts - notably researchers, who themselves are embedded in particular conditions and traditions of research. By appreciating this, the course articulates a methodological and epistemological challenge to the objectivism and scientism inherent in mainstream positivist research. Disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, politics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities, in general, are presented as legitimate alternatives to mathematics, biology, and physics for conducting plausible research in management.

A selection of key journal articles and book chapters published in the last decades will be used as course material. Classes will comprise a mixture of theoretical input and problem-based seminars. Students will be required to analyze and discuss scholarly articles and critically reflect on the assumptions of their own research.