Interregnum and Critical Management Studies: The possible end of meaningful work

We are now witnessing the first generation born into liquid modernity – the millennials – for whom being primarily called on by society as consumers and experiencing the deepened significance and logic of life as a lottery (Bauman and Mauro, 2016) is natural (yet uncomfortable). The main point made is that the first ‘solid’ (sic!) generation of liquid consumers that Bauman wrote so vividly about is set to embark on adult life and enter organizations en masse as managers and workers. It is argued that the entry of the millennials further intensifies the ongoing subsidiarization process that is already taking place in organizations and means that the individualization of collective organizational problems will be even more concealed and difficult to detect. In relation to the millennials entering organizations, it is further argued that it is essential that Critical Management Studies (CMS) takes heed of the challenges that the entry of the millennials carry with them. A Baumanian framework informs us that this can only be done by avoiding nostalgia – going back-to-the-future.     

After retrotopia? The future of organizing and the thought of Zygmunt Bauman

The main body of work of Zygmunt Bauman concerns his home discipline of sociology, but his insights have been influential also in the field of organization studies. In this text, we provide an overview of the extent of this influence, providing some additional context for positioning the other contributions to this special section. Afterwards, we explore in more detail two notions central for Bauman’s late thought: that of liquidity and retrotopia. The former constitutes the root metaphor for theorizing the current global predicament. In this text, we analyse how two modes of interpreting it, using the assumptions behind Kurt Lewin’s CATS model and the alchemical tradition underpinning Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of archetypes respectively, can help us theorize the alternative modes of organizing and managing encountered in a study of contemporary alternative organizations.These insights form the starting point for our second goal: to explore Bauman’s notion of retrotopia as a potentially fruitful starting point for discussing both the deficiencies of current visions of our future society, and the possibilities and vicissitudes of developing new forms of organizing and managing. Such new forms, both as practice and as theoretical constructs, are urgently needed if we are to face the numerous, and potentially catastrophic global challenges facing our society today.     

‘A deeply troubled organization’: Organizational satire in the BBC’s W1A comedy series

This paper analyses the ways in which a media organization implicated in a series of reputational scandals represents its own management in a comedy series. The organization in question is the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and the comedy series is W1A, a mockumentary commissioned and screened by the BBC in 2014–17. Firstly, I discuss the ways in which W1A as a ‘text’ uses satirical devices to ridicule its own management as well as management fads and fashions. Secondly, I analyse W1A as the ‘intertext’, and consider the satirical representations of management in W1A against the backdrop of the BBC’s reputational scandals. I put forward an interpretation that the intertextual references in the comedy series break down the distance between ‘us’ and ‘the troubled organization’. I also argue that intertextual reading of the series (e.g. the analysis of allusions, cameo appearances, and parallels with the real BBC) throws an entirely different light on organizational wrongdoing, opening new possibilities for organizational reintegration and the repair of broken trust. Not only does the reading of W1A change when the audience considers what is happening in the real BBC, but also our interpretation of what is happening in the BBC may change when we watch W1A.     

Indigenous Cosmogony and Andean Architecture in El Alto,Bolivia

This essay applies Bourdieu's analysis of the formation of the ‘scholastic habitus’ in medieval times—elaborated in his 1967 afterword to his French translation of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism—to the correspondence between indigenous mental categories and architectural innovation in the Bolivian ‘rebel city’ of El Alto. The principle of homology between mental categories and building layout (rooted in a shared habitus) can be used to interpret one of the most spectacular features of Bolivia's ‘emerging architectures’, known as chalets. The term chalet designates a hybrid structure consisting of a colorful and ornate penthouse and multi‐story dwelling erected on building rooftops. The chalets are architectural forms embedded within an economy of symbolic goods characterized by a ‘dual truth’: they are at once material and symbolic; they perform economic functions while seeking public visibility. The conspicuous lifestyle advertised by the construction of chalets can be understood by reference to the rising social power of the indigenous elites (cholos) dominating the thriving ‘ethnic economy’ of the city. The fraternities of El Alto emerge as the structural equivalent of the scholastic institution that Bourdieu associated with Gothic architecture: they are the site of production of a specific habitus, shared by native urban categories defined by similar residential locations, economic activities and forms of collective organization.     

Resilience and the (micro-)dynamics of organizational ambidexterity: implications for strategic HRM

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, resilience has emerged as a seminal and important topic linked to calls for adaptability, well-being and organizational performance. Extant strategic human resource management (HRM) literature and practices have developed many insights into resilience. However, overall, they have a propensity to conceptualise resilience as being associated with ‘macro-’ and ‘extreme’ situations. This paper complements the prevailing perspective by developing a micro-focus on resilience through the conceptual framework of organizational ambidexterity surfacing under-examined individual resilience in connection with HRM practices. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative approach presenting data from two illustrative contexts: an ‘everyday’ quasi-governmental institution and a prima facie ‘extreme’ pan-international military organization. Using template analysis, a number of valuable themes and similarities are identified. The findings and discussion underline the managerial challenges in handling organizational ambidextrous dynamics and tensions surrounding resilience, positive and sceptical approaches in relation to individual and organizational stances towards HRM practices. As such, the results point at value in HRM managers and practices recontextualising and appreciating ‘extremes’ and resilience more as an everyday (rather than exceptional) phenomenon wherein myriad micro-moments are highly significant in constructing and influencing macro-contexts. This also implies a need to see cynical resistance as normative rather than automatically negatively.     

From psoriasis to a number and back

This paper will argue that accounting can be understood as a special kind of Latourian Actor – a ‘space/time/value machine’ [Frandsen, A. -C. (2004). Rum, tid och pengar – En studie om redovisning i praktiken. Doctoral Thesis, Göteborg: BAS]. It starts conceptually by seeing accounting and its references as a ‘chain of translations’ [Latour, B. (1998). Artefaktens återkomst. Stockholm: Knowledge and Society; Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope. Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press]. Empirically it follows a puzzling set of such references, from a psoriasis clinic where accounting is unfamiliar – so part of what [Tuan, Y. -F. (2001). Space and place, 8th ed. London: University of Minnesota Press] would call a ‘space’ – to a central finance function where it is taken for granted embodied knowledge, and so part of ‘place’, and then back, to observe how these references become integrated into medical everyday work and its embodied ways of knowing, establishing the clinic as an accounting ‘place’ for those who work there.. It then argues that as these references become more taken for granted, accounting acts as a special Actor because of the way it circulates inside and outside both human and non-human ‘actants’, as a machine which always names and counts, so constituting space, time and valuing through its flexible ‘named numbers’.. It tracks how accounting moves to becoming familiar and expands its reach through four categories: ‘the character of the associations’, ‘the integration of associations and the delimitation of movement’, ‘order and its relation to change; and ‘the production of other spaces’. This illuminates how accounting draws actants into its chains or circuits of value, thus extending its ability to construct both facts and acts. Here the paper supplements the actor-network approach with ideas drawn from the work of Hoskin and colleagues [e.g. Ezzamel, M., & Hoskin, K. (2002). Retheorizing the relationship between accounting, writing and money with evidence from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 13, 333–367; Hoskin, K. (1981). The history of education and the history of writing, Unpublished paper. Department of Education, University of Warwick; Hoskin, K., & Macve, R., (1986). Accounting and the examination: A genealogy of disciplinary power. Accounting, Organisation and Society, 11, 105–136] which see accounting as a visible sign system naming and counting from before the invention of writing, and so having a special priority in settings concerned with coordinating action in space and across time. In modern managerial worklife settings, its named numbers circulate as paper and electronic texts which are strategically central to both financial and non-financial coordination of resources and actants. This helps clarify why accounting should be such a special Actor, as well as how it functions as machine.     

THE CONCEPT OF DECISION: A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS*

Decision-making as a central concept in management and organization theory has had a colourful and controversial career spanning some 50 years. During this time its image and meaning has shifted substantially to the point where its explanatory value as an established conceptual category in management and organizational analysis has been questioned. In this article, I attempt a critical study of the concept of decision and try to show that the various attempts to replace it by other terms such as ‘action’, and ‘change’, overlook the ontological status of the decision-making process. I argue here that decision is better understood as a series of interlocking pre-definitive acts of punctuating the flow of human experiences in order to facilitate sense-making and to alleviate our Cartesian anxiety. Decisions are not so much about ‘choice’or ‘intentions’as about the primordial ‘will to order’whereby interlocking configurations of micro-incisions punctuating our phenomenal experiences contrive to construct and reinforce a stable but precarious version of reality. When viewed thus, decision-making takes on a very different meaning - one that accentuates the concrete everydayness of micro-decisional acts which re-enact the ongoing contestation between order and disorder, routinization and breakdown, organization and disorganization, chaos and cosmos. Such micro-decisional ontological acts are what produces and sustains a version of reality to which we then subsequently respond. It is this ‘becoming’theory of decision-making which is offered as an alternative to the ‘event’driven model of decisional theorizing.     

A Bayesian analysis of suicide data

The identification of change points in a sequence of suicide rates is one of the fundamental aspects of Durkheim’s theory. The specification of a statistical standard suitable for this purpose is the main condition for making inferences about the causes of suicide with distinctive trends of persistency and variability just as Durkheim theorized. At present, the statistical ‘strategy’ employed by the French social scientist is too ‘rudimentary’. A hundred years later, I take the opportunity to test Durkheim’s theory through modern methodological instruments, specifically the Bayesian change-point analysis. First of all, I analyzed the same suicide data which Durkheim took into consideration. Change-point analysis corroborates the Durkheimian analysis revealing the same change-points identified by the author. Secondly, I analyzed Italian suicide rates from 1864 to 2005. The change-point analysis was very useful. Durkheim’s theory ‘works’ until 1961: suicides rates increased as industrial development increased. However, after 1961 and the economic boom, they declined, and when they began increasing again, after 1984, they did not reach the same level as before. This finding obliges us to ‘adjust’ the Durkheim’s theory giving space to Halbwach’s convergence law. Therefore, as high economic and social development levels are attained, suicide rates tend to level-off: People adapt to the stress of modernization associated to low social integration levels. Although we are more ‘egoist’, individualism does not destroy identity and the sense of life as Durkheim had maintained.     

Do social enterprises attract workers who are more pro-socially motivated than their counterparts in for-profit organizations to perform low-skilled jobs?

Abstract

The literature highlights that social enterprises (SEs) attract workers who are motivated to help others and to meet the social aims in which they believe. However, this assumption is challenged in the case of low-skilled jobs. Therefore, we have performed an empirical study in the quasi-market of service vouchers in Belgium to know if SEs attract workers who have a different motivational profile than their counterparts in for-profit organizations (FPOs) to perform low skilled jobs (N = 217). No significant differences were found. Next, we have compared FPOs with two types of social enterprises, Home Care Services Organizations (HCSOs) and Work Integration Social enterprises (WISEs), and again no significant differences were found for the whole sample. However, it seems that a selection effect exists in WISEs when the sample is reduced to people who were not previously unemployed. In others words, when WISEs deviate from their initial mission of ‘hiring the most vulnerable people on the labor market’, it is only to hire workers whose are highly motivated to achieve the organization’s mission and who fit with the values defended by the organization.     

Changing consumer behaviour through eco-efficient services: an empirical study of car sharing in the Netherlands

In this paper ‘innovation’ is discussed as a strategy to change consumer behaviour to reduce the environmental impact of consumption. Innovation aims to improve the ‘production process’ of certain end results or ‘units of service’ for the consumer, which is defined as the ‘consumption technology’. This concept includes the entire organization of how these units of service are produced. ‘Eco-efficient services’ are introduced as an innovation strategy, based on theoretical considerations through which more eco-efficient consumption technologies and less environmentally damaging consumption behaviour could be realized. This strategy is explored through an empirical consumer behaviour study on commercial car sharing services in the Netherlands. Based on an inventory of the environmental effects of this approach, as exemplified by the car sharing schemes, it can tentatively be concluded that the eco-efficient services concept offers an interesting framework for reconsidering the current consumption practice and for generating innovative activities in industry. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Decomposing profit change: Konüs,Bennet and Luenberger indicators

We introduce complementary decompositions of profit change that, relying on the duality between the profit function and the directional distance function, shed light on the different sources of profit growth including measures of technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and technological change. Our decompositions extend the literature on Konüs and Bennet quantity and price indicators to profit change. The first decomposition is ‘exact’ in the sense of Diewert, by completely exhausting the sources of profit change into profit inefficiency change (including technical and allocative inefficiency change), technological change, and output and input price change. The second decomposition equates the Bennet quantity indicator to a productivity measure represented by the Luenberger indicator plus allocative inefficiency change. We deem it ‘complete’ because in contrast to the existing literature, it retains the information on allocative inefficiency change while preventing the existence of residual terms capturing price variations, whose meaningful interpretation has not been addressed until now. Our proposed solution takes advantage of the flexibility of the directional distance function when choosing a suitable directional vector. All decompositions have the same structural form and therefore their components can be compared to each other vis-à-vis, providing alternative measures of equivalent sources of profit growth.     

Lattices of capacities,and related topologies1

Capacities are defined as set functions with regularity properties in terms of two general families K and G of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ sets (K = compact sets, G= open sets in the standard case). The space C of all such capacities is a complete lattice with respect to its natural partial order. The lattice structure of C is studied in combination with the natural topology of C. Also some subspaces are investigated.     

‘The Substitution of One Piece of Nonsense for Another’: Reflections on Resistance,Gaming, and Subjugation

This article reflects upon Willmott's 1993 article (‘Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organizations’) by revisiting the idea of ‘Corporate Culturism’ and its relevance for contemporary developments in management and organization, including higher education. It incorporates a commentary on how 1984 and ‘Strength is ignorance’ have been read and some reflections on the genesis of the original 1993 article. It then expands on themes in ‘Strength is ignorance’ which are of continuing relevance, and draws out implications for our research and professional lives, as scholars, working in business schools.     

Politische Ökonomie der Rechnungslegung – Bisherige Forschungsergebnisse und künftige Forschungsperspektiven unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lobbyingkonzepts

Particularly in the field of German research tradition concerning financial accounting thoughts about interpretation and development of standards are focal points. Along with the appearance of the information economics it became apparent that financial accounting is not only a technical vehicle but a social institution. By making accounting information publicly available it may have an effect on the distribution of economic income. Insofar the presumption is feasible that those players influence standard-setting whose welfare is directly affected by it. The above mentioned view that is rarely noted in the German-speaking countries is followed by the research approach so called ‘‘Political Economy of Accounting’’. Aim of this research approach is to explain the complex standard-setting process by considering the different parties within a society. The article at hand contributes to sum up state-of-the-art advancements in the field of scientific discourse concerned and provides an outlook on perspectives in this research area.     

THE PETER PRINCIPLE: PERSONAL OR ORGANIZATIONAL INCOMPETENCE?

This article proposes that incompetence in management may not be explained so much by the ‘Peter Principle’, i.e. by terminal weaknesses of personnel in faulty promotion systems, as it is by the organizational climate in which managers perform, i.e. by outmoded supervisory styles and limiting structural relationships. This alternative explanation is supported by Townsend's popular book, Up the Organization,¹ where Theory X styles of leadership, in some combination with bureaucratic elements of structure, are seen as impairments in modern organizations. This contention argues that organizational change agents must operate in tandem upon perceptions and attitudes as well as structural properties to maintain effectiveness - embarking on either skill and sensitivity training alone or mandating authority and task changes is insufficient. In addition, leadership flexibility and structural variety must provide alternative options across different task units if both short-run efficiency and long-term relevance are to be generated for the organization. Finally, organization survival is viewed as a function of managerial performance as determined by structure, including the promotion system, and by level of humanism of the climate, especially motivational stimuli. Within all of this, managerial effectiveness is considered to be influenced by incumbent conceptualizations of goals and capacities of the organization and of his own ‘self’ within that system. Concepts of self, in turn, are determined by historical notions associated with work and authority, as well as by various socialization processes in the organization, e.g. training, super-vision and general psychological conditioning. Accordingly, the matrix design of organizations and the contingency theory of leadership are offered as vehicles for tentatively re-conceptualizing the nature and form of collective behavior. Matrix and contingency theories focus upon modern, complex organizational structures and varied superior-subordinate relationships rather than upon man's instrumental performance, as with the Peter Principle, in explaining managerial inadequacies.     

How Portugal Became an ‘Unplanned Country’: A Critique of Scholarship on Portuguese Urban Development and Planning

In this article, I seek to expose how scholars came to construct the idea that Portugal is an ‘unplanned country’— a product of disorderly growth. While urban scholarship has now challenged the hegemonic view of spatial order as a proxy for modernity, development and progress, Portuguese scholarship has remained largely impervious to these debates as it consistently offers a view of the Portuguese city as ‘not quite yet’ modern and civilized. Based on a review of accounts by key authors recognized for their prominence and contribution to contemporary Portuguese scholarship, I argue that rather than being a constitutive fact of or truth about the Portuguese urban condition, the ‘unplanned country’ operates as an intellectual and discursive construct that organizes the experience of modernity, urban growth and social transformation throughout the twentieth century. The article discusses how Portuguese scholarship constructs the ‘unplanned country’ idea through insufficient engagement with relevant research and debates in urban studies and is based on several empirical shortcomings. The article concludes by offering a preliminary research agenda to address these imbalances. I suggest that such efforts could enhance the relevance and contribution of the Portuguese urban experience to recent calls for epistemological renewal in urban theory production. Cet article explique comment les chercheurs ont bâti l'idée que le Portugal est un ‘pays sans planification’, le résultat d'une croissance confuse. La recherche urbaine a désormais bousculé la vision hégémonique de l'ordre spatial comme indicateur de modernité, de développement et de progrès, mais la plupart des auteurs portugais sont restés hermétiques à ces débats, puisqu'ils dépeignent systématiquement la ville portugaise comme ‘pas encore tout à fait’ moderne et civilisée. En analysant les travaux d'auteurs déterminants, reconnus pour leur importance et leur contribution à la recherche portugaise contemporaine, cette étude préconise que, loin d'être un fait constitutif ou une vérité pour la situation urbaine portugaise, le ‘pays sans planification’ agit comme une notion intellectuelle et rhétorique qui structure l'expérience de modernité, de croissance et de transformation sociale au cours du XX^e siècle. L'idée de ‘pays sans planification’ est née d'un manque d'implication dans la recherche et dans les débats pertinents en sciences urbaines, ainsi que de plusieurs erreurs empiriques à la base de certaines démonstrations. La conclusion propose un programme d'études préliminaires pour remédier à ces anomalies. Ces travaux pourraient renforcer l'intérêt et l'apport de l'expérience urbaine portugaise dans le cadre de récents appels à un renouveau épistémologique dans la production de théories urbaines.     

UNRAVELLED HOMES: Forced Evictions and Home Remaking in Jakarta

This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature—‘developmental idealism and the family’ from population studies and the critical geographies of ‘homemaking’—we argue that the demolition of houses is but an initial event in a long, quiet and subtle, yet profoundly defining, process of ‘upgrading’ families as part of ‘improving’ society, according to developmental logic. The disciplining of the urban poor does not end with the demolition of their houses, but rather continues as part of the fulfilment of shelter. This article attends to the slow unravelling of home hidden and embedded in post-eviction everyday lives, which are often overlooked because of the overt and violent brutality of forced eviction. While eviction can be seen as the violent visual expression of developmentalism, we argue that the relocation in rusunawa is where this ideal permeates into daily domestic life, making mundane activities a battleground for different ideals of ‘home’.     

Optimal information transmission in organizations: search and congestion

We propose a stylized model of a problem-solving organization whose internal communication structure is given by a fixed network. Problems arrive randomly anywhere in this network and must find their way to their respective specialized solvers by relying on local information alone. The organization handles multiple problems simultaneously. For this reason, the process may be subject to congestion. We provide a characterization of the threshold of collapse of the network and of the stock of floating problems (or average delay) that prevails below that threshold. We build upon this characterization to address a design problem: the determination of what kind of network architecture optimizes performance for any given problem arrival rate. We conclude that, for low arrival rates, the optimal network is very polarized (i.e. star-like or centralized), whereas it is largely homogenous (or decentralized) for high arrival rates. These observations are in line with a common transformation experienced by information-intensive organizations as their work flow has risen in recent years.     

On the way to Ithaka[1]: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing

Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing has been one of the most influential books in organization studies, providing the theoretical underpinnings of several research programs. Importantly, the book is widely credited with initiating the process turn in the field, leading to the ‘gerundizing’ of management and organization studies: the persistent effort to understand organizational phenomena as ongoing accomplishments. The emphasis of the book on organizing (rather than on organizations) and its links with sensemaking have made it the most influential treatise on organizational epistemology. In this introduction, we review Weick’s magnum opus, underline and assess its key themes, and suggest ways in which several of them may be taken forward.     

TOWARDS A CRITICAL MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

This article examines the work of a number of writers who have attempted critical assessments of management science. Each writer has focused on specific areas that any critical management science would need to consider, viz. the origins of values, relations between organizations and society, the historical development of organizations, and the relationship between management science and developments in the capitalist mode of production. In addition these writers have declined to accept existing modes of organization as given, and have avoided the assumption that management science is inherently, or necessarily, manipulative. Each of the writers, however, has displayed several weaknesses in his analysis: thus Churchman fails to locate the management scientist in the society of which he is a part; Hales has no clear or viable alternative other than to call (in effect) for socialism, and makes the erroneous assumption that managerial strategies are necessarily effective; whilst Whitley too seems to have ‘divested management research of its practical dimension’. In conclusion it is pointed out that the actual effects of managerial strategies must be treated as problematic, since they may be modified by various forms of resistance and class struggle, and that developments in the production process may not necessarily be to the detriment of workers.