Critical Management Studies: A Critical Review

In this paper, we review the development of critical management studies, point at problems and explore possible developments. We begin by tracing out two previous waves of critical management studies. We then focus on more recent work in critical management studies and identify ten over‐arching themes (Academia, alternatives organizations, control and resistance, discourse, Foucauldian studies, gender, identity, Marxism, post‐colonialism, and psychoanalysis). We argue that CMS has largely relied on one‐dimensional critique which focused on negation. This has made the field increasingly stale, focused on the usual suspects and predictable. We identify a number of problems calling for critique and rethinking. We label these author‐itarianism, obscurantism, formulaic radicalism, usual‐suspectism and empirical light‐touchism.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Journal of Management Studies

• Publication date

  2024-02-25

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/joms.13047
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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