André Spicer

Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies

We argue that critical management studies (CMS) should be conceptualized as a profoundly performative project. The central task of CMS should be to actively and pragmatically intervene in specific debates about management and encourage progressive forms of management. This involves CMS becoming affirmative, caring, pragmatic, potential focused, and normative. To do this, we suggest a range of tactics including affirming ambiguity, working with mysteries, applied communicative action, exploring heterotopias and engaging micro-emancipations.

The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship

This paper engages with debates on enterprise culture and one of its key subjects—the entrepreneur. Enlisting the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to explain the continuing failure of entrepreneurship discourse to assign the character of the entrepreneur a positive identity. Shifting away from stable categories such as ‘the entrepreneur’, we describe entrepreneurship in terms of Lacan’s concept of the Real and Žižek’s concept of the sublime object. This allows us to critically scrutinize the operation of the phantasmic category of the entrepreneur. In addition to indicating some prospects for the future of psychoanalytic cultural criticism in organization studies, we make a case for a continual questioning of the subject, a questioning that is today being foreclosed by those critics who were first to call the subject into question.

Is Actor Network Theory Critique

In this essai we debate the extent to which Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides a meaningful contribution to the body of critical theories of organization. Critical approaches are commonly associated with a denaturalizing ontology, a reflexive epistemology and an anti-performative politics. In contrast, we suggest that ANT relies on a naturalizing ontology, an un-reflexive epistemology and a performative politics. This does not completely dismiss ANT as a useful approach to studying organizations. It does however question the contribution of ANT to developing a critical theory of organization.

Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity:

Existing accounts of leadership are underpinned by two dominant approaches: functionalist studies, which have tried to identify correlations between variables associated with leadership; and interpretive studies, which have tried to trace out the meaning-making process associated with leadership. Eschewing these approaches, we turn to an emerging strand of literature that develops a critical approach to leadership. This literature draws our attention to the dialectics of control and resistance and the ideological aspect of leadership. However, it largely posits a negative critique of leadership. We think this is legitimate and important, but extend this agenda. We posit a performative critique of leadership that emphasizes tactics of circumspect care, progressive pragmatism and searching for present potentialities. We use these tactics to sketch out a practice of deliberated leadership that involves collective reflection on when, what kind and if leadership is appropriate.

‘You Can Checkout Anytime, but You Can Never Leave’: Spatial Boundaries in a High Commitment Organization

This article suggests that the concept of organizational boundaries evokes a spatial metaphor. While the scant literature exploring the social geography of organizational life has pointed to the powerladen nature of spatiality, it does so only within the workplace. Our article maintains that the very boundary separating the inside from the outside of organizations is an equally important instrument for controlling labour. In light of the permutations that this boundary is currently undergoing, a field study is presented identifying aspects of a culture management programme aimed at significantly reorganizing the meaning of the inside/outside spatial divide among call-centre employees. This entailed a two-way process in which typically ‘private’ spatial practices are drawn into the site of production and organizational norms are encouraged outside work. The implications that these techniques have for employee autonomy are raised as important concerns.

Guess who's coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy

Organizational studies have recently drawn our attention to the importance of liminality in our working lives. This transitional timespace is characteristic of precarious or mobile employment such as temporary, project and consulting work especially. It is understood as a fluid and largely unstructured space where normal order is suspended and which is experienced as both unsettling and creative. This article critically explores liminality through a detailed study of the neglected activities of business dinners and back-stage management consultancy. We argue that liminality can in fact be a highly and multi-structured, comfortable and strategic or tactical space. We find that the use of wider norms and routines of eating and socializing as well as of hierarchical patterns of working and of exclusion and inclusion shape the experience and outcomes of liminality. Moreover, we highlight how the context of liminality is sustained by highly structured organizational activities in the production of domestic and public meals. We conclude that business meals mark a traditional, rather than modern, practice where ‘official secrets’ continue to grease the wheels of commerce. At the most senior levels especially, the liminality between work and private spheres can be far from unsettling and fluid.

Beyond Power and Resistance New Approaches to Organizational Politics

In this introduction to the special issue, the editors question the still-prevalent dichotomy of power and resistance when studying organizational politics. They begin by tracing the evolution of power and resistance in critical scholarship. Then, they propose that because of changing workplace dynamics, power and resistance are increasingly intertwined. More nuanced concepts are required to describe this. Finally, they argue that power and resistance should be considered as a singular dynamic called struggle.

Unmasking the entrepreneur

his unique book argues against the ideas of entrepreneurship that prevail in much of business practice as well as in popular and academic representations of the entrepreneur. The authors demonstrate how conceptual and political problems with entrepreneurship work and how they are interconnected. Building on recent critical studies of entrepreneurship, they ask what lies behind the friendly face of the entrepreneur.

Hail the snail: Hegemonic struggles in the Slow Food movement

This paper explores how new institutional fields are established and extended. We argue that they are created by social movements engaging in hegemonic struggles and which develop social movement strategies, articulate discourses and construct nodal points. We examine how this process played out during the creation and development of the Slow Food movement. We argue that the positioning of Slow Food as a new field was based particularly on using multiple strategies, increasing the stock of floating signifiers, and abstracting the nodal points used. This mobilized new actors and enabled a more extensive collective identity which allowed the movement to progress, extend, and elevate the field of Slow Food. The field of Slow Food was transformed from appealing only to gastronomes to becoming a broader field that encompassed social justice activists and environmentalists. This study contributes to the existing literature on field formation, the role of social movements in this process, and political dynamics within social movements. We focus on the importance of hegemony in the institutional processes around field formation by drawing out how Slow Food created a field through the forging of hegemonic links among a range of disparate actors.

Contested imaginaries and the cultural political economy of climate change

This article analyses the evolving cultural political economy of climate change by developing the concept of ‘climate imaginaries’. These are shared socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings of the climate. Climate imaginaries imply a particular mode of organizing production and consumption, and a prioritization of environmental and cultural values. We use this concept to examine the struggle among NGOs, business and state agencies over four core climate imaginaries. These are ‘fossil fuels forever’, ‘climate apocalypse’, ‘techno-market’ and ‘sustainable lifestyles’. These imaginaries play a key role in contentions over responses to climate change, and we outline three main episodes in the past two decades: the carbon wars of the 1990s, an emergent carbon compromise between 1998–2008 and a climate impasse from 2009 to the present. However, climate imaginaries only become dominant when they connect with wider popular interests and identities and align with economic and technological aspects of the energy system to constitute ‘value regimes’.