Nick Butler

The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion of Ethos in Critical Management Studies

The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments – is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.

Problematizing ‘Relevance’ in the Business School: The Case of Leadership Studies

In recent years, the discourse of ‘relevance’ has risen to prominence in the university-based business school. At the heart of this discourse is the suggestion that management researchers should align their research practices more closely with the needs of practitioners in external organizations. One important but under-researched strand of this debate focuses on the way in which ‘relevance’ is pursued by business scholars via forms of practitioner engagement such as management consulting, corporate presentations, executive education and personal coaching. Drawing on extensive semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the motivations, rewards and tensions experienced by leadership scholars in the process of engaging with practitioners. This study suggests that the pursuit of ‘relevance’ may come into conflict with norms of scholarly conduct, which in turn gives rise to a series of trade-offs and compromises. Ultimately, the authors argue that the prevailing discourse of relevance provides an alibi for scholars to orient themselves towards practitioners in ways that contravene their academic identity and research ethos (whether post-positivist, interpretivist or critical).

Joking aside: Theorizing laughter in organizations

Humour is becoming an increasingly prevalent topic in organization studies. On the one hand, humour is said to enable workers to undermine management control; on the other hand, humour is said to provide managers with a resource for ensuring compliance with corporate objectives. This paper seeks to challenge the duality found in the literature between rebellious and disciplinary forms of humour by examining the meaning and significance of laughter in organizations. Following Bergson, it will be argued that laughter serves to rectify overly rigid behaviour that has temporarily disrupted the natural elasticity of life. This will serve to attune us to the way in which laughter – whether it is directed at a dominant group or a marginalized group – plays a socially normative role in organizations through processes of ridicule and embarrassment.

Never let an academic crisis go to waste: Leadership Studies in the wake of journal retractions

In 2014, leadership studies saw the retraction of a number of journal articles written by prominent researchers who are closely associated with popular concepts such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership and spiritual leadership. In response, The Leadership Quarterly published a lengthy editorial that presented these retractions as a sign of health in a mature scientific field. For the editors of The Leadership Quarterly, there is no crisis in leadership studies. In this paper, we suggest that the editorial is a missed opportunity to reflect on positivist leadership studies. In our view, leadership ought to be in crisis because this would stimulate the community to question its guiding assumptions and reconsider its methods and objectives. We therefore hope to open up a critical discussion about the means and ends of mainstream leadership studies – not least of all its scientific pretensions.

Duelling with dualisms: Descartes, Foucault and the history of organizational limits

Abstract Critical perspectives in organization studies often dismiss Descartes’ philosophical contribution because it is seen to legitimize a patriarchal and phallocentric mode of reasoning. In particular, the Cartesian mind–body dualism is said to reinforce gender inequality in organizations by privileging the rational mind over the emotional body. However, not only is this view incomplete and misleading, it also fails to consider the more significant division between reason and madness in Descartes’ work. For Foucault, Descartes’ Meditations plays a role in excluding madness from the domain of thought at the beginning of the classical age; this mirrors organizational practices of exclusion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely the incarceration of the mad in houses of confinement. This tells us that Descartes’ work has relevance for understanding the relation between philosophy and organizations in a specific historical context. In place of the historically de-contextualized use of philosophy we frequently find in organization studies, we propose that organizational scholars should seek to identify physical exclusions, conceptual binaries and historical breaks in order to conduct a critical ontology of the present – what we call a ‘history of organizational limits’.

The failure of consulting professionalism? : a longitudinal analysis of the Institute of Management Consultants

Abstract This paper offers a longitudinal analysis of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC). Drawing on archive sources, we consider the manner in which the IMC sought to institutionalize a form of expertise specific to management consultants. Rejecting attempts to locate the boundaries of such expertise within idealized, archetypal frameworks, we analyse the IMC’s attempts to secure occupational closure in the field of consulting by means of normative, cognitive and symbolic mechanisms. While others account for the Institute’s professional project as a failure consequent upon consulting’s fragmentary knowledge base, we suggest that this project did not so much fail as drift towards another ‘hybrid’ form. In an attempt (a) to account for this shift and (b) to outline its key contours, we offer an archival analysis that explores the manner in which the Institute sought to reconcile the multiple interests and competing logics that construct professionalism within the field of consulting.

Risky business: Reflections on critical performativity in practice:

Critical scholars in the business school are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their research beyond the confines of academia. This has been articulated most prominently around the concept of ‘critical performativity’. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with critical leadership scholars, this article explores how academics engage with practitioners at the same time as they seek to maintain a critical ethos in relation to their external activities. While proponents of critical performativity tend to paint a frictionless picture of practitioner engagement—which can take the form of consulting, coaching, and leadership development—we show how critical scholars may end up compromising their academic values in corporate settings due to practitioner demands and other institutional pressures. Taken together, these pressures mean that critical scholars often need to negotiate a series of (sometimes insoluble) dilemmas in practitioner contexts. We argue that the concept of critical performativity is unable to contend meaningfully with these tensions because it replicates the myth of the ‘heroic-transformational academic’ who is single-handedly able to stimulate critical reflection among practitioners and provoke radical change in organizations. We conclude with a call for further reflection on the range of ethical dilemmas that can arise during academic–practitioner engagement.

No funny business: Precarious work and emotional labour in stand-up comedy:

Freelance creative work is a labour of love where opportunities for self-expression are combined with exploitative working conditions. This article explores this dynamic by showing how a group of freelance creative labourers navigate employment while coping with the pressures associated with economic precarity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we argue that full-time stand-up comedians engage in ‘pecuniary’ forms of emotion management in an occupational field where social networks and professional relationships play a prominent role. First, comedians project an image of positivity to demonstrate a willingness to work for little or no pay in order to curry favour with comedy club promoters. Second, comedians suppress feelings of anxiety and frustration that arise from financial insecurity in order to keep their relationships with promoters on an even keel – even when the rate of pay and promptness of remuneration fall below acceptable standards. Our study thus has implications for other creative sectors in which precarity is the norm, since it suggests that emotional labour is a resource not only for engaging with customers and clients but also for engaging with multiple employers, negotiating pay and dealing with conditions of insecurity in freelance settings – often with unintended, paradoxical, results.

How to Become Less Excellent

All rights reserved. With business schools becoming increasingly market-driven, questionable trends have emerged, such as the conflation of academic and corporate management, and the notion that academics and students are market players, who respond rationally to market signals. Using individual studies from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines and countries, this book identifies the global pressures behind these trends. It focuses on the debates surrounded the commercialization of business schools, and the rise of different methods of measuring their success. In their unique approach, the authors and editors discuss the impact of the confrontation between the timeless values embodied by Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom, and the hard realities of competition and corporatization in modern society. This book will be compelling reading for students and academics in critical management studies, organizational studies, public management and higher education, as well as for stakeholders in academia and educational policy.Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the question – why do professionals surrender their autonomy? This paper looks at the case of academics, in particular business school academics. It traces how this group of professionals have progressively surrendered their autonomy and complied with the demands of managerialism. Design/methodology/approach – This largely theoretical paper looks to develop an understanding of (over)compliance with the bureaucratization of research using the four faces of power – coercive, agenda setting, ideological and discursive. Findings – The discussion of this paper argues that the surrendering of autonomy has been reinforced through coercive forms of power like rewards and punishment and bureaucratization; manipulation and mainstreaming through pushing a particular version of research to the top of the agenda; domination through shaping norms and values; and subjectification through creating new identities. Originality/value – The paper explores how academics deal with tensions and paradoxes such as compliance and resistance, as well as love of work and loathing of it. To deal with these paradoxes, academics often treat their work as a game and see themselves as players. While this process enables academics to reconcile themselves with their loss of autonomy, it has troubling collective outcomes: the production of increasing uninteresting and irrelevant research.This chapter focuses on the relatively neglected domain of branding and the academic labour process, in particular in business schools. It is increasingly accepted that brands are not only marketing tools, they also potentially instruct and direct organizational members. In other words, branding is a means by which managers or leaders can exert control in the labour process through targeting employee subjectivities. Employer branding entails the alignment of employees, typically in service occupations, with how they profile themselves outwards to customers. Successful image management and branding tends to interact with identity. Karreman and Rylander argues that branding activities can more fruitfully be seen as the management of meaning rather than as benign marketing tools. Professional labour in academia is both simultaneously consuming the brand and producing it. Accordingly, much of the performance of academic labour can be understood as branding work, that is, doing things to market the business school or university brand to an external audience.This chapter explores critically the educational situation of today and the more destructive aspects of competition, where substance gives way to various moves faking quality. It highlights three themes in particular: educational fundamentalism, positional games and manipulation of the image. Higher education is increasingly a matter of various people – primarily students but also university employees – engaged in positional games. Higher education and the associated payoff are often regarded as indicating an increase in the human capital or ability of the person concerned. Educational attainment has changed at a faster rate than the job structure, as a result of increasing over-education in jobs with low educational requirements. A successful education system involves more than simply ensuring that an increasing number of students become somewhat cleverer. With educational fundamentalism quantitative concerns take the upper hand over qualitative concerns and quality suffers. What an academic degree stands for becomes highly uncertain.

Book review: : The unersity in dissent

Further, the question of relations of power between investment banking and the rest of society is not dealt with, even though investment banking has an important influence on the rest of society. This neglect of relations of power implies an absence of engagement with the systemic financial crisis of 2008. It could have been interesting to articulate the micro-processes of investment with the large-scale failure of finance in 2008. As a result politics and ethics are completely shrugged off. It seems that the processes of investment banking do not have any consequences concerning social justice or being an ethical subject for the stakeholders. Despite these epistemological and ethico-political issues, Marketing Shares, Sharing Markets. Experts in Investment Banking demonstrates that financial markets are socially constructed through specific processes and hence are not regulated by the natural laws of the market. Therefore, it constitutes a novel and interesting study that pushes some boundaries but not quite far enough. This book is definitely relevant for scholars and social scientists who are interested in the social construction of markets. It may also appeal to a non-academic audience which seeks to question the mainstream representation of the market.