Slawomir Magala

Critical Complexities, (from marginal paradigms to learning networks)

The concepts of critical theory and complexity merit criticism. Growth of knowledge merits paradigmatic sacrifices. The erosion of orthodox establishments and an on‐going re‐structuring of research communities make the sciences of management susceptible to the influences of critical social scientists. A change of paradigms ceased to be a threatening emergency so vividly evoked by Kuhn. The new complex world of overlapping research networks is less hierarchic, more mobile, and not easily centralized. In boundary‐less correlations all critical research paradigms are subjected to a networking and re‐networking at all times. Postmodernist anarchism (“anything goes”) is presently giving rise to the theories of organisational learning. The latter express a methodological compromise with respect to the paradigms and a political compromise with respect to the governance structures. The underlying tensions motivate an ongoing search for a sustainable compromise between a critical thrust of research and a managerial need for governance, accountability and control.

Critical theory: 15 years later

Purpose – The pupose of this paper is to explore the role of criticism in the growth of academic communities and their organizational transformations.Design/methodology/approach – Through a comparison between the Frankfurter School of critical thought with contemporary critical management studies, possible routes for further development of the latter are explored.Findings – The cognitive turn in behavioural sciences and the bureaucratic professionalization of knowledge‐intensive occupations are a serious threat to the possible development of critical management studies.Practical implications – By focussing on implications of the Frankfurter School of social thought, critical management studies can establish itself as a more profound and fundamental form of research within social sciences.Originality/value – The goal is to make the Frankfurter School a salonfahig discourse for managerial establishments.

Organizing change: testing cultural limits of sustainability

Purpose – A concept of culture as a solid black box of mental software is gone from serious research surviving in consulting modules and undergraduate teaching. Cultural values evolve and are more frequently examined in public through filters of institutional patterns and frames. The new, emergent cluster of sustainability values dominates and realigns all other values in unpredictable ways. One of the most relevant consequences consists of reinventing democracy, even within business corporations, Large Hadron Colliders and office work floors. The paper aims to define and interpret the cultural dimension of the emergent value of sustainability, which migrates towards the center of core values in the management of organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a theoretical interpretation with cutting‐edge empirical reports on the most complex research projects and their management based on negotiating values, goals and pragmatics. The paper also applies Boisots information space model.Fin...

Cases in Point

The return of the religious pattern of sensemaking into mainstream public debate in western societies has been widely noted by philosophers of culture and acknowledged by the media. All major institutional religions have seen increases in membership, and the prognoses of secularization as the inevitable aftermath of modernization and the growth of material welfare have been quietly shelved. This may be the result of the promise of stepping ‘outside’ material life, which religion — as opposed to science, scholarship, philosophy and ideology — offers, while humanist scholars deem it impossible: ‘Perhaps it is impossible to generalize intelligently about human life, because in order to do so we would have to step outside it’ (Eagleton, 2007, p. 138).

The rhetoric and narratives in management research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on the subject of the rhetoric and narratives in management research.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews selected contributions to the 4th Conference on Rhetoric and Narratives in Management Research held on March 24‐26, 2011 at the ESADE campus in Barcelona.Findings – The paper reveals various views of rhetoric and narratives in management research including plagiarism, individual (personal) narratives , material and spiritual narratives and deception in storytelling.Originality/value – The paper provides a useful introduction to the various papers on rhetoric and narratives in management research.

International Management Ethics. A Critical, Cross‐cultural Perspective

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Slumdog Millionaire: The rhetoric of chance or sentimental management of inequalities in pulp fiction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reinterpret rhetorical inventions in global multimedia and to re‐conceptualize the theoretical analysis of processes of sentimental representation of global inequalities, unfair terms of exchange and attempts to balance them (“Bollywood” of Mumbai vs Hollywood of LA). Design/methodology/approach – Philosophical and qualitative analysis of the rhetoric of communication forged by global power games and applied to symbolic strategies of resistance, with a case study of a particular highly successful movie in global multimedia network, namely Slumdog Millionaire, which had been coproduced jointly by professionals from the former “colonial power” (the UK) and from the former “conquered colony” (India) in order to challenge the latest superpower (Hollywood and the USA). Findings – Yesterdays underdogs are talking back and winning the symbolic game of multimediated communications by inserting a new professionally shaped response to the international inequalities laid bare and exposed to a growing critique. However, the ironies of the international division of labor and local cultural contexts can turn “sweatshops” into “boudoirs” subverting the rhetoric of Western domination. More Bollywood‐like strategies are needed to redress the imbalance. Originality/value – Apart from the very specialist studies in the aesthetics of the film as an art form, this is the first attempt to demonstrate the common theme of resistance to the dominant rhetoric of multimedia industries on the level of coding symbolic meanings and disseminating them through aesthetically successful cultural commodities by groups and regions “cast” in subordinate roles by cultural industries.

The expanding universe of social organizations

The second issue of JOCM in 2018 comes after the first, guest edited special issue, and provides readers with a fair overview of a daily fare of organizational research community. Our studies of changes, transformations, shifts and twists and turns of organizations reach out to the other disciplines and our metaphors become bold and daring. Singularities and multiple realities become a commonplace. This year, we begin with the question about the gravitational, electromagnetic and other force fields shaping the universe, in which organizations and their constellations, alliances and networks expand and cluster as if they were stars, planets, meteorites and other crystallizations of random circumstances emerging between the black holes of antimatter and white dwarfs of obsolete matter. [...]

International business and the Balti of meaning: food for thought

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the interactive processes linking lived embodied experiences, language and cognition (body-talk-mind) and their implications for organizational change. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use an “embodied realism” approach to examine how people feel/perceive/act (embodied experiences), how they make sense of their experiences (cognition) and how they use language and communication to “talk sense” into their social reality. To exemplify the framework, the authors use a cooking metaphor. In this metaphor, language is the “sauce”, the catalyst, which blends raw, embodied, “lived” experience with consequent rationalizations (“cooking up”) of experience. To demonstrate the approach, the authors employ the study of a Chinese multinational subsidiary in Bangkok, Thailand, where participants were encouraged to build embodied models and tell their stories through them. Findings – The authors found that participants used embodied metaphors in a number of ways ...

Commentary: Setting the theoretical stage

This a commentary on the paper by Fink and Mayrhofer published in European J. Cross-Cultural Competence and Management, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009, pp.42-65.