Sverre Spoelstra

Play at work: continuation, intervention and usurpation

The interest in organizational play is growing, both in popular business discourse and organization studies. As the presumption that play is dysfunctional for organizations is increasingly discarded, the existing positions may be divided into two camps; one proposes ‘serious play’ as an engine for business and the other insists that work and play are largely indistinguishable in the postindustrial organization. Our field study of a design and communications company in Denmark shows that organizational play can be much more than just functional to the organization. We identify three ways in which workplaces engage in play: play as a (serious) continuation of work, play as a (critical) intervention into work and play as an (uninvited) usurpation of work.

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.

Theology and organization

This Introduction argues for the importance of theology for the study of organization. It also draws the contours of a possible ‘theology of organization’. Theology of organization, as we use it here, does not refer to a study of organization that is rooted in faith, nor does it refer to a study of religious practices in organizations. Instead, theology of organization recognizes that the way we think about and act in organizations is profoundly structured by theological concepts. In this editorial to the special issue we have three aims: to outline what theology of organization is, to show how it builds upon Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘economic theology’ and finally to propose three different forms that theology of organization can take. These forms of theology of organization respectively (1) analyse organizational concepts as secularized theological concepts, (2) show how theological concepts have survived unaltered in organizational contexts and (3) show how theological concepts have been corrupted or lost their original meaning when deployed in organizational contexts. In the final section of this editorial, we introduce the five contributions to this issue and indicate how they connect to the three forms of theology of organization that we have proposed.

Profaning the sacred in leadership studies: a reading of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase

The leadership literature is full of stories of heroic self-sacrifice. Sacrificial leadership behaviour, some scholars conclude, is to be recommended. In this article we follow Keith Grint’s conceptualization of leadership as necessarily pertaining to the sacred, but—drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation—we highlight the need for organization scholars to profane the sacralizations embedded in leadership thinking. One example of this, which guides us throughout the article, is the novel A Wild Sheep Chase, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. By means of a thematic reading of the novel, we discuss how it contributes to profaning particular notions of sacrifice and the sacred in leadership thinking. In the novel, self-sacrifice does not function as a way of establishing a leadership position, but as a way to avoid the dangers associated with leadership, and possibly redeem humans from their current collective urge to become leaders. Inspired by Murakami’s fictional example, we call organization scholars to engage in profanation of leadership studies and, in doing so, open new vistas for leadership theory and practice.

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).

Robert Cooper: Beyond organization

Apart from one short book on work design, Robert Cooper has exclusively written articles and book chapters. This early book (Cooper, 1974) and other works from the early 1970s (eg, Cooper, 1972; 1973) were part of a programme at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London, whose object was to translate some of the theoretical ideas from sociotechnical systems thinking into practical language. Although interesting in its own right, it is Cooper’s later work, roughly starting with his 1976 essay ‘The Open Field’, which is of greater interest for the study of organization, primarily because it raises profound theoretical questions concerning the ontological underpinnings of organization. In this chapter I am concerned with these later works, in which Cooper turns away from the core concerns of the Tavistock programme to address more general philosophical and sociological questions concerning the nature of organization. From the mid-1970s until 1995, when he went to Keele University, Cooper worked in the Department of Behaviour in Organizations at Lancaster University. The ‘Lancaster group’, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s included Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan among others, questioned the status quo of organization theory by investigating its roots in sociology and philosophy. One of the key publications of these years is Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, first published in 1979 (see Hancock and Tyler, in this volume). Cooper and Burrell’s introduction of postmodernism and poststructuralism to the study of organizations in the late 1980s (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Burrell, 1988; 1994; Cooper, 1987; 1989b) was also strongly connected to the research performed by the Lancaster group. At Keele University, Cooper became the director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Social Theory and Technology, which was one of the largest groups of poststructuralists in the United Kingdom at that time. In his years at Keele Cooper further developed poststructuralist-inspired ideas (eg, 1998a; 2001a), in collaboration with the sociologist John Law among others. At the time of writing, Cooper is a visiting professor at Keele University. It would, however, be a mistake to limit a discussion of Cooper’s work to these ‘contributions’ to organization theory, since his treatment of organization

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.

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.

Leadership and Organization : A Philosophical Introduction

This book is a philosophical exploration of the relationship between leadership and organization. Each chapter in the book sheds light on this relationship by exploring leadership with respect to a particular theme: charisma, authority, religion, language, authenticity, image and followership. These themes are linked to popular notions of leadership, such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership and servant leadership.Offering insight into the ways in which leadership is understood in contemporary culture, the main thesis of Leadership and Organization is that understandings of leadership today are still shaped by the figure of the charismatic leader, even though charismatic leadership itself has lost much of its appeal. The clearest expression of this paradigm is the leadership-management distinction, where the leader is someone who transcends the organization and the manager someone who resides within the organization. Drawing on a broad variety of sources in continental philosophy, the author explores the central philosophical question of how leadership can be understood in relation to organization. (Less)

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.