Management and emancipation – two opposing ideas: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies

Thomas Klikauer (University of Western Sydney, Penrith South, Australia)

International Journal of Social Economics

ISSN: 0306-8293

Article publication date: 10 May 2011

712

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this conceptual‐theoretical review article is to examine two claims made by critical management studies (CMS): that CMS is emancipatory and that it has critical theory (CT) as its origin and prime theoretical base.

Design/methodology/approach

Two theories are contrasted: CT and CMS. The paper analyses one of CMS' newest key publications: the Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies in great detail focusing on epidemiology and philosophy.

Findings

The main finding is that CMS is a critical representation of mainstream MS. CT focuses on emancipation while CMS provides a system‐conforming interpretation of traditional MS that rarely presents alternatives to mainstream MS.

Research limitations/implications

The key implication is that CMS assists mainstream MS as a corrective but, in general, does not enhance emancipation.

Practical implications

The paper assists researchers in the field of management studies (MS) and its “critical” offspring of CMS in understanding the role CMS plays for traditional MS.

Social implications

It makes scholars aware that research conducted from within CMS provides system‐conforming solution to issues such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental issues. CMS scholarship is not a critical evaluation of, for example, CSR and environmental issues directed towards emancipation from present structures of managerial domination.

Originality/value

The value of the paper is threefold: for the first time, CMS has been measured against its own claims; the article provides clarity on three issues: MS, CMS and CT; and it assists research in the area of CMS and CT because it shows that the former is about improving mainstream MS while the latter is about emancipation.

Keywords

Citation

Klikauer, T. (2011), "Management and emancipation – two opposing ideas: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 38 No. 6, pp. 573-580. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068291111131418

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The idea of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies and a number of publications on critical management studies (CMS) is to combine The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (CT) with management studies (MS). In a typical managerial fashion of “critique+management studies=critical management studies”, two alien sets of ideas are supposed to be linked. Tellingly, CT is reduced to “study” when entering the management domain because critical management studies is not a theoretical subject like economics or moral philosophy but a subject that serves power (Baritz, 1960). Nevertheless, the first set of ideas – CT (Jay, 1974; Jeannot, 1994; Klikauer, 2007) – has its origins in Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth while MS is based on Taylor (1911), Fayol (1916), McGregor (1960, 2006), The Harvard Business School and the like.

One is about emancipation, a critique of enlightenment and domination and a domination‐free dialogue (Klikauer, 2007, 2008). The other represents the exact opposite: management's instrumental rationality (zero‐sum and cost‐benefit), repression, suppression, hierarchies, anti‐democracy, asymmetrical power relations, command‐and‐control and domination (Magretta, 2002; Kreitner, 2009). One has Kant's self‐thinking, Hegel's self‐actualising and Adorno's “mündige” individual as its “Menschenbild” (an ideal‐type of a critical and self‐reflective human being). The other denigrates human beings to human resources inside its domineering Human Resource Management structure where people are reduced to numbers on Harvard Business School's performance‐profit linking balanced scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1992, 1993). One sees human beings as self‐reflective agencies (CT) while the other sees people as a factor within a profit system enshrined in human capital theory (MS). People are processed into a managerial apparatus geared towards organisational goals or shareholder‐value (Orwell's Newspeak) to hide its profit‐maximising character in Orwellian Oldspeak (Orwell, 1948; Bowles and Gintis, 1975).

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies is only the latest instalment of the unattainable attempt to unify both poles. The endeavour to unify two contradictory and “un‐unify‐able” concepts of management and CT into CMS has a short history that started during the late 1980s and early 1990s. One might see Alvesson and Willmott's (1992a) as one of the key texts on this. The article was published in one of the major journals of Managerialism, the Academy of Management Review published by the American Academy of Management (www.aomonline.org). At first glance, the title “Emancipation in management” appears to be a tautology but Alvesson and Willmott try very hard to combine the un‐combinable by artificially dividing CT into a progressive and an accommodating stream. CT's progressive approach to emancipation is labelled “orthodox” and dismissed as “grandiose” while CMS focuses on “micro‐emanicipation” (p. 446ff.). This represents a kind of reductionism that would have been totally rejected by CT (Marcuse, 1966, 1968, 1969). For CT, emancipation is a Kantian categorical imperative and not a hypothetical imperative. There can be no conditions attached to emancipation and it is not an if‐then question but a critical moral duty of his trilogy of critiques on enlightenment (Kant, 1781, 1788, 1790; Klikauer, 2010; Jeannot, 2010, pp. 220ff.). For CT, full and total emancipation – not micro‐emancipation – has to be established if modernity is to be achieved (cf. Habermas' (1985) “Modernity – an unfinished project”).

CT can never be reduced to a “search for loopholes in managerial and organisational control” (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992a, p. 446). CT's “emancipatory idea” is not “a group of projects, each limited in terms of space, time and success”. While for Alvesson and Willmott (1992a, p. 447) “the costs of emancipation must be acknowledged […]”, for CT such managerial costs are irrelevant in its project of human emancipation but for management cost must be kept down (Magretta, 2002). For Alevesson and Willmott's (1992a, p. 457) crypto‐CT, the real ideas of the Frankfurt School are orthodoxies when noting “users of orthodox CT are inclined to be dismissive of ideas that are intended to enhance the capacity of managers to raise the productivity of labour”. Several things are done here: first, real CT is reduced and belittled as orthodox; second, CT has “inclinations” and not a well developed theoretical body; third, CT is just “dismissive” and does not highlight the contradictions between management and CT; fourth, managers only “intend” to increase the productivity of labour (sic!); and finally, is not an “increase in labour productivity” a bad thing – after all everyone wants labour to be productive, especially management and managerialism. Within this context, a closer examination of CMS latest text becomes possible.

Alvesson et al.'s collection on CMS published as an Oxford Handbook has 28 chapters and is divided into four parts. Part I outlines “Theoretical approaches” (four chapters), part II discusses “Key topics and issues” (12 chapters), part III is on “Specialisms” (six chapters), and the final part contains “CMS: progress and prospects” (six chapters). The collection is written by 44 authors. Unlike books with one or two authors writing on one subject, collections and handbooks often contain key writings on a wide range of issues by a relatively large number of authors. Two of the three editors – Alvesson and Willmott – have adopted a specific theoretical approach, that of CT (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992a, b, 1996, pp. 67‐90; Alvesson and Deetz, 2005; handbook: pp. 5‐6, 23; Scherer's Chapter 2).

Next to their Academy of Management Review article (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992a), the second core publication also dates back 1992, i.e. Alvesson and Willmott's (1992b) collection CMS. Since then, the field has established it self as an academic subject mostly conducted in various study groups attached to standard conference on management such as the Critical Management Studies Division at the US‐American Academy of Management, 6th Critical Management Studies conference at Warwick (2009), and in European Group of Organisational Studies meetings. CMS has yet to make a move towards establishing a journal.

In their introduction, the editors of the Oxford handbook write “CMS has emerged as a movement that questions the authority and relevance of mainstream thinking and practice” (p. 1) in management. For CT in the tradition of Kant's (1781, 1788, 1790) Trilogies of Critiques (“Critique of pure reason”, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement), it should be “A Critique of Management”, i.e. a proper critique rather than simply CMS' critical studies! Second, if CMS were in the tradition of CT (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, cf. Klikauer, 2007, pp. 76‐96), it would have domination and emancipation as core issues and not “questions of authority and relevance”. Nevertheless, the editors outline that being critical towards management is nothing new and mention Weber, Durkheim and Marx. Two points are important: first, one of Weber's favourite terms was “Herrschaft” or domination (Marcuse, 1968), a term suspiciously absent from their statement; second, Kant's critique, Hegel's dialectics and Marx' political‐economical writings had direct impacts of CT. Marx and CT are not primarily dedicated to “questions of authority and relevance” but towards what Marx expressed in his Thesis 11: emancipation from domination and oppression (Jeannot, 1994, 2010). CMS stops short of a quintessential Kantian critique and CT's advocacy of emancipation.

In “Recalling the Bigger Picture” (p. 14) four concerns of CMS have been outlined: critically questioning, negations and deconstruction, social reform and emancipation and the legitimate purpose of organisations. A critique in the tradition of CT goes beyond a simple “critically questioning”. Instead of de‐construction, CT would radically re‐construct management so that it would no longer reflect what it currently is. The clearest dividing line between postmodernism's de‐construction and CT's re‐construction rest on destruction under postmodernism and an emancipatory re‐construction of society towards ending domination and distortions under CT (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Habermas, Klikauer). Under point three, the term “emancipation” slips in (but not as a fully developed concept as CT advocates. Finally, CMS focuses on the “legitimate purpose of organisations” indicating that CMS is about a critique within organisations and not about organisations (Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980; Klikauer, 2007, p. 144f). For CT, current business organisations have no legitimacy and this is already so under the relative gentle benchmark of the total absence of democracy, never mind Kantian (means‐and‐ends) and Hegelian (alienation) moral philosophy, the pathology of commerce, white collar crime, environmental destruction, etc. Nonetheless, this chapter set the scene of the handbook (Klikauer, 2010).

The second chapter is on “CT and its contribution to CMS”. Like telling a story but adopting a business style of writing rather than a critical‐emancipatory mode, sections of the history of the Frankfurt School are retold. Although correctly outlining CT's key points from “critique of the dialectics of environment, the one‐dimensional society, a critique on technology”, to an “emphasis on communicative action”, the chapter manages to miss the core ideas of almost every one of them. For example, the key of CT's communication action (Habermas) and applied to management (Klikauer, 2007, 2008, p. 36) is not about an:

[…] idea becomes central as a point of reference for the creation of a free and just society where no social groups become marginalised and all interests are heard, as well as for the methodical orientation of social research.

Rather than that, Habermas had something completely different in mind. Communicative action is not about marginalised groups and getting heard, but about a domination free dialogue enshrined in ideal speech. This is something that is impossible under management or inside current for‐profit organisations. Habermas sets categorical imperatives (Kant) under which one either communicates free of domination or one does not. One either communicates ethically or one does not. There is no middle ground and no conditions can be attached to it. Habermas is very clear on this (Klikauer, 2008). His theory is not conditional (e.g. no hypothetical imperatives). Under Habermas' understanding of communicative ethics, a dialogue is either free of domination or it represents communicative distortions. Under management and inside today's organisations this is not possible. Unfortunately, the chapter does not take this into account. It is accommodative rather than emancipatory.

Chapter 3 relates the theory of critical realism to CMS. Critical realism rather than CT appears to be the truthful home of CMS. While CT constitutes a radical departure from everything management and organisations stand for, critical realism analyses the reality of management critically without emphasising a radical transformation of society and management towards Marx' Thesis 11: “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. Critical realism and CMS are reflective of the first half of the Marx dictum (philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways). CT rests on the second part (the point is to change it).

Chapter four discusses poststructuralism and CMS which had been sufficiently outlined by Thompson (2004, 2005). The final chapter of part I is on “Perspectives on labour process theory” emphasising CMS needs to develop a “credible account of the relationships between capitalist political economy, work systems and strategic and practice of actors in the employment relations” (p. 108). For that to occur, CMS has to take on critical political economy in a much more serious way. It needs to position management and managerialism inside the capitalist economy and it needs to talk about the forgotten actor of traditional management studies as well as CMS: labour. And it needs to do this from a critical‐emancipatory standpoint. Both are still outstanding.

The first chapter of part II is about “Organisations and the environment”. While mentioning the main representative of Social Ecology, neither social ecology nor Deep Ecology are conceptualised even though both are very much in line with CT. Social Ecology and Deep Ecology cannot be neglected, especially when one claims to have a critical approach to management and organisations as CMS does. David Knights provides a solid overview of power in the next chapter with a summary at the end. Thomas' chapter on “CMS on identity” critically outlines how management constructs individual and social identities ready to be used in the managerial process. This is followed by an informative chapter on “Managing globalisation” that misses too much of those emancipatory movements that resist globalisation and those advocating that a Different World is Possible. The short chapter on “Discourse and CMS” relates more to discourse inside CMS than management. Management does not operate with discourses but a distorted form of a one‐dimensional delegating downwards and reporting upwards (Klikauer, 2007, 2008). The adjacent chapter on culture highlights shared values (p. 233). Being an institutional setup for the creation of shareholder‐value, i.e. profit‐maximisation under asymmetrical power relations, corporations do not create shared values, because those who are supposed to share managerial values (“those who make things”, Aristotle) are excluded from the process of creating those so‐called shared values. Management applies the same to “those who make things” (Aristotle) when organisational changes are concerned as Chapter 12 shows. Culture as shared values and organisational change are reflective of Lockwood's (1964) system integration not social integration.

Chapter 13 is on “ethics”, a term that means moral philosophy or the philosophical study of morality. Conspicuously, all philosophers who have ever contributed to moral philosophy are totally absent from a chapter that is supposed to be on moral philosophy or ethics (Klikauer, 2010; Habermas(1990) is as absent as Žižek(1989, 1993)). This chapter is followed by “Critical management and organisational history” and “Gender and diversity”. An unexpected highlight is Fleming and Mandarini's chapter on “Towards a workers society? New perspectives on work and emancipation”. It does not appear that “New perspectives on work and emancipation” are at the core of CMS. The inclusion of just one chapter on workers and emancipation exemplifies this point. But at least, it protects the editors from the claim that they have neglected workers and emancipation. Not surprisingly, this chapter touches on Žižek, something the ethics chapter lacks. A statement in this chapter's conclusion is almost self‐evident for CMS' approach to workers and emancipation, “we return to the question of emancipation”. If one needs to “return” to emancipation, it is certainly not a key part of CMS! The chapter on “critical management and methodology” is not too reflective of CT's key text on this: Morrow and Brown (1994) Critical Theory and Methodology.

Part III is on specialisms. While missing operations management, it covers marketing, information systems, strategy, communication, human resource management and accounting. The last part discusses hierarchies, labour process theory, education and handbooks themselves. On education Bowles and Ginits (1976, 1986, p. 215; Klikauer, 2007, pp. 184‐204) is the key text for CT. However, Bowles and Ginits are missing in the Handbook of CMS. And this is precisely the problem with the Handbook of CMS. The trouble lies with CMS itself. If one positions CMS on a continuum between Karl Marx (strongly critical of management) and Baritz' (1960) Servants of Power (totally accommodating to management), then CMS should be located close to Marx (strongly critical) and CT (critical).

However, CMS is only mildly critical of management. CMS is not reflective of Marx (cf. Marx's polemic of a Kritik der kritischen Kritik, 1845) or CT. In short, CME offers nothing of the intellectual and delightful beauty of Adorno, Horkheimer; the emancipatory brilliance Marcuse; the thoughtfulness of Fromm, Reich, Kirchheimer and Neumann; and the theoretical thoroughness of Habermas and Honneth. On Habermas' (1987), three knowledge‐interests (Klikauer, 2007, pp. 79‐96), the handbook is not reflective of Habermas' first interest (empirical‐analytical with an interest in technical control). Instead, CMS are more at home inside the second interest with a hermeneutical interest in understating meaning (e.g. Alvesson and Willmott's (1996) Making Sense and Alvesson's (2002) Understanding). CMS creates an alternative meaning to standard management studies – no more and no less. It is not reflective of CT but appropriates CT to provide a mild critique from within rather than against management. It totally fails to highlight the inherent contradictions between management and human existence (Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980).

In conclusion, the handbook is exactly what is says: A Handbook of Critical Management Studies and not a critique of management (Kant, Hegel, Marx and CT) For example, inside the handbook's 582 pages, capitalism appears exactly twice, Managerialism only four times and managerial capitalism never. Understood as a mild critique from within, the handbook is an exquisite collection of state of the art chapters on CMS. It covers relevant areas of management, current management thinking and beyond. One can only agree with Burrell's statement in the final chapter of the handbook “we should be grateful that the authors and editors have worked together thus far to make such an en masse movement around CMS possible” (p. 561). CMS might be an “en masse movement” inside a group of marginalised management writers. Cleverly, it appropriates the language of some of the original thoughts of CT. With that CMS offers a system‐conforming and thereby system‐enhancing and system‐stabilising critique for management. CMS provides a corrective tool. It is not a critical, emancipatory and radical departure from the domineering structure of management.

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Further Reading

Marcuse, H. (1964/1968), “Industrialization and capitalism in the work of Max Weber”, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, pp. 20126.

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