A critical approach to managementDan Grace

“How librarians became Thatcherite and the myth of TINA”

• What is the article about?• What relevance does it have to you now

and in your future jobs?• Do you agree with the points made?• How does what the articles say relate to

what you’ve learnt so far on this module and your wider experience?

‘ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be’ (Marx 1844)

Critical Theory seeks to:

Expose the hidden assumptions of other theories and ideologies.ANDExpand the interpretation of the world beyond the economic. That is it assumes:• History shapes us and we shape it;• Mode of production is embedded in culture;• Knowledge is socially constructed;• Critic as participant.(Leckie & Buschman 2010)

Challenging TINA

Critical Management Studies seeks to:

“…take business and management as objects of study but also to approach them as parts of the capitalist system and to critique them on those grounds.”(Swann and Stoborod 2014, 594-595)

…in the context ofmanagement?

What is neoliberalism?

“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”(Harvey 2007, 1)

“[M]anagers act to intermediate between those who deploy resources to dominate and exploit others, and others who are subordinated in such a process.” (Alvesson and Willmott 2012, 21)

What, then, is management?

The political is the “broadly shared public space, an idea of living together” which is colonised by politics, “a particular sociological imaginary of ‘the people’, ‘organisation’, ‘management’” and so on.(Swyngedouw 2014, 90-91)

PoliticsVs.the political

“The (re-)production of everyday life through work lies at the foundation of every economic and political system.” (Wigger 2014, 739)

Critical theory PracticePraxis

How do I useCritical Theory?

Break – 10 mins

“A wave of disruption is sweeping in to challenge neoliberalism”

• What is article about?• What relevance does it have to you now

and in your future jobs?• Do you agree with the points made?• How does what the article has to say relate

to what you’ve learnt so far on this module, your wider experience and what we were discussing in the first half?

"Once upon a time, there was barter. It was difficult. So people in vented money. Then came the development of banking and credit." (Graeber 2011, 28)

The founding myth of the market

"People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”(Illich 1983)

NeitherStatenormarket

Investigating human-environment interaction, so we do “not conceptualis[e] natural resources as finite givens (in danger of being exhausted), but as aspects of socioecological environments that are continually constructed through cultural and historical processes.”(Paulson 2014, 46)

Politicalecology

StateOR

Hierarchy

MarketOR

Exchange

CommonsOR

Mutual aid

Socialrelationships

What do wemanage?

CommonsORMutual aid

StateORHierarchy

MarketORExchange

People Friendship/Citizenship

Subject resource

Rational individuals

Information Relationship/Subsistence

Objectresource

Commodity

Management as a technical process (Politics)

Management as a socioecological process (the political)

“The world does not contain any information. It is as it is. Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world.”(Illich 1973, 86)

What now?

• Reflective practice assignment and dissertation

• Reflective practice at work

• Critical Theory reading group

Individual

Collective

• Radical Librarians Collective

• Workplace activities

ReferencesAlvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2012). Making sense of management: a critical introduction (2nd ed). Los Angeles ; London: SAGE.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y: Melville House.

Harvey, D. (2011). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. London: Calder and Boyars.

Illich, I. (1983, Winter). Silence is a Commons. CoEvolution Quarterly, (40), 4–22.

Leckie, G. J., & Buschman, J. (2010). Introduction: The Necessity for Theoretically Informed Critique in Library and Information Science (LIS). In G. J. Leckie, L. M. Given, & J. Buschman (Eds.), Critical theory for library and information science: exploring the social from across the disciplines (pp. vii–xxii). Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited.

Marx, K. (1844). Letter to Ruge. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, (1). Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

Paulson, S. (2014). Political ecology. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, & G. Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era (pp. 45–48). Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Swann, T., & Stoborod, K. (2014). Did you hear the one about the anarchist manager? Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 14(4), 591–609.