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review

‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’

Damian O’Doherty’s Reconstructing organization is a wild tale of bob cuts and cats and talking chairs, set within the confines of Manchester airport. Rarely has a steel and concrete waiting room (for that is what airports are to its visitors, if not its employees) seemed more vivacious and colourful. Think Alice’s Wonderland with its strange and curious creatures, the author its likeable, excitable, Mad Hatter.

You can do things with words: Considering the performativity of performativity of economics

‘And then I discovered, you can do things with words!’ This enthusiastic exclamation marked the turning point of an academic career as it was once narrated to me at a conference dinner. The narrator had been trained in mainstream economics, but as he moved on from his PhD (a very complex, very sophisticated piece of quantitative research, I was given to understand) a certain uneasiness with the dogmas of the dismal science began to trouble our protagonist. Accordingly, he went on a quest to broaden his disciplinary horizons and had his eureka moment when stumbling upon J. L.

Immigrants, workers unions and gay/lesbian scenes: The not entire Sexual Revolution

Claim and introduction

The aim of the ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series is to ‘accommodate and foster new approaches to historical research in the fields of genders and sexualities’ (Springer, 2017). The following review shall give readers an idea of how the currently Denmark-based social scientist Andrew D. Shield lives up to the claim of ‘promoting world-class scholarship’ by describing and analysing straight as well as gay and lesbian immigrant stories in Denmark and the Netherlands from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Publish and perish

A few years ago, I published a paper on the ‘secrets of excellence’ in the business school (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). It was written as an ironic guide to publishing in top-ranked management journals. Some of the tricks of the trade we identified – ‘productivity through people’, ‘close to the customer’, ‘bias for action’ – overlap with Peters and Waterman’s 1980s business-yuppie classic In search of excellence.

Do critical management scholars take responsibility for the performative consequences of their concepts and methods?

Most critical management scholars argue that the value of their scholarship lies in its (alleged) emancipatory potential. The value of their critique, they claim, should be judged based on the extent to which it contributes to raising awareness about the silent and exploitative power dynamics permeating the management and organizational realities that they study. In this awareness-raising resides the potential for social change. It is this emancipatory ambition, this desire to speak back to power, that largely defines the field of Critical Management Studies (CMS).

Time to party?

Since the decline of classical Marxist theory and the concomitant proliferation of ‘new social movements’ from 1968 and onwards, two opposing lines of thought have dominated leftist thinking: One that could be called ‘horizontalist’ and one that could be called ‘verticalist’ (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013). While both lines of thought identify with the label of post-Marxism – sometimes even without apologies – their approaches to radical politics differ profoundly.

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