Issue Editors: Konstantin Stoborod and Thomas Swann
While the inclusion of anarchism and management in the same sentence would normally connote a rejection of one and a corresponding defense of the other, the study of management and radical social and political thought are not as antithetical as one might at first imagine. The field of critical management studies, regularly dated back to the publication of Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott’s collection (1992), has drawn on left wing theoretical sources as well as heterodox empirical research in reflecting on and ultimately criticizing prevailing practices and discourses of management. As Gibson Burrell noted twenty years ago, there is a ‘growing number of alternative organisational forms now appearing, whether inspired by anarchism, syndicalism, the ecological movement, the co-operative movement, libertarian communism, self-help groups or, perhaps most importantly, by feminism’ (1992: 82). Despite anarchism appearing first in his list of inspirations for alternative organisation... more
