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critique

Crawling from the wreckage: Does critique have a future in the business school?

Survival itself has something nonsensical about it today, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from the basement. (T.W. Adorno, Minimal Moralia)

Critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice. (Judith Butler, What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue)

Crawling from the wreckage: Does critique have a future in the business school?

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Survival itself has something nonsensical about it today, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from the basement.

T.W. Adorno, Minimal Moralia.

Critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice. 

Judith Butler, What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.

Inscribing organized resistance

Thoughts, antagonisms, innovations, demonstrations, elaborations, expectations and refutations. This is all to say, field-notes, from an array of politically engaged, non-objectifying theoretical work projects. Behold, the current issue of ephemera! Foolish is s/he who would seek to encapsulate a supposedly complete or somehow representative spectrum of such concerns within this, or indeed any format. Foolish also are those who would hope to find herein a necessary ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze, 1995).

No critique

Too often critique simply works as a safety valve; too often it becomes a logo. Indeed, we have seen an explosion of this logo in recent years: there are Critical Management Studies conferences and critical journals appearing everywhere. It seems as if there is a critical bandwagon that everybody feels they need to jump onto. But how much has the ‘critical’ logo really changed; how critical has our critique really been? We feel that too often the ‘critical’ signifier simply stands in for any real critique to be practiced.

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