Management
Beyond measure
The numbered
Managing the human? Towards diverse, engaged and critical HRM studies
Issue Editors: Frans Bévort, Per Darmer, Mette Mogensen and Sara Louise Muhr
Today considerations about the management of so-called ‘human resources’ is taken up almost routinely both in governmental programs, in organizations as well as in the private lives of citizens (Jackson et al., 2014; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2009). This, in tandem with the increasing power of HRM practices in contemporary corporations, signals how HRM has succeeded to construct itself as a ‘serious’ and ‘established’ field of research.
Rethinking organizational hierarchy, management, and the nature of work with Peter Drucker and Colin Ward
Philosophical anarchism is a defensible position in theory. The only trouble with it is it never works. (Drucker, 2010: 40)
We have to build networks instead of pyramids. (Ward, 2008: 33)
Governing work through self-management
While self-management has emerged as a robust way of getting things done in present-day work life and organizations, it also presents itself as a conception of considerable multivalency and ambiguity. In a broad sense, self-management seems to require that employees think, feel and act in ways that contribute to the realization and improvement of the individual worker, but only insofar as they concomitantly anticipate and contribute to the various needs of the organization (Manz and Sims, 1989; Thomas, 2002; Costea et al, 2008).
Web of capturing the moving mind
We mark this web – this publication, this project – with crossing lines, a chiasma. The Greek letter chi (χ) marks a decussation, a crossing of tracts. With it we wish to point to the nature of this project as a diagonal arrangement, a connection and crossing of heterogeneous domains and their codings.
Practical criticism and the social sciences of management
As we are reminded by the strong programme in the sociology of science, the processes by which ideas come to be counted as knowledge may have little to do with their intrinsic merits. Particularly in the social sciences and more particularly still in those social sciences relating to management, the absence of any analogue to Kuhnian anomaly enables certain favoured texts to circulate within the influence networks of academia, accumulating authority and creating alliances until certain of them achieve quasi-foundational status.
