publishing
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.
Satire, critique and the place of Critical Management Studies: Exploring Zero Books
Contextualization
Cederström and Fleming’s Dead Man Working, published by Zero Books, is an interesting intervention that gives us a chance to ponder a question, which should be the guiding question for aspiring public intellectuals and academics of a critical bent: Who are we writing for?
Handle with care
Handbooks, of organization studies. The main advantage of these collections is said to be the efficiency of fitting a wide raft of pieces in the palms of your hands, and hence the title or subtitle of ‘handbook’. As such, these handbooks are designed to be carried, used and situated within arms reach, with little fuss or effort... The purpose of this issue of ephemera is to critically investigate this publishing phenomenon... So, the whole issue is a collection of what might be thought of as ‘book reviews’, although there is perhaps more going on than this.
