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Mats Alvesson and Stanley A. Deetz, 2021
Originally published in 2000 as Doing Critical Management Research
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938412
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-5297-5297-0
ISBN 978-1-5297-3217-7 (pbk)
About the Authors
Mats Alvessonholds a chair in the Business Administration department at Lund University in Sweden and is also part-time Professor at University of Queensland Business School and at Case Business School, London. He has done extensive research and published widely in the areas of qualitative and reflexive methodology, critical theory, organizational culture, knowledge work, identity in organizations, gender, organizational change, management consultancy etc. He has published 30 books, most with leading publishers and hundreds of articles, many of which are widely cited and used on higher levels in university education.Stanley A. Deetzis Professor Emeritus and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research and professional practice has focused organizational culture and change, micro-practices of power in organizations, and designing interaction processes for collaborative decision-making. Deetz is author/co-author of over 150 scholarly essays and several books including
Leading Organizations through Transitions, Doing Critical Management Research, Managing Interpersonal Communication, Transforming Communication-Transforming Business, and Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and is a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar and an International Communication Association Past-President and Fellow. He has lectured widely giving well over one hundred visiting scholar and invited lectures in twenty-four countries.
Preface
Doing critical research is as important as ever. In the Western world which we mainly consider in this book, although most of the ideas probably have some global reach we struggle with well known problems such as environmental disaster, overconsumption, inequality, continued social oppression, more and more refined technologically mediated social control and a political landscape where ruthless and authoritarian regimes are on the rise and there is a broad sense of decay also in reasonably stable democracies.
All these themes and developments are important topics for social science. Equally, if not more urgent is to pay attention to and study less obvious social issues that may constrain people and make social institutions function poorly. Good critical social research focus not only on what is more or less known as worthy targets of critique, but also on things that may appear to be good or unproblematic but are much more constraining, repressive or thought-limiting in their effects.
Quite a great deal of critical work may for example reinforce victimization and the support of rights for a specific group without consideration of the need for intervention in larger systems of domination and may well be inattentive to many unintended consequences. Policies and routines aimed to protect may lead to the reinforcement of the iron cage of bureaucracy and generic regulations without attention to local circumstances and effects. Simple categorizations class, gender, race, ethnicity may at the same time, as most language use, be a resource in illuminating social problems and freezing understanding in fixed categories. Often the freezing of social categories may be constraining. Exploring social domination in such ways that an emancipatory or resistance-supporting effect is likely, calls for quite a lot of thinking and self-critique.
Good critical research needs to be informed by established social theory and knowledge as well as a good general understanding of contemporary issues, but also be curious and open-minded in empirical inquiry. A dilemma exists between a clear sense of purpose and direction on the one hand and an eagerness to go out there and find out what happens, what may, in addition to the usual suspects, be new suspects to conceptualize and explore.
Critical social research thus navigates between, on the one hand, continuing and expanding the overall themes and issues, associated with great thinkers and a clear political agenda of combatting injustice and repression, and, on the other hand, the open-minded study looking for unexpected, emerging themes leading to new insights. This view means a somewhat different take on critical research than what is advocated by activists as well as great theory-governed critical students.
The emphasis of this book is on the doing of critical empirical studies, informed by interpretive thinking and supported by the general thrust of critical theory, in particular the Frankfurt school, Foucault and postmodernism. We refrain from considering the entire spectrum of methods and possibly relevant theoretical sources and use the text to focus on a limited number of key themes, realizing that some readers may be disappointed about missing certain methodological specialties and, perhaps, their favorite more fashionable thinker and method.
