Author: Mark

  • Book Review – The social construction of management: Texts and identities (Harding, 2003)

    Book Review – The social construction of management: Texts and identities (Harding, 2003)

    Withdrawn from the University of Reading Library

    I was frustratingly late for the social construction of management party.

    I am rarely invited to parties these days and metaphorically speaking I would probably end up arriving late to the party or decline the invitation. In academia new ways of acting, thinking and writing appear to me as parties to which some people are invited and engage, it takes time to find the right parties and normally the world has moved on by the time that I arrive.

    I lived through the arrival of post-modernism in management and organization studies.  Looking back, it was an enjoyably disruptive party characterized by loud proclamations and knowledge mayhem.  I remember Karen Legge describing herself in one of her publications as ‘flirting with the post-modernist heuristic’. A wonderful way of saying I am in my car sat just outside the front door of the party.

    I was late to the social constructionist party and in all honesty, the cool kids had long departed by the time I showed up.  I must concede today I don’t really get Practice Theory, but based on previous engagement lead times, I should get it five years into my retirement, I think there is a joke in there, but at this point, it is beyond me.

    I show up to the social constructionist party too late, everyone is clearing up the debris which is very apparent and tangible.  Oddly, it is an informative standpoint to dig back into what we know with the passage of time. The significant contributions are discernible from the wasted party poppers and burst balloons. After the party, a level of reason prevails.  I have found myself sitting happily in a largely empty social constructionist party venue reading through all the ephemera (books and papers). There is a lot more I want to say about social constructionism, but I better get back to Harding (2003).

    I acquired the book for a few pounds last year via one of the usual online retailers, it was in hardback and in good condition. Although subsequently, I have taken my dayglo highlighters to it, so there are now signs of at least a party going on inside my head.  I have enjoyed the provocations of Nancy Harding, particularly when she writes with Jackie Ford.  There was a disparaging term in use many decades ago when I was a young social science undergraduate – ‘fake comrade’.

    In universities, I have been disappointed by the many critical scholars who live affluent lives yet talk the talk of radical Critical Theory (CT). I once asked a keynote CT professor at a conference when the low paid women workers he had been researching for many years in insecure insurance jobs would be emancipated, he claimed not to understand the question. Bad news for these women, but their labours contributed considerably to his promotions and progression, so not all bad news.  

    I have never been a Critical Theorist and never will be, it would be disingenuous for me to adopt such a position.  However, when I read Nancy Harding she comes across as the antithesis of a ‘fake comrade’, I don’t share all of her radical views, but I certainly share her passion for change and academic identity being all about challenging orthodoxy.

    I do like the title The social construction of management: Texts and identities (Harding, 2003).  This book was published in 2003 when the party music was still playing, they hadn’t run out of cider and that idiot hadn’t been sick all over the sofa. It reads as a radical read today, but it must have been even more intoxicating back in the early part of the last decade.  The title appears fairly benign, but the content is far from benign.

    …management texts are based on a foundational myth that ‘proves’ the need for management.  This myth states that without management the world will descend into chaos and anarchy. (Harding, 2003:53)

    We are now getting close to the unease I have been dancing around in this blog post. Harding (2003) throughout the book is critical about managers, management and large parts of management studies. In many ways, this is a book more about the destruction, rather than the construction of management. She cleverly deconstructs management as a science, as legal authority, as art, and as modernity.  These deconstructions still appear valid fifteen years later, although they are far from the mainstream understanding of management.

    However, it is difficult to offer a sustained critique of management given it is a dynamic and ambiguous process which is highly context dependent.  Creatively, management textbooks become the critical target and provide the unifying narrative for the book.  As a textbook author, I am familiar with such critiques – the party that never ends. 

    Typically, the critical scholar will complain that in a 6500-word chapter there was not a single reference to postcolonialism, or disability or environmentalism or whatever (insert whatever is important to you). It is impossible to include everything in every chapter and for me, it begs the question why not write your own textbook focussed on whatever floats your boat, rather than criticizing the textbooks of others? Certainly, I encountered many years ago a strong critique of change management in academic journals and this critique was missing from many of the textbooks I was reading, so I began to bridge what was being researched with what was being taught.

    Back to Harding (2003), her concern with textbooks and by association, their authors were not pedantic in terms of what was missing, but instead more substantive in terms of how they framed management theory and practice and for Harding (2003) how they constructed the identity of the manager.

    The potential manager reading about her/himself in the pages of the textbook and projecting themselves forward to when they are managers enacting the world of the text are simultaneously offered power while being subjected to that very power. (Harding, 2003:75)

    Some critical scholars choose not to use textbooks in their teaching and would never entertain the idea of writing a textbook, so we have an informal boycott of textbooks by many critical scholars.  My concern remains that if textbooks are an integral aspect of the knowledge landscape as Kuhn (1962) believed, readers of textbooks, in general, would benefit from authors from very different perspectives.

    I agreed with many of the ideas in Harding’s (2003) book and was rather pleased that I understood most of them, given some of the intellectual seams she mined.  However, to use that romantic platitude it is me not you, this textbook author was never going to fully embrace this particular book.

    WULBA Archivist

    Further Reading

    Harding, N. (2003) The social construction of leadership: Texts and identities.  London: Routledge.

    Hughes, M. (2016). Who killed change management? Culture and Organization 22(4): 330-347.

    Kuhn, T. (1962).The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • The Dark Side of Organizations

    The Dark Side of Organizations

    It took me time to theoretically appreciate the dark side of organizations.

    In writing a managing change textbook a decade ago, I included a chapter on ethics.  It seemed like the right thing to do. In all honesty, probably one of the book proposal reviewers suggested it.  My dilemma was that I wasn’t as fully engaged as I should have been, whilst I try to be ethical and encourage workshop participants to reflect on their own ethical positions I academically struggled at the time. 

    The favoured philosophical framing appeared to be an academic abstraction even an abdication of some of the evil acts of individuals and organizations.  Over the past decade, I have engaged more with the ethics literature, which has become particularly relevant as I have focussed on leaders and leadership.  I share this because I had the realization that if I couldn’t engage even myself when writing the ethics and change chapter, I was unlikely to engage readers.

    This dilemma surfaced writing the new textbook, although writing about ethics seemed to be the right thing to do, earlier concerns persisted.  I could write a far better chapter than a decade ago, but would it really influence or persuade? Or would the celebration of philosophies from ancient Greece now look more elegant, but little else?

    I decided to frame the relevant chapter in terms of the dark side and at the very least this made the activity more interesting and meaningful for myself and hopefully, my engagement would influence readers, only time will tell.  

    A few years ago I purchased, read and enjoyed The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership.  It reads very well, offering case study warnings from organizational history about when transformational leadership goes wrong.  It was like an antidote to all the excessively enthusiastic transformational leadership literature that seemed to dominate debates. It offered a model of relating the critical/theoretical to the practical application of leadership in which readers were made very aware of the negative consequences of leader actions, the cloak of Greek philosophy had been removed.  Using case studies gave us context often missing from enthusiastic accounts of leading change and transformation.  I believe that these deep and rich accounts of context would allow readers to relate what leaders were doing to themselves asking that important question what would I do in that situation?

    In writing the textbook chapter, it proved difficult to differentiate the dark side of organizations from the dark side of organizational change and in the end, I settled for the former. In reviewing literature for the chapter, I was surprised about the development of dark side literature, it went far beyond my own interests in management and organization studies, capturing the imagination of scholars in very different academic disciplines.

    As I explored the dark side literature I appreciated the shades of darkness, one might even say grey, through to black.  This reflected some accounts of the dark side not being very critical, through to critical accounts which question the political and economic context in which organizations operate as being highly problematic. In understanding the development of interest in the dark side of organizations I found Linstead et al’s (2014) review very informative in terms of how this debate evolved and their differentiation of a darker side of organizations and why we need to challenge such aspects of organizations.

    I tend to facilitate organizational change workshops for external clients and to date, they have never asked for input on ethics or the dark side.  The closest I came was doing an overview of organizational change over a morning. At the end of the morning, the Chaplain asked why we hadn’t covered ethics and organizational change. It was a fair point in that the onus must be on me to introduce ethics/dark side concerns into workshops, rather than waiting to be asked. In fairness, these days I do, any discussion of organizational change inevitably raises (or should raise) ethical/dark side concerns.  When I frame the debate in terms of the dark side we tend to have a good level of debate quite quickly. 

    My one current concern is semantic. Decades ago there was a debate about associating black bin bags with rubbish and by association black people with rubbish.  I wasn’t convinced by that debate.  However, I always watch the non-verbal closely and there does appear to be some unease. It was slight, but for example, recently a Ghanaian workshop participant appeared uncomfortable with the fashionable dark side terminology. I reassure myself in that the critical scholars cited are explicitly anti-racist and that they use this terminology to highlight discriminatory workplace activities and colonialism. Then again we know how powerful language and discourse can be in shaping thinking, this debate is ongoing.

    Further Reading

    Hughes, M. (2019) The dark side of organizations. In Hughes, M. (2019) Managing and Leading Organizational Change. London: Routledge.

    Linstead, S., G. Maréchal., and R.W. Griffin. (2014) Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization. Organization Studies 35(2): 165-188.

    Tourish, D. (2013) The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective. London: Routledge.

    The Dark Side of the Organization
  • Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking (René ten Bos, 2000)

    Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking (René ten Bos, 2000)

    Withdrawn from Imperial College London

    I really enjoyed reading Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking, I was unfamiliar with the writings of Bos and suspect I must have been following up a reference. I have been around long enough to have experienced the concept of management fashion becoming very fashionable and influential and then becoming unfashionable and less influential.  The wonderful writings of Eric Abrahamson spring to mind from this era, but for myself, it was David Collin’s Management Fashions and Buzzwords which had the biggest impact given his focus upon organizational change. I refer to his notion of critical-practical in workshops to this day, the idea that we need to reconcile critical thinking with practical application to challenges of organizational change in schools and hospitals. Unfortunately, organizational change writing polarizes between the happy talk of excessively positive and prescriptive writing or the misery, elitism, and arrogance of certain critical scholars. I try to write in the liminal space between these poles, Collins certainly achieved this goal and also Bos certainly achieved it in this book.  Bos approached this maturing fashion debate from the perspective of philosophy. I must admit I do not have a fraction of Bos’s insight into philosophy, but his art was making this book readable and engaging for readers like myself.

    The book has a utopian element which always attracts me, the impossible dream of what might be, despite dystopia being far more evident than utopia. But he questions the quest for utopia offering us his unique way into management fashion.  In all our ‘moving forwards’ talk we search for a utopia we may never find.  There is a chapter entitled ‘Longing for Leadership’ which was probably why I acquired this book ‘leadership is very much a matter of staging’ (Bos, 2000: 66).  We tend to write and talk about leaders as managers of meaning. Here we get an alternative, Bos writes about the construction of leadership authority, but he also writes about the corrosion of authority informed by the writings of Bruce Lincoln. So the authority of leaders requires the corrosion of authority of others. We had to doubt the capabilities of managers before we could believe in leaders. I am not encouraging such a position and neither was Bos (2000), but it helps us to understand the shift from managers to leaders. This shift was never empirically informed it was a question of staging. Unfortunately, most people believe that this shift was empirically informed.

    ‘…the core tenet of this book: management fashions should not be criticized for being fashionable but for not having been able to get rid of utopian tendencies.’ (Bos, 2000: 181).

    This line of reasoning appears to have implications for organizational change theories and practices.  Those into appreciative inquiry will not like this, but how do we avoid utopian tendencies in our theories and practices of organizational change?

    ten Bos, R. (2000) Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    WULBA Archivist

  • Withdrawn university library book appreciations – WULBA

    Withdrawn university library book appreciations – WULBA

    The good people at woodlanddecay.com have agreed to host an archive of withdrawn university library book appreciations (WULBA) for the foreseeable future. These are mainly management and organization studies (MOS) books which once resided on the shelves of a university library, but for unknown reasons were withdrawn.  

    I share an example of one of these books from the LSE Library. As you see in the featured image, they tend to be rubber stamped as withdrawn, ironically this example was Imagining Tomorrow, but things change and this book was no longer required in the LSE Library.

    In feeding my book habit, I often buy second hand books which in the case of monographs can be a tenth of the price of new editions, with even ebooks equally prohibitively priced. These books are often hardbacks and they are often in good condition, retailers tend to label them ‘like new’, ‘very good’.  Sometimes these books tell a sad story of never being issued since they were purchased.  The librarians have a challenge maintaining space for all the books students and academics require and so I guess every so often a little  ‘weeding’ is required.

    What interests me is that an academic must have recommended a library purchase with the expectation that the purchased book would be read.  I regard this as a form of intelligent endorsement, if the book didn’t capture the imagination of library users, it doesn’t mean that it is a bad book.  

    I am intrigued by the enduring influence of orthodoxy. The MOS books that I tend to purchase tend to challenge orthodox views of management and organization. So what I witness are little rages against the dying of the light. In this spirit I have decided to celebrate these books through publicizing short appreciations of such books I have acquired over the years.  I will publicize these and hopefully other appreciations may follow.

    Postscript (February 2023)

    In the good old days books used to be rubber stamped with the date when you took them out of the library. As I reflect back, this was one of my creative ideas, that I never fully realized. I used to be troubled by university library shelves laden with copies of Kotter’s Leading Change. That book would have been top of my list for being withdrawn.

    The titles of the three books which I read and reviewed and featured in WULBA tell a story. I do hope this post might inspire somebody else, in the meantime check out these WULBA reviews.

    Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking

    The Social Construction of Management

    Pandemonium: Towards a Retro Organization Theory

    WULBA Archivist

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