Critical management studies

1. Critical management studies Alexander StyhreDept of Business AdministrationSchool of Business, Economics, and Law University of Gothenburg

2. The role of business school research? • To producepractical know-how to informmanagerial work? Or to socialize social elites? Or provide analyticalframeworkhelpingboth managers, policy makers, and otherstakeholdersunderstand and manageorganized work? (seeKnights’sarticle) • Distinguishbetween a technicalknowledgeinterest (”How to accomplishcertaingoals”), a social knowledgeinterest (”how to understand the role of organizations”), and emancipatoryknowledgeinterest (”How to live a qualitative life in the organizedcontemporary period”) • Critical Management Studies (CMS) advocate a form of critique of management practices (se Alvesson and Willmott chapter). • Much business school research are either of the first two kinds: ”instrumental” or ”analytical.” • CMS seeks to bring in a critique of organizational and managerialpracticeinto the study of organizations. • Principal idea: Organizations are notdisinterested, non-political social arenas butsiteswhere power and politics are at play.

3. ”Critique, Critical, criticism” Concepts from the Enlightenment: “Reason,” “critical,” “modern” (a battle between “ancients” and “moderns”) (Briggs and Burke, 2009: 82). Kant: The three “critiques” Modern social theory: • Karl Marx: Labour relations and commodity fetishism under the regime of capitalist economic accumulation. • Max Weber: the theory of rationalization of society. Contemporary becomes an “iron cage” dominated by “fact-minded” administrators. • Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin): The fusing of Marxist theory and Freudian psychoanalysis. “The authoritarian personality” in the aftermath of the holocaust during WWII. • Critique: The analysis of the implication from managerial practice

4. Contemporary cases1. Financial traders on Wall Street (I) • The “culture of smartness” on Wall Street • “Almost all the front-office workers I encountered emphasized how smart their coworkers were, how ‛deep the talent’ was at their particular bank, how if one just ‛hired the smartest people,’ then everything else fell into place.” (Ho, 2009: 39) • “[I] was struck by how proclamations of elitism (through ‛world-class’ universities, the discourses of smartness and globalization) seemed foundational to the very core of how investment bankers see themselves, the world, and their place in it. Representing a world of ‛collective smartness’ and exclusively seemed fundamentally connected not only to the criteria for becoming an investment banker but also to the very nature of what they do.” (Ho, 2009: 50) • Entrants to Wall Street make between 300,000 USD to 500,000 USD annually

5. Financial traders on Wall Street (II) • Disregard for other industries • “My informants conflated the characteristics of brightness and motivation with work ethic to frame their own industry as the cutting edge of efficiency, radically transforming the mediocrity of regular corporations. Wall Street beliefs about ‛complacent’ workplaces in the ‛outside world’ certainly help to justify programs of downsizing and narratives of doing more work less people and suggests how corporate America should reframe its very approach to work and employment..” (Ho, 2009: 104) • “Wall Street investment bankers, by virtue or by their smartness, believe that they cannot help but outwit, outmaneuver, run circles around most corporations. These kinds of charts and jokes work to perform and produce their sense of superiority and entitlement.” (Ho, 2009: 105) • “Most corporate work, from Wall Street’s perspective, is neither change oriented, financially innovative, nor directed towards spiking stock prices; it is not forward-thinking nor in lockstep with the market, and as such is inherently unproductive. It does not ‛add value’ according to the financial parameters by which investment bankers measure success.” (Ho, 2009: 105-106)

6. Financial traders on Wall Street (III) • Consequences: • “Corporate organizations are today measured and treated according to how Wall Street value and evaluates financial assets. The precarious balance that corporate America had wrought between catering to stock prices and administering to the multiple and conflicting participants of the corporations has been tipped decisively in favor of financial values and interests . . . To hear Wall Street tell the narrative of stock markets and shareholder ascendancy in the late twentieth century is to hear a narrative of justice prevailing after prolonged hijacking of the modern corporation by a ‛fat, dumb, happy’ bureaucracy.” (Ho, 2009: 158) • Questions: • What is the role of elitist ideologies in Wall Street in shaping behaviour? • What consequences do the excessive overwork in Wall Street have for the view of society more broadly? • Why do the “smartest and brightest” act as if society is one-dimensional, i.e., only concerned about economic effectiveness? What about other stakeholders and CSR?

7. 2. Pharmaceutical industry (I) • In 2002, “the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 2 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, but 57 percent of these companies’ total profit.” (Brody, 2007: 57) • During the 1970s, drug companies “averaged 8,9 per cent profit as a percentage of revenue” in comparison to 4,4 per cent for all Fortune 500 industries in the 1970s. In the 1980s, 11,1% compared to 4,4% and I the 1990s 15,1% compared to 4.1%. (Lexchin, 2006: 11) • Develop drugs where the money is rather than the needs are • “[T]he 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in developing countries represents only 20 percent of the global market for drugs. (The entire African continent represents only 1,3 percent of the world market). Conversely, the 20 percent of the world’s population who live in North America, Europe, and Japan constitute 80 percent of the world market. Predictably, of the 1,400 new drugs developed between 1975 and 1999, only 13 were designed to treat of prevent tropical diseases and 3 to treat tuberculosis. In the year 2000, no drugs were being developed to treat tuberculosis, compared to 8 for impotence or erectile dysfunctions and 7 for baldness. Developing drugs to deal with personality disorders in family pets seems to have higher priority than controlling diseases that kill millions of human beings each year”. (Bakan, 2005: 49)

8. Pharmaceutical industry (II) • The exploitation of “drug naïve” populations • Loss of inmates as volunteers in clinical trials; people in Latin America and Eastern Europe consume less drugs “intervening” with the trials. • “Different pollution profiles, different ways of regulating (or not regulating) air pollution, and high rates of lung cancer and respiratory diseases mean shorter life spans. There you have people getting cancer who are a lot younger. Younger people are desirable from the perspective of trials because they are a better bet to be responsive to therapy. And we have better data up-front for different age groups, which is good for approval.” (Scientists, cited in Petryna, 2009: 22) • More money spent on administration and marketing than R&D (Angell, 2004); largest group of lobbyists in Washington. • Medicalization and the practice of “scientific ghostwriting.”

9. Pharmaceutical industry (III) • The case of Vioxx • “Almost immediately after the drug’s FDA approval in 1999, serious cardio-vascular safety questions about Vioxx surfaced. Still, Merck tenaciously defended . . . the drug safety, denied any risks, and vigorously campaigned for Vioxx. This medication quickly became one of Merck’s most lucrative drugs. Over 20 million patients took Vioxx, and annual revenue, for the drug ‘reached $2,5 billion’ in 2003 . . . Merck finally withdrew Vioxx from the market on September 30, 2004, amid continuous pressure for the scientific community. Executives acknowledge that Merck’s most recent data showed and increased cardiovascular risk, but insisted that no previous data had revealed this problem. The company stated that it disclosed all that it knew about Vioxx safety and rejected responsibility for patients health complications. Unfortunately, an estimated 27.000-60,000 died while taking the drug before its withdrawal from the market . . . Deceased patients’ families have since filed numerous lawsuits against Merck.” (Lyon, 2007: 381) • “Merck executives sought to disqualify critics of Vioxx in the scientific community by socially constructing them as ‘anti-Merck.’”(Lyon, 2007: 389) • “In unequivocal terms, Merck constrained sales representatives form discussing Vioxx’s risks. To avoid discussions of heart-attack risks, Merck employees were provided with scripts and told not to omit or add information.” (Lyon, 2007: 387) • Questions: • What are the performance indicators for Big Pharma? Bottom-line profits? • What are the regulatoryframeworks and norms guiding the new drugdevelopment process?

10. Key themes in CMS • Power and (managerial) control (often with reference to Michel Foucault). • Gender: organizations are ”gendered” in terms of providing different life chances and opportunitiesregardingcareers and authority. • Post-colonialtheory: organizations are ethically or raciallyskewed and based on homophily, the preference for ”sameness.” • Class and privileges: Organizations are arenas whereelitesinternalizeprofessionalideologiesand identities, serving to reproduce social structures and safeguardingclass-interests.

11. Power • Traditional view: Someone “has” power. • “By power is meant that opportunity existing within a social relationship which permits one to carry out one’s own will even against resistance and regardless of the basis on which this opportunity rests.” (Weber, 1990: 113) • Post-structuralist view: Power constitutes social relations and subjectivities, power “creates”: • “In a society like ours—or in any society, come to that—multiple relations of power traverse, characterize, and constitute the social body; they are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established not function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.” (Foucault, 2003: 24)

12. Gender • Biological sex vs gender, the ”social and symbolic” denotation of individuals. • “Gender has to do not only with bodies, and power, but also with the politics of knowledge, and therefore with organizations as containers of different bodies and sexualities, as arenas of power/knowledge, and with organization theory as a system of knowledge representation”. (Gherardi, 2003: 211) • That is, manyorganizational and social resourcesmay be ”gendered”: technology, knowledge, professions. • Example: Many different studies of organizationsincluding Hancock and Tyler’s (2000) study of flight attendents: • “The organizational bodies of the attendants thus become artifacts of the organization, much as the corporate logos or the design of the aircraft interiors do, serving to form and communicate a collective organizational identity both amongst its members and to its paying clients” (Hancock and Tyler, 2000:120)

13. Postcolonialtheory: Race/ethnicity • “Postcolonial theory is . . . of obvious relevance for any examination of gender and cultural identities at the workplace, and for analysing the ways in which identities of otherness are produced out of dominant-group/marginal-group dynamics”. (Prasad & Prasad, 2002: 61) • “Postcolonialism alerts us to the lingering effects of colonial discourses on workplace practices and organizational arrangements”. (Prasad & Prasad, 2002: 63) • Studies of colonialistpractices and beliefs, overseas and ”at home.” • Example: Kalonaityte’sstudy of SFI (Svenska för invandrare): problematization of culturalissues and life styles, e.g., whyshouldfemale trust their husbands? Teaching is disciplinary and culturallyembedded • Janssens and Zanoni’s (2005) study of how ”diversity” is ”produced” in threeBelgiancompanies. • Diversity management literature.

14. Class • “Class generally stands for economic/power inequalities structured by production, market, and/or occupational systems.” (Acker, 2006: 6) • Example: Not very fashionable in organization studies as an object of study, some studies of how social elites are trained in accomodatingcertainvalues (in lawschool, business school, and medicalschool) • Danielle, a law schools student at “Graham university” who “firmly believed during her first year of law school that most lawyers were overpaid and took advantage of their powerful position in society, now says without criticism: ‘Lawyers work really, really hard . . . the money is deserved. I think lawyers are really, really smart. I think they are very articulate and on top of things’”. (Schleef, 2006: 2)

15. The value and shortcomings of CMS • Pro: All societiesneedregulatorymechanismexaminingtaken-for-grantedbeliefs and uprooting group thinking. CMS as a research frameworktakes a skepticalview of organizational and managerialpractice, seeking to undermineclaims of rationality. • Contra: (1) CMS represents a ”suspicious” view of managers and organizations, presenting an idealizedview ”non-economic life.” A form of romanticview of premodern life. • (2) CMS is hijacking the concept of critique.

16. Summary • CMS emphasizes power and domination in organizations; organizations are neithervaluefree, nor detached from the interests of specific social actors. • CMS tends to overstate the capacity of specific group to manipulate social processes and organizational action. CMS preset an overtlyskepticalview of organizations.