Drawing upon a range of influential contemporary movements in the social sciences such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, this text provides a wide-ranging analysis of management and its various specialisms. The book offers critical understandings of key areas of management theory...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the question – why do professionals surrender their autonomy? This paper looks at the case of academics, in particular business school academics. It traces how this group of professionals have progressively surrendered their autonomy and...

Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful...

The chapter aims to bring out the dynamic nature or hierarchy in organizations and presents a conceptual framework for making sense of hierarchy in contemporary work. We describe hierarchy as the result of a contradictory dynamic that incorporates both vertical and horizontal practices of...

The paper reviews some basic themes in postmodernism and argues for a moderate incorporation of these themes in organization studies and methodology. This approach, named interpretive unpacking, takes issues of multiple and fluid meanings, ambiguities and fragmentation seriously without the a...

This chapter discusses professional service firms as collectivities. Collectivity refers to the interface between the social and the cultural. It is a ‘social unit’; however, it is defined through the meanings, definitions and distinctions of the people involved. This chapter addresses the...