Critical perspectives on organization and management theory - Linda Smircich

This volume questions the organization of knowledge in organization studies that took shape after World War II. It calls into question the managerialist view of what organizations are, how they should be conducted and how they should be studied. The authors of the essays included here represent a diversity of views: neomarxist, labour process, symbolic, feminist. Together they question the epistemological choices that were made; they articulate other paradigmatic paths that could have been taken; and they provide alternative forms of knowledge production. Collectively they forward a view of organizations not as rational and efficiency seeking, but as sites of inequalities and resistances, where meanings and interpretations are contested, reflecting the wider tensions between diverse interest groups within society. In general these writings encourage us to pay attention to important omissions in mainstream understanding of management and organizations and to the social costs of such omissions. They also question what the role of the organizational scholar should be or could be: detached scientist, management apologist, political analyst, social advocate?