Love^®: a critical reading of Lovemarks

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to argue that an enriched understanding of texts would enable more informed and responsible management practice. The authors present an approach to the analysis of management texts that enjoys, rather than contests, multivocality with the aim of making our approach to defamiliarising texts an accessible change management tool.

Design/methodology/approach

Working with a reader‐response methodology we provide comment on, and analysis of, a popular management book, Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks. The authors context a response to this text in a discussion of commodity fetishism and deconstructed management theory texts. The interpretation of the subject text highlights its rhetorical suasion and pulls buried meaning into view.

Findings

The authors demonstrate that rhetorical analysis and satirical play, a mode of defamiliarisation that is employed in their own reading and incorporated into their classroom praxis, enables managers to better understand and control their own sense‐making. The authors argue that where their enriched understandings challenge embedded assumptions, changed management practices are enabled.

Originality/value

The authors offer their own construction of a Lovemark text, a satirical echo of the Roberts original, as an example of the distancing effect of humorous textual play.

Citation

Sayers, J. and Monin, N. (2007), "Love^®: a critical reading of Lovemarks", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 671-684. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810710779090