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To consider Critical Management Studies as a social movement.

The purpose is fulfilled by reflecting upon the history of Critical Management Studies by reference to social movement theory, institutional theory and the social theory of hegemony.

Critical Management Studies is plausibly understood as a social movement.

The chapter offers a fresh perspective on Critical Management Studies by representing it as a movement rather than as a specialist field of knowledge.

A reply to responses by Prem Sikka and Tony Willmott (“The withering of tolerance and communication in interdisciplinary accounting studies”) and Robert Scapens (“Reactions on reading ‘The withering of criticism’”) to Tony Tinker's initial paper, “The withering of criticism”.

The paper employs argument and discourse to critique the responses and defend the author's position.

The paper offers the authors' view of the comparative research approaches of Briloff, Sikka and Willmott.

The paper extends critical debate on North American and UK contributions and approaches to critical accounting scholarship.

Mats Alvesson is professor of business administration at the University of Lund, Sweden and at University of Queensland Business School, Australia. Research interests include critical theory, gender, power, management of knowledge intensive organizations, leadership, identity, organizational image, organizational culture and symbolism, qualitative methods and philosophy of science. Recent books include Interpreting Interviews (Sage, 2011), Metaphor We Lead By: Understanding Leadership in the Real World (Routledge, 2011, edited with Andre Spicer), Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies (Oxford University Press, edited with Todd Bridgman and Hugh Willmott), Understanding Gender and Organizations (Sage, 2009, 2nd edition edited with Yvonne Billing), Reflexive Methodology (Sage, 2009, 2nd edition edited with Kaj Skoldberg), Changing Organizational Culture (Routledge, 2008, edited with Stefan Sveningsson) and Knowledge Work and Knowledge-Intensive Firms (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Flows of ideas and paradigmatic wars are easier to trace through informal memoirs than methodological drill manuals. Sc’MOI’s emergence, flourishing, and decline are linked to a floating group of social scientists with the ambition to introduce managerial research into the humanist fold. Elective affinities linked David Boje and the undersigned to the Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey, the Cardiff critical theory analyst Hugh Willmott, and the Lund organizational sciences guru Mats Alvesson. The drift from the International Academy of Business Disciplines to the Standing Conference on Management and Organizational Inquiry was accompanied by the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Marginal? Perhaps? But evolution picks up random cultural drifts and turns them into destinies of knowledge production. The narrative, humanist turn survived and kicks forward.

In the UK and elsewhere, accounting vocabularies and practices have come to permeate everyday life through their involvement in the management of hospitals, schools, universities, charities, trade unions, etc. This has been accompanied by an increase in the power of accountancy and the institutions of accountancy which increasingly function as quasi‐legislators. Such developments call for a (re)consideration of the role of accounting academics/intellectuals. Argues that, in a world where major business and professional interests are organized to advance sectional interests, to promote stereotyped images and to limit public debates, accounting academics/intellectuals have a responsibility to give visibility to such issues and thereby mobilize potentialities for gaining a fuller understanding of, and encouraging more democratic participation in, the design and operation of major social institutions. Suggests that, despite the constraints on academics, there are considerable opportunities to create, develop or become active in public policy debates through networks that comprise politicians, journalists, disaffected practitioners and concerned citizens – all of whom are potential allies in furthering a process in which accounting and its institutions are problematized and accounting professionals are rendered more accountable.

During the past decade, one of the major thrusts of change in manufacturing industry has been the alignment of manufacturing methods to rapidly changing and turbulent market demands (Piore & Sabel, 1984; Smith, Child & Rowlinson, 1990). A focus upon core products and processes, involving customer responsiveness and the elimination of waste has been coupled with a drive to improve product quality and cost reduction. ‘New Wave’ lean manufacturing techniques (Storey, 1994) and management control methods (Berry, Broadbent & Otley, 1995) are therefore now widely com‐mended as a means of improving competitiveness in industry (Smith, 1990). However, it is always easier to extol the virtues of such techniques than to translate them into a coherent set of practices (Kunda, 1992).

This paper is situated within two debates. First concerns the theories of ‘disorganised capitalism’ and the like which argue for major restructuring of advanced capitalist societies. Reed (1991) usefully identifies and summarises three varieties of such theory: (i) Post‐Fordism/Flexible Specialisation (e.g. Piore and Sabel, 1982); (ii) Disorganised Capitalism (e.g. Lash and Urry, 1987); (iii) Post‐Modernism (e.g. Poster, 1984). Common to these theories of ‘disorganised capitalism’ is the understanding that the progressive development of an ‘organised society’ (Prestus, 1962) — characterised by concentration, centralisation and corporatism — is being interrupted/challenged by trends in a contrary direction. The second relates to arguments about the work of middle management (e.g. Goffee and Scase, 1986 v. Dopson and Stewart, 1990).

This chapter explicates the theoretical basis and contribution of poststructuralism to the study of strategy and strategic management. More specifically, it focuses upon Foucauldian analysis which is contrasted to rationalist and interpretivist studies. Foucauldian analysis is not regarded as a corrective but as an addition to these established approaches to studying strategy. Notably, Foucault's work draws attention to how discourse constitutes, disciplines and legitimizes particular forms of executive identity (‘strategists’) and management practice (‘strategizing’). We highlight how Foucault's poststructuralist thinking points to unexplored performative effects of rationalist and interpretivist studies of strategy. Foucault is insistent upon the indivisibility of knowledge and power, where relations of power within organizations, and in academia, are understood to rely upon, but also operate to maintain and transform, particular ‘discourses of truth’ such as the discourses of ‘shareholder value’ and ‘objectivity’. Discourse, in Foucauldian analysis, is not a more or less imperfect, or ineffective, means of representing objects such as strategy. Rather, it is performative in, for example, producing the widely taken-or-granted truth that ‘organization’ is separate from ‘environment’. In turn, the production of this distinction is seen to enable and sanction particular and, arguably, predatory forms of knowledge, in which the formulation and application of strategy is represented as neutral, mirror-like and/or functional.