Search results

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.

This paper offers six shamanic futures concepts to augment Inayatullah's six pillars, questions and concepts of futures studies.

Drawing on Ashis Nandy's use of the shaman as a futures category that posits alterity and the unknowable as the dissenting component of futures studies, six concepts (geophilosophy, rhizome, intercivilisational dialogue, heterotopia, immanence and hybridity) from poststructural thinking are proposed to offer an account of the agency‐structure interface (context) that is of practical value to futures practice.

Futures praxis is pragmatic and goal driven, seeking preferred futures outcomes for those in context. The six shamanic futures concepts further this end by outlining conceptual processes that deepen understanding of context as a co‐creative and living space.

Futures studies is becoming increasingly sophisticated; the six shamanic concepts push practitioner's understanding of how to facilitate deep organizational change.

This paper provides six concepts that enable futures practitioners to better understand the nature of their own practice.

This paper extends Inayatullah's mapping of the futures field by suggesting six concepts that facilitate an understanding and harnessing of the potential of context.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The history of Circassian diaspora by expressing experiences of Syrian Circassians with oppression and resistance was informed by Archer’s three-stage cycle in the context of analytical structure-agency dualism leading to social change. In the last period, Turkish Circassians’ political awakening in the name of “return to homeland” overlaps the last forced migration experience of Syrian Circassians. As a matter of fact, return to the homeland is nothing but a return to the past and a call to account for solidarity in the diaspora. Therefore, the new refugee experience of Syrian Circassians has strengthened social construction of return to the past and recalled a search for reassessing their past. But, more importantly, it shows transnational solidarity of diasporic subjects beyond nation-states.

The aim of this paper is to present a reinforced version of structuration theory, known as strong structuration theory, set out in Stones as a disciplined approach to qualitative case study research in the organization, management and accounting fields. This framework challenges the belief held by certain critics that structuration theory cannot be used in substantive empirical research but is only a sensitising device or analytical tool.

A conceptual discussion is the approach of the paper.

The key concepts of strong structuration theory are outlined and then put in the context first of two attempts to apply the framework to empirical research and second of two recent papers which address theoretically informed qualitative research and the use of structuration theory in IT studies.

There are some limitations of this paper. The framework offered was not used to set the original research questions in the two case studies employed as these cases were conducted before the publication of Stones' book in 2005. Also, as weaknesses in the framework can best be assessed using empirical findings, a full evaluation cannot be carried out until such research is undertaken.

This paper draws on recent research and thinking in sociology that have yet to be brought into case studies in the fields of accounting and management in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how accounting is implicated in the creation and maintenance of organizational boundaries. The analysis focuses on organizations subjected to conflicting objectives as a result of new public management (NPM) reforms.

The analysis is based on case studies of four cultural organizations (Show Caves) in Greece. Data are collected from semi-structured interviews, informal discussions and document analysis. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of “field”, “capital” and “habitus” and Llewellyn’s analysis of organizational boundary maintenance.

The study observes that NPM reforms contributed to shifting organizational boundaries – from cultural/archaeological to economic/financial and this resulted in conflicting organizational objectives. This subsequently created conflicts between key actors (municipal politicians, professional managers and anthropologists). These actors, depending on the positions (and habitus) they occupy, and the capital (political, cultural and symbolic) they hold, are able to bargain for resources (economic capital). The conflicting objectives (archaeological/cultural/historical, political and commercial) that emerged and the tensions that arose between the key players shaped the identities and boundaries of the Show Caves.

The study makes an original contribution by revealing the complexity and struggle between actors and the role of accounting in managing the boundaries. For example, the study explains how financial threshold and accountability structures function within these cultural organizations that are subjected to conflicting objectives in the context of NPM reforms.

The philosophical position known as critical realism is briefly introduced, and some of its central features are used to connect the philosophy and the realist social theory to some current library and information science (LIS) models of information behaviour.

The paper uses a literature‐based analysis of the critical realism concepts of a stratified social reality, the importance of contextualisation, and the relation between structure and agency. These features are discussed in relation to various models of information‐seeking behaviour, but also to the “interpretative” approach to information as meaning which can only be achieved through discourses in a human community.

The critical realism perspective could lay a fruitful foundation for an interdisciplinary research field like LIS, and its user studies in particular, concerned with many levels of information creation, seeking, use and processing. It is the task of the LIS researcher to explain the mechanisms that influence the information seeking, not only on an empirical level, by observing the user and his/her discourse community, but also by revealing possible underlying causes and relations.

An awareness of the fact that social and cultural structures exist independent of one's knowledge of them has implications on how many central problems in the LIS field are regarded and studied.

The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to analyze the current state of the astructural bias in symbolic interactionism as it relates to three inter-related processes over time: (1) the formalization of critiques of symbolic interactionism as ahistorical, astructural, and acritical perspectives; (2) an ahistorical understanding of early expressions of the disjuncture between symbolic interactionism and more widely accepted forms of sociological theorizing; and (3) persistent and widespread inattentiveness to past and present evidence-based arguments that address the argument regarding symbolic interactionism as an astructural, ahistorical, and acritical sociological perspective. The argument frames the historical development of the astructural bias concept in an historically and socially conditioned way, from its emergence through its rejection and ultimately including conclusions about contemporary state of the astructural bias as evidenced in the symbolic interactionist literatures of the last couple of decades. The analysis and argument concludes that the contemporary result of these intertwined historical and social conditioning processes is that the astructural bias myth has been made real in practice, and that the reification of the myth of an astructural bias has had the ruinous effect of virtually eradicating a vital tradition in the interactionist perspective which extends back to the earliest formulations of the perspective. As a result, a handful of suggestions that serve to aid in reclaiming the unorthodox structuralism of symbolic interactionism and the related interactionist study of social organization are provided in the conclusion.