Critical management studies (CMS) is a loose but extensive grouping of politically left wing and theoretically informed critiques of management, business and organisation, grounded originally in a critical theory perspective. Today it encompasses a wide range of perspectives that are critical of traditional theories of management and the business schools that generate these theories.
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It is generally accepted that CMS began with Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott's edited collection Critical Management Studies (1992). Critical Management Studies (CMS) initially brought together critical theory and post-structuralist writings, but has since developed in more diverse directions.
A dominant narrative within CMS is that perhaps the most important development in its stimulation was the global expansion of business schools, an American invention, especially in Europe. Decreases in state funding, so the narrative has it, for social sciences and increases in funding for business schools during the 1980s resulted in many academics with graduate training in sociology, history, philosophy, psychology and other social sciences ending up with jobs "training managers". However, what business schools are or should do has always been debated.
These academics brought different theoretical tools and political perspectives into business schools. They began to question the politics of managerialism and to link the techniques of management to neo-liberalism. These new voices drew on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Later Feminism, queer theory, post-colonial theory, anarchism, ecological philosophies, and radical democratic theory also had some influence. (See Alvesson and Willmott 2003 for a survey of the field.)
The roots of CMS also came from a series of UK Labour Process Conferences that began in 1983 and reflected the impact of Braverman's (1974) attempt to make Marxist categories central to understanding work organisations. Industrial relations and labor studies scholars have joined the CMS fold in the US, seeking new opportunities for employment as labor-related programs have diminished in number.
At the same time a significant strand of critical accounting studies began to develop marked by the publication of Tony Tinker's Paper Prophets (1985) and the appearance of the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting.
Contrasting with the dominant origin narrative is an account which states that, along with the contributors to CMS from the intellectual traditions identified here, there is a significant - and overlapping - bloc among CMS scholars of those who have had extensive pre-University experience as workers and managers. The inconsistencies between their experiences in the workplace and the claims of mainstream managerialism, and an intention to connect those experiences to broader explanations and theorizing leads these people to CMS.
The main home of CMS has been in the organisation theory and behaviour parts of British, Australian and Scandinavian business schools, though there are strong contributions in related fields such as accounting with growing interest in other management specialisms, such as marketing,international business, operational research, logistics etc. Since the 1990s academics from North America and other parts of the world are also engaging with this body of writing and research. The CMS Division within the (American) Academy of Management (AoM), with a membership of around 800, is larger than some of its Divisions and is more international than any Division.
Many heterodox scholars in various parts of the world had been inspired by the international activities of the Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism. This latter grouping developed work which drew variously on post-structuralism and symbolic interactionism in order to develop a cultural and anthropological understanding of contemporary organizations. Others, though, were without affiliation and/or seeking new formations and alliances. Since 1999, there has been a bi-annual CMS conference held in the UK as well as workshops and a bi-annual conference held at US Academy of Management.
Today there are significant concentrations of CMS scholars in the UK at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London, at the School of Management at the University of Leicester, and at Essex Business School at the University of Essex. Elsewhere, Copenhagen Business School and Istanbul Bilgi University have clusters of CMS scholars, but many CMS scholars globally rely on conferences and journals like Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Studies, ephemera: theory and politics in organization, Culture and Organization, or Organization: the critical journal of organization, theory and society for their affiliations.
Main points of debate have focused on the relationship with more orthodox forms of Marxism, the nature and purposes of CMS critique, as well as questions of inclusion and exclusion (Fournier and Grey 2000), the possibilities of social transformation from within business schools (Parker 2002), and the development of alternative models of globalisation.
A recent trend in CMS has seen the incorporation of automist Marxist theory, first introduced in the English-speaking world by the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). New CMS scholars using these theories are interested in proposing alternative non-capitalist forms of organizing work and life often around the notion of collective responsibility for the commons. Other recent developments include engagements with post-colonial theory and critical race theory to investigate the way management and business schools contribute to what Cedric Robinson (1983) has called racial capitalism.
Wider impatience with market managerial forms of organization are common enough outside the business school, from anti-corporate protest to popular media presentations of managers. What CMS attempts to do is to articulate these voices within the business school, and provide ways of thinking beyond current dominant theories and practices of organization.