Who is it that Would Make Business Schools More Critical? A Response to Tatli
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00796.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Mark Learmonth,Jackie Ford,Nancy Harding |
Who is it that Would Make Business
Schools More Critical? A Response
to Tatli
Jackie Ford, Nancy Harding and Mark Learmonth1
Bradford University School of Management, Emm Lane, Bradford BD9 4JL, UK, and 1Durham University,
Durham Business School, Mill Hill Lane, Durham DH1 3LB, UK
Corresponding author email: j.m.ford@bradford.ac.uk
Our short paper, as a response to Tatli’s recent comment on our work, provides the
opportunity to develop further an exploration of problems that both Tatli and ourselves
identify in critical management studies (CMS). Here, we articulate ideas that we shied
away from in our original paper, notably regarding an unreflexive masculinity that
dominates some aspects of CMS. We suggest that many of Dr Tatli’s concerns resonate
with our own. This response therefore aims to generate further debate about CMS and
how it may be perpetuating some of those very practices it abhors in management and
organizations.
Our original paper (Ford, Harding and Lear-
month, 2010) was explicitly intended to stir up
debate about critical management studies (CMS),
so it is in this spirit that we very much welcome
Ahu Tatli’s response. Indeed, we find ourselves
rather sympathetic towards several of her criti-
cisms of CMS, a number of which echo points we
ourselves have made in other places (e.g. Currie
et al., 2010). Furthermore, we take her point that
CMS is hardly short of ‘warnings made by CMS
scholars themselves on the problems of CMS’
(Tatli, 2011, p. 6). There is clearly a need to effect
concrete beneficial action to make CMS friendlier
to those who might otherwise be sympathetic to
its broad aims.
On the other hand, however, we found Tatli’s
overall verdict on CMS rather too harsh. For
example, like the rest of academia, CMS is cer-
tainly still dominated by white men, but white
men are not a homogeneous group and some, at
least, are responding thoughtfully and changing
their ways of working as a result of the challenges
from those of us who are not white, male, hetero-
sexual or middle class. This is at least a start! And
unlike Tatli, we see hope for change. One cause
for optimism, for example, is in the significant
strand of post-colonial scholarship present within
CMS – a strand of scholarship that has attracted
men and women who are not always ‘white,
heterosexual, most probably western, [and] able
bodied’ (2011, p. 5). We are thinking here, for
example, of the post-colonial streams at CMS
conferences, or the recent special issue of Organi-
zation devoted to the issue. There is also burgeon-
ing work using queer theory (from Parker, 2002,
to Harding et al., 2011), for example, and while
feminist thought sometimes languishes in its
own ghetto, feminist-inspired work appears in
the British Journal of Management (e.g. Fotaki,
2011),Organization and other journals that
publish critical management papers. CMS, in
other words, is not as homogeneous as Tatli
presumes.
But perhaps where we disagree with Tatli most
strongly is on the way to find ‘solutions to the
false assumptions and exclusionary practices
that dominate CMS’ (2011, p. 8). Such solutions
(which, for us, would be to develop business
schools as places of mutual respect, where dif-
ference underpins actions, the overly-voluble
British Journal of Management, Vol. 23, 31–34 (2012)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00796.x
© 2011 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management © 2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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