Bob Hodge

For too long, ‘critical management studies’ would have seemed an oxymoron to Bob, as to many other critical/cultural studies academics and activists from the left. A personal connection first disrupted this unthinking prejudice: his partner Gabriela Coronado got a job in a School of Management, with the brief to develop a critical curriculum for management students, and accidentally become a critical management academic. The influence of Stewart Clegg was also a factor, who had been bringing critical social theory to bear on themes like power into organisation studies since 1989. From that was a short step to recognising that Marx’s studies of capitalism, in newspapers and in Das Kapital alike, were foundation texts for Critical Management, even though the modern school of that name, inaugurated by Alvesson and Willmott’s Critical Management Studies (1992) gives it a shorter, less diverse history.

Bob’s attraction to critical management came partly from his recognition that discursive processes sustaining modern business practices under globalisation should be major targets for critical discourse analysis (see ‘Mexico Inc.? Discourse analysis and the triumph of managerialism’  Organization 13:4, 2006:529-548 with G Coronado)  as Norman Fairclough also fully recognised in his critical discourse program. The reframing of ‘management’ within a broader object, ‘organisation’ (studies) was also helpful in opening new possibilities for a critical social analysis, especially if it included a social semiotic analysis of the role of cybernetic systems in the so-called ‘revolution’ claimed for the new world order (see ‘Speculations on a Marxist theory of the virtual revolution’  2005 Fibreculture 5 with G Coronado ). Finally, it was a fruitful site to apply ideas from chaos theory, since kinds of systems theory still flourished in theory and practice in management circles (see ‘Change’ in and ‘chaos theory’, entry in the Sage International Encyclopedia of Organisation Studies, ed. Clegg and 2008).

As well as various articles on different themes of critical management studies, the major synthesis has been work arising from the Larrikin ARC project (with G Coronado, Fernanda Duarte and Greg Teal, all of the School of Management, UWS). This used a chaos theory framework to develop a critical management argument using the ‘larrikin principle’ to stake out room for counter-tendencies, alternative practices and forms of resistance, within capitalism itself, as already intrinsic to modern global capitalism (provisional title of book: ‘Chaos theory and the Larrikin Principle: Working with organisations in a global world’)