The Critique Of Management

This book reflects on the nature of business management to contribute to the development of a philosophy and ethics of management. It engages in conceptual engineering of management to delineate the phenomenon of management and, as a result, to open a new perspective on management beyond its self-evident conceptualization. After questioning the self-evident concept of management, the author develops a philosophy of management with six dimensions of the nature of management: management as participation; management as resistance and responsive action; management as constitution of meaning; management as politico-economic governance; management as non-reductive stakeholder engagement; and management as epistemic insufficient entrepreneurship. These six dimensions of management are taken as points of departure to develop an integrated concept of business ethics, an individual competence for ethical business management, and a concept of ethical codes for corporate social responsible behavior. This new conception of philosophy of management and business ethics can guide future philosophical and empirical work on the nature of management. The Critique of Management is an excellent resource for researchers, students, and professionals interested in philosophy of management, business ethics, and corporate social responsibility.

Most people know what management is but often people have vague ideas about Manageralism. This book introduces Manageralism and its ideology as a colonising project that has infiltrated nearly every eventuality of human society.

Strategic Management (2020) is a 325-page open educational resource designed as an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The open textbook is intended for a senior capstone course in an undergraduate business program and suitable for a wide range of undergraduate business students including those majoring in marketing, management, business administration, accounting, finance, real estate, business information technology, and hospitality and tourism. The text presents examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today's firms and how they go about implementing those strategies. It includes case studies, end of section key takeaways, exercises, and links to external videos, and an end-of-book glossary. The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

Against Management argues that management is increasingly being seen as a problem, and not a solution. Martin Parker argues that managing is not the only way to organize and that managerialism is a global form of ideology, which is being used to justify considerable cruelty and inequality. He also suggests that, in a variety of places, an odd collection of people seem to be coming to similar conclusions. It is possible to identify cracks in the religion of managerialism as some of its converts begin to lapse and others intensify their protest. In order to illustrate his argument, Parker draws from a wide variety of sources - anti-corporate activism; books and films which use management as their backdrop; the movement for business ethics and corporate social responsibility; as well as critical management studies and general social theories of the present. Parker's overall argument is that we can see the beginnings of a cultural shift in the image of management and that this is a significant historical change. Perhaps most importantly, it opens up the possibility of exploring non-managerial alternatives to contemporary assumptions about organizing. Against Management deliberately attempts to blur the boundaries between academic and popular writing, and encourages some radical questioning of the common sense that tells us that we need management, managers and management schools. This will be essential reading for second-year undergraduates and above in business and management studies (including MBA), sociology and cultural studies.

The discipline of silviculture is at a crossroads. Silviculturists are under increasing pressure to develop practices that sustain the full function and dynamics of forested ecosystems and maintain ecosystem diversity and resilience while still providing needed wood products. A Critique of Silviculture offers a penetrating look at the current state of the field and provides suggestions for its future development. The book includes an overview of the historical developments of silvicultural techniques and describes how these developments are best understood in their contemporary philosophical, social, and ecological contexts. It also explains how the traditional strengths of silviculture are becoming limitations as society demands a varied set of benefits from forests and as we learn more about the importance of diversity on ecosystem functions and processes. The authors go on to explain how other fields, specifically ecology and complexity science, have developed in attempts to understand the diversity of nature and the variability and heterogeneity of ecosystems. The authors suggest that ideas and approaches from these fields could offer a road map to a new philosophical and practical approach that endorses managing forests as complex adaptive systems. A Critique of Silviculture bridges a gap between silviculture and ecology that has long hindered the adoption of new ideas. It breaks the mold of disciplinary thinking by directly linking new ideas and findings in ecology and complexity science to the field of silviculture. This is a critically important book that is essential reading for anyone involved with forest ecology, forestry, silviculture, or the management of forested ecosystems.

This book offers a critique of recent developments in the study of organizational structure in the USA. There has been a profusion of new paradigms offered in the USA and this has fragmented the field. Many of these paradigms share an anti-management quality, painting managers in an increasingly negative light. This book examines five major, contemporary US organizational theories: population-ecology, institutional, resource dependence, agency and transaction cost economics. Each of these theories and their attendant research is critically examined and severe problems are identified in either theoretical coherence or empirical validity. Lex Donaldson argues that it is possible to reintegrate the field by taking structural contingency theory as the core theory and adding on to it selective propositions from the newer paradigms. He also offers suggestions for needed reforms in the US academic cultural and institutional system.

Written in the European tradition of Kant's philosophical trilogy on critique and Hegel's concept of ethical life it outlines the great traditions in ethical philosophy: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, and utilitarianism. It presents modern ethics from Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas to Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

First published in 1998, this volume of readings provides an overview of the development of the study of Management Control theory over the past 35 years. The period encompasses the publication of a major and seminal text by Anthony and Dearden in 1965, which acted as a touchstone in defining the range and scope of management control systems. This laid management control’s foundations in accounting-based mechanisms of control, an element which has been seen as both a strength and a constraint. A good deal of work has followed, providing both a development of the tradition as well as a critique. In this volume we attempt to provide a range of readings which will illustrate the variety of possibilities that are available to researchers, scholars and practitioners in the area. The readings illustrate the view that sees control as goal directed and integrative. They go on to explore the idea of control as adaption, consider its relationship with social structure and survey the effects of the interplay between the organisation and the environment. The essays included are not intended to lead the reader through a well-ordered argument which concludes with a well reasoned view of how management control should be. Instead it seeks to illustrate the many questions which have been posed but not answered and to open up agendas for future research.