Martin Parker

George Cheney is concerned with one of the most important issues facing those interested in organizing in the present age. Can alternatives to market managerial organization survive and prosper? It is common enough nowadays to assume that the 'convergence thesis' of the 1960s has developed into fully blown globalization. Whether economic or cultural, the idea is that one best way of organizing has emerged and is (and also should be) spreading across the world. Rabid managerialists and vapid politicians seem to agree on this ...

). This is a big fat hardback book, priced at£ 85. This alone should tell us rather a lot about the production and consumption of its knowledge. Unless paperbacked, it is doomed to be bought only by university libraries, and hence invisible to most readers, apart from the red eyed scholars who snuffle around in the half light. Perhaps this is the fate of critical projects in many disciplines–whether in management, policy studies, law, criminology or wherever. They finally become 'Oxford Handbooks', and then the game is up, crushed beneath the ...

What follows is a dialogue, in the Platonic sense, concerning the justifications for "business ethics" as a vehicle for asking questions about the values of modern business organisations. The protagonists are the authors, Gordon Pearson – a pragmatist and sceptic where business ethics is concerned – and Martin Parker – a sociologist and idealist who wishes to be able to ask ethical questions of business. By the end of the dialogue we come to no agreement on the necessity or justification for business ethics, but on the way discuss the uses of philosophy, the meanings of integrity and trust, McDonald's, a hypothetical torture manufacturer and various other matters.

Purpose - The article aims to provoke debate about the organizational implications of international business. Design/methodology/approach - This is a conceptual argument relying on elements of social theory and contemporary politics. Findings - The paper finds that organizing is not a synonym for hierarchy, management or markets, though they are all examples of organization. Practical implications - The implication for research and practice is exploring alternatives to hierarchical market managerialism. Originality/value - Many ...

In this article the mundanity of contemporary cyberspace will be contrasted with the technological sublime of the space programme, now almost 40 years ago. Using some short stories from JG Ballard, I explore the idea that contemporary forms of 'space', usually prefigured as 'cyber'or 'virtual', are insular and privatized in comparison to Apollo. To a certain extent, this contraction of ambition can also be witnessed in contemporary cyberpunk science fiction, and in the combination of capitalist and conspiratorial narratives about ...

This dialogue engages with the ethics of politics of capitalism, and enacts a debate between two participants who have divergent views on these matters. Beginning with a discussion concerning definitions of capitalism, it moves on to cover issues concerning our different understandings of the costs and benefits of global capitalist systems. This then leads into a debate about the nature and purposes of regulation, in terms of whether regulation is intended to make competition work better for consumers, or to prevent negative outcomes for citizens. The conclusion speculates about the usefulness or otherwise of this Socratic method of dialogue.

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to explore the production of management knowledge in Argentina. Design/methodology/approach–Based on a qualitative research strategy that draws on one of the authors' participant observation in the field of Argentine management education, selected data from Argentine universities, and a bibliometric study of local and foreign management journals.

This paper contrasts the standard account of the relationship between containerisation and globalisation with a picture of multiple mobilities and moorings. I suggest that an account of containerisation cannot so easily be contained because sameness, security, plenty and economic rationality have also produced the aporias of difference, danger and emptiness as well as a diverse range of cultural representations. I take this to be a specific representation of a more general argument against the reduction in complex social and material mobilities to a determinist account of technology or a teleological version of history.

Abstract This article presents a reading of the place of food in a variety of texts which concern the Mafia. In many organizations, food often seems to be symbolically deployed as a representation of community through commensality. However, in the Mafia, unlike many contemporary organizations, food preparation and consumption appears not to be relegated to liminal times and spaces, but to be a central part of being a Mafiosi. The article explores this idea in terms of the connections between metaphors of community and family in the ...

This paper presents a case study of management culture in a manufacturing organisation. Its general aim is to assess the usefulness of the concept ‘culture’ as it applies to organisations. After first establishing that the organisational members had a sense that their organisation was an unique ‘family’ the article then proceeds to argue that this ‘togetherness’ was, in many contexts, divided. Managers also had a series of conflictual orientations to other members that were partially defined by the managers organisational role but were also underwritten by assumptions about organisational history, community, biography and profession. The paper concludes by suggesting that, at this level of analysis, managers are not often an unified block with a common identity and that management culture is hence best seen as a map of oppositions and commonalities that reflects the wider culture that the organisation is a part of.

This paper is concerned with the theoretical and ethical-political implications of thinking about organisations as communities, and community as organised. After outlining some of the recent managerialist attempts to articulate organisations as sites of common culture the paper proceeds to make analytic distinctions between society/community and state/organisation. I suggest that both of these poles are ideal types which are better thought of as two empirically unrealisable ends of a continuum of subjective identification and ...

Abstract Much contemporary writing on organizational culture overstresses consensus. Using a case study of a UK National Health Service district, it is suggested that there can be distinctframes of meaning within one organization. Managers' ideas about creating a unified culture were reflective of an attempt to move from medical dominance to a managerialist orientation, but this change was the subject of considerable dispute. There was debate about whether management was appropriate to an organization that had traditionally ...

Abstract This introduction to the special issue consists of some arguments that are intended to fold the conceptsethics' andpolitics' into one another. The aim of this exercise is to take business ethics to task for having a narrowlyethical'view of its ambitions. Instead, I propose that business ethics needs to embrace political theory in addition to the moral philosophy that it has (up to now) treated as canonical. I argue that such an enlargement will encourage those who currently practise business ethics to ask broader questions about the current ...

This is an ambitious book. Mark Featherstone has written an intellectual history that runs from Aristotle to Žižek, with most of the big beards being nodded at along the way. The argument rotates around the question of utopia, and broadly adopts what might now be called the standard “postmodern” diagnosis. That is to say, as soon as we attempt to bring imagination into reality, repression results. All the trains to the Promised Land end up at Auschwitz.

Abstract This paper suggests that one of the first influential legitimations of hierarchy comes from the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, about 1500 years ago. Despite the fact that he was ordering angels, he suggests both ontological and political reasons for accepting that organization must equal hierarchy. This is an assumption that is rarely contested even today, and the idea of hierarchy is central to theories of organization, and justifications of managerialism.

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to explore the production of management knowledge in Argentina. Design/methodology/approach–Based on a qualitative research strategy that draws on one of the authors' participant observation in the field of Argentine management education, selected data from Argentine universities, and a bibliometric study of local and foreign management journals.

Abstract This article considers the relationship between historical and fictional accounts of piracy, and relates them to contemporary issues about the legitimacy of states and global business. I begin by showing how privateers were gradually distinguished into pirates and navies. At the same time, the pirate becomes a character in the popular imagination, atrickster'figure on the side of the people, and against authority.

Drawing on data collected during 14 months of ethnographic research in an Australian Coastal Hotel, the paper describes the management of service encounters. Hotel staff used meetings and training sessions to simulate service scenarios, hypothesizingcustomer wants and needs'. In order to do this they constructed the image of an idealGuest', an image that was collectively evoked in order to shape the conduct of service encounters.

Abstract A few months before the first Moon landing, James Webb published his book Space Age Management. This article considers a number of ways in which the age of space was also the age of management, and perhaps also the end of the age of industry. I consider the cold war and new deal politics of the Apollo programme, as well as the complex but mundane forms of work organization that were necessary in order that the means could result in such spectacular ends.

This paper illustrates and theorises a tradition of 'gothic'representations of organisation in the last two centuries. It links Marx's conjunction between capital and the vampire, Dickensian melodrama, and Weber and Kafka's labyrinthine bureaucracy, to contemporary films that show power‐crazed lunatics at the top of corporate skyscrapers. I argue that this represents a powerful form of cultural critique through representation.

On the 12th of June 2008, an advert for 'Doritos', a flavoured corn chip snack, was broadcast from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean. Doritos are manufactured by the Frito-Lay Company of Plano, Texas, which is owned by PepsiCo Incorporated. In 2007, PepsiCo and its various subsidiaries delivered an operating profit of $8,025 million on a turnover of $39,474 million. The advert was aimed at a solar system 42 light years away orbiting the star 47 Ursae Majoris, in the constellation of the Plough.

Abstract This paper defines the circus as an institutionalized questioning of forms of stability and classification, and then enquires as to how such effects are produced. I begin with the cultural representations of the circus, and then move through sections on community, movement and economic organization. This order is intended to illustrate that the production of mystery is a complex affair, and that cultural and economic descriptions of this particular form of organization are necessarily entangled.

During the lead up to the publication of this Special Issue, we invited several figures to engage our original call for contributions in what ever way they saw fit. As these commentaries proliferated, it became increasingly apparent to us that it would be worth staging a virtual roundtable discussion–that being an online discussion co-ordinated and chaired by ephemera (in this case represented by Stephen Dunne)–devoted to the question of what today's Business School is for.

In this paper I attempt to make connections between 'queer'theory and contemporary thinking about managing and organising. It is structured around a re-presentation of queer, particularly the work of Butler and Sedgwick, and a discussion of the potential consequences of queering for managers, managerial practices and the science of management. Throughout, I am primarily concerned with authority claims-both personal and institutional-as well as the relation between (critical) theory and (critical) practice.

Abstract This article discusses our analysis of over 2,000 articles published within 20 top business and management journals. The article empirically demonstrates how little attention is being paid by the work published within these journals to contemporary political issues across the globe. We also demonstrate the extent to which the same is true ofcritical'journals such as Organization.

I am on holiday, sitting on the decking outside a lodge in some woods in Lincolnshire. I have my laptop, and am waiting for the others to get up, so have decided to make a start on this book review. I don't seem to resent sitting here, but am puzzled now, after reading Fleming and Spicer's challenging little book, as to whether I should be doing this at all. I am clearly a certain sort of obsessive subject, but (assuming I don't bother with the search for my original authentic self) I wonder what else I want to do, right now.

Catherine Casey is keen to suggest that the world is changing, and that the social sciences are in crisis. The “postindustrial, postmodern capitalist conditions”(p. 185) in which we now live need a new form of analysis which is up to the task. So how would one assess these sorts of assertions?

When research, teaching and writing about history is being done, it is usually justified with reference to the problem of induction. Though induction is called a 'logic', it is really a guess about probability. If the sun has risen every day for all of my life, then it will probably rise tomorrow. There is no necessary reason implied here, no deduction from principles, simply a guess based on spotting a pattern and then predicting it into the future.

Abstract Citations tell us something about the patterns of knowledge exchange around a particular journal. To examine this network, one can use Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports database and derive three basic citation relationships: the numbers of articles citing (and thus influenced by) a journal, articles cited by (thus influencing) a journal, as well as the self-citation rate of the journal. In this article we examine the patterns relating to 27 selected journals in organization and management.