What is CMS?
Critical Management Studies (CMS) is a largely left-wing and theoretically informed approach to management and organisation studies. It challenges the prevailing conventional understanding of management and organisations. CMS interrogates the established relations of power, control, domination and ideology in organisations, exploring their relations with people and society.
As an umbrella research orientation CMS embraces various theoretical traditions including anarchism, critical theory, feminism, Marxism, post-Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, representing a pluralistic, multidisciplinary movement. Although there are differences among these traditions, CMS has distinguishing characteristics such as denaturalisation, non-performativity and reflexivity in the organisation studies (Fournier & Grey, 2000). These characteristics are continuously re-constructed due to the developing structure of CMS. For instance, there have been suggestions to make CMS critically performative (see Spicer et al., 2009).
Having originated in business schools in the United Kingdom, CMS as a platform has audiences all over the world including Europe, Australia, Asia, Latin America, Canada and the United States. Bi-ennial CMS conferences have been organized since 1999. CMS also has presence at annual European Group of Organization Studies colloquiums and Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism.
Why a portal for CMS?
The aim of this website is to gather information about CMS in one place as well as develop its own content (e.g. overviews on philosophers and CMS, overviews of themes researched within CMS, commentated bibliography etc) through collaboration of the CMS community. The website works as a wikipedia-type website, so everyone can contribute to its content.
Criticalmanagement.org is for everyone who wants to find out about/keep updated with CMS, both academic and non-academic, working in CMS and other areas.
