ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the rapid and recent congealing of the UK business school has also involved bringing intellectual assumptions from other places. It argues that different understandings of the role of social science and its relevant theoretical resources provides the deep structure for a tension between Critical Management Studies (CMS) on the one hand and industrial relations and the sociology of work and employment on the other. CMS runs the danger, in the UK, of becoming mere Management Studies, indistinguishable from the orthodoxy of Andreski's streamlined sorcerers in anything other than rhetorical terms. The chapter concerns the application of critical theory to management, and the avoidance of a sociologism which would dissolve the specificity of CMS into a more general understanding of ideological and cultural phenomena. Nowadays, UK business schools have become substantial institutions in their own right and located in a global labour market for English-speaking students and staff.
