ABSTRACT
The invitation to write a piece on ‘challenges and controversies in management research’ presents us with the opportunity to refl ect on the potential for developing radical or critical approaches in management and organizational studies. In this chapter we will attempt to provide a historical commentary on the evolution of politically leftist approaches to research and theory, drawing primarily on a structural Marxist approach. In so doing we want to address the precarious and contradictory position of academics in business schools who see themselves as being in some sense leftist, radical or critical. We are particularly concerned with those academics in the fi eld of organization studies who can be included as part of the loose community that describes itself as ‘Critical Management Studies.’ We recognize that any notion of what it means to be ‘critical’ is necessarily contested, and we intend to address some of the problems associated with it. We certainly do not intend to make any exclusive claims for the term, although we readily acknowledge that for some constituencies in Critical Management Studies it carries connotations of an identifi cation with Critical Theory derived from the Frankfurt School (e.g., Alvesson and Willmott 1996; Alvesson et al. 2009). Our intention is to refl ect on the relationship between Critical Management Studies and the political defeat of the Left. In order to do so we trace the trajectory of a major contributory stream in Critical Management Studies, namely, Labor Process Theory, a radical paradigm of organization theory that became especially infl uential in UK business and management schools from the early 1980s. (Labor Process Theory became increasingly infl uential in wake of the founding, in 1983, of the annual Labour Process Conference, established by management academics at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology [UMIST] and Aston University). After setting out the extent of the defeat of leftist ideas in late twentieth-century Britain and the United States we provide a series of commentaries on the development of critiques that are relevant for understanding the location of contemporary Critical Management Studies.
