ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the work of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, in order to problematize conventional approaches to the study of management and organisations that have been thought of as informed by a positive eplstemology. Whether quantitative or qualitative methods are used, representational approaches to knowledge production rest on a privileging of the consciousness of the researcher who is deemed capable of discovering the "truth" about the world of management and organizations through a series of representation. Rather than collaborate in the myth of progress that underlies the demand for stable and positive management knowledge, we can celebrate the conditions of subjectivity that make this mythology impossible to sustain. Genealogy contrasts sharply with conventional history, which in emulating the methods of the positive sciences focuses on the historical event as developing sequentially through time and space and subject to a "discoverable" set of causal determinants which preceded it.
