New Issue of ephemera published: The Practical Criticism of Organization Studies
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/ 

Table of Contents

editorial
  
 
Peter Armstrong and Simon Lilley
 Practical Criticism and the Social Sciences 
 
 
 
articles 
 
 
Geoff Lightfoot
 Nothing Beats a 2x2 Matrix: A Short Commentary on George Ritzer's
Globalization of Nothing
 
George Ritzer 
 Response to Lightfoot
 
Josephine Maltby 
 There Is No Such Thing as Audit Society: A Reading of Power, M, (1994a)
'The Audit Society'
 
Michael Power 
 Response to Maltby: In Defence of The Audit Society
 
Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter 
 Baffling Bill McKelvey, the Commensurability Kid
 
Bill McKelvey 
 Response to Jackson and Carter: Commensurability, Rhetoric and Ephemera:
Searching for Clarity in a Cloud of Critique
 
Steven Toms 
 'Immeasurability': A Critique of Hardt and Negri
 
Nanette Monin and Ralph Bathurst 
 Mary Follett on the Leadership of 'Everyman'
 
Peter Armstrong 
 In Search of Seminality: David Knights and Glenn Morgan on Company Strategy
 

 
 
reviews
 
 
Anna Helle
 The Philosophical Friendship of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
 
David Sköld
 In Need of Medication?
 
Sam Dallyn
 Managerialism and Development
 

Description

The papers collected in this volume of ephemera are from the First
Conference of Practical Criticism in the Social Sciences of Management held
at The Management Centre, University of Leicester in January 2008. The
conference was expressive of the idea that a common language of criticism
within a discipline can emerge from the practice of criticism itself,
specifically from a close reading of its key texts in respect of their
argumentative structure, use of evidence (where applicable) and rhetoric of
presentation. Concurring with Alvesson, Hardy and Harley's (2008) contention
that "destabilizing practices" are a desirable feature of debate 

within management studies, it was felt that the immediate priority was to
begin the work of disrupting the established patterns of authority within
the field. Accordingly, participants were invited to provide a close-reading
criticism of a prominent work which they considered to exert an undesirable
influence. One contribution included here, however, exemplifies close
reading in its positive aspect: that of providing a detailed case for the
reinstatement of a writer who they believe to be unjustly neglected. In
literary criticism, on which the approach was modelled, there is no general
presumption of a right to reply. In deference to the norms of social
science, however, the authors whose work is examined in this volume were
invited to provide a reply and the three responses which were received are
reproduced in this volume as they were received, and in full.

In more detail

Over the last two decades, the field of organization studies has undergone
an unprecedented period of experiment and proliferation in respect of its
ontologies, epistemologies, substantive theories and styles of presentation.
In some quarters, this has led to concerns about the possibilities of debate
between incompatible paradigms whilst others have expressed anxieties over
the credibility of the field as a body of knowledge both with practitioners
and other academics. For some these concerns have crystallised around the
issues of cumulation (Pfeffer, 1993) or relevance and rigour (Hodgkinson,
Herriot and Anderson, 2001), prompting suggestions that these should be
tackled by methodological fiat combined with a more censorious refereeing
process.

From those who have experienced the period as one of creativity and
intellectual carnival, the reaction to such proposals has been predictable
(Van Maanen, 1995): methodological, theoretical and presentational variety
being positively valued as appropriate to the elusive nature and complexity
of the subject. On these mutually incompatible grounds, debate has petered
out into an unsatisfactory stand-off, with the concerns of the `legislators'
still outstanding and the champions of variety finding that tolerance, too,
can be repressive, i.e., that the right to be different often adds up to a
right to be ignored. When variety progresses to the point of fragmentation,
the lack of a common language of debate creates the conditions under which a
politics of knowledge can take over the functions of critical dialogue. The
ironic result is a series of intellectual fiefdoms within which what shall
count as a contribution is legislated just as surely as under a formal regime.

The papers collected in this edition of ephemera are intended to address the
concerns of both parties in a new (or very old) way, which we have called
`Practical Criticism' after a course pioneered by I.A. Richards at Cambridge
University ninety years ago. With the object of equipping the undergraduates
to turn out passable book reviews, Richards asked them to debate their
interpretations and evaluations of passages of poetry directly, i.e.,
without concern for the context in which they were produced (or the author
who produced  them), so that the sole argumentative recourse was the text
itself. The course ultimately led to a form of criticism which was
sufficiently robust and coherent to dominate the teaching of English
literature for the next thirty years, latterly in the modified form of `New
Criticism'. What is of interest from the point of view of the  present
situation of organization studies, is that the approach seems to offer a
means of reconciling the concerns of both sides of the `proliferation'
debate. Those who would wish to legislate for their own methods and
standards of scholarship are free to make their case as are those whose
priority is methodological and interpretive freedom. Where the present
debates around these issues are conducted almost entirely in theoretical and
meta-theoretical terms, the practical criticism approach differs in asking
the protagonists to substantiate their arguments by reference to particular
pieces of work, most usefully those regarded as influential or exemplary in
their fields.

References
Alvesson, M., C. Hardy and B. Harley (2008) `Reflecting on Reflexivity:
Reflexive Textual Practices in Organization and Management Theory', Journal
of Management Studies, 45(3): 480-501.
Hodgkinson, G. P., P. Herriot and N. Anderson (2001) `Re-aligning the
Stakeholders in Management Research: Lessons from Industrial, Work and
Organizational Psychology'. British Journal of Management, 12 
(Special Issue): S41–S48.
Pfeffer, J. (1993) `Barriers to the advance of organizational science:
Paradigm development as a dependent variable'. Academy of Management Review,
18: 599–620.
Van Maanen, J. (1995) `Style As Theory'. Organization Science, 6(1): 133-143.