Making a difference within a management department: A masochistic or emancipating journey?

Description

This talk explores the extent to which a Critical Management Studies (CMS) academic could develop an individual and collective academic agency, through his role as departmental head of a UK business school.

By taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Professor David Jones will reflect upon the cultural and political tensions over a year, emerging from his attempts to develop a particular form of staff development, through what was named the ‘Shoreside Sessions’, which were specifically organised around a disconnected location, along the coast.

The intention was to understand whether a focus on the non-instrumental process and love of research led to a respite around managerialism and/or towards an increased contestation of university managerialist practices. By looking through a Lacanian conceptual lens, the research findings offer a tempered hope that middle management, demonised by much of the CMS literature, could play a pivotal role in not only providing an opportunity for respite, but to actively embrace a contestation to managerialism.

However, the legitimacy of attempts to enact such counter-cultural staff development is limited in a temporal sense, due to the growing conflicting managerialist, institutional agendas, which department heads need to deliver. It recommends that the potential to foster individual and collective resistance to managerialist practices is more dependent upon crafting new staff developmental roles, not so compromised by such opposing agendas.