The Critical Management Studies (CMS) has historically questioned the hidden power structures of corporate life. It is now criticizing itself.
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The package includes two recent articles in the Journal of Management Studies. One by André Spicer and Mats Alvesson (2024), and the other by Alvesson and Spicer (2025), along with the Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies (2011).
To understand CSM better, the book in particular provides three core characteristics of CMS, following the formulation by Valérie Fournier and Christopher Grey (2000):
De-naturalization—challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin management practice. Hierarchy is not inevitable. Markets are not natural. Greed and competitiveness are not universal human traits. CMS asks: What if things could be otherwise?
Non-performativity—not aimed at improving the efficiency of organizations. Mainstream management knowledge is assessed by its ability to help managers achieve their goals. CMS refuses that framing. It does not ask whether knowledge is useful for management but whether management itself is defensible.
Reflexivity—questioning how we develop knowledge about organizations. CMS scholars are expected to examine their own assumptions, positions, and complicity in the systems they critique.
The book also maps the field across four parts: theoretical approaches (critical theory, critical realism, poststructuralism, labour process theory); key topics (identity, globalization, discourse, culture, ethics, history); specialist disciplines (marketing, information systems, strategy, HRM, accounting); and commentaries (hierarchy, labour process, critical management education).
Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2025). Critical Management Studies: From One-Dimensional Critique to Three-Dimensional Scepticism. Journal of Management Studies, 63(3), 1637–1660.
Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T., & Willmott, H. (Eds.) (2009). The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford University Press.
— Spicer & Alvesson (2024)
Contemporary CMS is often one-dimensional: thin understanding, thick critique, and absent alternatives. Researchers leap to negation before properly understanding a phenomenon.
- Academia – critical studies of academic work, metrics, precarity, resistance.
- Alternative organizations – co-ops, anarchist collectives, employee-owned businesses.
- Control and resistance – neo-normative control, brand-based control, resistance.
- Discourse – language and meaning systems in embedding power relations.
- Foucauldian studies – biopower, governmentality, ethics of self.
- Gender – performativity, intersectionality, embodiment, masculinity.
- Identity – identity work, regulation, dis-identification, self-alienation.
- Marxism – labour process, platform capitalism, digital labour.
- Post-colonialism – Eurocentrism, southern voices, translocality.
- Psychoanalysis – Lacanian concepts, fantasy, jouissance, lack.
- Intersectionality – gender, race, class together.
- Embodiment – bodily experiences of control.
- Fluidity – blurring organizational boundaries.
- Outside the West – co-ops in Argentina, business schools in UAE.
Guru worship – following Foucault, Lacan, Butler without critique. Quotations are inserted to add authority, but often add little insight.
Jargon camouflages thinking. ‘Discourse’, ‘governmentality’, ‘resistance’ become hegemonic ambiguous big concepts (hembigs).
Pre-packaged critique: capitalism, Western domination, patriarchy, neoliberalism. Always the same ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.
One-off interviews, thin ethnography. Empirical material confirms theory; rarely kicks back to surprise.
Always the same targets: managers are power-hungry, neoliberalism is always bad, gender is always oppression. No nuance.
Drawing on Sedgwick (1997), Alvesson & Spicer (2025) propose a reparative critique that is:
- Open to surprises – not anticipatory.
- Additive – not mimetic.
- Weak theory – not strong theory.
- Attentive to pleasure – not just negative affect.
- Ameliorative – not just exposure.
Burrell (Chapter 28) describes the handbook as a swarm – not one coherent projection, but a multitude of possibilities. CMS is a movement of permanent opposition.
- Part I: Theoretical approaches – critical theory, critical realism, poststructuralism, labour process theory.
- Part II: Key topics – identity, globalization, discourse, culture, ethics, history.
- Part III: Specialist disciplines – marketing, information systems, strategy, HRM, accounting.
- Part IV: Commentaries – hierarchy, labour process, critical management education.
Fournier & Grey (2000) characterize CMS by:
- De-naturalization – challenging taken-for-granted assumptions.
- Non-performativity – not aimed at improving efficiency.
- Reflexivity – questioning how we develop knowledge.
Always Knowing the Ending
The CMS literature pattern follows a familiar path: neoliberalism, managerialism, patriarchy, bureaucracy, or the various other “-isms” that populate the critical lexicon.
The empirical work, often based on a modest number of interviews, reveals that workers are oppressed, marginalized, or exploited.
They also often participate in their own oppression. The paper concludes by identifying some form of resistance—usually subtle, sometimes only visible to the researcher eager to find it.
What is striking is not that these findings are wrong. In many cases, they are undoubtedly correct. The problem is that the research seems to know what it will find before it begins. As Spicer and Alvesson put it, “the storyline often seems to be written before the research even starts.”
Ten Themes, One Pattern
The review of CMS publications between 2008 and 2020 identifies ten major themes: academia, alternative organizations, control and resistance, discourse, Foucauldian studies, gender, identity, Marxism, post-colonialism, and psychoanalysis. There are also several cross-cutting concerns like intersectionality and embodiment.
Within this group, however, a common structure of argument emerges.
The preferred theoretical resources have shifted over time from Marxist labour-process theory to poststructuralist analysis to psychoanalytic concepts.
The empirical sites have expanded from manufacturing workplaces to universities and digital platforms.
The result? They often produce predictable findings. “Many papers identified a novel, a particular group of people is oppressed, controlled, or marginalized.”