Ethnography is at the heart of what researchers in management and organization studies do. This crucial book offers a robust and original overview of ''doing'' organizational ethnography, guiding readers through the essential qualitative methods for the study of organizations. Preparing students to enter the field with a confident outlook and a toolkit of skills, chapters present a series of action-learning projects to arm readers with practical exercises that will hone the abilities of the organizational ethnographer. Expert contributors offer crucial outlines into a variety of essential skills, including shadowing, autoethnography, interviews, media analysis and storytelling. The book concludes with a chapter by a doctoral student, providing unique insights into the development of the ethnographic understanding of organizational realities. Featuring useful exercises and an accessible style, this book is critical reading for PhD and Masters students in business administration and organizational theory, as well as social science students undertaking qualitative methodology programmes. It will also be useful for students on MBA courses in need of a humanistic approach to organizations.

Ethnography is at the heart of what researchers in management and organization studies do. This crucial book offers a robust and original overview of ''doing'' organizational ethnography, guiding readers through the essential qualitative methods for the study of organizations. Preparing students to enter the field with a confident outlook and a toolkit of skills, chapters present a series of action-learning projects to arm readers with practical exercises that will hone the abilities of the organizational ethnographer. Expert contributors offer crucial outlines into a variety of essential skills, including shadowing, autoethnography, interviews, media analysis and storytelling. The book concludes with a chapter by a doctoral student, providing unique insights into the development of the ethnographic understanding of organizational realities. Featuring useful exercises and an accessible style, this book is critical reading for PhD and Masters students in business administration and organizational theory, as well as social science students undertaking qualitative methodology programmes. It will also be useful for students on MBA courses in need of a humanistic approach to organizations.

Discussions of feminism and gender in organizations and management studies, have, with some notable exceptions, become stuck in something of a time-warp. This lies in stark contrast to the developments in the fields of feminism and gender theory more generally. Management and organization studies needs new applied topical gender theories that challenge the limits on what can be said about working lives in organizations. Gender and the Organization: Women at Work in the 21st Century looks to update management organizational studies with the recent developments in gender theory, including theories of embodiment, affect, materiality, identity, subjectification, recognition, and the intertwining of political, social and the psyche. As well as looking backwards at existing feminist and gender theory, this exciting book also looks forward, developing an organizational feminist theory for the twenty-first century. Exploring what feminist ethics of an organization would look like, this volume shows what a revivified feminist organization studies could offer to gender theorists more generally. This book will be of interest not only to management and organization theorists, but also more generally to feminist and gender theorists working across the social sciences, arts and humanities. It will appeal to postgraduate and research students and also to established organization and management scholars working in business schools across the world.

Discussions of feminism and gender in organizations and management studies, have, with some notable exceptions, become stuck in something of a time-warp. This lies in stark contrast to the developments in the fields of feminism and gender theory more generally. Management and organization studies needs new applied topical gender theories that challenge the limits on what can be said about working lives in organizations. Gender and the Organization: Women at Work in the 21st Century looks to update management organizational studies with the recent developments in gender theory, including theories of embodiment, affect, materiality, identity, subjectification, recognition, and the intertwining of political, social and the psyche. As well as looking backwards at existing feminist and gender theory, this exciting book also looks forward, developing an organizational feminist theory for the twenty-first century. Exploring what feminist ethics of an organization would look like, this volume shows what a revivified feminist organization studies could offer to gender theorists more generally. This book will be of interest not only to management and organization theorists, but also more generally to feminist and gender theorists working across the social sciences, arts and humanities. It will appeal to postgraduate and research students and also to established organization and management scholars working in business schools across the world.

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a novel way that is likely to resonate with academics, policy makers and practitioners engaged in the organization of public services delivery as it is from a perspective that challenges many received ideas in this field.

Starting from the perspective of critical management studies, the contributors to this volume embed a critical perspective on policy orthodoxy around critical public services policy and management studies (CPPMS). In so doing the authors bring together previous disparate fields of public services policy and public services management, but more importantly, debate and present what 'critical' constitutes when applied to public services policy and management. This edited collection presents chapters from a broad range of public services domains including health, education, prisons, local and central government and deals with a range of contemporary issues facing public services managers are examined, including regulation of professions, risk management, user involvement, marketing and leadership.

What is management and how do the people who become managers take on a managerial identity?

How does text inform the manager's identity?
From cultural studies we understand that the relationship between text and reader is not passive but that each one works upon the other, and that text is active in forming the identity of the reader. This books is the first to analyse how many management textbooks construct their readers. It analyses management textbooks published since the 1950s and shows they construct a world in which chaos is kept at bay only by strong management, and in which strong management is based upon the rationality of modernity. This book exposes and analyses such claims-to-truths, and theorizes their arguments using the work of Butler and Foucault, the sociology of scientific knowledge, critical legal studies, art history and queer theory.

By revealing a postmodern turn in management textbooks, The Social Construction of Management is both a critical and empirical study that explores the constitution of managerial identities in the age of mass education in management. An exciting contribution to the growing body of knowledge within critical management studies, this book challenges the way we think about organizations and their management, and about management education as a whole. This is thought provoking reading for anyone studying management, or working in the managerial organization.

'What is CMS for and what might its future be- both inside the domain of academia and outside it? It's a question that has beguiled and frustrated academics within and outside its community. At the hear of CMS is an enduring skepticism concerning the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing ideas and forms of management and organization. Using ideas from feminist and queer theory, authors of this volume aim to generate some thinking and possibly a nascent agenda. It focuses on the future of CMS but also intertwines it with ideas as to how scholarly communities can engage in working lives differently.

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a novel way that is likely to resonate with academics, policy makers and practitioners engaged in the organization of public services delivery as it is from a perspective that challenges many received ideas in this field. Starting from the perspective of critical management studies, the contributors to this volume embed a critical perspective on policy orthodoxy around critical public services policy and management studies (CPPMS). In so doing the authors bring together previous disparate fields of public services policy and public services management, but more importantly, debate and present what 'critical' constitutes when applied to public services policy and management. This edited collection presents chapters from a broad range of public services domains including health, education, prisons, local and central government and deals with a range of contemporary issues facing public services managers are examined, including regulation of professions, risk management, user involvement, marketing and leadership.

Inspired by the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, influenced by Marx's theory of alienation and intrigued by theories of death, this book develops an anti-methodological approach to studying working lives. Distinctions are drawn between labour (the tasks we do in our jobs) and work (self-making activities that are carried out at the workplace): between the less than human, zombie-like laborer and the working human self. Nancy Harding argues that the experience of being at work is one in which the insistence on practising one's humanity always provides a counter-point to organisational demands.

Despite a substantial body of work arguing for a new form of writing about management, organisations, workers, ourselves, and our lives, these calls are ironically made within the traditional scientific language. This volume of Dialogues in Critical Management Studies makes an important effort to facilitate the growth of a nascent movement to write differently and thus capitalise on the fruitful and creative margins which this opens up. Writing Differently is a critical, insightful, poetic and timely collection of essays, poems, plays and auto-ethnographic pieces that showcases the potential of academic writing. These texts reflect how writing is not always something we control or have agency over, demonstrate the multiple ways of expressions that are possible when we write about that which matters and exhibit the rich and varied forms of writing that emerge in the processes of being involved in scholarly work. The volume will be of interest to those interested in alternative ways of working, researching, thinking, organizing, writing research and research lives.

Although governments believe that the key to efficient health services lies in organisations run by inspiring leaders who stimulate the most efficient forms of management, many people working in health services, including managers, and an increasing number of academics, are discomforted by such a belief system. This books aims to provide a language in which such discomfort may be articulated. Its objectives are to nurture scepticism about the benefits of management, to debunk the notion that management is merely a technical device to promote efficiency, and to reveal the oppressiveness of managerialism. It thus challenges mainstream management texts, which seek unthinkingly to guide people in the impossible task of good management. Contributors, many of whom were experienced health managers before becoming academics, are drawn from across the social sciences. They illustrate how beliefs in 'grand practices' such as economics or evidence-based medicine are misplaced, and explore the potential of an ethical management of health services. They investigate the experiences of managers doing management and reveal that it is impossible for managers to do management. This book should be of interest to graduate students of public sector management, to lecturers and researchers in public sector management and to public sector managers themselves -- or those working with them.

In this study the social construction of dementia is examined closely for the first time. Nancy Harding and Colin Palfrey show how Western society sees dementia as a disease, rather than a natural part of the ageing process. They take issue with the constructed view of the body as a machine, whose parts 'break down' and need replacement. Furthermore, the authors argue, the various explanations of the causes of dementia are nothing but speculation dressed up as theories, which serve only to confuse the carers. Based on an intensive three-year-long evaluation of a community care service for older people with dementia, `The Social Construction of Dementia' looks at the experience of users and providers alike, and provides a refreshing new viewpoint on the `disease' of dementia.