Case in Point: Scaffolding for a Critical Turn in the Sciences of Management

Abstract

The arrival of a critical turn in the contemporary sciences of management was not unexpected and prompted one of the established gurus of the managerial sciences, Henry Mintzberg, to proclaim that MBA programmes were dead. Based on narrowly dogmatic but institutionally privileged (it is tempting to label them ‘barren’) paradigms and irrelevant research, they were less than useful for future managers. So said Mintzberg during the Academy of Management annual conference in Honolulu in 2005. A critical attitude towards mainstream managerial sciences has subsequently become a permanent feature of the AoM publications.¹ By reconstructing critical incidents in the recent history of research communities we can track some of the individuals, ideas, events and processes that provided the scaffolding for this critical turn. For example, we might ask, when did the first get-together of researchers who later shaped critical management studies take place? When were the basic ideas that led to this meeting first articulated? Flows of ideas and the emergence of schools and research topics are still easier to track through the memoirs of retired researchers and by following their informal chats than through openly accessible information sources on research communities and their outputs.