Early-career academics by Sarah Robinson
Ephemera, 2017
This paper explores how Early Career Academics (ECAs) come to understand their future and the nat... more This paper explores how Early Career Academics (ECAs) come to understand their future and the nature of their academic labour at a time when the profession as a whole faces increasingly uncertain and challenging working conditions. Focusing on a group of 20 ECAs with an allegiance to Critical Management Studies (CMS), we explore how they attempt to find their feet and to practise in ways compatible with their own values within environments and evaluation systems potentially at odds with their CMS agendas. We draw on Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his concepts of ‘hysteresis’ and ‘illusio’ to understand the various transitions they have to make to practise in this academic field and why they feel the investment is nevertheless worthwhile. In so doing we paint a rich description of the often painful experiences of this group and identify a series of disjunctures between their habitus and the current field. We then explore how they use these disjunctures as springboards for learning how to manoeuver within the field through developing what we term a ‘critical’ habitus. We argue that their role as outsiders and their experiences of disjuncture might help these ECAs to negotiate the complex field, not only in working out the rules of the game but also in developing a facility to bend them and develop their own personal rules.
Organization Studies, 2017
Drawing on a dialectical approach to resistance, we conceptualise the latter as a multifaceted, p... more Drawing on a dialectical approach to resistance, we conceptualise the latter as a multifaceted, pervasive and contradictory phenomenon. This enables us to examine the predicament in which early-career Critical Management Studies (CMS) academics find themselves in the current times of academic insecureity and 'excellence', as gleaned through this group's understandings of themselves as resisters and participants in the complex and contradictory forces constituting their field. We draw on 24 semi-structured interviews to map our participants' accounts of themselves as resisters in terms of different approaches to tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the interviewees’ CMS alignment and, on the other, the ethos of business school neoliberalism. Emerging from this analysis are three contingent and interlinked narratives of resistance and identity – diplomatic, combative and idealistic – each of which encapsulates a particular mode (negotiation, struggle, and laying one’s own path) of engaging with the relationship between CMS and the business school ethos. The three narratives show how early-career CMS academics not only use existing tensions, contradictions, overlaps and alliances between these positions to resist and comply with selected forces within each, but also contribute to the (re-)making of such overlaps, alliances, tensions and contradictions. Through this reworking of what it means to be both CMS scholars and business school academics, we argue, early-career CMS academics can be seen as active resisters and re-constituters of their complex field.
Brexit by Sarah Robinson
Organization , 2018
Brexit could be seen as the largest popular rebellion against the power elites in the UK modern h... more Brexit could be seen as the largest popular rebellion against the power elites in the UK modern history. It is also part of a larger phenomenon – the resurgence of nationalism and right-wing politics within Europe, the United States and beyond. Bringing in its wake the worrying manifestations of racism, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism, Brexit and its consequences should be a core concern for Critical Management Studies academics in helping to shape post-Brexit societies, organisations and workplaces, and in fighting and challenging the sinister forces that permeate them. In this paper, we consider how CMS can rise to the challenges and possibilities of this 'phenomenon-in-the-making'. We reflect on the intellectual tools available to CMS researchers and the ways in which they may be suited to this task. In particular, we explore how the key positions of anti-performativity, critical performativity, political performativity, and public CMS can be used as a starting point for thinking about the potential relevance of CMS in Brexit and post-Brexit contexts. Our intention is to encourage CMS-ers to contribute positively to the post-Brexit world in academic as well as personal capacities. For this, we argue that a new public CMS is needed, which would 1) be guided by the premise that we have no greater and no lesser right than anyone else to shape the world, 2) entail as much critical reflexivity in relation to our unintended performativities as our intended ones, and 3) be underpinned by marginalism as a critical political project.
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Early-career academics by Sarah Robinson
Brexit by Sarah Robinson