Abstract:
Over the past decades there have been persistent radical critiques of management.
Previously the goal was to apply forms of Marxian analysis to the world of managpnent
and organizations, usully seeing it as a sphere of false consciousness, distorted and
unreflective practices, and three-dimensional power or hegemony. Surprisingly, even after the
Marxist scaffoldings that supported such claims have been deamstructed-both practically
and theoretically-there are still current contributions to management thought that seek to
resuscitate the same critiques, often under the rubric of Critical Management Studies. These
representations seem incrmsingly bizarre, given the theoretical currents emanatingfrom poststructuralist
and postmodem thought that have been emergent in recent years, associated
ideas such as polyphony, difference, deconstruction and translation. In this article we draw
on these sources to produce a different representation of management-one that we would
argue acts as an effective counter-factual to that which provides support to some of the central
tendencies manifest in critical approaches to management. Rather than seeing modern
management as necessarily a totalitarian practice, one that should necessarily be subject to a
negative critique, we would argue that, at its best, it enables polyphony rather than tyranny,
and the possibility to be both critical and for management.
