This detailed English write-up introduces the paper “Critical Management Studies: From One-Dimensional Critique to Three-Dimensional Scepticism” by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer. The authors argue that Critical Management Studies (CMS) currently faces significant shortcomings due to its reliance on a “one-dimensional critique,” and they propose a shift towards a more nuanced “three-dimensional thinking” to revitalize the field.
The Problem: One-Dimensional Critique
The core issue identified is that much of the existing work in CMS has become stale and preoccupied with standard objects for critique. This “one-dimensional critique” is characterized by:
- Focus on Negation: It primarily centers on the negation of a dominant social order, often immediately taking an oppositional stance without fully understanding a phenomenon’s complexity. This means researchers frequently provide “thin descriptions” followed by “thick critique” but offer an “entirely absent account of better alternatives”.
- Formulaic and Repetitive: Critiques are described as authoritarian, obscurant, exhibiting “formulaic radicalism” and “empirical minimalism”. The lines of questioning and patterns of negation are often the same, leading to “cookie-cutter critique” with repetitive claims (e.g., managers are power-hungry, neo-liberalism is negative, marginalized groups suffer). This does not enrich knowledge and means researchers repeatedly cover familiar ground.
- Lack of Imaginative Alternatives: One-dimensional critique rarely translates into meaningful attempts to imagine realistic alternatives, often confining proposed solutions to narrow, small-scale, localist participatory models, thus leading to a “one-dimensional understanding of alternatives”.
- Critical Paranoia: This approach is likened to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “hermeneutics of suspicion” or “critical paranoia”. Key features of this include:
- Strong Anticipation: Critics start with assumptions and seek out minor indicators to confirm them.
- Mimesis: Suspicion spreads, leading to repetition of existing insights, even for tangentially related issues.
- Strong Theory: Assumptions are treated as universally applicable, neglecting local nuances.
- Negative Affect: An over-focus on identifying and protecting from darker emotions (anxiety, domination), often neglecting neutral or positive aspects.
- Faith in Exposure: The belief that merely “unveiling” hidden structures of domination is a revolutionary act. This leads to repetitive findings and conclusions, making critical practices narrow and out of touch.
The Solution: Three-Dimensional Thinking / Reparative Critique
To address these problems, the authors advocate for “three-dimensional thinking,” which involves understanding, questioning, and reparation. This approach draws heavily on Sedgwick’s idea of “reparative critique”.
- Reparative Critique’s Differences from Paranoid Critique:
- Openness to Surprises: Instead of being highly anticipatory, it’s open to unexpected features and novel ways of thinking.
- Additive: It focuses on observations and practices that add something new, rather than merely repeating existing insights.
- Weak Theory: It uses smaller concepts that explain particular empirical phenomena in limited settings, rather than universally applicable “strong theory”.
- Attention to Positive/Neutral Aspects: Critics are attuned not just to what is problematic, but also to positive and neutral aspects, offering a richer picture.
- Ameliorative: It aims to do more than just show problems; it seeks to improve upon them by suggesting what might be better in a particular setting. This approach aims to move beyond identifying the “dark side” and instead identify positive visions for the future of management, bringing to light richer and more complex realities with the hope of revealing alternatives.
The authors outline what this “reparative critique” looks like in practice through three distinct steps:
The Three Dimensions in Practice
1. Dimension One: Understanding
This initial stage emphasizes developing a careful and open-minded understanding of a phenomenon, fostering openness to surprise and new phenomena.
- Relaxing Assumptions:
- Avoiding “Usual Suspects”: Instead of immediately targeting predictable issues like patriarchy, capitalism, or neo-liberalism (which often come with pre-written storylines), critics should consider themes without clear good-vs-bad narratives.
- Challenging Political Agendas: Strong political commitments (e.g., intellectual activism tied to social justice) can lead to confirmation bias, a “hyper-critique” with negativity bias, and predictable, unoriginal claims, potentially missing important insights.
- Questioning Celebrated Concepts: For example, the assumption that “resistance” is always progressive should be relaxed, as it can undermine necessary work, safety, or diversity initiatives. Studies like Contu’s “decaff resistance” or Kunda and Rintamäki & Alvesson’s work on “private” resistance co-existing with compliance illustrate this complexity.
- Thick Description:
- In-Depth Study: After relaxing assumptions, researchers should undertake in-depth study to produce unpredictable, rich, and engaging stories of the selected phenomenon. This often involves primary empirical observation, such as ethnographic work, to observe tensions between talk and practice and uncover deeper, often repressed or tabooed, layers of meaning.
- Intellectual Attitude: It requires a combination of openness and theoretical sophistication to go beyond common sense and identify underlying patterns without imposing a specific, predictable theory. Techniques include defamiliarizing the everyday, using pre-understandings ambitiously, mobilizing alternative metaphors, looking for surprises, and turning logic on its head.
2. Dimension Two: Questioning
This stage moves from understanding to generating complex critique, employing “weak theory” and attending to positive, negative, and neutral aspects.
- Explore Dilemmas:
- Nuance over Blanket Rejection: Avoid blanket rejections of managerialism, neo-liberalism, or bureaucracy, recognizing that people (including critics) often benefit from and participate in these dynamics. The authors propose “anti-anti-isms” to acknowledge that while excess management can create problems, pure autonomy can lead to ineffectiveness or new tyrannies.
- Contextualizing Critique: Recognize that order, guidelines, and control can be necessary (e.g., for effective hospitals, schools), and improved efficiency can align with emancipatory ideals. Examples include scrutinizing “empowerment” (which can be a managerial technique), performance measurement (balancing accountability with academic complaints), and acknowledging bureaucracy’s benefits in reducing uncertainty and providing fairness.
- Nuanced Leadership: Explore more balanced ideas on leadership, moving beyond demonization, and considering concepts like “reflexive leadership” or “leadership on demand” where employees shape authority relationships.
- Human Imperfections: Identify contradictions in ordinary people and institutions, such as narcissism, self-imprisonment, or the preference for “functional stupidity” from below.
- Ironic Narratives:
- Moving Beyond Tragedy: Escape the “tragic narrative” common in CMS, which solely focuses on the dark and gloomy side of organizations and sees oppression everywhere.
- Acknowledging Other Aspects: Recognize neutral or positive aspects (e.g., excellence can motivate; fun at work isn’t always sinister).
- Complex Portrayals: Avoid portraying subjects as merely “conditionable creatures” or finding “resistance everywhere” in tiny, insignificant acts.
- Alternative Metaphors: Organizations can be seen as messy, confusing, fragmented, ambiguous—more like a “circus, a comedy, a spectacle, or a theatre” than an “iron cage”.
- Embracing Irony/Satire: Using irony as a narrative style captures absurdities, paradoxes, and incongruities, allowing for a more playful, less judgmental critique that questions assumptions. The “stupidity-based theory of organizations” is an example.
3. Dimension Three: Reparation
This final stage aims to make critique additive and ameliorative, opening new possibilities and fostering positive change.
- Deflation:
- Cutting Down Overinflated Concepts: This involves “cutting down to size” puffed-up or overinflated concepts in management (e.g., leadership, strategy, CSR), akin to the “emperor’s new clothes” fable.
- Impact: Deflation removes pretense, questions those who perpetuate myths, and exposes the foolishness of those in power. It symbolically “inoculates” audiences to harmful myths and declutters working lives of counterproductive fictions. Examples include exposing the “myth of smartness” with “functional stupidity” or showing how “wellness” measures can be counterproductive.
- Concept Creation:
- Constructing Alternatives: This goes beyond minimization to create new insights and alternative understandings that can trigger new practices and potentially more emancipatory practices.
- Techniques:
- Relativization: Presenting dominant organizational practices alongside other alternatives to show multiple ways to organize. Examples include contrasting corporate forms with other organizational ecologies or “leaderization” with other coordination mechanisms like management, bureaucracy, or “leadership on demand”.
- Reversal: Exploring the flip side of dominant concepts, such as focusing on socialist elements in large corporations, “slowness” as an alternative to obsession with speed, or “subtracting” activities instead of adding more initiatives (e.g., reducing “organizational sludge”).
- Specific Alternative Practices: Proposing concrete ideas, such as “anti-stupidity management” measures like using a devil’s advocate, reflexive exercises, or “bullshit bingo” to foster critical reflection and employee responsibility.
In conclusion, this paper encourages CMS to move beyond its current limitations by being more ambitious, imaginative, and curious. By adopting a three-dimensional approach of understanding, questioning, and reparation, CMS can offer novel insights, identify realistic positive alternatives, and engage with the complexities of organizational life beyond just “the dark side”.
Reference: Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2025). Critical management studies: From one-dimensional critique to three-dimensional scepticism. Journal of Management Studies, 0(0), 2-24. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13256
