LAUSR

The task of this introduction to “critical management” is twofold. First, it presents a short overview of what management actually is, outlining four different perspectives on management, while the second part delivers a critical-analytical overview of recent articles published on critical management in the journal Critical Sociology between 1989 and today. The first part starts by highlighting the difference between management and “critical” management. In doing so, it also distinguishes between four perspectives on management (see Table 1). Before getting into the details of these four perspectives on management the question “what is management?” (Magretta, 2012) should briefly be addressed. Ever since Fayol’s (1841–1925) six functions of management – planning, organising, staffing, directing, coordinating, and controlling – and even more so since Frederick Winslow Taylor’s (1856–1915) short book on “scientific management”, they and their entourage of affirmative writers (e.g. Ford, Ackoff, Drucker, Chandler, Porter, Jack Walsh, Peters, Kotter, Hamel, Handy, Herzberg, Kanter, Mayo, Mintzberg, Weick, etc.) have sought to give management the appearance of being mathematical, logical, engineeringlike, rational, and even scientific. It has been Taylor’s (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management that more or less singlehandedly invented management while giving it the appearance of being scientific. Taylor did this by introducing two forms of division of labour inside companies: the first is his classical (horizontal) division of work into minute work tasks. Perhaps even more important has been Taylor’s second (vertical) division because it destroyed the craft knowledge of workers about how to make things, placing this knowledge firmly into the hands of those who now organise and manage the manufacturing process: management. Through that, management gained widespread acceptance and ideological legitimacy. But Taylor’s so-called “scientific management” reads – at least in parts – like an ideology. Especially when he writes that a worker is