‘Feminism and Critical Race Theory? That’s Chapter 12’.
Doing Critical Management Studies as if Feminism and
Critical Race Theory Really Mattered.
Convenors
Dr Diane Grimes, Syracuse University, US
Dr Deborah Jones, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Professor Beverly Metcalfe, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Jennifer Mease, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Dr Pat Parker, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Sarah Proctor-Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand
Dr Valerie Stead, Lancaster University Management School, UK
Dr Elaine Swan, Lancaster University Management School, UK
Stream Description
This conference stream invites papers and work in progress from
those wishing to examine the marginalisation of feminist and critical
race theorising in Critical Management Studies (CMS). We take CMS
to work as a subfield of study, a growing body of knowledge, a way
of organising and producing knowledge, and a network of power.
In a recent book, Martin Parker writes that the CMS identity claims
that it has ‘broad left, pro-feminist, anti-imperialist’ sympathies
(2002: 117). We beg to differ: in our view, CMS has gone little
beyond the tactic of ‘add women and stir’. Our argument is that
feminism and critical race theory have been largely ignored by
much of the writing within CMS. CMS scholars have shown
a reliance on, or perhaps a phallic fascination with, male
philosophical writers (e.g. Derrida, Foucault). They have given
space to feminist theorists in tokenist ways, citing only certain
famous feminists such as Butler and Haraway and then only
marginal sections of their work: for example, by citing Judith Butler
and her work on Derrida and Foucault when in fact she also draws
extensively on feminist writers such as Cixous, Irigaray and Fraser.
In these ways, feminism and critical race theory are seen as subthemes or even ‘derivatives’ of CMS. As our title suggests, most key
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critical management studies texts place gender and race, feminists
and critical race theorists in one chapter, or literally in the margins.
But more than this, we suggest that CMS produces knowledge and
spaces within the academy based on certain unexamined practices
of inclusion and exclusion. After Sara Ahmed (1998), we want to
examine under what conditions feminism and critical race theory,
and feminists and critical race theorists are included in CMS. In
what ways does CMS authorise and define what and who counts?
More importantly, we want to explore how feminism and critical
race theory can ‘speak back’ to CMS. Our argument here is not
meant to stabilise, essentialise or fix these studies: for example,
there is not just one feminism. We do want to recognise, however,
how CMS operates as a ‘gendered [and racialised] modality of
enunciation’ which involves particular ways of organising concepts
and values (Ahmed 1998: 14). These have material gendered and
racialised effects which authorise certain texts, theories and
hierarchies of knowledge.
This stream proposes that one important way in which feminism
and critical race theory can talk back is by cutting the Gordian knot
of theory and practice which ties up CMS. Feminism and critical
race theory can do this by locating academics as practitioners in a
political world of sex, gendering, racialiastion, power and
knowledge. In contrast to the split - between us (academics) and
them (practitioners) - which constitutes a key binary in the
development of CMS, most feminists and critical race theorists in
organisational studies occupy the positions of both us-academics
and us-practitioners.
We agree that, as Valerie Fournier and Chris Grey have suggested,
CMS represents ‘a commitment to (some form of) denaturalization’
and so is associated with ‘an anti-performative stance’ (2000: p.8).
But much of CMS seems to marginalise the complex and
sophisticated feminist and critical race theory debates in which
‘denaturalizing’ tendencies join with an urgent performative drive to
make a difference. At the same time where the ‘denaturalizing’
theory of feminist and critical race theorists has been taken up, the
transformative critique largely neutralised. Thus, whilst there has
been recent discussion within CMS on making more connections
with practitioners, e.g. via studying or collaborating with social
movements, these seem to be constructed as CMS academics
helping to supplement a ‘lack’ by adding in some politicos. This
stream wants to debate whether CMS practitioners might take a
more reflexive approach by looking at the politics of their own
knowledge production – both in terms of what counts as knowledge
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and how racism and sexism are reproduced in academic institutions
including CMS.
In this stream we invite contributors to scrutinise both the
‘academic-practitioner’ sides of the binary. In particular, we would
like to explore the absence and presence of feminist and critical
race knowledges conceptually and empirically. We also want to
examine the conditions under which they are ‘included’ in CMS and
what these indicate about what CMS has achieved so far. Examples
of research informed by feminist and critical race theory which
‘speak back’ and offer alternative ways of doing CMS are
encouraged. We would also welcome submissions which locate the
production of CMS texts within gendered and racialised academic
practices whereby black men and women and white women
continue to be marginalised in all the typical ways that scholars of
male-dominated white organisations describe. We hope the stream
will go on to imagine ‘doing CMS as if feminism and critical race
theory really mattered’.
References
Ahmed, S. (1998) Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and
Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fournier, V. & Grey, C. (2000) ‘At the critical moment: Conditions
and prospects for critical management studies’. Human Relations,
53(1), 7-32.
Parker, M. (2002) Against Management. Cambridge: Polity.
Call for papers
We invite papers or workshops which do one or more of the
following:
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Explore, challenge and examine gendered and racialised
knowledge production in CMS and academia
Imagine, speculate, fantasise what CMS would look like if
feminism and critical race theory spoke back and were heard
Examine and address the gendered and racialised hierarchies
of knowledge in management and organisation theorising
Analyse the tensions/convergences between feminisms and
critical race theories, feminists and critical race theorists and
between these and CMS
Provide accounts of the implications of feminisms and critical
race theories for CMS and its espoused transformative
project/s
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Examine the terms on which who or what gets included and
authorised in CMS and the institutional practices and
apparatuses that produce these inclusions and exclusions
Address how methodologies and decisions about empirical
research sites for CMS can continue to collude in the
privileging of particular gendered and racialised thinking and
practices
Explore where and at what point social movements including
feminism become important and interesting enough to be
collaborated with in CMS
Conceptualise how feminisms and critical race theory enable
us to challenge, re-conceive, antagonise and reconfigure CMS
practices and theorising
This list is of course not exhaustive and we welcome different ideas
broadly related to the spirit and theme of the stream. Please
contact any of the convenors if you wish to discuss your paper or
work in progress.
Submission Deadlines
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Abstracts maximum 1000 words, A4 paper, single spaced, 12
point font to be submitted to Elaine Swan by 1st November
2008: e.swan@lancaster.ac.uk
Notification of acceptance of abstracts by 18th December
2008
Full paper to be submitted by 1st May 2009
Convenors Details
1. Dr Deborah Jones, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Email: Deborah.Jones@vuw.ac.nz
Dr Deborah Jones is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria Management
School in Wellington, New Zealand. She has published on gender,
ethnicity, equality and diversity in organisational studies. She is a
coordinator of OIL (Organisation, Identity and Locality), the Critical
Management Studies group in New Zealand.
2. Sarah Proctor-Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand
Email: Sarah.Proctor-Thomson@vuw.ac.nz
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Sarah Proctor-Thomson is a Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour,
and associate to the Centre for the Study of Leadership at Victoria
Management School, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand. She joined Victoria from the UK where she was a research
associate in the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, Lancaster
Management School, and a doctoral researcher in Women’s Studies.
Sarah is currently completing her PhD which contributes a discourse
analysis of the normalisation of gender and difference in the
‘creative’ digital media sector in the UK. She has published a
number of monographs and journal articles in the area of leadership
and leadership development and has also presented her recent
research on gender, difference and the creative industries in
national and international conferences.
3. Dr Elaine Swan, Lancaster University Management School, UK
Dr Elaine Swan is senior teaching fellow at Lancaster University
Management School. She is currently directing a 5 year research
project for the BBC on diversity and has recently co-directed a
national research project on race and gender in the learning skills
sector. She has published in the areas of gender, diversity and
equality, recently co-editing two special issues on equality and
diversity and has completed a book on gender and diversity in the
workplace with Dr Caroline Gatrell to be published by Sage in 2008.
Another major research interest for her is the interface between
therapeutic cultures and the workplace on which she is writing a
book entitled ‘Worked up Selves: Therapeutic Cultures, Personal
Development and Self Transformation in the Workplace’ to be
published by Palgrave in 2009.
Email: e.swan@lancaster.uk
Lead Convenor: Dr Elaine Swan
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