Critiquing management scholarship

Unique, unflinching, provocative-that's how reviewers describe a new book co-edited by Pushkala Prasad, Skidmore's Zankel Professor of Management for Liberal Arts Students. She calls it "throwing down the gauntlet" in critical management scholarship by challenging the traditionally peripheral status of postcolonialist, feminist, and other new approaches in the discipline.

According to its publisher, the Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies "showcases the pluralistic generation of CMS scholars that has emerged in recent years." The book's 24 essays by international scholars tackle such topics as "The 'Iron' in the Iron Cage: Retheorizing the Multinational Corporation as a Colonial Space," "Power Failure: The Short Life and Premature Death of Critical 'Diversity' Research," and "Sexualities and/in 'Critical' Management Studies."

Prasad says she and her co-editors—Anshuman Prasad of the University of New Haven, with Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills of Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia—have long been involved in critical management studies but have grown impatient with the field's tendency to limit its analyses to class and remain "unperturbed by its Eurocentric orientation." So their book foregrounds more racial, gender, and global dimensions of business, "especially in the non-Western world, which accounts for more than 85% of the planet's population."  

As Reviewer Shiv Ganesh of Massey University in New Zealand concludes, the book "significantly challenges, revises, pluralizes and expands the terrain of critical management studies."