A lecture introducing critical theory, specifically some ideas from political ecology, to MA librarianship students on their Management module at the University of Sheffield. N.B. All images (except Marx and Illich pics) are by Clifford Harper (http://www.agraphia.co.uk/home.html) and are used entirely without permission.

1. A critical approach
to management
Dan Grace

2. “How librarians became Thatcherite
and the myth of TINA”
• What is the article about?
• What relevance does it have to you now
and in your future jobs?
• Do you agree with the points made?
• How does what the articles say relate to
what you’ve learnt so far on this module
and your wider experience?

3. ‘ruthless criticism of all that
exists, ruthless both in the
sense of not being afraid of the
results it arrives at and in the
sense of being just as little
afraid of conflict with the
powers that be’
(Marx 1844)

4. Critical Theory seeks to:
Expose the hidden assumptions of other theories and
ideologies.
AND
Expand the interpretation of the world beyond the
economic. That is it assumes:
• History shapes us and we shape it;
• Mode of production is embedded in culture;
• Knowledge is socially constructed;
• Critic as participant.
(Leckie & Buschman 2010)
Challenging
TINA

5. Critical Management Studies seeks to:
“…take business and management as objects of study
but also to approach them as parts of the capitalist
system and to critique them on those grounds.”
(Swann and Stoborod 2014, 594-595)
…in the context of
management?

6. What is
neoliberalism?
“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political
economic practices that proposes that human well-being can
best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and
free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an
institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”
(Harvey 2007, 1)

7. “[M]anagers act to intermediate between those who deploy
resources to dominate and exploit others, and others who
are subordinated in such a process.”
(Alvesson and Willmott 2012, 21)
What, then, is
management?

8. The political is the “broadly shared public space, an
idea of living together” which is colonised by politics,
“a particular sociological imaginary of ‘the people’,
‘organisation’, ‘management’” and so on.
(Swyngedouw 2014, 90-91)
Politics
Vs.
the political
“The (re-)production of everyday life through work
lies at the foundation of every economic and political
system.”
(Wigger 2014, 739)

9. Critical theory PracticePraxis
How do I use
Critical Theory?

10. Break – 10 mins

11. “A wave of disruption is sweeping in
to challenge neoliberalism”
• What is article about?
• What relevance does it have to you now
and in your future jobs?
• Do you agree with the points made?
• How does what the article has to say
relate to what you’ve learnt so far on this
module, your wider experience and what
we were discussing in the first half?

12. "Once upon a time, there was barter. It was
difficult. So people invented money. Then came
the development of banking and credit."
(Graeber 2011, 28)
The founding myth of the
market

13. "People called commons that part of the environment
which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their
own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized
claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to
provide for the subsistence of their households.”
(Illich 1983)
Neither
State
nor
market

14. Investigating human-environment
interaction, so we do “not
conceptualis[e] natural resources
as finite givens (in danger of being
exhausted), but as aspects of
socioecological environments that
are continually constructed
through cultural and historical
processes.”
(Paulson 2014, 46)
Political
ecology

15. State
OR
Hierarchy
Market
OR
Exchange
Commons
OR
Mutual aid
Social
relationships

16. What do we
manage?
Commons
OR
Mutual aid
State
OR
Hierarchy
Market
OR
Exchange
People Friendship/
Citizenship
Subject
resource
Rational
individuals
Information Relationship/
Subsistence
Object
resource
Commodity
Management as a technical process
(Politics)
Management as a socioecological process
(the political)

17. “The world does not contain
any information. It is as it is.
Information about it is created
in the organism through its
interaction with the world.”
(Illich 1973, 86)

18. What now?
• Reflective practice assignment and
dissertation
• Reflective practice at work
• Critical Theory reading group
Individual
Collective
• Radical Librarians Collective
• Workplace activities

19. References
Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2012). Making sense of management: a critical
introduction (2nd ed). Los Angeles ; London: SAGE.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y: Melville House.
Harvey, D. (2011). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. London: Calder and Boyars.
Illich, I. (1983, Winter). Silence is a Commons. CoEvolution Quarterly, (40), 4–22.
Leckie, G. J., & Buschman, J. (2010). Introduction: The Necessity
for Theoretically Informed Critique in Library and Information Science (LIS). In
G. J. Leckie, L. M. Given, & J. Buschman (Eds.), Critical theory for library and
information science: exploring the social from across the disciplines (pp. vii–xxii).
Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited.
Marx, K. (1844). Letter to Ruge. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, (1). Retrieved
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
Paulson, S. (2014). Political ecology. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, & G. Kallis (Eds.),
Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era (pp. 45–48). Abingdon, Oxon ; New York,
NY: Routledge.
Swann, T., & Stoborod, K. (2014). Did you hear the one about the anarchist
manager? Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 14(4), 591–609.