Mills, Albert J. and Tony Simmons

1995 Reading Organization Theory: A Critical Approach. Toronto, ON: Garamond Press. This is one of the required books for this OT class. The book is easy to read, but introduces some complications. Such as labor process theory of Braverman, and some postmodern theory. The book is a critical reading of OT, including some interesting critiques of Daft, Peters, Hammer, etc. It is not heavy with theory, but askes tough questions that can be uncomfortable. Why are their no chapters on race or ethnicity in the OT books? Where is the material on sexual harassment? Where is the view of labor, the workers presented in other OT books? Then the book sets out to make up for those silences.

Collins, David

1998 Organizational Change" Scoiological Perspectives. London: Routledge. This book is not soft on guru consulting or executive educaiton approaches to change and OT. The book is a shift form top-down to bottom-up views of OT and change, questions sacred concepts like consensus, and favoring a view of the world that is inherently complex, and not at all simple. Collins distrusts step-by-step change approaches and the functionalist paradigm represented in the upper right quadrant. The book includes CT, Marxist and other radical frames of reference on OT and change. It also gets into Braverman's labor process theories of deskilling.

Linstead, Stepher, Robert Grafton Small and Paul Jeffcut (Eds.)

1996 Understanding Management. London: Sage. The book raises a number of puzzlements about OT and management. The author includes work by cultural anthropologists questining the indeological infrastructure of management. Chapters draw upon comparative fieldwork in capitalist and communist countries. There is a critique of AT&T. Also a look at how identity is constructed. The book contains pieces that from a CT point of reference are skeptical of postmodern work. But there are also examples of postmodern consulting. In short it is a diverse collection. It could fit in left or right bottom quadrants. To me it leans more to the uncomfortable quesitons.

Alvesson, Mats & Hugh Willmott

1996 Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Each author has done lots of critical work. This book has critiques of the Guru Consutlants and much of the Guru Executive Education work. The empowerment, TQM, Tom Peters, and Hamm-reengineering works are the subject of much deconstruction. The book is unique in a call to do deconstruction with the labor process theory of Braverman and Marx. It is both complicated and can make the uninitiated uncomfortable. It challenges views assumed to be the bedrock of management and OT.

Korten, David C.

Fulop, Liz and Stephen Linstead

1999 Management: A Critical Text. Austrailia: MacMillian Educatoin Australia Pty Ltd. This is another edited collection. They take a decidedly critical approach to management. They are familiar with the Burrell (1997) book. They take executives with fat salaries to task. They ask "who would want to be a manager? Theirs is a critical inquiry, not finding flaws and weakness, but a way to imrove managers' abilities to deal with the problems they face. The book contains material on liberal and radical feminism; masculine and feminine voice, post-heroic leadership, etc. It does this in the context of traditional theory, but gives each a twist.

Jacques' book (somone borrowed it).

Casey, (this one too).

Clegg. Stewart R.

1989 Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. When I met Clegg I took him for a ride on the Harley to see what he was made of. He likes HAWGS just fine. Frameworks of power does many things, one is to develop a critical and postmodern analysis of power. This view of power is the most complex around. Circuits of power is a "discursive field of force" socially constructed by human agency by virtue of organizing (1989: 17). Circuits of power is a three dimension theory. First, the episodic power relations, agencies in social relations. Second, dispositional power, the obligatory passage points fixed in rules of meaning and relationship. Third, the facilitative power relations of the techniques of discipline and production. Clegg (1989: 239) proposes that power can be analyzed as moving through three distinct and interacting circuits in his relational articulation of how power flows and is calibrated in organizations at the juncture between social and system integration. For Clegg (1989: 239) it is the fixing or rules of practices that make facilitative the "core of power." And what is neat about the theory is that it puts both empowerment (upper right quadrant) and disempowerment (bottom quadrants) in the same model of power. He also covers Lukes Foucault, Weber, and Marx. It is complex and it can make the status quo very uncomfortable.

Burrell, Gibson

1998 Pandemonium : Towards a Retro-Organization Theory. London: Sage. This book is a postmodern tour de force. Burrell is critical of contingency theory (e.g. Daft and Robbins) and wants something more. He picks up on the history of the peasantariat as a way to get critical about OT, in what he calls a "Retro-OT." He is also critical of the late modern approaches to postmodern OT (e.g. Bergquist and some of my stuff too). To write a postmodern text he divides the top from the bottom of the page inviting the reader to read the top half of the book from left to right, and then return along the bottom half of pages to complete the journey The book applies the genealogy approach of Foucault, to understaind how ideas in Ot have changed and modified with power, knowledge, and the body. The body is the site of disciplinary practices. He raises challenges asking (following Bauman) if the Holocaust is related to modern OT, to division of labor and depersonalization. The book tries to be non-linear and for that reason alone it is complex. But, also complex because it makes the reader aware of the dark side of the postmodern condition, covering de Sade, Nietzsche, Kafka and Sartre. Not a book that finds its way onto many OT course reading lists in the US. Not yet.

Foucault, Michele

1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the prison. Trans. By Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage Books. Where do I begin. This book demonstrates genealogical postmodern and critical theory. It links knowledge and power to OT in ways that have influenced so many of our works. It is also a good read. It takes a walk on the dark side of punishment in the birth of prisons, with its torture chambers. But, then as it skates through modernity, one wonders if the work prisons are not worse than the torture chambers. Then by the end the concepts of surveillance and panoptic control are brought up to the late modern condition. Instead of finding fault with this leader or that corporation, Foucault is able to see us all caught up in idea systems over which we have little control. We can resist, but in many cases it is futile.

Marx, Karl

1867 Das Kaptal: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Hamberg: Verlag von Otto Meissner; NY: L. W. Schmidt. English version (1967), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, The Process of Capitalist Production. Trans. By Samual Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels. NY: International Publishers. There are some readings from Marx we will do. As stated his chapters on labor process are foundational to CT. But, I resonate with his descriptions of child labor, the struggle for the eight hour day, the tactics used by corporations to stall these initiatives. His focus is on the production system of capitalism as it eclipses feudal production. But, unlike Weber who also does this work, Marx has a game plan, to overthrow managerialism, but in the end realizes the dream will not happen. Still his focus is to bring democratic control to the firm and to have local control of the corporate giants.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

1886/1973 Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin Books Ltd. I have already stated my summary above let me add a quote or two:

"Of life's middday! Oh festival! Oh garden of summer! I wait in restless ecstasy, I stand and watch and wait - where are you, friends? It is you I await, in readiness day and night. Come now! It is time you were here! (BGE, p. 222).

"It should be noted at once that in this first type of morality the antithesis 'good' and 'bad' means the same thing as 'noble' and 'despicable' - the antithesis 'good' and 'evil' originates elsewhere… The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges 'what harms me is harmful in itself,' he knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values" (BGE, p. 195).