On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies

Abstract

The article reconceptualizes the meaning of emancipation in management and organization studies and develops an approach that (a) takes into account recent criticism of its “totalizing” tendencies raised by post structuralists and (b) makes it more sensitive to the particularities of—and thereby more relevant for—management studies. The first part of the article reviews and discusses tendencies in critical theory toward negativism, essentialism, and intellectualism. The second part reformulates the grand enterprise of emancipation into a more modest project, scaled down in terms of scope and ambition. The third part discusses ways of advancing this protect in terms of listening, writing, and reading.