tl;dr: Putting politics in management and organization research while managing cultural differences in transatlantic scholarship.
Attending a large international management conference with more than 10,000 participants from all over the planet is a great opportunity for some second-order observations: observe how others observe. This exercise in the sociology of international, cross-cultural scholarship reveals some interesting insights. One of these insights is the lack of politics in management research, the blindness to the political economy – in Paul Adler’s words – in which managerial activities take place and organizations thrive, survive, struggle and die. Certain more recent developments like political CSR notwithstanding, I find it hard to understand that, for example, in a strategy session on climate change, the majority of the discussion was focused on the strategic implications for issues like structuring your supply chain. The corporation, especially the multi-national corporation as (a) embedded in a political-economic environment as well as (b) being a deeply political actor itself was hardly reflected. This is insofar even more puzzling that there seems to be a general, or superficial, understanding that private sector companies are key actors when it comes to dealing with issues like climate change or other societal grand challenges. So why not fully embrace politics and political-economic issue in managerial research and push for a »political turn« in management and organization research? As a Sustainability researcher and postgrowth advocate, this just feels natural to me.
But me feeling so at home when thinking about management and politics so closely related, in fact understanding private sector companies as potential transformative actors for a very different global economic system, might just be my own cultural bias as a European scholar. And this is the second of my insights: North American and European scholars are performing their scholarship very differently, they are at home in very different sociological reference frames and probably draw on a different understanding and structure of their cultural and knowledge capital. I can only speak about North America and Europe, as these were the backgrounds of the vast numbers of scholars I met – and even in non-Western scholars you could see these two very different »foils of scholarly action« at work. In North America, management scholars are highly professionalized and map themselves onto clear peer networks and career structures. Which discipline, which academic society, which division of that society are you in? Then this settles where you publish and what kind of research you accept as legitimate. In contrast, European scholars might appear rather ecclectic and philosophical, drawing on a larger variety of backgrounds and sources and also being more used to working inter- and transdisciplinary. Are these the two pathways for managerial research from which we have to choose? It would make transatlantic scholarly exchange and collaboration difficult – but probably also very inspiring, once you worked yourself through the cultural differences.
Postscriptum 7 August: at least in the SIM and ONE divisions of the Academy of Management there seems to be an emerging consensus about the necessity of a »political turn« for management & organization research & teaching. That truly would be promising! #TransformativeScience