Notes from AOM 2018

tl;dr: Management scholars need to embrace activism, not just because of the state of the world but because of the state of their field.

Every August since 2009 it is AOM season for me: the Academy of Management holds its annual meeting and around 10,000 management scholars from around the planet converge on one place for five days, filled with workshops, symposia, paper sessions and endless debates on the relevance, impacts and challenges of management as society’s dominant practice. Remember: it does not have to be fun to be fun. But every year there is something to chew on. Last year I was becoming aware of some of the differences between American and European management research, this year some things have been amplified.

First of all, my own small part in this huge amount of scholarly madness, a professional development workshop (PDW) on “Strategy Beyond Growth”. Together with Robert Perey from UTS Sydney, John Jermier from USF, Fergus Lyon from Middlesex, Lena Olaison from the CBS, and Glen Dowell from Cornell, we were looking into notions of sufficiency and degrowth as new strategic imaginaries for organisations and their strategy processes. This has been the 8th workshop on “beyond growth” issues, our little movement within the Academy in promoting degrowth ideas in management has found its place within the Critical Management Studies (CMS) division. Our session was packed with up to 50 people, a great turnout for a PDW, especially as we had some large “competitors” at the same timeslot, most prominently Henry Mintzberg. The success of this year’s PDW was probably down to teaming up with the Strategic Management (STR) division, having Glen as session chair of the Organization & Natural Environment (ONE) division on board, advertising heavily on several social media channels, and being now somewhat (in)famous for making challenging and interactive sessions. A note of advise for AOM novices: not all workshops are really workshops in which you can discuss and contribute, some are just paper sessions without papers.

These intellectual efforts of providing great sessions has also led to a special issue with Organization (SAGE) on ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Organizations and Organizing in a Post-Growth Era’. Long time colleagues Bobby Bannerjee from CASS, Ana Maria Paredo from University of Victoria, as well as Robert and John (see above) are guest editors. With this special issue we want to broaden and intensify the discussions on alternatives to economic growth on an organizational and managerial level. The deadline is May 2019. Interest in this special issue is already high as we receive lots of questions and letters of intent to participate in the call for papers. For AOM 2020, when the special issue will be out (or almost out), I will definitely try to get a symposium on the results into the program.

On a more meta-level when it comes to the state of the AOM and its scholars, I found it interesting how many discussions were focused on the need of management scholars to understand themselves as public intellectuals in the age of Brexit, Trump, populism and fake news. Within the AOM we see strong impulses for scholarly activism, to not just being researchers and teachers, but also citizens and activists. Andy Hoffman from Michigan is a leading example here as a management professor. This connects to notions of “acting up”, a topic especially in many CMS sessions at AOM 2018. As a German I could not help to think about Uwe Schneidewind and his concept of “transformative science“, assisting in the Great Transition towards Sustainability.

And here comes my issue(s). In Europe, we have research traditions that are, compared to the US, both more radical in their thoughts and theories as well as more practical when it comes to societal and political relevance. Participative action research, mode 2 research, transdisciplinarity: these are research traditions I myself was brought up with. These are not new issues but have been with us, especially in Sustainability-related research, for the last twenty, thirty years. Now while it is true that I have my own distorted worldview as a growth-critical management scholar, educated by an ecological economist and a system dynamicist at university, but there is a strange unearthly-ness to management scholarship in the Angloworld. I use that term deliberately because it marks a deeper divide in how our research practices and scholarship cultures manifest themselves. The Angloworld is comprising of the predominant English-speaking OECD countries and, to a lesser degree, those countries aligning with them in their (higher) educational traditions.

Be aware, this is me “feeling” the divide, I have not yet completely understood it. But while in Europe, e.g. Germany, a management researcher is valued for her practical contributions measured in third-party (mostly industry-based) funding for her research, the Angloworld follows a more “bloodless” approach of producing quantifiable output for highly ranked journals. Wait, I hear you say, isn’t that what we all do now? Yes and that is a problem. The focus on quantifiable journal output is moving management, as a science, away from its research object: to help managers with their organizational problems. This is the approach to business administration (“Betriebswirtschaftslehre”) in the German tradition of the field, following Eugen Schmalenbach and also Edmund Heinen. Of course, a journal publication can be practical oriented but then it is not in a high-ranked journal – and the high-ranking journals are all from the Angloworld and what makes a journal high-ranking is also defined within the cultural reference frame of the Angloworld. There is a real and present danger here of making management research, our very own scholarship, meaningless outside of the confines of academia. Only in this context we might be able to understand the sudden urge mentioned above to become societally more relevant. As management scholars in a global context, we have to engage in this debate. It goes straight to the very foundations of management science is and how it contributes to good management practice.