MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP

Critical Perspectives on Management and Leadership

Critical Perspectives on Management and Leadership

Introduction

Critical Theory takes as its starting point the work of Marx and Freud and a analogy is often drawn between the Marxist theory of ideology as illusion and the individual delusions analysed by Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927) where he speaks of a middle-class girl's' delusion that a prince will come and marry her. Critical theory would seek to dispel her delusion by giving her a critical and self-critical awareness of why such a marriage is improbable in the extreme. However, also showing her why she clings to that delusion (Day, 2001).

Although Marxism takes many different forms, Marxist economics centres on the analysis of the commodity, defined as an object that satisfies a human need, or as having a use-value. Commodities also have an exchange value to the extent that they can be exchanged for other commodities and the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of the labour time required to produce it. Under capitalism, according to Marxist economic theory, the wage -labourer does not only reproduce the value of his wage, he also produces surplus- value and is the source of the capitalist profit and without which the system cannot work. The rate of surplus -value is variable and is the subject of both negotiations and conflict between workers and capitalists (Bassi, McMurrer & Arvey, 2006).

For Marx, alienation is a characteristic feature of modern capitalism and of the commodity fetishism whose devaluation of the human world is proportional to the overvaluation of things. Because he does not own it, the product of the worker's labour appears to take on an alien or threatening life of its own. The labour process is therefore experienced not as a joyful act of creation, but as a loss of reality. The worker who creates the object of labour both loses it and becomes a slave to it, whilst the employer's appropriation of the product is experienced as estrangement and alienation (Burgoyne, Hirsh & Williams, 2004).

Critical Theory often forms a critique of ideology and seeks to explain why people accept or consent to systems of collective representations that do not serve their objective interests but legitimate the existing power structure and exposes the falsity of non-cognitive beliefs (such as value judgements) that are presented as cognitive structures. In general, critical theory seeks to give people a critical take on what is normally taken for granted. For example, it based on the assumption that it is possible for people to master their own destiny but the possibilities available to them are often narrowed, distorted and impeded by management conventionally. Critical Management Studies focuses on how individuals in large bureaucracies, and as consumers of mass goods, are affected by corporations, schools, government and mass media; and how personalities, beliefs, tastes and preferences are developed to fit into the demands of mass production and mass consumption, thereby standardising individuals, that is, reducing them to parts in a machine ...