Narrative approaches to organisation and management studies are very much in vogue. Offering a new challenge to management scholarship, Management Theory: A Critical and Reflexive Reading exposes the subtexts of five influential texts by Taylor, Follett, Drucker, Mintzberg and Kanter. In doing so, it encourages readers to recognise the stories that management theories tell, and more significantly, those that they exclude. The book has been constructed as the story of the author's own research journey, using a unique blend of management theory and poetry. The resulting work is an academically rigorous and clearly described post-modern method of text analysis that draws on a wide range of literary theory. Management Theory: A Critical and Reflexive Reading provides novice researchers and teachers with a transparent view of the researcher's methodological workshop, while also modelling an alternative narrative mode of reporting.
Building on the rapidly developing interest in guru theory and management fashions, this book introduces the idea of scriptive reading to readers of management.
