Speaker: Professor Hugh Wilmott (Bayes Business School and Cardiff University)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Work, Organisation and Management Group
Open to: all University of Liverpool staff and students, with no sign up needed
Date: Wednesday 20 September 2023
Time: 15:00 - 16:30
Place: Management School - Seminar Room 2 (first floor)
Abstract
In management and organization studies (MOS), ‘craft’ is typically invoked to indicate the presence of tacit skills or imaginative and/or embodied qualities in methodological processes of producing and communicating knowledge.
Unpacking the etymology of ‘craft’ points to a less restrictive sense of craft that includes the constitutive role of ethics and politics.
The narrowness of the significance ascribed to craft is attributed to the dominance of a neopositivist regime of knowledge in which an ethics of dissociation (eg facts are separated from values) is widely combined with a politics of exclusion (eg critique is marginalised).
Deviation from this methodological composite is, accordingly, considered ethically suspect and/or politically compromised.
Its pervasiveness in MOS is illustrated by reference to ‘Gioia Methodology’ and, more broadly, to abductive reasoning.
To escape these methodological restrictions, a reframing is proposed that places value neutrality in question and incorporates critique.
Co-authored by Professor Hugh Willmott and Professor Emma Bell (Open University).
Keywords
Methodology, craft, ethics, politics, openness, Gioia Methodology, abductivism.
Speaker
Hugh Wilmott is a Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Bayes Business School and Cardiff University, with his research interests spanning the sub-fields of management organization studies.
He has co-authored two major textbooks (Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management, 3rd Edition and Organization Theory and Design: An International Perspective, 3rd Edition) and has published over 20 books, as well as contributing to a wide range of management and social science journals.
Hugh is particularly interested in the development and application of management theory by drawing upon the resources of critical social science, and his research has contributed to the areas of professionalisation, teamwork, regulation, business ethics, management learning, accounting policy and practice, organizational culture, financialisation and the management of higher education.
Hugh has been an Associate Editor of The Academy of Management Review and previously served an equivalent role in the journal Organization.
He has also been a board member of numerous journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies.
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