Abstract

The Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden wrote that poetry makes nothing happen. In some sense, substituting Critical Management Studies (CMS) for poetry, this statement might be relevant to the work of critical scholars or at least be posed as a question – does CMS make anything happen? This, of course, is a difficult if not impossible question to answer. Perhaps all we can do as critical scholars is challenge and deconstruct the world as it is, not always with an alternative in mind but guided by the possibility that there are alternatives: alternative societies, alternative ways of organizing, alternative ways of managing, alternative ways of working. Perhaps critical research, working at many levels in many areas, with the lived experiences of people (and in other ways), might at least find some way of influencing the structures, ideas and thoughts of society, organizations and people in ways where alternatives might be considered and where a difference can be made. This is the hope of this chapter: that deconstructive criticism might enable an appreciation of what is excluded from consideration in the world(s) and begin to identify other possibilities and forms of resistance to the ‘normal’ that enable alternative conversations with those engaged in those world(s).