Repoliticizing Managment

Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas's social theory for the critical study of management, organization and employment, this book proposes a new definition of legitimate corporate action; based on Habermas's principles of communicative rationality and discourse ethics. Systematic in its application of the full range of Habermas's arguments to management and economics, it uses insights from these disciplines to inform a critique and reconstruction of Habermas's work. The result is a distinctive new conceptualization of the relationship between social interaction and economic structures and institutions. Concluding that corporate legitimacy - the successful combination of market economics with distributive and environmental justice - is only possible in the context of deliberative forms of democratic workplace governance, the findings of this work have serious implications for our understanding of corporate social responsibility and of the part managers and employees can play in putting it into practice.'[Cradden] envisages the transformation of oppositional politics [in the economic sphere] and does not shirk the theoretical challenges that recent history has posed...In particular, he does not necessarily accept that effective protest must now come from outside the corporate economy, that all protest within the core institutions of advanced capitalism has been accommodated and normalized...This is an intellectually demanding work which treats one of the most important developments of modern times with the seriousness it deserves.' Professor Stephen Ackroyd, Lancaster University, UK 'A highly illuminating and original analysis, both of contemporary organizational life and of the recent history of employment relations in Britain.' Professor John Kelly, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK