Apologies for cross-posting, please circulate...
Narratives of Horrible Management by Management Scholars
Dariusz Jemielniak, Monika Kostera
assistant professor of management, professor of management
Kozminski Business School, Warsaw University /Vaxjo University
As early as in 1903 George B. Shaw in Man and Superman produced a maxim that "he, who can,
does. He, who cannot, teaches" (and if s/he can't even teach, s/he consults – as management
scholars would mordantly like to add). We are all familiar with this saying, and yet, surprisingly, it
has not been an incentive for self-reflection on the management science.
Can management scholars manage anything? If we are so productive at describing management,
good business practices, and rules of thumb for business practitioners, are business schools its
paragons?
We seriously doubt that. After all, as Davydd Greenwood (2009) convincingly shows, most
universities are not really knowledge-driven, learning organizations, and a lot of scholarly rhetoric
is dedicated to supporting the academic status, rather than to knowledge production. Thus, in our
research we want to contrast the high claims, our discipline clearly makes, with the everyday
practice of mismanagement by management chairs, deans, or presidents. In the spirit of anarchistic
theory of knowledge (Feyerabend, 1975), we would like to collect the stories of poor management
by management scholars. We are gathering the observations of freaks, sociopaths, or just really bad
managers in business schools. We are building a narrative on management scholars' profession
based on professional management scholars' narratives (Corvellec, 1997, 2006; Czarniawska-
Joerges, 1998; Czarniawska, 2000).
But we can't do this without you. We would like to invite you to this project. Please, send us a tale
on the worse case of management in business academia you can think of. We do not demand the
story to be factually correct (as it could sell out your identity). Instead, we would like to request
stories that are correct in the spirit. Even if they did not happen, it is your honest belief, that they
could have happened. In this sense, they are more important and true than the mechanical, historical
fact, as they carry the archetypical wisdom of the world. Stories, in a form of first person narratives,
should normally not exceed 1 page of a single-spaced document, but we are flexible – what counts
most is that we really, really need them by the end of April (extensions, naturally, possible :).
The story can be anonymous or not, in Polish or in English. Please, help us! Send your story to
monika@kostera.pl and darekj@alk.edu.pl
Corvellec, H. (1997). Stories of achievements: narrative features of organizational performance.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Corvellec, H. (2006). Elements of Narrative Analysis. Gothenburg: Gothenburg Research Institute.
Czarniawska-Joerges, B. (1998). Narrative approach in organization studies. Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications
Czarniawska, B. (2000). The uses of narrative in organization research. Gothenburg: Gothenburg
Research Institute.
Feyerabend, P. K. (1975). Against method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. London-
Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Greenwood, D. J. (2009). Are Research Universities Knowledge-intensive Learning Organizations?
In D. Jemielniak & J. Kociatkiewicz (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Knowledge-intensive
Organizations. Hershey - New York: Information Science Reference.