28: Organizations as Rhetoric (Part 1)

For our sixth Journal of Management Studies Classic episode we discussed a set of articles by Professor Mats Alvesson on Organizations as Rhetoric. Focusing on the original work published in 1993, we were very pleased to welcome Mats himself as a guest on this episode!

In this paper, Mats made a series of critical claims to highlight ‘the politics and rhetoric of professions’, as opposed to an ‘essentialist’ view of organizations (Alvesson, 1993: 999). Central to his observations is a notion that although organizational knowledge is seen as key to to organizational performance, there is little grounding or relationship to external reality of such knowledge.

So, if you're interested in critical management, epistemology or anything to do with identity construction, we highly recommend that you listen to what Mats has to say on these topics!