Beyond the critical moment: relocating critical management studies inside management

Critical management studies (CMS) is going through an identity crisis. Although it is one of the most prominent additions to management thinking in the last 35 years, many now see CMS as a dead-end for cynical, distanced, and meaningless work. But what should replace it? There is no shortage of opinions. However, informed by narrative theory and critical management history, this paper contends that these proposals are unlikely to succeed unless we tell new stories about where CMS, and potentially other critical projects, came from. There is a widely recited idea that CMS developed when a group of sociologists migrated into UK business schools in the wake of Thatcherism. It presents CMS through a narrative of outsiders, struggling with their place inside management research – an account which has been used to question the legitimacy of critical approaches in management ever since. This paper shows that this account overlooks a long-standing engagement with critical theory within management scholarship itself. Telling this intellectual origin story could help critical scholars and critically-oriented practitioners to think in new ways.