Critical Management Studies - Geographical Base

Geographical Base

The main home of CMS has been in the organisation theory and behaviour parts of British, Australian and Scandinavian business schools, though there are strong contributions in related fields such as accounting with growing interest in other management specialisms, such as marketing, international business, operational research, logistics etc. Since the 1990s academics from North America and other parts of the world are also engaging with this body of writing and research. The CMS Division within the (American) Academy of Management (AoM), with a membership of around 800, is larger than some of its Divisions and is more international than any Division.

Many heterodox scholars in various parts of the world had been inspired by the international activities of the Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism. This latter grouping developed work which drew variously on post-structuralism and symbolic interactionism in order to develop a cultural and anthropological understanding of contemporary organizations. Others, though, were without affiliation and/or seeking new formations and alliances. Since 1999, there has been a bi-annual CMS conference held in the UK as well as workshops and a bi-annual conference held at US Academy of Management.

Today there are significant concentrations of CMS scholars in the UK at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London, at the School of Management at the University of Leicester, and at Essex Business School at the University of Essex. Elsewhere, Copenhagen Business School and Istanbul Bilgi University have clusters of CMS scholars, but many CMS scholars globally rely on conferences and journals like Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Studies, ephemera: theory and politics in organization, Culture and Organization, or Organization: the critical journal of organization, theory and society for their affiliations.