This paper contributes to the development of a critical understanding of strategic management. We provide a brief outline of strategic management as it is conventionally taught and practiced, pointing to several avenues for developing critical approaches. In the broadest sense, a critical perspective stands outside of the managerialist orientation in order to study strategy as an organizational process. We review work in the processual school that purports to describe how strategy is ‘really ’ made, from bargaining, constructivist, and emergent perspectives. We argue that processual approaches hold some promise but quickly move toward prescriptive managerialism. A second, more profound critique draws from critical theory and postmodern insights to question the social and political effects of strategic management. Strategy can be viewed as a set of practices and discourses which promotes instrumental rationality, reproduces hierarchical relations of power, and systematically privileges the interests and viewpoints of particular groups. While this approach has been valuable in probing the ideology of strategy, its focus on discourse and lack of concern with the ‘truth of strategy ’ is a potential weakness. A third approach draws from Gramsci to offer an historical materialist perspective, which pays more attention to the content of strategy. We argue that the strategic deployment of discursive, organizational, and economic resources in sustaining or challenging hegemony suggests a strategic concept of power and a political perspective on corporate strategies to exercise market power, discipline labour, influence government policies, and resist pressures from social groups. It also points to a more encompassing vision of emancipation strategies than that offered by critical theory.

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This paper considers issues underlying the conceptualization of trust and control relations in the context of the introduction of a major formalization technology in a medium sized manufacturing and wholesaling enterprise. The implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning system represents a major, organization-wide disruption to business processes and individual relationships. The research reported here involves in-depth case research throughout the process of implementing the new system and highlights the tensions identified in the literature between coercive and enabling control in the context of a turning point for key staff in “getting on board” with the new system and its requirements. Characteristics of the formalizing technology – an enterprise resource planning system – are explored in terms of Armbrüster et al’s (2002) suggested use of Popper’s framework to identify tendencies to ‘closedness ’ in organizational attitudes. The empirical research gives primary emphasis to day to day practice in an organizational setting as a way of exposing complexities often diffused in the desire to offer alternative approaches to re-design the bureaucratic organizational model according to some idealistic concepts of the superiority of consensus and collectivity. Keywords * trust * control * manufacturing * case research * post-bureaucratic * interviews * Enterprise resource planning

This is a chapter about power in groups and organizations. In the following pages, we suggest that the analysis and exploration of the complexities of organizational power by managers and workers is both necessary and useful. We begin by discussing three of the prominent theoretical perspectives on power from the literatures of social and organizational psychology and critical management studies. We then outline some of the dilemmas and challenges faced by executives, managers and workers around empowerment, disempowerment and organizational democracy. Then, building on the seminal works of Follet, Deutsch, Tjosvold, Clegg, Mumby and others, we offer a framework of organizational power which views power as a multifaceted phenomenon; as thoughts, words and deeds which are both embedded within and determining of a complex network of relations, structures and meaning-making processes at different levels of organizational and community life. Such a framework enables us to understand the relational aspects of power and authority within the context of the macro structures and ideologies that give them meaning. It can also help identify those domains in organizations where the potential for sharing cooperative power is, in fact, not

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particularly grateful for the helpful suggestions made by Bob Cooper, Anthony Hopwood, Rolland

The paper seeks to clarify and illustrate the distinctive contribution of Foucaultian discursive analysis to the study of strategy. We distinguish it from other forms of analysis before applying it to interpret a fragment of empirical material drawn from a longitudinal study of a global retailing company. In conclusion, the paradox of undertaking discursive analysis is discussed.

Attempts to introduce TQM into two NZ companies and the consequent changes to management and accounting systems are examined in a critical way. The aim is to get a better understanding of why such implementations fail so frequently, or at least produce results unanticipated by the normative literature. The paper looks at the implementations from the workers ' as well as the managers ' point of view. The fieldwork evidence is used to reflect on the traditional and critical literatures. The managerial literature seeks solutions in the form of removal of barriers to successful TQM implementations. The critical literature raises questions about "successful " implementations. The way the two literatures could complement rather than oppose each other is presented in the concluding section. 1