Guest editors' introduction: Management and Goodness

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2003 by Hopfl, Heather, Beadle, Ron

Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good. Hence the Good has been rightly defined as 'that at which all things aim' (Aristotle).

Aristotle begins his Ethics with these words and thus provides us with a possible starting point from which to consider the nature of the Good. Aristotle had been a student of Plato for over twenty years but when Plato died, Aristotle found that he could no longer see eye-to-eye with the new leaders of the academy and, after many disagreements, he moved away and set up the Lyceum. Here, he taught Platonic philosophy but he also encouraged his students to criticise Platonic thought.

It is with these two thoughts in mind, goodness and critique, that we would like to start this introduction to this Special Issue. First, by giving emphasis to the various ways in which the Good is constructed in organisations and, second and with equal emphasis, by giving attention to the importance of critique in management theorising. Whether we are considering the average text book approach to the notion of the Good or the pursuit of the good in management training and development, we are confronted by implicit and frequently explicit assumptions about the nature of goodness and about whose good is being defined. The rhetoric of strategic management, of trajectory and teleology, is also implicitly concerned with the pursuit of some notion of "goodness". In so-called quality management and in service management this "good" becomes quite specific and, indeed, is frequently highly specified and taxonomic. Goodness, excellence and perfection meet in some future place and/or state which is the object of the striving. Management is about the construction of future states of desire, of the construction of the sublime, of sterile notions of perfectionism, of gendered realities and the definition of such endpoints is fundamental to the construction of the "good" which is the goal of management striving. Kenneth Burke (Burke, 1961:180) has talked about the definition of the good as establishing a counter covenant which defines what is bad. Gordon Lawrence has talked about management development as being concerned with "the correction of faults" (Lawrence, 1985: 235).

This Special Issue of Tamara had its origins in a stream which we convened for the 2nd International Conference on Critical Management Studies held at UMIST in 2001. The Critical Management Conference has now established itself as one of the major arenas for new work in critical management and we used the opportunity to expose and explore a subject which interested us both: Management and Goodness. We were looking for papers which discussed the status, meaning, purpose, deployment, mobilisation, praxis, and development of the notion of the "good" in management. At the same time, we recognised that even this broad definition did not do justice to the complexity of the idea we had in mind. Even to speak of management and goodness in the same terms implies, in Aristotelian thinking, that there is a good management and, of course, this is precisely the idea which we wanted to critique. What is clear is that management has a rhetoric of goodness, hence the notion of the good employer, the good manager, the pursuit of excellence, the pursuit of desired future states and so on. Since "ethics" as a good has become the property of this rhetoric and the pursuit of this management good, goodness itself seemed a good place from which to start.

In our call for papers for the CMS II stream we had asked potential contributors to give attention to the relationship between management, conceptions of goodness and critique in order to render problematic the implicit notion of "the good" within management discourse. We were gratified to receive a broad range of papers which were both of a high standard and which we thought made an important contribution to the development of this area of work. Contributors to the Stream considered a variety of management contexts - including management training initiatives, organisation change programmes, health and safety policies and the conduct of management research - and in each of these challenged the implicit construction of management as "good".

In selecting papers for this Special Issue, we were looking for contributions which adopted a critical perspective and which used this to examine the way in which "the good" is constructed both within the rhetoric of management and in its practice. Consequently, the work presented is animated by the ongoing need to re-evaluate the construction of meaning in management. Contrary to most conventional management literature which attempts to deal with notions of "goodness" via a relatively superficial and discrete concern for business ethics, our position is that whether management is understood as an activity, an entity or as an ideology, it always carries an implied notion of the good. The heterogeneity of the contributions to this Special Issue demonstrates the breadth of this emergent concern. We are, therefore, grateful to David Boje for setting up Tamara and for his commitment to critical work which has enabled us to publish this collection of papers. We hope the papers in this issue give a flavour of the range and eclecticism of the Management and Goodness stream at the conference.