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This book takes up a question that has rarely been raised in the field of management: 'Could modern Western colonialism have important implications for the practices and theories that inform management and organizations?' Employing the frameworks of postcolonial theory, an international group of scholars addresse this question, and offer remarkable insights about the implications of the colonial encounter for management. Wide-ranging in scope, the book covers major topics like cross-cultural management, control and resistance, corporate culture, the discourse of exoticization in museums and tourism, and stakeholder issues, and sheds new light on the troubling legacy of colonialism. Scholars and practitioners searching for a new idiom of management will find this book's critique of contemporary management invaluable.

This article focuses on the methodological and epistemological aspects of hermeneutics, a leading genre of interpretive research. Beginning with a brief overview of the limitations of methodological discussions of hermeneutics in current organizational research, the article first introduces readers to the historical context of hermeneutics and then discusses the major epistemological and methodological concepts and debates that inform contemporary hermeneutics. Next, methodological guidelines for employing hermeneutics in organizational research are proposed. Finally, some conclusions are offered.

Book reviewed in this article:In Search of Meaning: Managing for the Health of Our Organizations, Our Communities, and the Natural World Thierry C. PauchantAnshuman Prasad is a Visiting Professor at the University of Calgary. He co‐edited Managing the Organizational Melting Pot: Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.

The exit of Coca-Cola from India in the 1970s has been extensively used in IB textbooks as illustrating the challenges faced by MNEs in difficult political/regulatory environments. In this article, we use critical hermeneutics to challenge the conventional understanding and interpretation of the event. Instead, an understanding of the macro-economic and historical context suggests that the company had other options available to it and may have lost a valuable opportunity due to inflexible policies. IB textbooks should be wary of falling prey to naïve managerialism and instead provide a critical understanding of the operations within a larger context to their readers.

Organizational scholars have shown considerable interest in the rise of complex systems of organizational control, sometimes referred to metaphorically as the process of tightening the iron cage, as well as patterns of workplace resistance to it. More recently, the scholarly spotlight seems to have shifted from formal modes of employee resistance to more informal or routine forms of workplace resistance. This paper presents a detailed ethnographic account of informal resistance and its ability to limit managerial control in a health maintenance organization undergoing the computerization of its administrative functions. Our study adopts a more problematic approach to understanding routine resistance, tracing its discursive constitution in the workplace. Using the findings of an ethnographic study involving observation and interviews, we show how routine resistance was discursively constituted and how it limited organizational control in interesting and unexpected ways. This discursive constitution was achieved through (a) owning resistance, (b) naming resistance, and (c) designating indirect resistance. The paper also analyzes how these different discursive constructions limited managerial control by affirming autonomous self-identities, renegotiating roles and relationships, and reinterpreting dominant managerial discourses. Finally, broader implications for understanding routine resistance in organizations are drawn.

This paper examines the process of work computerization in a Health Maintenance Organization from an institutionalist perspective. It investigates how one element of the institutional environment, viz., the ideology of professionalism, became a powerful presence and continually influenced the process of work computerization in the organization. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the paper identifies the different local meanings of professionalism held by organizational members. It then examines how the ideology of professionalism became institutionalized within the organization through a combination of micro-and macro-level forces. The paper also looks at the consequences of this ideology for the computerization process. Mainly, it shows how the ideology of professionalism facilitated a climate of acceptance toward computers, escalated commitment to the technology and was partly responsible for the suppression of individual concerns regarding work computerization. Finally, implications for organization theory and research are drawn.

Although critique has come to enjoy a well-recognized place in organizational research and scholarship, the typical business management classroom continues to be relatively underexposed to the critical program. This article represents an attempt to bring critical management scholarship closer to the business classroom. The article discusses issues such as the disciplinary status and relevance of criticism in management as well as the usefulness of the concept of ideology as a critical device. This is followed by the outlines of an experiential exercise (based on a Tom Peters video) followed by the outlines of an experiential exercise (based on a Tom Peters video) designed to engage business students in critical theorizing. Finally, some implications of the exercise are presented.

This article examines the institutional entrepreneurship displayed by the US tobacco industry in its attempt to overcome the moral illegitimacy of smoking among women in the years following World War I. Using historical analysis within a critical institutional framework, we trace the strategies used by the tobacco industry in combating seemingly powerful taboos and convincing large sections of the female population to take up smoking. Contrary to popular explanations linking the appeal of cigarettes to the aura of sexual glamour that was associated with them, we posit that the industry was able to initially expand its female consumer base by creatively appropriating the discourse of 'the new American woman' that was emerging in elite circles at that time. We found that many tobacco manufacturers were institutionally entrepreneurial in their ability to discursively connect selected ideals of emancipation with a spectrum of female identities in American society. We conclude by drawing implications for an understanding of the management of moral illegitimacy.