Critical Organization Studies

A year ago this week, on the 4th January 2019, my wonderful friend and colleague Dr. Sandra Annunziata passed away suddenly leaving a baby daughter Elena and partner Francesco. This was, and is, a great loss not just to her close family and friends but also to critical urban studies. Sandra was (and indeed is) an inspiration to me - her infectious enthusiasm, strength, generosity, intellect, knowledge and lovely sociability.

This paper questions the implications of entrepreneurial responses to conditions of employment precarity by 'healthy volunteers' in phase I clinical trials in the United States. Such individuals are typically serial participants who often identify as professional volunteers and seek out drug studies as their primary source of income. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, this paper illustrates how healthy volunteers selectively import the identity of 'hustler' from the street environment and reposition it as connoting a set of valuable creative skills that give them a competitive edge over other participants. An entrepreneurial ethos allows them to view personal sacrifice and exposure to potentially dangerous drugs as smart investments leading to financially stable futures. These discursive moves normalize extractive, and at times dehumanizing, labour relations that offload expenses and risks to workers.

This article explores the relationship between personal sacrifice and identity work within conditions of profound structural insecurity. We develop the concept of sacrificial labour to describe how individual self-sacrifice aligns workers' identities to the needs of organizations while gradually foreclosing the actualization of individuals' desired future selves. Drawing upon qualitative data from a longitudinal study of healthy individuals who enrol in paid clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry, we make two contributions to the identity-work literature. First, we argue that the ongoing project of building stable and secure identities may become damaging when structural and cultural conditions defy even provisional, fragile attainment of this goal. Second, we reflect on how racialization and social marginalization erode identities and constrain possibilities for identity recuperation. Whereas the identity-work literature often focuses on the agential accomplishments of individuals, we provide a troubling account of how persistent social and economic inequalities confound identity realization efforts.

Motivated by the question of responsible AI and value alignment, I seek to offer a uniquely Foucauldian reconstruction of the problem as the emergence of an ethical subject in a disciplinary setting. This reconstruction contrasts with the strictly human-oriented programme typical to current scholarship that often views technology in instrumental terms. With this in mind, I problematise the concept of a technological subjectivity through an exploration of various aspects of ChatGPT in light of Foucault's work, arguing that current systems lack the reflexivity and self-formative characteristics inherent in the notion of the subject. By drawing upon a recent dialogue between Foucault and phenomenology, I suggest four technophilosophical desiderata that would address the gaps in this search for a technological subjectivity: embodied self-care, embodied intentionality, imagination and reflexivity. Thus I propose that advanced AI be reconceptualised as a subject capable of "technical" self-crafting and reflexive self-conduct, opening new pathways to grasp the intertwinement of the human and the artificial. This reconceptualisation holds the potential to render future AI technology more transparent and responsible in the circulation of knowledge, care and power.

The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis.

Scholars whose work has been broadly classifi ed as falling within critical management studies (CMS) have sought to challenge the assumption that management is a neutral and value-free activity concerned with attaining the instrumental goals of organizations that serve a common good (Adler, Forbes and Willmott 2008). CMS is concerned with the 'questioning of taken-for-granteds, both about [management] practice and its social and institutional context. .. Identifying and questioning both purposes, and confl icts of power and interest' (Reynolds 1998, p. 192). It aims to expose and reform the mundane and frequently unnoticed routines and practices that privilege some groups (and individuals) at the expense of others and create injustices in organizations and in the society at large (see Adler et al. 2008 for a more detailed overview of CMS foci). CMS's critique targets not only managers and those who create and sustain the kinds of social arrangements that its proponents seek to expose and reform but also much of conventional management research and education. Critical researchers have pointed out that organizational science (including organizational behaviour, strategic management, human resources management, and so on) tends to take the managerial point of view (Alvesson and Willmott 1992b, Frost 1980) and to pay insuffi cient attention to the socioeconomic conditions within which organizations function (Nord 1974). The aim of such research often is to help managers attain their goals, such as overcoming resistance to change or attaining maximum productivity, more easily, but there often is a lack of mindfulness to the potentially detrimental impact of these prerogatives on other organizational stakeholders (Deetz 1992, 1995). The needs of employees are considered only from an instrumental perspective-if at all-and within a predetermined structure. Thus, it is argued that many 'conventional' organizational researchers tend to assume the universality of elite and managerial interests (Nord and Jermier 1992).

To confront the climate crisis requires fundamental system change in order to break the convention of relentless economic exploitation of nature. In this Special Issue we extend understanding of the opportunities for an organizing perspective on sustainability in order that organization studies might contribute more effectively to the challenges of organizing sustainably. This organizing perspective is particularly sensitive to (1) a variety of forms and practices of sustainable organizing in different societal spheres and on different levels, (2) the social institutions, logics and value systems in which these forms and practices are embedded, (3) the power and politics of promoting (or blocking) sustainable organization, and (4) the ways in which work, voice, participation, and inclusion are organized and contribute to developing societal capabilities. These features formed the basis of our original call for papers and we review selected literature on sustainability, including the contribution of organization studies and the articles in this Special Issue, through this organizing perspective. In so doing we identify four key themes of a future research agenda that builds from the foundations of existing research and addresses key current limitations in both theory and practice: sustainability requires social justice; connecting local and global scale shifts; democratizing governance; and acting collectively. We conclude with some implications for our own scholarship in organization studies if we are to meet the twin challenges of the need for new theorizing in combination with devising practically relevant support for change.

The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis.

What is the problem? Despite UK government legislation to promote equality in the workplace e.g., Shared Parental Leave (SPL) and flexible work, the gender pay and care gaps continue to favour men over women (ONS, 2020; UK Government, 2020b). Uptake of UK SPL in 2020 was 2% of eligible couples (Howlett), which signals cultural and structural barriers. The existence of ‘masculine organisations’ (Acker, 1990) may explain this problem. Masculine organisations are microcosms of patriarchy, which maintain hegemonic masculinity (HM) as the ‘most honoured way of being a man’ (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). This patriarchal ‘gender norm’ (Butler, 2011) perpetuates the ‘motherhood penalty’ (Brearley, 2021) and ‘patriarchal deficit’ (Bailey, 2015), which negatively impacts all working parents, and their employers by association. Method This thesis uses dystopian fiction (DF) to ‘blur the lines’ between fictional and empirical data (Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2014). DF is used as a critical ...

Today’s fathers are more involved with childcare than the generations that preceded them. There is evidence to suggest that men consider fatherhood and their relationships with their children as more important than ever before. Still, society generally deems the activity of “parenting” as feminine. Thus, men who choose to identify with hegemonic notions of masculinity have few pre-existing father identities to choose from. I argue that fathers actively masculinize their parenting in order to protect their masculine identities. I use qualitative methods to examine the different approaches that they take to conciliate their actions as fathers with their identities as men. They do so by stressing different areas of importance when it comes to parenting, by adding masculine elements to their fathering activities, and by staying away from parenting activities that are generally marked by society as feminine.  

This model applies theories of organizational socialization to characterize the aspiring entrepreneur's journey from neophyte to firm founder and to Identify factors that may Influence the transition from a pre-organization to the formation of a new organization. The model distinguishes two identifiable stages which shape organization formation—Anticipatory Socialization and New Entrepreneur Socialization. Anticipatory Socialization characterizes the predisposing characteristics and experiences that precede the cognitive choice to become an entrepreneur. New Entrepreneur Socialization specifies the critical variables that Influence the new recruit once the decision Is made to start a firm. Three factors determine the transition into the entrepreneurial role: Motivational Bases for Adaptation, Socializing Agents and the Structural Context of the Entrepreneurial Setting. The eventual outcome of entrepreneurial socialization, Organization Formation, Is the survival or discontinuanc...

Knowledge can get lost when workers leave the company, or it may be missed when new challenges emerge. Specific knowledge may be important for the value-added chain of an organization, and its inaccessibility could be a problem. The work on this paper seeks to juxtapose this problem with the concept of intangible knowledge. This concept is developed as an observation model for particular situations within organisations, in which specific, useful, knowledge is no longer available and is being missed. This paper considers a potentially useful way to deal with absence of such knowledge by using the social science approach. In addition to social systems theory, the communication and cultural science view was selected here to propose a new understanding of the function of knowledge as a communicational or cultural parameter within structures and meanings of a social system. This should facilitate a better perception of the actions and dynamics inside organizations regarding knowledge or ...

In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have been somewhat sidelined by attention to the causes and effects of gentrification in the now rather extensive gentrification studies literature. Yet resistance to gentrification is growing internationally and remains a (if not the) key struggle with respect to social justice in cities worldwide. In this article, we address this gap head on by (re)asserting the value of survivability for looking at resistance to gentrifications around the globe. U.S. urban scholars have been at the forefront of writing about resistance to gentrification, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York City, but in a situation of planetary gentrification it is imperative that we learn from other examples. Critically, we argue that practices of survivability can be scaled up, down, and in between, enabling the building of further possibilities in the fight against gentrification, the fight to stay put. There needs to be a stronger and more determined international conversation on the potential of antigentrification practices worldwide and here we argue that survivability has a lot to offer these conversations.

Critics lament that corporate social responsibility has failed to significantly change business practices and that it became ‘de-radicalized’ once embraced by corporate business management. Using historical analysis, this article reevaluates this de-radicalization thesis, questioning whether corporate social responsibility ever was as inherently radical as the thesis assumes. The article demonstrates that early corporate social responsibility was already invested with a strategy of pragmatism, an investment that traces back to a group of late 19th and early 20th century American Christian reformists, also known as the social gospel movement. They promised that industrialism would unify Christian ethics and capitalist production, thereby reconciling the conflict between profitseeking and social solidarity. The discourse they advanced already contained what would later become key corporate social responsibility components, including (1) the notion of ethical businessmen, (2) the corpo...

Purpose-The majority of organizational newcomers have prior work experience. Organizational socialization tactics are less effective for such "experienced newcomers", relative to graduate newcomers. Hence experienced newcomers tend to rely on their own actions to become socialized. The aim of this article is to assess and potentially extend the range of adjustment strategies identified as being used by experienced newcomers themselves to achieve positive adjustment. Design/ methodology/ approach-Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 86 experienced newcomers entering a professional services organization. Findings-Nineteen strategies emerged, with seven newly identified in this research. These are compared with strategies found in past research. Practical implications-HR, and the managers and colleagues of newcomers can use the strategies identified and categorized here to encourage newcomers to use organizationally-appropriate behaviors. Newcomers can use these strategies to help themselves achieve their own adjustment goals. Originality/ value-There is an increasing focus on newcomer proactive behavior in organizational socialization research, yet there are few empirically grounded developments of newcomer adjustment strategies. To our knowledge, this is the first Investigating Organizational Socialization 2 paper to focus on what experienced newcomers report doing to help themselves adjust.

Foucault’s notion ‘the dispositive’ has been introduced in organization studies as a highly promising concept. However, its analytical and empirical potentials remain to be fully explored. This article develops dispositional analytics which conceives of organizations as pervaded by multiple dispositives that interact, reinforce or contradict one another. In this reconstruction, particular emphasis is given to the visibility produced by dispositives, through which subjects and object emerge in a particular prescriptive light. Furthermore, analytical privilege is given to relations over substance. This means foregrounding the interrelations between dispositives as well as the dispositive’s ‘internal relationality’, that is, the relations established by each dispositive out of which organizational problems arise and transform. The framework’s potentials are explored in a study of care workers’ responses to a management reform that disciplined and depersonalized care-giving. The difficu...

O conceito de tecnologia desenvolvido por Michel Foucault ocupa uma posição ambígua na pesquisa organizacional contemporânea. Por um lado, a noção foucaultiana de "tecnologias de poder" tornou-se uma ferramenta analítica chave para pesquisadores organizacionais que buscam compreender as complexidades do poder na vida organizacional. Por outro, a abordagem foucaultiana à análise organizacional foi amplamente criticada por negligenciar a ação dos atores humanos, que figuram antes como meros instrumentos do poder, do discurso ou das tecnologias de poder. Este artigo argumenta que essa crítica amplamente aceita faz pouca justiça ao pensamento de Foucault sobre tecnologia e organização. Reavaliando o próprio conceito de tecnologia de Foucault, em especial no contexto de suas palestras de 1978, argumentamos que a crítica convencional da "negligência da ação" é mal orientada. Para fugir a essa ortodoxia interpretativa, empreenderemos uma reformulação do tema da tecnolog...

Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true — that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive — not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.

Neste artigo, propomos analisar como as performances de genero ao longo do filme Boi Neon se engendram a partir de dispositivos de subjetivacao marcantes em nossa contemporaneidade como trabalho e sexualidade. O filme explora um horizonte agreste e seco de potencialidades de trabalho e de vida que produz, ao contrario do que se espera, profusoes de fazeres criativos e de estilisticas do viver que nao seguem os moldes do regime de verdade do nosso tempo. Dessa forma, abriu espaco para refletirmos sobre o quanto se produz e se vive em lugares que parecem pouco transformados pela logica moderna do trabalho. O percurso metodologico foi delineado pela producao de micronarrativas fluidas, que dizem sobre como a narrativa de Boi Neon nos afetou. As micronarrativas produzidas colocam em pauta o processo de criacao de exercicios reflexivos que se revelam como alternativa a existencia assujeitada, em especial no âmbito do trabalho.

In spite of-or better, because of these studies-there is a need to go further in analyzing the complex organizational consequences of mergers and acquisitions. Especially questions concerning culture and identity and their relationships with various types of discourse require special attention. This is what this special issue is all about. CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE SPECIAL ISSUE This special issue brings together four contributions. In the first article, Jan Löwstedt, Annika Schilling, Marie Tomicic and Andreas Werr offer a process perspective on post-merger integration. Based on a longitudinal study of a merger between two consulting companies, they suggest that the management of differences plays an important role in shaping post-merger integration processes. Löwstedt et al. argue that these processes need to be understood as an emerging interplay between their internal dynamics as well as the external dynamics of the economic and ideational environment of the merger. Löwstedt et al. outline four post-merger phases and suggest four different ways of managing differences. The interplay between the integration process, the ideational context and the economic environment explain the transition from one phase to another. This suggests that post-merger integration processes in professional service firms such as consultancies are highly context-sensitive. In the second article, Eero Vaara, Janne Tienari and Ingmar Björkman pick up on the theme of differences, albeit in a different form. Vaara et al. outline a sensemaking perspective on knowledge transfer around 'best practices' in a merging multinational organization. Based on a study of Nordea, a financial services group created through a series of Nordic cross-border mergers and acquisitions, they identify four specific sensemaking processes around the transfer of best practices: identification, evaluation, (re)contextualization, and (re)configuration. The major point of their analysis is that these sensemaking processes are socio-political in nature. Furthermore, they argue that uncovering the socio-political aspects helps us to understand the often-encountered problems and disappointments in post-merger knowledge transfer. In brief, they thus help us to see what kinds of socio-political and other complexities even the most 'rationalistic' integration tools bring with them. The third article in the special issue moves from differences to ambiguity. Annette Risberg takes a critical perspective on the dominant view according to which post-acquisition integration should lead to standardisation and homogenisation. She bases this criticism on a study of two foreign acquisitions made by the Finnish Kone Cranes. Risberg maintains that the homogeneous view of cultures and organisations that the popular and academic management writings endorse-with an ideal of control and success-hinders managers from running acquisitions successfully, rather than vice versa. Accord-Editorial: Understanding the organizational implications of industrial restructuring 9 1 2003

The paper advances the hypothesis that the discursive introduction of 'emotions' has profound effects on the constitutional level of organisations. Our reflections depart from Luhmann's systems theory, where the concept of emotions refers to the communicatively inaccessible consciousness, whereas 'organisation' refers to a communication system reproducing itself through decisions validated by membership. Our point is that the introduction of emotions as a criterion for membership transforms the functional organisation system. Our reasoning is developed through four propositions and summed up through reflections on the employment contract. Finally it is argued that the 'emotional organisation', where existence, membership and organisation co-emerge, gives rise to incessant inclusion and exclusion operations.

How many anarchists does it take to start a conversation about anarchism in a business school? Perhaps the most appropriate punchline is that such a conversation shouldn’t ever take place at all, never mind the number of participants. And yet just that conversation did take place, in November 2010. In fact, the topic of anarchism almost naturally surfaces within discussions of forms of organising that escape the Procrustean bed of the day-to-day academic curriculum of business and management studies; at least it does if this special issue is anything to go by.

In this article we argue that a component of structuration theory-the duality of structure-is a valuable heuristic for an integrative framework seeking to explain the role of communication in how membership is negotiated over time. The membership negotiations (MNs) perspective detailed here considers structural features of negotiation processes, while accounting for how active participation of newcomers and incumbents sustains and alters them. We offer a model of MNs and 18 propositions concerning how role expectations, group/organizational norms, formal structure, external and indirect sources of socialization, identification, power relationships, and member interaction are media for ongoing organizational MNs. Through these media, incumbents and newcomers interactively rely upon, sustain, and occasionally alter focal structures, practices, and the meanings of membership.

The impetus for this essay arose from a close reading of the work of American psychoanalyst Hans Loewald. Little referenced in the psychoanalytic literature on organizations, Loewald offers a unique and highly influential set of ideas that both prefigure contemporary psychoanalysis and redefine classical theory. In this essay I explore how Loewald might deepen the psychoanalytic literature on organizations by focusing on his central notion of ''replenishing regression.'' This notion is placed in dialogue with the prominent paradigm of systems psychodynamics to demonstrate how regression in organizations too often gets cast as a dysfunctional and inhibiting experience to be overcome rather than tolerated and appreciated. By upending this common thinking, Loewald's work is shown to carry intriguing implications for organizational life, including the prospects of feeling ''more alive …though not necessarily the more stable.''

This chapter draws on data from research on 'Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting' which is about young children's embodied engagements with food. The research was based in a nursery in the northwest of England that is known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to 'disadvantaged' 2 year olds. The assemblage moves beyond the linear accounts of UK policy narratives around 'healthy eating' and 'balanced diet' in the early years that force children's relationships with food into binary positions such as having a 'healthy appetite' or being 'fussy eater'. Instead, it harnesses the concepts of 'becoming' and 'difference' to open up the potentialities of a machinic food assemblage, where alternative forms of monstrous life, created between heterogeneous entities at mealtimes, are recognised as in circulation in the early years setting. The assemblage will examine one particular 'monstrous' story about how a child experiences the limits of her own body while finding her 'self' affectively entangled with food and other entities. It foregrounds the affective relationships she has with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Methodologically, the assemblage turns to the post-humanities, which offer opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of 'being' and 'knowing' as a researcher. Our entanglements in this assemblage draw in visual, auditory and tactile bodily intra-relationalities, as the event becomes co-produced in the interrogation of what is beyond or more-than-human.

In this article we argue that a component of structuration theory-the duality of structure-is a valuable heuristic for an integrative framework seeking to explain the role of communication in how membership is negotiated over time. The membership negotiations (MNs) perspective detailed here considers structural features of negotiation processes, while accounting for how active participation of newcomers and incumbents sustains and alters them. We offer a model of MNs and 18 propositions concerning how role expectations, group/organizational norms, formal structure, external and indirect sources of socialization, identification, power relationships, and member interaction are media for ongoing organizational MNs. Through these media, incumbents and newcomers interactively rely upon, sustain, and occasionally alter focal structures, practices, and the meanings of membership.

Management and humour are becoming more closely interlinked in contemporary organizational life. Whereas humour was conventionally viewed as a deleterious, alien element at the workplace, it is now increasingly viewed as a valuable management tool. This development raises the question of whether humour can still be regarded as having critical or subversive potential. This article discusses three research approaches to management and humour: the instrumental, the ideological critical, and contemporary critical organization studies, giving particular emphasis to extending the last tradition. Hence, the article situates itself in the critical debate on the function of humour in the workplace and on ‘cynical reasoning’ recently initiated in organization studies. It seeks to contribute to this debate by defining the features of a critical humoristic practice in a post-authoritarian management context. The point of departure is primarily Žižek’s critique of ideology and its application in...

The emergence of the idea that organizations are like organisms is generally seen as having saved organization studies (OS) from its mechanistic precepts. We argue that it has not. Rather, the mechanistic underpinnings of organization merely found a new medium of expression in the organism metaphor. This is largely due to the particular legacy that first informed so-called organic thinking about organizations in the 20th century. This essai investigates the history of the words organization and organism and asks how it became possible for one to be used as a metaphor for the other. Then it examines the way that the organism was brought into the fold of organization so as to reinforce the Modernist and mechanistic underpinnings of the field. We conclude that if the mechanistic ghost in the organism is to be exorcised, OS needs to recognize and rethink these underlying premises. Towards this end, we offer two alternative ways of thinking organization via the organism: one pre-Modern a...

Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true — that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive — not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.

In the early 1960s, a number of anarchist writers showed an interest in cybernetics, in which they saw the tools for better articulating radical forms of self-organisation. Discussions on the connections between anarchism and cybernetics did not advance very far, however, and by the 1970s the topic seems to have fallen off the anarchist radar. With an increase in interest in cybernetics over the last few years, this paper picks up where these debates left off and highlights some key points of contact between cybernetics and anarchism that have the potential to advance radical accounts of self-organisation. Based on a theoretical appraisal of the core texts and arguments in the debate around anarchism and cybernetics, the paper shows that the way in which hierarchy is formulated in cybernetic thought has a crucial impact on anarchist theory and practice and aids both academic approaches to social movements and, importantly, anarchist and radical left praxis. In addition, it provides ...

This chapter draws on data from research on 'Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting' which is about young children's embodied engagements with food. The research was based in a nursery in the northwest of England that is known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to 'disadvantaged' 2 year olds. The assemblage moves beyond the linear accounts of UK policy narratives around 'healthy eating' and 'balanced diet' in the early years that force children's relationships with food into binary positions such as having a 'healthy appetite' or being 'fussy eater'. Instead, it harnesses the concepts of 'becoming' and 'difference' to open up the potentialities of a machinic food assemblage, where alternative forms of monstrous life, created between heterogeneous entities at mealtimes, are recognised as in circulation in the early years setting. The assemblage will examine one particular 'monstrous' story about how a child experiences the limits of her own body while finding her 'self' affectively entangled with food and other entities. It foregrounds the affective relationships she has with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Methodologically, the assemblage turns to the post-humanities, which offer opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of 'being' and 'knowing' as a researcher. Our entanglements in this assemblage draw in visual, auditory and tactile bodily intra-relationalities, as the event becomes co-produced in the interrogation of what is beyond or more-than-human.

Formålet med denne artikel er at bidrage til forståelsen af, hvordan praktiske problemer (herunder ledelsesproblemer) og vidensproblemer er forskellige og alligevel kan berige hinanden. Artiklen henvender sig til ledere, som skal lave en akademisk problemorienteret opgave i samfundsvidenskabeligt regi. Man benytter sig her ofte af problemorienteret projektarbejde, dvs at man strukturerer sine analyser ved hjælp af en problemformulering. Artiklen stiller – og besvarer – derfor spørgsmålet om, hvad et problem er. Endvidere argumenterer den for vigtigheden af at skelne mellem videns- og ledelsesproblemer.

Formålet med denne artikel er at bidrage til forståelsen af, hvordan praktiske problemer (herunder ledelsesproblemer) og vidensproblemer er forskellige og alligevel kan berige hinanden. Artiklen henvender sig til ledere, som skal lave en akademisk problemorienteret opgave i samfundsvidenskabeligt regi. Man benytter sig her ofte af problemorienteret projektarbejde, dvs at man strukturerer sine analyser ved hjælp af en problemformulering. Artiklen stiller – og besvarer – derfor spørgsmålet om, hvad et problem er. Endvidere argumenterer den for vigtigheden af at skelne mellem videns- og ledelsesproblemer.