Theoretical focal points

Our research is focused using the following theoretical focal points:

Workplace identity

Workplaces shape how people can come to understand who they are with impacts on their lives. These processes have power effects that intersect with class, gender, race and ethnicity, professional identities and careers.

Alternative organising

Most mainstream management knowledge has been generated for professionals through researching standard hierarchical and managerialist forms of organisation. Studies of alternatives allow consideration of democratic, egalitarian and values-based modes of organising which have been generally neglected.

Relations of domination

Relations of domination create understandings, practices and processes which reproduce ways of being and organising that are taken for granted with associated asymmetries and inequities hidden from view. Such relations may occur between people who are categorised as having different genders, races and social classes, as well as between humans and other living beings.

Critical methodologies

Management and organisation research tends to assume organisations are real, objective, corporeal entities. The resulting reification of organisation limits understandings of how they come into being through human conversation and language, as well as more-than-human others. Critical methodologies allow an examination of the processes through which organising is produced and understood, including the influence of popular culture and public imaginaries.