What Exactly did you Expect from CMS? American Business Schools as an Expression of Futile Relations

The intention of this chapter is to evaluate the likelihood that the Critical Management Division (CMS) of the Academy of Management can accomplish anything beyond helping to promote the careers of its members.

This chapter examines the likelihood of getting anything done from a personalized historical approach, as the author was a witness to many of the events covered in the chapter. It also compares the experience of the CMS Division with that of critical management as an academic specialty in other nations.

After examining the evolution of the social role of the US-based Academy of Management along with the origins of the CMS Division, the author concludes that the division’s emergence was tolerated precisely because it was so unlikely to accomplish anything that might challenge the institutional privileges of academic management, let alone seriously threaten the hegemony of American-led global capitalism.

The chapter intends to discourage critical scholars from wasting their time and energy trying to make CMS into something it is not structurally capable of being, and instead focus on building organizations outside of the academy that might stand a chance of promoting the goals of critical management.

While several histories and critiques of UK-based critical management have been published, this chapter may be the first critical history of CMS.