Divisions and unities in critical management studies

Critical Management Studies (CMS) is becoming increasingly institutionalised, through conferences and tracks, book series or handbooks, journals that encourage critical work, and self-designated 'critical' business schools. There are two key institutions centrally involved in this legitimating process, the US-based Academy of Management CMS Division and this European Critical Management Studies Conference. However, because of the tensions that characterise relations between North American and European management scholarship, and with many scholars facing funding pressures in their employing universities, these two institutions may be diverging in their goals and orientations, and critical management scholars may be choosing to affiliate either to one or the other. As a consequence, these two organisations may even be competing with one other for members and intellectual influence. In addition, CMS is characterised by another divide, between 'the West' and 'the Rest', or 'the North' and 'the South'. Many individuals within the Euro-American CMS community collaborate, supervise, and teach across global regions, and a growing number of scholars based in 'the Rest' of the world contribute to CMS. And yet it is still relatively difficult for many of us to understand what CMS looks like outside of these institutionalised contexts, for example, in mainstream business schools in the Middle East or India. In this regard it is worthy of note that the editors of and contributors to the Oxford Handbook of CMS; with two exceptions all are based in the UK, the US, or Australia.