Debates and Literature

The events at Leicester led to a number of public scholarly debates and conversations. For some of these events, recordings are available and can be watched here. Furthermore, a number of scientific publications refer to the history and development of the University of Leicester School of Business and the former School of Management. This page documents the recordings and the publications and will be regularly updated.

 

Recordings

 

The Conservatives‘ War on Free Speech – Owen Jones featuring Keir Milburn from Leicester – 18/02/2021

Critical Thinking and the Business School, Event hosted by Martin Parker and Pete Turnbull, featuring Simon Lilley and Gareth Brown from Leicester – 2/04/2021

 

Covid Responses and the Threat to Higher Education – CPERN, in collaboration with EAEPE, SASE, ESA CPERN, BISA IPEG, and IIPPE hosted a discussion with Henry Giroux (McMaster University), Laura Horn (Roskilde University) and Sam Dallyn from Leicester – 31/07/2021

 

Freeze Peach Episode 16 – Citizens of Change or Peaches of Change? Featuring David Harvie and Deborah Toner from Leicester – 15/11/2021

Academic Freedom Under Attack, Webinar 2 – The Leicester Case. Featuring David Harvie, Deborah Toner, and Gibson Burrell from Leicester – 25/10/2023

 

 

Literature and Blogposts

 

Burrell, Gibson (2009): Handbooks, Swarms, and Living Dangerously. In M. Alvesson, T. Bridgman, & H. Willmott (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of critical management studies (pp. 551–562). Oxford University Press.

In this handbook article, Gibson Burrell refers to the manifesto of the critical management school and gives a short account of the internal
debates and the resistance against the critical approach of the school.

Parker, Martin (2021): The Critical Business School and the University: A Case Study of Resistance and Co-optation. Critical Sociology, 47(7–8), 1111–1124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520950387

Martin Parker writes about the history of the critical management school.

‚Can a school of ‘critical management studies’ survive in the context of a marketising university which relies heavily on business education for its income? This paper explores the case of a UK management school which attempted to do that and survived for 13 years with a clearly ‘critical’ project. As someone who worked in the school, but left some time ago, I evaluate its successes and failures, concluding that the radicalism of its research and publication strategy was not paralleled by an understanding of the politics of the institution and its environment. This led to a posture of ‘defensive isolation’ which ultimately made the school vulnerable to changes in the strategies of senior university management.‘

Morrish, Liz (2021): Space for Academic Freedom. Academic Irregularities, 28/08/2021. https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/2021/08/28/space-for-academic-freedom

‚At the University of Leicester, scholars of critical management studies have been selected for redundancy on the basis of titles of their journal articles, or sometimes just the titles of the journals themselves. This is the most egregious example of ideological cleansing and a breach of academic freedom by a UK university.‘

Burrell, Gibson (2022): Dialogue is actually the weapon of the powerful (Interview with Gislene Feiten Haubrich). Journal of Openness, Commons and Dialogue, 1(1), 24-30. http://rgcs-owee.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Feiten-Haubirch-Interview-Gibson-Burrell.-Dialogue-actually-is-the-weapon-of-the-powerful.pdf

In this interview, Burrell mentions the idea of a community of scholars which played an important role in Leicester – ‚that would be some small sort of contribution, even though it doesn’t exist anymore.‘
 

Brady, Andrea (2022): If you’re not bargaining, you’re bagging. In: London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/july/if-you-re-not-bargaining-you-re-begging

‚Disputes are also brewing at individual institutions. Mass redundancies, course closures and fire-and-rehire programmes have targeted  the arts and humanities at Goldsmiths, Leicester, Roehampton, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton, De Montfort, Portsmouth and Sheffield Hallam.‘
 

Kavanagh, Donncha (2023): Don’t shut down the business school: Re-locate it. In: Ephemera, 22(3) https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/dont-shut-down-business-school-re-locate-it

In this article about the future(s) of Critical Management Studies and the Business School, Donncha Kavanagh mentions the events at Leicester.

Fleming, Peter/Olaison, Lena/Plotnikof, Mie/Grønbæk Pors, Justine/Pullen, Alison. (2023). Crawling from the wreckage. Ephemera, 22(3). https://ephemerajournal.org/index.php/contribution/crawling-wreckage
 
‚The relation between ranking systems and the possibilities of critical thinking may, however, be transforming. More recently, the administrative apparatchik has begun scrutinizing and policing the content of scholarship. For example, the 2020 business school redundancies at Leicester University homed in on academics working in the fields of political economy and critical management studies. The criticality of their research – irrespective of whether it was being published in ‘elite’ journals or not – is what management sought to weed out. Commentators also took due note of the many academics in these fields active in the union. The union threatened to strike over the dispute, and thousands of academics around the world signed letters of support, as did critical journals (including ephemera), which called for a halt to the layoffs. Nevertheless, employers prevailed, resistance dissipated, and an explicit engagement in critical scholarship at Leicester University effectively became a dismissible offence.‘