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book-review2019
ORG0010.1177/1350508419890081OrganizationBook Review

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Book Review © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1350508419890081
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Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. Dennis Tourish. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019. pp. x+304, Price: $29.99, ISBN: 9781108480475.

Many have sought to puncture the balloon of management studies in today’s universities, but the
balloon has proven remarkably resilient. If anyone is going to succeed, it is Dennis Tourish. This
devastating book is not another jeremiad on the failure of management scholarship but a systematic
critique of a field built on corrupt practices and vacuous theorizing since its very beginnings, and
of the cynicism, disenchantment and burnout of those who inhabit it. Tourish is not critical of the
scholars who for different reasons make their livings and careers in the area of management; he is
very critical of the practices, institutions and products (including research outputs) that characterize
the field.
The book starts with a crushing review of the two ‘theoretical’ pylons on which management
established its credentials as an academic discipline, meriting the respect accorded to physics or
law, Scientific Management and Human Relations. These two traditions are endlessly reproduced
by every textbook as foundational theories in management. Yet, as Tourish demonstrates, they are
both built of entirely fictitious premises, false assumptions, substantially fabricated findings and
wishful thinking. The work of Taylor, Mayo and Co are parts of the field’s mythology and should
be read as such rather than as anything meriting the label of theory. Mythologies, however, have
consequences and they frequently come to play a vital part in what follows. What followed
Scientific Management were ever more rigorous attempts to control, deskill and dominate the
worker; what followed Human Relations were ever more systematic attempts to infantilize and
patronize him or her. This chapter alone should be mandatory reading to anyone entering this field
as student, academic, administrator or policy-maker.
The chapters that follow offer a critique of management scholarship for much of the last hundred
years that essentially falls in two categories, a constant stream of managerialist recipes aimed at
increasing efficiency and a separate stream of virtually meaningless research that either states the
obvious or is mystifyingly abstruse. The former invariably seeks to increase profitability by enhanc-
ing organizational controls over employees or eliminating workers altogether through automation,
mechanization and precarization. Some of these management recipes, in Tourish’s view, can be
spuriously effective, though at a cost to the workers. Others like those that have fuelled the audit
society are entirely counter-productive and dysfunctional. The triumph of metrics, including perfor-
mance indicators, best practice and the like, in business has resulted in a variety of games, including
the publishing game that so obsesses academics. The net result is a growth of different methods and
skills for gaming the different metrics and more generally for improving image as against substance.
Indeed, in many games played by organizations today, image becomes substance.
2 Organization 00(0)

When applied to academic work, especially to what is carried out in Business Schools, the tri-
umph of metrics, rankings, impact factors and the like results in thoroughly vacuous research,
corrupt practices and empty verbiage. Tourish diligently exposes a number of dubious or down-
right immoral practices for boosting publications, citations, impact factors and standings in differ-
ent rankings. These include plagiarism, data falsification, selective presentation of evidence and
harking (post-facto hypothesizing). He devotes an entire chapter to retractions, the withdrawal of
published articles that are shown to be based on fraud or professional malpractice of some sort.
Most readers, like myself, will be unfamiliar with the little-known or carefully hushed scandals in
academic publishing that Tourish brings to light, but one is left with the impression that they rep-
resent the tip of a large iceberg.
However, the biggest dysfunction of academic publishing in management studies is in the quality
of the research itself which is poorly written, esoteric in content, infinitesimally original and virtu-
ally meaningless to anyone who does not inhabit the different academic microdisciplines. If many
quantitative researchers are guilty of offering trivial additions to the literature, often deploying for-
midable mathematical resources to demonstrate the obvious, qualitative researchers are guilty of
obfuscation, repetition, faddishness and, frequently, a total indifference to the real problems that
afflict organizations, societies and even the planet. In many cases, they are seen debating how many
angels can dance on the head of a pin or, more appropriately, fiddling while the Earth heats up.
Tourish reserves some of his strongest criticisms for scholars in his own field of leadership stud-
ies and also in Critical Management Studies, which represent the opposite sides of the problem –
the former coming up with an endless stream of panaceas to the problem of leadership (the latest
one of which is authentic leadership), the latter obstinately refusing to get their hands dirty by
addressing any of the concerns of real managers and real organizations. Tourish’s trenchant cri-
tique does not content itself with anonymous generalizations but is at times directed at prominent
scholars and even stars in these fields, though to his credit he does not exempt himself from some
of the faults he finds in others. He is particularly severe in his condemnation of academic language
that is meant to impress by obfuscating and confusing and offers several good examples of the
genre. In the tradition established by C. Wright Mills (1959) in The Sociological Imagination, he
offers several translations of pretentious jargon demonstrating that when something is meaningful,
it can be expressed in plain English and when it cannot it is almost certainly vacuous.
Unlike many other critics of management studies, Tourish dedicates an entire chapter on the
suffering inflicted by the current state of affairs on many of the practitioners, especially the younger
scholars. The publishing game may create a few winners but also a far greater proportion of losers.
Reading through the testimonies of some of the researchers quoted by Tourish, one is left with the
impression that the human body inhabiting academia is a walking wounded one, bombarded by
unreasonable requests, enticed to engage in dubious practices in producing meaningless verbiage
and insulted along the way by unending criticism and censure.
Despite its penetrating criticism, Tourish’s tone is neither strident nor destructive. Unlike some
of our professional colleagues, he does not call for the closing down of business schools, nor for
the abolition of all metrics and research assessments. Instead, he offers a wide range of measured
recommendations for reforming the system at different levels and across different institutions,
including departments, universities, journals, publishers and policy-makers. What he maybe fails
to indicate is that unless the system is reformed, it is likely to implode sooner rather than later as it
creates many more losers than winners. Above all, the losers include the students whose fees pay
for the time academics spend on research aimed only at boosting their departmental rankings and
their career prospects but of little benefit to society or to the students themselves. It is time that
other scholars in the area of management studies joined Tourish in calling for a root and branch
reform of a system that has far outlived its usefulness.
Book Review 3

ORCID iD
Yiannis Gabriel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6265-1699

Reference
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Yiannis Gabriel
Lund University, Sweden