This paper draws on the work of Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to explore the ideological fantasies of strategy. Specifically, the paper argues that the academic field of strategy-as-practice (SAP) quilts a set of organizational activities and practices around the master signifier of 'strategy'. This means that SAP theory circles around a void that its proponents seek to fill through an endless search for the objet petit a, the paradoxical object-cause of desire. The paper demonstrates this by showing how the SAP literature conceptualizes the practice of strategy in a circular and self-referential way, i.e. as an effect that respectively posits its own cause. The illusion is that the practice of strategy appears to be present from the very beginning in the SAP literature, when it has been constituted post factum. Ultimately, the paper seeks traverse the fantasy of strategy and reveal the surplus enjoyment at the heart of SAP theory. The paper concludes by exploring alternative ways of understanding the practice of strategy from the perspective of the transgressive 'act' (passage a l'acte).

Critical scholars in the business school are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their research beyond the confines of academia. This has been articulated most prominently around the concept of critical performativity'. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with critical leadership scholars, this article explores how academics engage with practitioners at the same time as they seek to maintain a critical ethos in relation to their external activities. While proponents of critical performativity tend to paint a frictionless picture of practitioner engagementwhich can take the form of consulting, coaching, and leadership developmentwe show how critical scholars may end up compromising their academic values in corporate settings due to practitioner demands and other institutional pressures. Taken together, these pressures mean that critical scholars often need to negotiate a series of (sometimes insoluble) dilemmas in practitioner contexts. We argue that the concept of critical performativity is unable to contend meaningfully with these tensions because it replicates the myth of the heroic-transformational academic' who is single-handedly able to stimulate critical reflection among practitioners and provoke radical change in organizations. We conclude with a call for further reflection on the range of ethical dilemmas that can arise during academic-practitioner engagement.

In recent years, the awareness of academic misconduct has increased due to high-profile scandals involving prominent researchers and a spike in journal retractions. But such examples of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) serve to obscure the less flagrant, more subtle cases of possible misconduct: what some have called questionable research practices (QRPs). Where FFP is seen as inherently negative, QRPs fall into an ethical gray zone between permissible and impermissible. We draw on semistructured interviews with business school scholars to explore the occurrence of QRPs. Prevalent QRPs include playing with numbers, playing with models, and playing with hypotheses. Scholars explain the existence of QRPs in three ways: the inadequate training of researchers, the pressures and incentives to publish in certain outlets, and the demands and expectations of journal editors and reviewers. We argue that a paradox is at work here: To live up to the positivist image of pure science that appears in academic journals, researchers may find themselves-ironically-transgressing this very ideal. Ultimately, this challenges the individualistic account of academic misconduct by drawing attention to the role played by institutional actors, such as academic journals, in encouraging forms of QRPs.

Freelance creative work is a labour of love where opportunities for self-expression are combined with exploitative working conditions. This article explores this dynamic by showing how a group of freelance creative labourers navigate employment while coping with the pressures associated with economic precarity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we argue that full-time stand-up comedians engage in 'pecuniary' forms of emotion management in an occupational field where social networks and professional relationships play a prominent role. First, comedians project an image of positivity to demonstrate a willingness to work for little or no pay in order to curry favour with comedy club promoters. Second, comedians suppress feelings of anxiety and frustration that arise from financial insecurity in order to keep their relationships with promoters on an even keel - even when the rate of pay and promptness of remuneration fall below acceptable standards. Our study thus has implications for other creative sectors in which precarity is the norm, since it suggests that emotional labour is a resource not only for engaging with customers and clients but also for engaging with multiple employers, negotiating pay and dealing with conditions of insecurity in freelance settings - often with unintended, paradoxical, results.

It is increasingly common to describe academic research as a publication game, a metaphor that connotes instrumental strategies for publishing in highly rated journals. However, we suggest that the use of this metaphor is problematic. In particular, the metaphor allows scholars to make a convenient, but ultimately misleading, distinction between figurative game-playing on one hand (i.e. pursuing external career goals through instrumental publishing) and proper research on the other hand (i.e. producing intrinsically meaningful research). In other words, the publication game implies that while academic researchers may behave just like players, they are not really playing a game. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we show that this metaphor prevents us, ironically, from fully grasping the lusory attitude, or play-mentality, that characterizes academic work among critical management researchers. Ultimately, we seek to stimulate reflection about how our choice of metaphor can have performative effects in the university and influence our behavior in unforeseen and potentially undesirable ways.

This chapter examines forms of game-playing in the business school by focusing on the way that the regime of excellence – understood primarily in terms of journal rankings and research assessments – comes to modify academics' relationship to scholarship. It offers some suggestions on how academic game-plays in the business school. The chapter reviews the literature on the rise of excellence, focusing on the impact of journal rankings and research assessments on academic working lives. In recent years, 'excellence' has emerged as a key discourse within the contemporary university. Originating in the private sector and the rise of New Public Management in the 1980s and 1990s, 'excellence' involves orientating academic knowledge production around metrics such as journal rankings, impact factors and league tables. To this extent, it is aligned with neo-liberal 'audit culture' that seeks to measure and assess the products of academic labour as discrete units of value rather than as primarily scholarly contributions.

Today, it is becoming increasingly common for companies to harness the spirit of play in order to increase worker engagement and improve organizational performance. This paper examines the ethics of play in a business context, focusing specifically on the phenomenon of workplace gamification. While critics highlight ethical problems with gamification, they also advocate for more positive, transformative, and life-affirming modes of organizational play. Gamification is ethical, on this view, when it allows users to reach a state of authentic happiness or eudaimonia. The underlying assumption, here, is that the ‘magic circle’ of play—a sphere that exists entirely for its own sake—should be protected in order to secure meaningfulness at work. However, we argue that this faith in play is misguided because play, even at its most autotelic, is ethically ambivalent; it does not lead inexorably to virtuous work environments, but may in fact have an undesirable impact on those who are playing. Our study thus contributes to research on the ‘dark side’ of organizational play, a strand of scholarship that questions the idea that play always points toward the good life.

There are plenty of books and articles on research methods, but few discuss the nature and purpose of method sections in academic journals. Based on interviews with critical and interpretivist researchers, this short paper examines the nature and purpose of method sections in management and organization studies. We show how researchers make sense of, and struggle with, positivist expectations about the form and content of method sections. Ultimately, we call for greater openness about what method sections might look like and ask whether all academic articles need method sections.

This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the “Conference Challenge” posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what’s already happening in the broader “publication game” in the university.

This paper offers an analysis of the professional project that was pursued by the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) on behalf of its members. The paper builds on Sturdy's (2011) call to develop empirically grounded accounts of the ways and means of consulting. In addition, it responds to the analysis of the Association of Project Management (APM) developed by Hodgson, Paton and Muzio (2015), which invited further comparative study of professional projects. Drawing on archive data, this paper develops a comparative analysis that considers four key themes: (1) the professionalization strategies developed by the IMC and the APM; (2) jurisdictional issues and shifts in the fields of consulting and project management; (3) the structure of credentials developed for practitioners in both arenas; and (4) the attitudes and actions of key stakeholders shaping policy in the APM and the IMC. The paper examines the contrasting fortunes of the APM and the IMC, yet observes similarities in working practices across these apparently distinct settings. Reflecting on this comparison, the authors consider the nature, contours and limits of consulting professionalism and conclude with the suggestion that, within the analysis of professional projects, conventional conceptualizations of 'success' and 'failure' should be considered as 'impostors'.

From its inception, leadership studies has embraced the positivist tradition of hypothesis testing. In this tradition, psychometric instruments are meant to ward off belief from scientific practice by testing theories against empirical facts. While leadership scholars purport to conform to the standards of value-neutral science, this paper tells a different story. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 39 positivist leadership researchers, we argue that leadership studies is heavily invested with faith in two main ways: (a) faith in leadership concepts, even when their accompanying measures fall short of methodological standards and (b) faith in leadership studies as a science, even when it is tainted by commercial interests and professional rewards. Ultimately, we suggest that positivist epistemology is accepted in leadership studies as an article of faith. By exploring the interconnection between science and belief in the business school, we draw attention to the secular religion of scientism in leadership studies.

In 2014, leadership studies saw the retraction of a number of journal articles written by prominent researchers who are closely associated with popular concepts such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership and spiritual leadership. In response, The Leadership Quarterly published a lengthy editorial that presented these retractions as a sign of health in a mature scientific field. For the editors of The Leadership Quarterly, there is no crisis in leadership studies. In this paper, we suggest that the editorial is a missed opportunity to reflect on positivist leadership studies. In our view, leadership ought to be in crisis because this would stimulate the community to question its guiding assumptions and reconsider its methods and objectives. We therefore hope to open up a critical discussion about the means and ends of mainstream leadership studies - not least of all its scientific pretensions.