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Professor Emma Bell Inaugural Lecture

"Cults and Cultures of Management"
Tuesday 23rd October, 2012. Westminster Theatre. 6pm

"Management’s love affair with culture began in the early 1980s. However, little more than a decade later, managers and management scholars had fallen out of love with culture and moved on to newer management fashions. This tendency to continually repackage organisational ideas tells us something about the way in which managerial, and scholarly, careers are constructed. And yet culture did not go away quietly. Instead it shifted from what was on the surface (symbols, rituals and practices), to what lay beneath (values and beliefs).

In this lecture I will trace the resurgent interest in religious and spiritual beliefs in organisations and consider what this post-secular turn reveals about cultures of management and the ethical systems that they promote. Drawing on my research into companies including Walmart and Apple, I will suggest that the power of organisational culture lies beneath the surface, and while some of these belief systems may be considered disciplinary, belief can also provide an ethical frame for challenging the excesses of modern management."

Emma Bell is Professor of Management and Organisation Studies at Keele Management School, Keele University. Her research is informed by a commitment to understanding cultures and the role of belief systems in management and organisation.

She also teaches and writes about methods in management research. Her research has been published in journals such as Organization and Human Relations, and she is the author of two books Business Research Methods (3rd edition 2011), with Alan Bryman, and Reading Management and Organization in Film (2008).