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First Inaugural by Emma Bell
Professor Emma Bell, Keele Management School/RI for Social Sciences, last week gave the opening lecture in the University's programme of Inaugural Professorial Lectures for 2012/13. The title of the lecture was "Cults and Cultures of Management".
She said 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.
In her lecture she traced the resurgent interest in religious and spiritual beliefs in organisations and considered what this post-secular turn reveals about cultures of management and the ethical systems that they promote. Drawing on her research into companies, including Walmart and Apple, she suggested that the power of organizational 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.
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