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This article examines the history of British house magazines from 1945 to 2015. It discusses their content, audience and function within companies. From tools of internal public relations, house ma...

The question of whether and how research quality should be measured, and the consequences of research audits such as the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) – formerly the RAE – are considered in relation to the role of journal ratings such as the Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Quality Guide (the ABS Guide). Criticism of the ABS Guide has distracted attention from the results of successive RAEs, where the panel for Business and Management has been one of the most selective in its allocation of the highest grades, especially when compared with the neighbouring field of Economics. If the ABS Guide had been used to grade outputs submitted for Business and Management in the RAE 2008 then many more outputs would have received the highest grades, especially in accounting where outputs from journals such as Critical Perspectives on Accounting, which are highly rated in the ABS Guide, appear to have been downgraded by the RAE panel. The alleged bias against accounting in the ABS Guide rests on a particular interpretation of citation impact factors for journals, and a narrow definition of subject fields. Critics of the ABS Guide would be better advised to direct their attention to scrutinizing the results of the REF and considering whether it provides an adequate research ranking for UK business schools. 15% of all full time students in the UK study business and management, including accounting and finance, but only 6.7% of the full time equivalent research active staff submitted in the RAE 2008 were in business and management, or accounting and finance. Research audits are therefore forcing the separation of teaching from research in UK business schools. With an estimated ratio of 71 full time students per research active faculty member in UK business schools, it may be time to consider a more appropriate, inclusive, and economical form of ranking for research in business and management.

This article reviews the evidence presented by those alleging bias in the rating of accounting journals in the ABS Guide to Journal Quality in Business and Management Studies. Drawing upon a wider range of citation metrics and international journal ranking schemes, the analysis presented covers all the accounting journals listed in the current 2010 version of the ABS Guide. The evidence of bias based on the mean RAE 2008 GPA scores for institutions and on the ‘world elite count’ as published in the guide is rejected. The simplistic comparison of the proportion of grade ‘4’ journals in accounting relative to other subject areas is rejected as evidence of bias and the preferred method reveals that the ABS Guide provides the accounting subject area with one more grade ‘4’ journal and seven more grade ‘3’ journals than might otherwise be expected. There is no evidence that the use of Thomson-Reuters citation data in the process of constructing the ABS Guide has been detrimental to accounting journals. The accounting journals in the ABS Guide have lower mean scores on almost all citation metrics when compared to other subject area journals with the same ABS grade. A detailed comparison of the ranking of accounting journals in seven international journal ranking lists fails to find evidence of bias against accounting journals and suggests that grade ‘3’ accounting journals have been favorably rated. In a detailed comparison of accounting and business history journals, there is little evidence from any source reviewed to suggest that Accounting History is of the same quality rank as Business History or that Accounting History clearly warrants a higher ABS Guide rating. The conclusion is that the evidence presented supports the view that the ABS Guide has not been biased in its rating of accounting journals.

This Rejoinder responds to criticisms made by Simon Hussain (2011) about the construction and operation of the Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide. In this paper the broad purposes of journal lists and guides are outlined before an account is given of the long history and multiple forms of these lists, particularly in the field of Accounting. Having described the main features of different types of journal list, the advantages and benefits of the approach adopted in the compilation of the ABS Journal Quality Guide is outlined. The paper then ends by noting that one of the copy-editing mistakes identified by Dr Hussain has been rectified, but the remaining concerns about the rating of accounting education and accounting history journals reflect the absence of these titles from journal citation reports and international journal lists. Furthermore, the lower rating of Accounting & Finance research in the RAE2008 in comparison with Business & Management Studies research in th...

The ABS list is one of the most widely used journal quality lists available. It is pluralistic and comprehensive, and is widely seen as capturing the consensus in relation to journal ratings. As editors of the ABS list we are concerned at recent calls for a moratorium, or even the abolition of journal quality lists. These calls reinforce the elitist view that the tacit knowledge of where to publish should not be made explicit in lists.

How is it that a collection of working class drifters, sociology graduates, and ex-leftist politicos have ended up teaching in UK business schools? Understanding the predicament of these ‘critters’ helps to explain the ironic contingencies that provide the conditions of possibility for institutionalizing critical management studies (CMS), in particular the historic ‘defeat of the Left’ and the lack of more practical activities for radical management academics. Unlike labour process theory (LPT), CMS has come to terms with its institutional location within business schools and has taken the opportunity provided by the continued expansion of research oriented UK business schools to institutionalize itself as a recognized business school constituency. This has even led to the creation of one or two critically oriented business schools in the UK, where the contradictions of CMS are played out. One such contradiction is that having provided an opening for a wider academic and leftist intellectual community to enter the business school, CMS now finds itself faced with an autonomist critique which insists that the mainstream management curriculum is ‘worthless’ and calls for nothing less than the abolition of business schools. Consideration of this critique provides an opportunity to explore the identity of critters and the cultural performativity of CMS in providing a sign for their disaffiliation from the business school.

Organizations are increasingly being called to account for their history. In particular, German and non-German companies have been called to account for their relations with the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Organizations are not only accountable for past activity, but also for previous, often misleading, historical accounts of their behaviour. Thus we are interested in how an organization deals with historical accounts of its past, and how this reflects its culture. Therefore we draw upon concepts from organizational culture studies, and specifically Martin's three perspectives of culture as integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. We take the illustrative case of Bertelsmann, the German publishing company. Revelations of its record under the Nazis, when it published anti-semitic literature, were brought to light by Hersch Fischler in 1998, when Bertelsmann was in the process of taking over Random House. These revelations jarred with the company's image of corporate social responsibility and undermined the company legend, which alleged that it had an impeccable record, and had even been closed down for opposing the Nazis. The Bertelsmann case highlights the dilemmas involved in organizations invoking their past. Debate over the Holocaust has highlighted the dilemmas of truth and relativism in representations of history. The Bertelsmann case highlights similar dilemmas for organizational culture perspectives.

Debates about the role of capitalist corporations depend ultimately on their response to the enduring question of ‘who controls the large modern corporation’. This article aims to identify various competing schools of thought that can be classified as ‘managerialist’ and ‘anti-managerialist’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘radical’, which have emerged over the course of the last 70 years, moving on to consider how each has impacted on the discipline of business history. The paper utilizes a two-by-two matrix that divides theories along two dimensions to set out four alternative perspectives. Along the horizontal dimension, anti-managerialism is opposed to managerialism; along the vertical dimension, mainstream and radical perspectives are opposed. The article then assesses the extent to which these conflicting perspectives have influenced the work of business historians, from Chandler's earliest work through to more recent thinking on the links between corporate governance, accountability and broader market forces. Em...

Company magazines originated in the United Kingdom and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century and have been a constant feature of the large-scale corporation in both countries. The paper historically examines the growth and development of company magazines in Britain, studying a broad array of house journals in both the private and the public sector. Its main focus is to examine how company magazines contributed to the development of corporate culture in corporations via the development of the concept of corporate cultural communication. It does so from a process of genealogy and discursive analysis. It argues that company magazines have developed three foundational discourses in British corporations, those of industrial welfare, industrial relations and marketing. The relative mixture of these discourses has been a key ingredient in organizational and corporate cultures. While the emphasis of these discourses have changed over the period, they have remained constant throughout., thus...

The concept of culture promised to make organization studies more historical and to provide theoretical relevance for business history. This promise has not been fulfilled. The conventions at various levels of organizational culture studies prevent them from becoming more historical, and the conventions of business history make it difficult to engage with the concept of culture. Corporate culturism imposes a narrative structure that privileges the role of founders in history. Similarly, corporate sponsorship reinforces the tendency for business historians to endorse the unity and continuity of corporate cultures. The influence of economics in business history reduces culture to a residual variable and subordinates narrative to economic models. Organizational symbolists are suspicious of narrative, which they associate with founder-centred corporate culturism. Instead, ethnographies emphasize verisimilitude and the subjective experience of the author at the expense of verifiable historical narratives. Business historians adopt an objective stance that allows them to write definitive company histories, but makes it difficult to engage with the subjectivism and relativism of organizational symbolism or the scepticism of post-modernism. Unlike organizational culture studies, post-modernism in history is identified with a return to narrative. A serious engagement with organizational culture studies might engender the much-needed critical reflex in business history. We use the rare examples of historical deconstruction in organizational culture studies (Boje 1995) and of deconstruction in business history (Church 1996) to highlight the differences between the two discourses. We argue that a more historical approach in organizational culture studies and a more reflexive engagement with the concept of culture in business history would facilitate the deconstruction of founder-centred narratives of corporate culture.

Stephen Procter, John Hassard and Michael Rowlinson investigate the introduction of cellular manufacturing in two units of a large British engineering group. They explore the reasons for its introduction – in both cases it was the cumbersome, functionally-based system of production that precluded quick and easy reaction to changes in conditions – and the effects such as the flattening of the organisational structure and the new role of the cell leader. A comparison of the two companies shows the difficulties involved in trying to enhance discretion by means of a process that was explicitly low-trust in nature. In one case an open and participative style was used which appeared to meet with success. In the second case, management adopted a closed and uncommunicative style which induced indifference and, at worst, resistance. Stephen Procter and Michael Rowlinson are Lecturers in the School of Management and Finance at the University of Nottingham, and John Hassard is Professor in the Department of Management at the University of Keele.

The relationships between computer integrated manufacturing (CIM), corporate strategy and organization are assessed, and various periodizations for analysing the process of innovation are considered. The periodization selected consists of concept, translation, commissioning and operation, and this is then used to structure a case study, based on in-depth interviews, of the introduction of CIM in a medium sized UK manufacturer of electrical components for the automotive industry.

SUMMARY This paper discusses the use of performance related pay (PRP) as a means of control over the relationship between effort and reward. Taking a critical perspective, it describes how the implementation of PRP in a UK-based electronics company has been used as a device to remove trade union influence in wage-setting arrangements and to effect changes in employee behaviour. The opinions of supervisors, line managers, personnel managers and shop-floor staff are discussed and the implications for management control are assessed. The paper concludes that from management's perspective the PRP system appears to have been a success, for it has in some cases ‘commercialized’ the relationship between effort and reward, and has pre-empted expressions of employee resistance.

New evidence from a British electronics plant on the experience of a harmonisation programme is presented and questions the generally accepted favourable image of moves towards single status working. The presentation is novel in that instead of offering a traditional literature review followed by the empirical data, the article develops two forms of case description. The first case is a fictional “Composite” account derived from previously published materials in which we have assembled the key themes into a single narrative to convey an image of harmonisation as it is presented in the literature. This can then be compared with the more contradictory experience of harmonisation found during ethnographic research at the Collaborating Company, where management was more constrained and the process was not conflict free. The two cases can be read as a contrast between image and reality which then needs to be explained.

The purpose of this panel symposium is to show why and how context matters, and to draw attention to the benefits of integrating causal mechanisms and context to explain complex organizational phenomena. Our goal is to initiate a new dialogue among various constituents of the Academy of Management by bringing forward new questions and perspectives that highlight the salience of “contexts”. We believe this panel will generate fresh new debates particularly among Business Policy and Strategy (BPS), International Management (IM), and Organization and Management Theory (OMT) division members; and also will be of interest to members of the Entrepreneurship, Organization Behavior and Research Methods Divisions.