Academy of Management 2024 Booklist

Once hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, it is now clear that platforms are reshaping the world of work, and Amazon has been a forerunner in setting the trend.

This book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms that differ in how they organize workers: its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform (Mechanical Turk). With access to the people who are working at the heart of these platforms, it explores how different working conditions alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency in traditional and alternative ways.

Written for social scientists studying and researching the platform economy, this is a timely and important analysis of work and workers on the (digital) shop floor.

Published in collaboration with BUIRA, this book provides a critical review of the field of industrial relations (IR) and evaluates its future in the rapidly evolving world of work.

Written by key names in IR, the book captures the significant transformations that have taken place within the field over the past decade. It traces the historical development of IR, exploring its ongoing impact on our lives. The chapters delve into various aspects, including union organization and mobilization, the influence of new technology, and the examination of intersectionality in the context of work and employment.

This is an invaluable resource for academics and students of employment and industrial relations, as well as HR professionals, trade union organizations and representatives.

The turnover of labour and its significance for workers and employers has usually been considered at the organizational level as individual exit behaviour, and seldom in relation to the cross-border mobility practices of migrant workers within and without the workplace.

Drawing from labour process theory, the autonomy of migration, social reproduction, and industrial relations, this book explores the relationship between labour mobility and international migration under a global and historical perspective.

Uncovering both the individual and collective actions by migrants inside and outside worker organizations, the authors develop a new understanding of migrants’ everyday mobilities as creative and life-sustaining strategies of social reproduction and labour conflict.

It seems clear that many formerly stable societies in wealthy developed countries appear to be falling into an apparent state of ‘permacrisis' accompanied by an increasingly angry and irrational social and political culture that is undermining the peace and stability of our societies and democratic institutions, from the local to the global.

Applying an original biosocial approach (the social map), and drawing on ideas and evidence from sociology, history and political economy, to psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics, John Bone argues that conditions in our turbocapitalist and increasingly estranged, media dominated societies have created a toxic environment, deeply damaging to our mental and physical health. As well as shedding new light on our current troubles, Bone also outlines why this leaves us ill prepared to deal with two of the greatest challenges confronting humanity: the rise of AI and automation and how we deal with climate change.

This book outlines what it means to study political parties as organizations by developing and applying four theoretical perspectives to the case of an unconventional Green party in Denmark called Alternativet (meaning ‘the alternative’).

Drawing on an ethnographic study, the book tracks the party’s humble origins in 2013 as a social movement through its inaugural term until the 2022 national elections, spotlighting Alternativet's unprecedented organizational dynamics.

By dissecting this ‘party that did not want to be a party’ through classical, configurational, comparative, and cultural lenses, the author opens a new area of enquiry to scholars in organization and management studies.

EPDF and EPUB available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Money is central to capitalism and to our many sustainability crises. Could we remake money so as to advance sustainable economies and fair societies? A growing number of scholars, politicians and activists think we can, and they are doing it from the bottom up.

This book examines how grassroots groups, municipalities and radical crypto-entrepreneurs are remaking money by designing and organising complementary currencies. It argues that in their novel ideas and governance practices lie the key for building green and inclusive economies.

Engaging imaginatively with the future of money, this accessible book will appeal to anyone interested in constructing a more sustainable and just world.

Based on decades of research, this book explores global social change processes through the concepts of social change organisations (SCOs) and social change makers (SCMs) – the individuals working within and alongside SCOs.

The book delves into a vast array of compelling social justice issues, from tackling inequality to championing human rights, bridging the realms of social movement and third sector research.

Inspiring and empowering, this is essential reading for scholars, students, NGOs and activists alike.

The symptoms of menopause transitions have profound implications for work and are, in turn, affected by work. Despite this, the topic is rarely discussed in management and organization studies.

Providing an overview of existing knowledge in the field of menopause in the workplace, this collection re-theorizes the management of human resources as it relates to the connections between gender, age and the body in the workplace environment with an intersectional analysis.

Offering theoretical frameworks from experts as well as possible practical approaches that can be implemented in workplaces to support women transitioning through menopause, this is a go-to reference for academics and policy makers working in the field.

Active labour market policies aim to assist people not in work to move into employment through a range of interventions including job search, preparation, training and in-work support and development. While policies, programmes and scholarship predominantly focus on jobseekers’ engagement with these initiatives, this book is the first text to shed light on the employer’s perspective.

Bringing together renowned scholars from social and public policy and human resource management, the book draws on empirical research, comparative case studies and real-life examples from practice, providing a comprehensive analysis of this under-explored issue.

This go-to resource will inform HRM and public policy scholarship and promote collaborations between the disciplines.

Winner of the Social Enterprise and Innovation category and overall Management Book of the Year, awarded by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), the British Academy of Management (BAM) and the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS)

How do men interested in gender equality become ‘change makers’ and lead their organisation towards inclusion?

Directly addressing men, this innovative book reveals how they can be centrally involved in creating gender-inclusive cultures in their organisations. Using cutting-edge research, it suggests practical actions for men as leaders and managers to implement in order to make real changes .

Ideal for the time-poor professional, it is essential reading for all men who want to make a difference but don’t know where to start.

How can we reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to provide new opportunities for social change?

Based on an ethnography with an anti-violence feminist collective, this vibrant and vital book develops an interdisciplinary approach to activism and activist research, helping us reimagine the role of scholarship in the fight against social inequality.

With its reflections on novel tools that can be utilized in the fight for social justice, this book will be a valuable resource for academics in critical management studies, sociology, gender studies, and social work as well as practitioners and policymakers across the social services sector.

Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work and what do they really do? Most importantly, what might finance be and what could we expect from it?

Exploring contemporary finance via the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, Roscoe mingles historical and technical detail with humorous anecdotes and lively portraits of market participants.

Deftly combining research and autobiographical vignettes, he offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion. Positioning financial markets as central devices in the organization of the global economy, he includes contemporary concerns over inequality, climate emergency and (de)colonialism and concludes by wondering, in the market’s own angst-filled voice, what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.

From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers?

This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations.

Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires.

This is an innovative book that offers a complete view of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy.

We all have to work to pay the bills – but what influence do we really have over our pay and working conditions? The emergence of the global economy, digital technologies, mass migration, gig work and zero hours contracts have thrust this question to the forefront of HRM. So how can we keep the ‘human’ in human resource management faced by these pressures?

This book adopts a critical approach to today’s major workplace challenges. It turns traditional HRM on its head by placing workers’ perspectives towards the workplace alongside those of managers to create an HRM textbook for the 21st century. Written by two experienced and research-active authors, the book:

• locates control of labour costs and productivity at the heart of HRM policy and practice;

• covers key issues that are overlooked in many textbooks, including conflict and resistance, the ‘new’ unitarism, migration and the challenges of Artificial Intelligence;

• adopts a critical approach that will appeal more to students who don’t wish to become traditional managers;

• includes current examples and case studies from the international world of work and business that will bring the subject to life.

This is a comprehensive one-stop resource for students and lecturers alike.

'Corporate purpose' has become a battleground for stakeholders’ competing desires. Some argue that corporations must simply generate profit; others suggest that we must make them create social change.

Leading organization studies scholar Timothy Kuhn argues that this 'either/or' thinking dramatically oversimplifies matters: today’s corporations must be many things, all at once.

Kuhn offers a bold new Communicative Theory of the Firm to highlight the authority that creates corporations’ identities and activities. The theory provides a roadmap for navigating that battleground of competing desires to produce more responsive corporations.

Drawing on communicative and new materialist theorizing, along with three insightful case studies, this book thoroughly redefines our understandings of what corporations are 'for'.

Welcome to the economy of algorithms. It’s here and it’s growing. In the past few years, we have been flooded with examples of impressive technology. Algorithms have been around for hundreds of years, but they have only recently begun to ‘escape’ our understanding. When algorithms perform certain tasks, they’re not just as good as us, they’re becoming infinitely better, and, at the same time, massively more surprising. We are so impressed by what they can do that we give them a lot of agency. But because they are so hard to comprehend, this leads to all kinds of unintended consequences.

In the 20th century, things were simple: we had the economy of corporations. In the first two decades of the 21st century, we saw the emergence of the economy of people, otherwise known as the digital economy, enabled by the internet. Now we’re seeing a new economy take shape: the economy of algorithms.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Why does scholarship on innovation fixate on certain classes of technology? Could our research tools and techniques be concealing as much as they reveal?

Ryan T. MacNeil shows how the common instrumentalities of innovation research carry neoliberal market biases. He calls for critical scholars to examine how we observe and understand innovation, offering ways forward to deconstruct and reform disciplinary conventions.

This book makes a valuable contribution to critical management and science and technology studies by shedding light on the ‘dark matter’ of innovation. This will be an important resource for scholars and practitioners interested in disruptive ideas about innovation.