I have tried to have a look at Critical Management Studies through the web. To make sense of the Networked Learning Conference it helps to keep up with critique, or at least it offers some clues.

Google finds

http://www.criticalmanagement.org

but this starts with a directory of files. I think it is helpful to record the problems, that is just the quality management approach that I support. And the graphic shows another problem.



Not sure why this should be. I did download reedy.pdf and there has been no disaster so far. But the message is not encouraging and so I think there should be an approach to Google to work out some corrective action.

Patrick Reedy seems to me to be questioning whether there is any request from activists for an academic contribution. Now much of what I work on is not progressive or even political. Quality assurance is obviously a corporate sort of topic. But I am also concerned with web design for general use including social groups. My impression is that the critique take on network learning has not moved much past objecting to the conditions for dialogue, so there is hardly a design phase. What is there about forms of practice? I would like to find some links so if I have missed them, guidance would be welcome.

Meanwhile social networking sites do exist but they seem to have happened in a parallel universe.

Academics seem much more interested in the "dark side", the negative consequences of anything at all. There is now a dedicated conference.



Here is a sample-

Organizations also seem to have a history of and an interest in repressing basic human impulses such as sexuality, carnality or violence whilst institutionalizing them (Foucault 1977; 1990) Organizational processes of normalization create and define deviance and perversion in those activities that cannot effectively be eradicated, and generate disciplinary practices to police this body of behaviour. Is the repressed always subject to return and never completely eliminated or contained? Is organizational crime always with us? Moreover, do exposures of the dark side of organization : 1. indicate mismanagement, loss of managerial power, passivity, neglect of duties and inadequate surveillance, and invite intervention for improved performance; or 2. do they indicate the presence of fundamentally uncontrollable forces that are an inalienable part of the viscerality of human organising?

So is Google a safe environment? I think so, why not? Comments welcome.

And is there a message board somewhere?