Abstract
Business school faculty are frequently faced with management practices they find objectionable. Reactions vary, but compliance and hidden resistance are common responses. In this paper, we seek to understand compliance and hidden resistance as responses to objectionable management practices in business schools. To explore this problem, we present a case study of a business school where a new dean brought about aggressive and abrupt managerialist changes toward which faculty were broadly hostile. Faculty eventually failed to resist these changes and ended up resorting to exits and workplace disengagement while complying with management expectations regarding work outputs. To make sense of compliance and hidden resistance as responses to objectionable management practices in business schools, we propose the following concepts: “mercenary mentality” and “resipliance” (a combination of expressing resistance attitudes to peers-and to self-and complying with management demands for work outputs). The presence of a mercenary mentality and the related tendency to resipliance-which we argue are both common in business schools-undermines the capacity for resistance against objectionable management practices at the workplace, reminding us that resistance is fragile and elusive.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 257-273 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Academy of Management Learning and Education |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 26 Jun 2023 |
Funding
We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to the associate editor Gabrielle Durepos for her invaluable guidance, and to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful input. Furthermore, we would like to thank the members of the LUMOS group at the Department of Business Administration at Lund University and the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. We also received vital feedback to earlier versions from Amit Nigam and André Spicer—we are very grateful to you both. We would like to thank the Jan Wal-lander and Tom Hedelius Research Foundation for providing financial support for this research. Finally, we would like to thank the interview participants who made this research possible.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Tom Hedelius Research Foundation |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management