Hugh Willmott
Biographic Data
| ID | 208586 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hugh Willmott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hugh |
| FAMILY NAME | Willmott |
| SIGNATURE | WILLMOTT H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7945-7796 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 102 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 720 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 96 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Glassworking at Barking Abbey
Excavations conducted between 1985 and 1990 at the site of Barking Abbey yielded extensive evidence of the earliest Anglo-Saxon monastery, founded in the seventh century and subsequently sacked by the Vikings in AD 870. One of the most noteworthy finds was the base of a glass furnace, along with pits containing glass-melting crucibles and working waste. This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of this material. The circular furnace wa…
Safeguarding science
This Speaking Out attends to the opacity and injustice of scientific manuscript evaluation. Its focus is upon the embeddedness of editors, reviewers and authors in a moral order conditioned by an asymmetrical structure of power relations that is sustained by deference and secrecy. Attention is given to the shortcomings of complaints and appeals procedures that currently provide the principal, non-independent means of safeguarding science by inter…
Crafting Colour
The presence of early medieval millefiori insets on metalwork found across the British Isles has long been noted, as has the manufacture of millefiori canes in Ireland. However, attempts to classify, date and provide provenance for the glass, as opposed to the metal into which it was set, have been limited. New research on glassmaking waste from Barking Abbey, complementing that already published from Jarrow, suggests that millefiori production w…
Reframing methodology
Purpose “Craft” is a trope widely used to characterize diverse practices of scientific knowledge production and communication, including within the field of Management and Organization Studies (MOS). On examination, “craft” is found to have a deep etymological connectedness to science, ethics and politics. Attending to this etymology provides a basis for disclosing how the dominant, neopositivist normative order of knowledge generation and dissem…
The glass from the Barco de las Pipas
This article presents the typological and chemical analysis of a small glass assemblage recovered from a, likely Dutch, early 17th-century shipwreck known as Barco de las Pipas, found off the coast of the Province of Montecristi, Dominican Republic. All fifteen glass fragments recovered during underwater excavation were typologically characterised, sampled, and analysed using Electron Micro-Probe Analysis (EMPA) for major and minor elements and L…
Sacred Landscapes and Deep Time
Excavation of a postulated early Medieval hermitage near Crowland, England, identified a site with a long and complex chronological sequence.During the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, a monumental henge was built, among the largest so far identified in the Fens of eastern England, probably later adapted into a timber circle.After a period of apparent abandonment, the interior of the henge was reoccupied around the 7th century A.D. and, after furth…
I am My Work
From Roman Table to Anglo-Saxon Grave
The presence of Roman material in early Anglo-Saxon graves in England is well documented, and recent excavations at Scremby in Lincolnshire have revealed a complete copper-alloy enamelled drinking cup in a sixth-century ad female burial. Not only is such a Roman vessel a very rare find, but also its inclusion in an early medieval grave makes it a unique example of the reuse of an antique object in a funerary context. This article presents a typol…
Ivory from early Anglo-Saxon burials in Lincolnshire – A biomolecular study
Ivory bag rings have been found in more than 70 cemeteries across southern, central, and eastern England dating to between the late-5th and 7th centuries AD. These rings are most frequently found in richly furnished female graves, and would have served as the framework for bags that hung at the waist. Debate over the source of this ivory has prevailed since the 19th century, with walrus and mammoth ivory considered as possible contenders to eleph…
Revisiting conflict
What is the role of conflict in bringing about radical change? Taking the case of the gig economy, we study the conditions of possibility for fairer alternative ways of organising to emerge. Currently, some commentators underscore the sense of freedom of working as a self-employed contractor; others focus on its negative and exploitative dimensions. Less attention has been given to the potential emergence of (radical) conflicts around the nature …
Re-evaluating the landscape of early ecclesiastical foundation in the Kingdom of Lindsey
In 1993, David Stocker published a review of the evidence for the early church in Lincolnshire, proposing a series of models explaining the pattern behind the documented foundations of the 7th and 8th centuries. Over the last three decades, excavations at West Halton, Partney, Little Carlton and the long-awaited publication of those from Flixborough, in addition to new research at a range of other sites, make a re-evaluation of his arguments poss…
Not the ‘from the editors’
The paper reflects on the experience of preparing a ‘From the Editors’ (FTE) editorial for The Academy of Management Review that went through a process of editorial evaluation prior to its rejection. It provides a detailed example of an encounter between orthodox and heterodox forms of scholarship, illuminating their distinctive value-orientations and forms of engagement. Its specific focus is upon evaluative criteria applied, accountability of d…
Among his fellows cast’
Critical essay
The standing and progress of science depends upon confidence in the evaluation of knowledge claims. This essay affirms the value of peer review as a ‘gold standard’ but argues that its efficacy for scientific progress is, on balance, diminished by blinding. It reflects critically upon the anomaly between an ethos of openness that is widely held to define scientific work, and the opacity institutionalized in reviewing and editorial processes, with…
Rethinking Early Medieval ‘Productive Sites’
The rising popularity of hobbyist metal detecting has provided early medieval scholars with various important new datasets, not least the concentrations of metalwork commonly known as ‘productive sites’. Awareness of these foci derives almost exclusively from archaeological evidence, yet they continue to be interpreted through a documentary lens, and are frequently labelled ‘monasteries’. Using the recently discovered site of Little Carlton, Linc…
Ethics, politics and embodied imagination in crafting scientific knowledge
This article explores ‘research-as-craft’ as a sensitizing concept for disclosing the presence of ethics and politics, as well as embodiment and imagination, in the doing and representation of scientific activity. Routinely unnoticed, marginalized or suppressed in methodology sections of articles and methodology textbooks, research-as-craft gestures towards messy, tacit, uncertain, yet rarely thematized, practices that are central to getting scie…
A Black Death mass grave at Thornton Abbey
Microcredit, the corporatization of nongovernmental organizations, and academic activism
Based on an interview with academic-activist Professor Anu Muhammad, this edited transcript illuminates the corporatization of nongovernmental organizations, with specific reference to perpetuating the negative effects of neoliberal microcredit practices in developing countries. It focuses upon how such corporatization is contributing to corruption and the weakened role of the state. The concept of poor-people-led cooperatives is proposed as an a…
Of saints, sows or smiths? Copper-brazed iron handbells in Early Medieval England
Copper-brazed iron handbells were a distinctive feature of monastic life in Early Medieval Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Handbells were used in liturgy, prayer, worship, and later as reliquaries. In England, brazed bells of the seventh to ninth centuries take on a greater range of sizes and forms and are found on a wider variety of sites. As a consequence, their roles within Christianity have been questioned, and associations with animals and itin…
The role of intermediaries in governance of global production networks
This article locates the reorganization of work relations in the apparel sector in Pakistan, after the end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quota regime, within the context of a global production network (GPN). We examine the role of a network of corporate, state, multilateral and civil society actors who serve as intermediaries in GPN governance. These intermediaries transmit and translate competitive pressures and invoke varied, sometimes c…
The cultural grammar of governance
We identify limits of ‘reflexive governance’ by examining the UK Code of Corporate Governance that is celebrated for its ‘reflexivity’. By placing the historical genesis of the Code within its politico-economic context, it is shown how its scope and penetration is impeded by a shallow, ‘single loop’ of reflexivity. Legitimized by agency theory, the Code is infused by a ‘cultural grammar’ that perpetuates relations of shareholder primacy as it res…
The social potency of affect
We address the centrality of affect in structuring social practices, including those of organizing and managing. Social practices, it is argued, are contingent upon actors’ affectively charged involvement in immanent, yet indeterminate social relations. To understand this generative involvement, we commend a temporally-sensitive, critically-oriented theoretical framework, grounded in an affect-based ontology of practice. We demonstrate the releva…
West Country Households, 1500-1700
Essays on the development of the post-medieval house, its contents and decoration. During the last forty years, South-West England has been the focus of some of the most significant work on the early modern house and household in Britain. Its remarkable wealth of vernacular buildings has been the object of muchattention, while the area has also seen productive excavations of early modern household goods, shedding new light on domestic history. Th…
Logics in policy and practice
Drawing on the ‘logics approach’ to advance critical policy studies, we contribute to our understanding of the banking reform process in the wake of the financial crisis. We focus on the political and ideological dimensions of this process, paying particular attention to the way the narrow character of associated debates is produced and maintained. We operationalize the logics approach by invoking a ‘nodal framework’ that apprehends the banking s…
Cooperatives—saviours or gravediggers of capitalism? Critical performativity and the John Lewis Partnership
The structures of ownership and governance at John Lewis, a major UK employee-owned retailer, have been commended by those who wish to recuperate capitalism and by those who seek to transform it. From a perspective of ‘critical performativity’, John Lewis is of special interest since it is celebrated as a successful organization and heralded as an alternative to more typical forms of capitalist enterprise. By examining the cooperative elements of…
Power and Subjectivity at Work
The paper presents a critical exploration of the treatment of subjectivity and power in sociology through an examination of recent developments in labour process theory. This is introduced through a discussion of dualism and the study of power. It is then argued that the exposure of the neglect of subjectivity in the response to Labour and Monopoly Capital has not been matched by effort to remedy this deficiency. Originating in Marx, the intellec…
Managing the Academics
The paper analyzes a number of major developments in higher education in the U.K during the past decade or so. It explores the connection between changes in the organization and control of academic labor processes (e.g., teaching, administration, and research) and pressures exerted by the dynamics of capitalist development to commodify and control the work of academics. The first section considers the relevance of labor process analysis for under…
Power and Identity in Theory and Practice
Power is often theorised in a way that equates its meaning with A's control over B. Alternatively, it is regarded as a universal transformative capacity. In which case, power is conceptualised in terms of its accomplishment of social order. The central objective of this paper is to expose the contribution and limitations of existing functionalist, action theoretic, radical and relational conceptions of power. This is done by attending to the sign…
Going privately
Public private partnerships provide an important illustration of the way the traditional role of government as employer and service provider is being transformed. While policy–makers argue that the growing role of the private sector is not driven by ideological thinking – that, in fact, both public and private sector organizations can benefit from working together in partnership relations – in practice it is the norms and rules of private sector …
Just How Managed is the McUniversity? Craig Prichard, Hugh Willmott
This paper seeks to illuminate ways in which the introduction and use of man agement knowledges and practices in U.K. universities overlaps, intersects and confronts established knowledge and practice in these sites. While broadly supportive of the general directionality of work in this field by other authors (Parker and Jary 1995; Winter 1995; Miller 1995) who argue that U.K. univer sities are becoming increasingly corporately managed around a '…
Debating Labour Process Theory
This paper locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programmes for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency. Whereas the `orthodox' school tends to re-assert the structuralist and economistic features of Marx, the `anti-realist' or deconstructionist position invites the abandonment of analysis that has traditional…
Death. So What? Sociology, Sequestration and Emancipation
The paper argues for the widely unacknowledged importance of death in the motivation of human conduct and the significance of the sequestration of death for sociological theory. Sociological studies that illuminate modern strategies for coping with death also contribute to its sequestration as they routinely naturalise the contemporary commonsense understanding of death as something negative that must be coped with. The (negative or morbid) repre…
Rethinking Management and Managerial Work
The paper presents an alternative understanding of managerial work based upon a reconstruction of labor process theory. Drawing upon contemporary studies of management practice, the paper explores the relevance of poststructuralism and an attentiveness to subjectivity to articulate a view of managerial work as the subject and object of the contradictory organization and control of capitalist labor processes. This understanding is illustrated by r…
Where Constructionism and Critical Realism Converge
The paper interrogates the status, nature and significance of epistemological relativism as a key element of constructionism and critical realism. It finds that epistemological relativism is espoused by authorities in critical realism and marginalized or displaced in the field of management and organization studies, resulting in forms of analysis that are empirically, but not fully critically, realist. This evaluation prompts reflection on the qu…
Taylorizing business school research
The article critically examines how work is shaped by performance measures. Its specific focus is upon the use of journal lists, rather than the detail of their construction, in conditioning the research activity of academics. It is argued that an effect of the ‘one size fits all’ logic of journal lists is to endorse and cultivate a research monoculture in which particular criteria, favoured by a given list, assume the status of a universal bench…
Revisiting conflict
What is the role of conflict in bringing about radical change? Taking the case of the gig economy, we study the conditions of possibility for fairer alternative ways of organising to emerge. Currently, some commentators underscore the sense of freedom of working as a self-employed contractor; others focus on its negative and exploitative dimensions. Less attention has been given to the potential emergence of (radical) conflicts around the nature …
Unconscious Sources of Motivation in the Theory of the Subject; An Exploration and Critique of Giddens’ Dualistic Models of Action and Personality
The role of intermediaries in governance of global production networks
This article locates the reorganization of work relations in the apparel sector in Pakistan, after the end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quota regime, within the context of a global production network (GPN). We examine the role of a network of corporate, state, multilateral and civil society actors who serve as intermediaries in GPN governance. These intermediaries transmit and translate competitive pressures and invoke varied, sometimes c…
Dualism and Domination
This paper concerns itself with the difficulties of reconciling the separation of the individual from society (sociological dualism) in both theory and practice. In theory, the failure of structuralism, functionalism, marxism or phenomenology is that of attempting to reconcile sociological dualism without also relating it to the problems of existential dualism whereby individuals are preoccupied self-defeatingly in securing meaning through solid …
Ethics, politics and embodied imagination in crafting scientific knowledge
This article explores ‘research-as-craft’ as a sensitizing concept for disclosing the presence of ethics and politics, as well as embodiment and imagination, in the doing and representation of scientific activity. Routinely unnoticed, marginalized or suppressed in methodology sections of articles and methodology textbooks, research-as-craft gestures towards messy, tacit, uncertain, yet rarely thematized, practices that are central to getting scie…
Logics in policy and practice
Drawing on the ‘logics approach’ to advance critical policy studies, we contribute to our understanding of the banking reform process in the wake of the financial crisis. We focus on the political and ideological dimensions of this process, paying particular attention to the way the narrow character of associated debates is produced and maintained. We operationalize the logics approach by invoking a ‘nodal framework’ that apprehends the banking s…
Cooling Out the Marks
Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from…
Critical Management and Global Justice
Book review: Unveiling the Masks: Critical Management Studies: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, edited by Mats Alvesson, Todd Bridgman and Hugh Willmott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 752 pp. £89.00. ISBN 0199237719
Pottery as plunder
The site at 43–53 Narrow Street, located in the Ratcliff area, produced unprecedented finds relating to the period of London's expansion as a mercantile centre during the 17th century. The most extensive and interesting discoveries comprised a late 15th-century brick clamp, and building remains with associated pits and ditches dating from the 16th through to the 18th centuries. The remains dating to the late 16th through to the end of the 17th ce…
The cultural grammar of governance
We identify limits of ‘reflexive governance’ by examining the UK Code of Corporate Governance that is celebrated for its ‘reflexivity’. By placing the historical genesis of the Code within its politico-economic context, it is shown how its scope and penetration is impeded by a shallow, ‘single loop’ of reflexivity. Legitimized by agency theory, the Code is infused by a ‘cultural grammar’ that perpetuates relations of shareholder primacy as it res…
The Decline of Labour Process Analysis and the Future Sociology of Work
Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive 'neo-orthodoxy' has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work.…
Glass and pottery manufacture at Silkstone, Yorkshire
This article reports an excavation on the site of a 17th-century glasshouse and 18th-century pottery at Silkstone, Yorkshire, and summarizes the results of an intensive analytical programme of scientific analysis of the glassworking debris arising from it. The area excavated was small, but the sieving of soil samples ensured a high rate of recovery of artefacts and debris associated with the industries. A large number of samples of glass and glas…
The social potency of affect
We address the centrality of affect in structuring social practices, including those of organizing and managing. Social practices, it is argued, are contingent upon actors’ affectively charged involvement in immanent, yet indeterminate social relations. To understand this generative involvement, we commend a temporally-sensitive, critically-oriented theoretical framework, grounded in an affect-based ontology of practice. We demonstrate the releva…
Excavation of an early 17th-century glassmaking site at Glasshouse, Shinrone, Co. Offaly, Ireland
An archaeological research excavation was conducted in the area immediately surrounding an upstanding glassmaking furnace near Shinrone, Co. Offaly, Ireland. It dates to the early to mid 17th century and was built and operated by French Huguenots, probably de Hennezells (de Hennezel/Henzeys/Hensie) who had settled in this region as part of the Crown plantation of King’s County (now Co. Offaly). This furnace, which employed wood rather than coal a…
White-Collar Work
Part of a series of books based on papers delivered at the annual UMIST-Aston conference, combined with specially commissioned contributions, this text examines the labour process, focusing on the whi
Power, Values and Relations
Dualism and Domination
This paper concerns itself with the difficulties of reconciling the separation of the individual from society (sociological dualism) in both theory and practice. In theory, the failure of structuralism, functionalism, marxism or phenomenology is that of attempting to reconcile sociological dualism without also relating it to the problems of existential dualism whereby individuals are preoccupied self-defeatingly in securing meaning through solid …
Power and Identity in Theory and Practice
Power is often theorised in a way that equates its meaning with A's control over B. Alternatively, it is regarded as a universal transformative capacity. In which case, power is conceptualised in terms of its accomplishment of social order. The central objective of this paper is to expose the contribution and limitations of existing functionalist, action theoretic, radical and relational conceptions of power. This is done by attending to the sign…
Unconscious Sources of Motivation in the Theory of the Subject; An Exploration and Critique of Giddens’ Dualistic Models of Action and Personality
In Defence of Organizations Theory
Our Work, Our Lives, Our Worlds
Beyond Epistemology and Reflective Conversation
In response to the current crisis in the philosophy of social science, the proposition has been advanced that "reflective conversation" between researchers offers a way of attaining awareness and understanding of the non-epistemological influences that shape the processes and products of research. The recognition of these (inescapable) sources of bias is said to heighten awareness of the limitations of methodology and has the potential to avoid t…
The Process of Technological Change
Power and Subjectivity at Work
The paper presents a critical exploration of the treatment of subjectivity and power in sociology through an examination of recent developments in labour process theory. This is introduced through a discussion of dualism and the study of power. It is then argued that the exposure of the neglect of subjectivity in the response to Labour and Monopoly Capital has not been matched by effort to remedy this deficiency. Originating in Marx, the intellec…
Labour Process Theory
How are we to make sense of the way work is organised and controlled? To what extent is its design the result of technological demands, the interests of capital or processes of negotiation and struggl
The New Middle Class and the Labour Process
This chapter will explore the debates within the literature on class around what Braverman (1974) called 'intermediate employees' and what we call 'middle groupings'. In particular we will see how these debates conceptualise the labour process dimensions of class relations within the division of labour of advanced capitalist economies. Skill, so central to labour process theory, has also become a focal concern in theories of the class structure w…
Labour Process Theory
White-Collar Work
Part of a series of books based on papers delivered at the annual UMIST-Aston conference, combined with specially commissioned contributions, this text examines the labour process, focusing on the whi
On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies
Labour Process Theory
Social Constructionism and Communication Studies
(1994). Social Constructionism and Communication Studies: Hearing the Conversation But Losing the Dialogue. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 17, Communication Yearbook 17, pp. 42-54
Culture and control in a life insurance company1
This paper presents a case study of a corporation undergoing organizational and cultural change within the context of a transformation in the political philosophy of Britain. Studying these cultural and symbolic changes enables us to appreciate how the restructuring of the economy is worked out at the level of the enterprise as the British government embraced a New Right politics of “free market” economics. The analysis is framed within an overal…
The odd couple
Here the author examines continuities and tensions between the discourses of Business Process Re‐engineering and Human Resource Management. Addressing their respective assumptions and claims, especially with regard to the organization of ‘human resources', critical attention is focused upon their shared advocacy of employee empowerment and strong leadership from senior managers
Managing the Academics
The paper analyzes a number of major developments in higher education in the U.K during the past decade or so. It explores the connection between changes in the organization and control of academic labor processes (e.g., teaching, administration, and research) and pressures exerted by the dynamics of capitalist development to commodify and control the work of academics. The first section considers the relevance of labor process analysis for under…
Outing' Organizational Analysts
Parker (1995a) asks a fundamental question begged by the postmodern suspicion of modernist metanarratives: `Critique in the Name of What?' His discussion of this issue, in which a self-consciously ethical commitment is advocated, is used in this paper as a springboard for further reflection upon the possibility of making the articulation and pursuit of ethico-political concerns central to the production of knowledge about organizing and organizat…
Rethinking Management and Managerial Work
The paper presents an alternative understanding of managerial work based upon a reconstruction of labor process theory. Drawing upon contemporary studies of management practice, the paper explores the relevance of poststructuralism and an attentiveness to subjectivity to articulate a view of managerial work as the subject and object of the contradictory organization and control of capitalist labor processes. This understanding is illustrated by r…
Just How Managed is the McUniversity? Craig Prichard, Hugh Willmott
This paper seeks to illuminate ways in which the introduction and use of man agement knowledges and practices in U.K. universities overlaps, intersects and confronts established knowledge and practice in these sites. While broadly supportive of the general directionality of work in this field by other authors (Parker and Jary 1995; Winter 1995; Miller 1995) who argue that U.K. univer sities are becoming increasingly corporately managed around a '…
Making Sense of "Quality?"-Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services
This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the "technical" managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarch…
Management Lives
The authors consider the meaning of work, power and identity consumption and bureaucracy and rational choice and meaning as these qualities affect individuals in management positions
Considering Passionate Humility
This essay considers the role of passion and humility in the theory and practice of public administration in response to one of its central conundrums: how to act in administrative capacities with “passionate” commitment and conviction, while at the same time entertaining the possibility that, in its formulation and/or application, this commitment might be misplaced, misguided or wrong
Sociology (60 works) · Political science (49 works) · Law (41 works) · Epistemology (34 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (31 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Economics (28 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · History (22 works) · Social science (21 works)