David Knights
Biographic Data
| ID | 247351 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Knights |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Knights |
| SIGNATURE | KNIGHTS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0072-0393 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 903 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 86 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Capital mobilization
When ‘I’ becomes ‘we’
Based on ethnographic research of a large food retail cooperative in New York (the Co-op), this article raises the research question of whether organizations can cultivate an ethic of responsibility to others and, if so, how this can be secured in everyday working practices? It draws principally on the work of Foucault and especially his later writings on the care of the self and ethics but seeks to link these deliberations to Levinas in identify…
Organizing male infertility
This paper explores how organizations within the fertility treatment sector in the UK discursively construct (cis) male infertility and whether, in so doing, they reinforce or reproduce prevailing institutionalized discourses and practices of masculinity. We seek to address the gender disparity in contemporary understandings of reproductive health in Organization Studies (OS) where women's experience of infertility and its impact is well research…
Extended reality and sustainable tourism
Through a critical pedagogical framework, global conservation initiatives are integrated to curate a transformational extended reality (XR) curriculum in nature-based tourism (NBT). This proposed design affects visitors’ protected area experience and supports human–wildlife relationships through XR exposure (before), peak NBT experiences (during), and post-experience reflections (after). The authors’ XR design entitled Knowing Wolves (KW) is insp…
Rural tourism and evolving identities of Chinese communities in forested areas
Rural China has faced considerable challenges in recent decades, leading to the dissolution of many state-owned forest farm communities and threatening sustainable development. There remains a need to understand the drivers and characteristics associated with these changes, including the influence of rural tourism on combating forest recession. This study addresses these concerns by constructing and applying a regional sociology framework to inve…
Challenging humanist leadership
It can be argued that a humanistic enlightenment approach to leadership emerged as a counter to the historical prevalence of totalitarian elitism where leaders were often autocratic and authoritarian, demanding obedience through command and control. Although beginning with the ancient Greeks, this kind of leadership has continued through classical periods from early medieval times up until the industrial revolution, and also into our modern era. …
Disrupting masculinities within leadership
This study provides a concise summary of the book Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in challenging Masculinities, New York and London: Routledge, 2021. It examines the masculinity of leadership and how through an embodied form of reasoning, it might be challenged or disrupted. A central argument of the book is that masculine leadership elevates rationality in ways that marginalise the body and feelings and often has the effect of san…
Milking It for All It’s Worth
Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all its worth now represent a previously unimaginable level of exploitation? New technology has intensified milk production fourfold over the last 50 years, rendering the cow vulnerable to various and frequent clinical interventions deemed necessary to meet the demands for dairy products. A major question is whether or not the veterinary code of practice f…
Embodied Research Methods
A book guiding researcers in the use of embodied methods in social science.Disembodied research erects false dichotomies between flesh and reason, and between the corporeal and the social. By contrast, Torkild Thanem and David Knights engage with approaches and practices that exploit the body’s capacity to generate knowledge, craft lively accounts, and create fleshy concepts. These approaches enrich our understanding of how people live, work, and…
Gender still at work
Apart from a few paragraphs reminiscing on how, in response to a publisher contacting us, Jill, Marilyn and I founded Gender, Work and Organization combined with a few comments on its evolution as a leading journal in our field, this article largely summarizes and seeks to develop my lifelong interests in discourses and practices of masculinity. It pays tribute to my doctoral students and/or research colleagues with whom many of these ideas conce…
Masculinity
Who's a good boy then? Anthropocentric masculinities in veterinary practice
Veterinary surgeons (vets) provide us with a fascinating platform to study anthropocentric and zoocentric beliefs, which we argue are gendered in both their genesis and practice. Gendered in the sense of the double meaning of our title ‘who's a good boy then?’, which reflects both a default male gender and a patronizing masculine claim to mastery over the animal. In addition, veterinary practices are organized in specifically masculine ways that,…
Practice makes perfect? Skillful performances in veterinary work
Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or simply a question of practice makes perfect? This question arose from our empirical research on veterinary surgeons (vets), who we found were often struggling with the divergence between the precise and unambiguous knowledge underlying the training and the unpredictability and imprecision of their everyday practices. These are comparatively underexplored…
Ways of leading in non-Anglophone contexts
The English language has for some time dominated academia worldwide (Steyaert and Janssens, 2013) and become accepted and institutionally embedded as the international language of academia. This is illustrated within the field of leadership studies where, since its beginnings in the early part of the Twentieth Century, research into leadership has largely been pursued by scholars in the USA and the UK working in the English language. Consequently…
Living on the edge? Professional anxieties at work in academia and veterinary practice
Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of as…
In remembrance of Professor Joan Acker
This article celebrates Joan Acker's academic life and her enormous contribution to the field of gender, work and organization. It acknowledges not just what she contributed to gender studies and politics but how she combined her analysis and her activism with a concern for equality more generally, especially in relation to social class and race
(Mis)managing diversity
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge the dominance of the mainstream discourse and practice of diversity management (DM) by identifying and problematizing three distinct but related issues that it encompasses: first, its tendency to displace all alternative approaches; second, its general neglect of the social-historical context and third, its almost exclusive focus on the business case rationale for supporting diversity. Design/me…
Assessing riverine threats to heritage assets posed by future climate change through a geomorphological approach and predictive modelling in the Derwent Valley Mills WHS, UK
Binaries need to shatter for bodies to matter
Arguing that binaries and their relationship to masculinities operate to constrain the development of corporeal or embodied ethics in organizations, this article seeks to advance their deconstruction and dissolution. If bodies are to matter, binaries need to shatter. First, it deconstructs the binary by examining the epistemological space between representations of life, language, labour and gender and the assumptions of subjectivity that are the…
Leadership Special Issue Call for Papers
Careering through academia
This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individuali…
It’s a Bittersweet Symphony, this Life
This article demonstrates the importance of studying insecurity in relation to identities at work. Drawing upon empirical research with business school academics in the context of the proliferation of managerialist controls of audit, accountability, monitoring and performativity, we illustrate how insecurities in the form of fragile and insecure academic selves are variously manifested. Emerging from our data were three forms of insecurity—impost…
Open innovation, gender and the infiltration of masculine discourses
Purpose: This paper aims to illustrate how open innovation is implemented in practice in a large multinational corporation and to discuss how masculine discourses of rational control and competition are reinforced during such a process. Design/methodology/approach: An exploratory single case study approach has been employed. Qualitative empirical data (interviews and documents) are derived from a four year longitudinal research project on open an…
Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management
This eagerly awaited introductory textbook provides a fresh approach to the study of Organizational Behaviour and management. Seeking to make the subject matter more relevant and accessible, it treats Organizational Behaviour as a field of activity that has many parallels with what is experienced in everyday life. Students will find it easier to learn about organizations by appreciating how work relations and management activities are not so dist…
Foucault, power, resistance and all that
Corporate Strategy, Organizations, and Subjectivity
This paper attempts to develop a new approach to the study of corporate strategy. It draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to suggest that corporate strategy can be seen as a discourse which has its own specific conditions of possibility. These are traced historically to various exercises of power within the conduct of war and the development of business organizations. Strategy is located as an emergent set of practices which has distinctiv…
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…
Careering through academia
This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individuali…
Sex Discrimination in UK Academia
This article examines the gendered nature of employment in UK universities, showing women's experience of discrimination through differences in contract status and in access to academic hierarchies. It argues that the typical academic career path is structured according to a male perception of success: research‐active, participating in the Research Assessment Exercise, an uninterrupted career history. The system of meritocracy upon which appointm…
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…
Between Representations and Subjectivity
The distinction between male and female and masculinity and femininity continues to polarize relations between the sexes in ways that generally subordinate, marginalize, or undermine women with respect to men. The gender literature has recently challenged the singular and unitary conception of gender identity, arguing that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities that are often fragile, fragmented and fluid. Despite this, the bi…
Towards an Ecology of Retail Financial Services
In this paper we explore the relationship between knowledge, trust, and space in the production and consumption of retail financial services as part of a wider enquiry into processes of financial exclusion. We argue that the relationship between knowledge and trust helps to explain the evolution of financial services and the production over time of distinctive ecologies of financial service production and use. We discuss the changing scales of fi…
Challenging Dualism
In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized 'victims' who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations …
Dreams and Designs on Strategy
Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. Th…
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered
Recent managerial discourses share similar assumptions about organizations and the means to their greater efficiency. One of these is a faith in teamworking as a method of ensuring that human resources are effectively mobilized to achieve the unquestioned benefits of any specific technology or prescriptive programme. In this article we will explore what teamworking means for employees' lives within an automobile manufacturing company. We question…
Ain't Misbehavin'? Opportunities for Resistance under New Forms of 'Quality' Management
In this paper we explore the development of a new regime in a major bank where total quality management (TQM) has recently been introduced. A number of recent critics have suggested that TQM all but eliminates resistance either through a management regime that removes waste or through the totalising discourse it propagates. We argue that new management innovations associated with TQM and `empowerment' are effective in increasing control over work…
Gendering Jobs
The paper argues that the understanding of gender relations at work necessitates an explicit consideration of corporate strategy and managerial practices. Through the detailed examination of relations within a financial services company, we show how certain important issues of corporate strategy revolve around the gendered nature of particular jobs. The struggle within senior management to develop a corporate strategy was reflected in the lower l…
Organizational discourse and subjectivity
This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the relationship between organizational discourses and subjectivity, revolving around whether organizational discourses determine individual subjectivity and the extent to which there is room for human agency. It does so by providing empirical illustrations of how organizational discourses constitute subjectivity during processes of recruitment in a large American consultancy firm operating in Swe…
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 …
"When "Life Is but a Dream
In this article, we explore the genesis and operation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) within a medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can be decontextualized and decoupled from organizational politics and posit that BPR can be managed instantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we argue that BPR is likely to be constituted by and through politica…
(Mis)managing diversity
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge the dominance of the mainstream discourse and practice of diversity management (DM) by identifying and problematizing three distinct but related issues that it encompasses: first, its tendency to displace all alternative approaches; second, its general neglect of the social-historical context and third, its almost exclusive focus on the business case rationale for supporting diversity. Design/me…
The Concept of Strategy in Sociology
This paper takes up the debate on strategy initiated by Crow (Sociology 23). It argues that the concept of strategy has been uncritically appropriated by sociology. It has been treated as though it were an unproblematic concept, whereas in fact it is embedded within specific discourses and has particular social effects. In particular, Crow fails to consider the explicit use of the concept of strategy in two key areas of social life - the military…
The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power
This article presents some of the problems that need to be resolved if organization is to be developed to its full potential. Our central argument is that both management and staff typically act on the basis of a false understanding of the nature of power. Power is typically treated as if it were an individual possession, rather than as a relationship between people. Consequently, managers ignore or attempt to deny their ultimate dependence on st…
Practice makes perfect? Skillful performances in veterinary work
Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or simply a question of practice makes perfect? This question arose from our empirical research on veterinary surgeons (vets), who we found were often struggling with the divergence between the precise and unambiguous knowledge underlying the training and the unpredictability and imprecision of their everyday practices. These are comparatively underexplored…
It's About Time
In recent years numerous financial services companies have explored the profitability of marketing specifically to women. These practices are largely informed by traditional product and service distribution methods where the target is predominantly male `heads of household'. This article provides alternative approaches to the issue of gender and its bearing on financial services consumption. We argue that women's everyday lives frequently result …
Who's a good boy then? Anthropocentric masculinities in veterinary practice
Veterinary surgeons (vets) provide us with a fascinating platform to study anthropocentric and zoocentric beliefs, which we argue are gendered in both their genesis and practice. Gendered in the sense of the double meaning of our title ‘who's a good boy then?’, which reflects both a default male gender and a patronizing masculine claim to mastery over the animal. In addition, veterinary practices are organized in specifically masculine ways that,…
Gender still at work
Apart from a few paragraphs reminiscing on how, in response to a publisher contacting us, Jill, Marilyn and I founded Gender, Work and Organization combined with a few comments on its evolution as a leading journal in our field, this article largely summarizes and seeks to develop my lifelong interests in discourses and practices of masculinity. It pays tribute to my doctoral students and/or research colleagues with whom many of these ideas conce…
Management Control in Sales Forces
The paper examines the way in which the management of a large life insurance company controls its sales force. Whilst the paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of an under-researched occupational area - that of sales - it is concerned to do this within a theoretical framework derived from the critique and development of labour process theory. Thus the sales process itself is examined as the site of a complex series of practices mediated b…
Passing the Time in Pastimes, Professionalism and Politics
This article may be seen as in search of time but with no 'real' prospect of finding it since it is believed that time reflects and reinforces the relations in which it is embedded. The article will focus on pastimes, professionalism, and politics, arguing that while these diverse activities would appear to have no more than their alliteration in common, they share a similar orientation to time that is informed by a phenomenological consciousness…
Milking It for All It’s Worth
Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all its worth now represent a previously unimaginable level of exploitation? New technology has intensified milk production fourfold over the last 50 years, rendering the cow vulnerable to various and frequent clinical interventions deemed necessary to meet the demands for dairy products. A major question is whether or not the veterinary code of practice f…
The Effect of Negro and White Examiners on Negro Intelligence Test Performance
Erasmus Darwin . Donald M. Hassler
Album of Science
The Nature of Science
The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power
This article presents some of the problems that need to be resolved if organization is to be developed to its full potential. Our central argument is that both management and staff typically act on the basis of a false understanding of the nature of power. Power is typically treated as if it were an individual possession, rather than as a relationship between people. Consequently, managers ignore or attempt to deny their ultimate dependence on st…
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 …
The Theory, Practice and Politics of Manpower Planning
Since individual and/or sectional interests are embedded in organisational relations, the meaning and significance of manpower plans will depend very much on the political and career systems of which they are both a condition and a consequence. Manpower planning can never be seen simply as a technical solution to practical problems for insofar as it reflects and reinforces power‐knowledge practices within organisations, it is as much part of the …
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…
Our Work, Our Lives, Our Worlds
Job Redesign
The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals . Margaret F. Steig
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…
Subjectivity, Power and the Labour Process
The primary aim of this chapter is to develop a critical analysis of the labour process which resists the dualistic tendencies to perceive social reality in terms of a binary opposition between voluntary subjects, on the one hand, and objective structures, on the other. It is therefore concerned to challenge theoretical constructions that reduce the complexity of social life into a polarisation where the 'free', expressive and creative actions of…
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
Management Control in Sales Forces
The paper examines the way in which the management of a large life insurance company controls its sales force. Whilst the paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of an under-researched occupational area - that of sales - it is concerned to do this within a theoretical framework derived from the critique and development of labour process theory. Thus the sales process itself is examined as the site of a complex series of practices mediated b…
The Concept of Strategy in Sociology
This paper takes up the debate on strategy initiated by Crow (Sociology 23). It argues that the concept of strategy has been uncritically appropriated by sociology. It has been treated as though it were an unproblematic concept, whereas in fact it is embedded within specific discourses and has particular social effects. In particular, Crow fails to consider the explicit use of the concept of strategy in two key areas of social life - the military…
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
Corporate Strategy, Organizations, and Subjectivity
This paper attempts to develop a new approach to the study of corporate strategy. It draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to suggest that corporate strategy can be seen as a discourse which has its own specific conditions of possibility. These are traced historically to various exercises of power within the conduct of war and the development of business organizations. Strategy is located as an emergent set of practices which has distinctiv…
Gendering Jobs
The paper argues that the understanding of gender relations at work necessitates an explicit consideration of corporate strategy and managerial practices. Through the detailed examination of relations within a financial services company, we show how certain important issues of corporate strategy revolve around the gendered nature of particular jobs. The struggle within senior management to develop a corporate strategy was reflected in the lower l…
Labour Process Theory
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…
It's About Time
In recent years numerous financial services companies have explored the profitability of marketing specifically to women. These practices are largely informed by traditional product and service distribution methods where the target is predominantly male `heads of household'. This article provides alternative approaches to the issue of gender and its bearing on financial services consumption. We argue that women's everyday lives frequently result …
Sociology (67 works) · Political science (52 works) · Law (39 works) · Epistemology (35 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (29 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Public relations (26 works) · Economics (25 works) · Business (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works)