Being Critical It is now more important than ever that to successfully complete your MBA studies you will

need to have developed your critical thinking skills. As a masters level student, it is vital that you develop your ability to think critically throughout the whole of your programme. On all your modules you must demonstrate your capacity to think critically about management, business and organization, both as academic topics and as practical activities. The OU study skills booklet Thinking Critically defines it thus:
To think critically is to examine ideas, evaluate them against what you already know and make decisions about their merit.

Source: http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/students/thinking-critically.pdf Practically speaking this means: o interpreting information and data by paying careful attention to what is in an article or other information source (what points and claims is the author making, what evidence do they provide, etc.? This highlights the importance of reading and note-taking skills) o analysing the material (literally, this means examining it part by part and then as a whole leading to questions such as where it fits in the wider debate around a topic, what its point of view is. Even details of where and when it was published or broadcast can provide clues here, helping you to look behind the content) o testing the material against what you know already (for example, seeing how well it accounts for a real situation, or compares with other perspectives on the same topic). In academic terms, being critical should not be understood as just being negative. Being critical, academically, means that you recognise that information produced by people, in whatever format, will be infused with their biases, either knowingly or unknowingly. From a critical perspective, there is no such thing as bias-free knowledge. Similarly, knowledge is always subjective. Perceiving knowledge as biased or subjective does not mean that it becomes devalued, simply, by acknowledging knowledge in this way its status as a human and therefore social construct is recognised. What critical thinking highlights and signals up for closer scrutiny is knowledge or information that is presented as bias-free simply through the use of language. From a critical perspective, our use of language is very important and revealing. For example, I can claim a decision I have made is bias-free by saying I have made an objective decision. By claiming it to have been an objective decision I am claiming that my personal feelings have been removed from my decision making (quite how I managed this is unclear as I was never taught how to be objective at school, it is just something I am assumed to be able to do as a manager) and that other people with access to the same information would have made the same decision. Critical thinkers would argue that all decisions taken by humans are subjective as we cannot remove our humanness (what it means to be human) from our decision-making processes. As critical thinkers, what we should be doing is reflecting on how our decisions are influenced by our feelings, motivations and aspirations. This point is not just a matter of academic hair-splitting, as Box 1 indicates, it goes to the heart of working life as a manager.

Box 1 First one needs to realise that knowledge is never value free and objective. While we may rely on the science of aerodynamics to fly to a business meeting, most knowledge we will deal with as managers is not of this sort. Seemingly objective facts are not what they appear to be, but are generally interpretations by people and are biased by self-interest, power, contexts and assumptions. The questions to ask here are: Why has this problem been raised? Why has this decision been made (or put off)? What factors are promoting or suppressing particular information? What is shaping the agendas of discussions or meetings? Source: (Tyler 2007) One requirement of critical thinking as applied to evaluating an article, for example, is that you look behind the text and consider what may have influenced the author as he/she wrote his/her work. This can involve you asking questions about his/her background, where the work was published, and what motivations may have influenced him/her. In this section we will include an example of a critical evaluation of a classic article which does precisely this. Strategy-making often has a high status within organisations and can involve external consultants who charge considerable fees for their services, therefore knowing that an author is also a consultant may help us understand why he/she is putting forward a particular idea. Crucially, critical evaluation also involves asking the question what is not here that should be? Power This critical stance is also something that can be used in organisations to highlight and expose overt uses of power in organisational life. However, before you go off and accuse your senior managers of using their power to impose the organisations strategy on you, remember that without the presence of power nothing would get done. Power is not, in itself, a negative force, it is how it is used that counts. This is illustrated very neatly in a recent book by Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips (2006), who draw from the work of Mary Parker Follett in the early 20th century to challenge the idea that power is straight-forward and one dimensional. They talk of power over, which they see as largely coercive and is exercised when people and things are made to do something that they would not otherwise do or when their preferences to do something are arrested or stopped in some way. (2006: 191) This form of power is that which is typically referred to when one group or individual impose(s) their or his/her view(s) on others who are not powerful enough to openly resist. Power to however, is much more positive and is creative, it accomplishes acts, and it changes the nature of things and relations. (2006: 191) In short, nothing gets done without some form of power being present to enable acts to be performed. You use power in your daily interactions to get even the most basic of tasks done. Of course, conflicts arise when one group acts in a way they feel is power to, but others experience as power over behaviour. An interest in business, management and organisation is also an interest in how power is handled. For example, a recent paper by McCabe (2009) is intriguingly titled Strategy-as-Power, and examines how power was exercised during strategy work in a UK building society. So, being critical means looking behind what is written, the claims made and the benefits cited, and

exposing the hidden agendas we all have when we are communicating knowledge and information. Thinking Critically The Open Universitys booklet Thinking Critically, is a useful introduction to the notion of thinking critically and is available at http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/students/thinkingcritically.pdf However, it suffers a little in being prepared by the Open University with a wide range of disciplines in mind (from Science to Humanities) and not all of the points will be relevant to all of the material you will encounter on B835. Also, it speaks of the aim of critical thinking as to try to maintain an objective position as possible. This, of course, contradicts what was said at the beginning of this session, when we questioned the very idea of objectivity in decision making at least. The idea of objectivity in the hard, natural sciences, is different to how it is conceived in the social sciences. Objectivity in the natural sciences relates to things being studied that exist regardless of the scientist being there to observe them (think of mountains, rivers, particles, atoms etc., whose existence is not affected by the scientists studying them). Whereas in the social sciences, of which business schools are part, critical theorists claim our presence as researchers studying humans doing things like strategy affects what is done. Similarly, when writing up their experiments researchers in the hard sciences can, with reasonable justification, claim that what they write-up is the product of detached observations that can be replicated elsewhere. Whereas, in the social sciences this claim is more disputed, with those working from critical perspectives saying that what is written-up is based on findings that are open to multiple different interpretations, depending on the preferences of the researcher(s). While it is not necessary for you to be exposed to this (ongoing) debate in the social sciences in any great depth, it is important that you are aware that such a debate exists. Our emphasis on the importance of critical thinking in the module reflects our belief that issues of subjectivity and objectivity, for example, are not simply notions to be dismissed, but that they impact upon how knowledge and information are constructed, examined and, most crucially, used in strategy. Activity Critical Thinking and Reflection There is no one right way of thinking critically, as it is so dependent on individual conceptions of knowledge. What this Activity does is provide you with some prompts that can help you develop your critical thinking skills. We use Mintzbergs Five Ps for Strategy (http://search.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=47 60299&site=ehost-live&scope=site) paper and perform a brief critical analysis of it. The questions or prompts used to undertake the critical thinking exercise are set out below. We have grouped them under three main headings. The questions prompting the notes are designed in particular to help you think around the text and interrogate an authors ideas. Used constructively, they should help you to consider articles and readings in a broader critical context. First though, we suggest you read Mintzbergs paper making notes as you go along about the issues we have talked about so far. Once you have done that, go through the questions below and the responses I have given and compare your own findings with mine.

Here are the question/prompts: Interpreting the information How would you summarise the paper? What data is Mintzberg basing his ideas on, are limitations in the data acknowledged? Is Mintzberg claiming his ideas apply universally across all industries: service and manufacturing, public and private, all geographic regions? Analysing the material Where was the article originally published? What time has elapsed since its original publication? Does this matter? What are the articles strengths? What are the articles weaknesses? Are limitations acknowledged? Comparing and applying information Are the main points relevant for your organisation or industry, if so why? Are the main points not relevant for your organisation or industry, if so why? What are the wider societal implications of the article, if any? Whats missing from the article that you feel should be there? Lastly, you need to always remember that your criticisms are subjectively constructed by you, so they are, in part, shaped by your own preferences concerning how you understand strategy. No two criticisms will be the same, as each is a unique construct. However, some criticisms are better than others because the quality of argument is more developed, comprehensive and internally consistent. Acknowledging and recognising your criticism to be biased by your own thoughts, feelings and prejudices is good reflexivity-in-action, and helps remind you that your criticism isnt right, in any final sense, but it should be insightful and useful. Critical Analysis of Mintzbergs Five Ps For Strategy What follows are notes prompted by some critical questions addressed in a reading of the article. It is not a full critical analysis of the Mintzberg paper, more detailed notes that should enable a full critical analysis to be undertaken. A full critical analysis should be written as a coherent narrative, usually in the form of an essay or as a response to an exam type question. This has not been developed into that level of sophistication. 1. Interpreting the information How would you summarise the paper? Mintzbergs paper is useful for how the notion of the five Ps conceptualises a multidimensional nature of strategy. The explanation of each P and their potential interrelationship adds to our understanding of strategy, but the examples he draws from to illustrate his points can perhaps be seen as rather self-serving. Mintzberg is a very effective writer and wordsmith, who can present complex ideas in an accessible and understandable way this is part of his attraction to business schools and practitioners but, the danger with his approach is that academic rigour is sacrificed for popularity. His central argument is developed at a level of abstraction that calls into question its usefulness. His analysis is done not at the firm or industry level, but at a macro, conceptual level. This means that to make his work useful

researchers and practitioners have to take his ideas and adapt them to their own contexts. This is not unusual, indeed, it is to be expected that papers that seek to conceptualise strategy in this way can only reasonably conduct their discussion at a very broad level of analysis. However, the process of adaptation to a more meaningful level is not without its own problems, as the temptation is to alter reality to fit the theory is great, but to do so would negate the theory as representing reality. Mintzbergs five P theory is interesting, but not without its problems. What data is Mintzberg basing his ideas on, are limitations in the data acknowledged? Mintzberg cites no primary data to support his claims, the only data he includes is secondary data (data that has been collected for a different purpose to how it is being used, meaning that the quotations Mintzberg uses were not collected for his study). The first substantial quote on page 13 is said to come from ...a business executive..., but we are left uninformed who this person is and in what context the remark was made. Similarly, the second quotation is said to be a comment on a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota taken from Business Week magazine. The rest of the data referred to tends to be anecdotal or taken from previously published texts (the Honda example from Pascale (1984) amongst others) and used to illustrate key points. The writing of an article based on purely secondary data is a perfectly valid academic activity. However, authors doing this tend to be quite selective in what secondary data they draw from, as the tactic is to access data that supports the point they want make. Authors are less likely to present secondary data that challenges or questions the arguments they are trying to construct. Mintzbergs paper is largely data-free, and is therefore conceptual is nature; again, there is nothing wrong with this, but readers should bear this in mind when they read it. Had he drawn from primary data he had collected in the messy worlds of organisations, his points may not have been as well-defined but would have had a stronger supporting empirical base. Is Mintzberg claiming his ideas apply universally across all industries: service and manufacturing, public and private, all geographic reasons? Although Mintzberg draws from several historical examples he says nothing about which Ps apply in which industries and in which geographic areas, or whether all Ps apply. For a paper in a journal aimed partly at practitioners this may appear surprising. However, this approach is fairly typical for articles of this type, as they are written at such an abstracted level as to suggest that their concern lies with broad conceptualisations of strategy, not whether these apply to particular industries. That role would be left to researchers who follow in the articles wake and who would conduct empirical work in specific organisations and industries based on Mintzbergs abstracted conceptualisations (another reason why a literature search for articles that have used the concepts in practice is needed see the Leong and Ward paper cited later, which appears to apply the Five Ps concept to manufacturing, and in doing so identifies a sixth P appropriate, they claim, in a manufacturing context). Clearly, applicability of the Ps concept to specific industries or geographic regions is not Mintzbergs concern here. Again, that is perfectly valid (authors cannot cover everything in a 14 page article), but as readers we need to be aware of the type of paper we are reading, what is being argued and what is being left out.

2 Analysing the material Where was the article originally published and why has it been reproduced? The original site of publication was California Management Review (CMR) in 1987. A visit to the journals homepage (http://cmr.berkeley.edu/) reveals that the title is owned by the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Therefore, it is administered by a university business school, rather than a purely commercial publisher. However, all publishers, academic or otherwise, have agendas they wish to advance, so we need to find out what stance on management and strategy CMR take. By clicking on Submission Guidelines we can read a little about how CMR sees itself, the audience it is aimed at and therefore, what sort of papers it welcomes. First, CMR sees itself as addressing both an academic and practitioner audience (some journals address only an academic audience e.g. Organization Studies or Human Relations, while others a practitioner audience e.g. Management Today). What this suggests is that the academic rigour you would expect from Organization Studies reviewers for example, would not be the same as that CMR reviewers practice, but this process would be much more rigorous than that used by Management Today. However, it also suggests that the article is much more accessible than those typically found in Organization Studies, and that Mintzberg would have practicing managers in mind when writing it and not necessarily fellow academics. The guidelines state that CMR is particularly interested in articles that focus on corporate strategy and organisation. Implicit in this is the belief that strategy is best addressed at a corporate level, so we are unlikely to find any articles on strategy that do not use a level of analysis lower than this (remember from Unit One we noted that a sociological perspective of strategy focuses on praxis, and micro-level acts therefore, from what CMR say, it is doubtful whether it would be interested in articles that took this perspective). What time has elapsed since its original publication? Does this matter? The article appeared in CMR in 1987. Articles of this type generally go through several drafts before they are accepted for publication and this process alone can take two years or more. So, the version that was published in CMR in 1987 was probably written in 1985 or 1986. Does this matter? The short answer is, it depends! Seminal articles, such as Mintzbergs, can still be relevant to how strategy is understood today, but thinking about them will have developed in the intervening years. So, it is reasonable to assume that Mintzbergs ideas in the five Ps paper will have been examined, tested, criticised and discussed in the intervening decades since its original publication. To undertake a critical analysis of the paper it would be important to do a literature search on the key terms in the article to find out how more recent thinking treats these ideas. Academic databases such as EBSCO are the best places to conduct such a search (go to the Databases section of the OU Librarys web site and search for Business Source Complete). A quick search on EBSCO at time of writing this commentary (2009) found only one paper that seems to be directly linked to Mintzbergs CMR paper: G. Keong Leong and Peter T. Ward (1995) The six Ps of manufacturing strategy. International Journal of Operations & Production Management 15(12), pp.32-45. Interestingly, a search on Google Scholar reveals that Mintzbergs paper is cited in 334 other texts within the Google Scholar database. This appears contradictory. It is cited in a huge

number of texts, but appears to be a significant theoretical source in only one. It seems that this article has become a paper authors feel compelled to cite, without really using it to develop their theoretical argument. This means it hasnt significantly affected how theories around strategy have developed (if it had, it would have appeared in many more papers on the EBSCO database) and also that the ideas Mintzberg puts forward have not been tested or examined in any academically rigorous way. This would suggest we perhaps need to question whether we should accept the points Mintzberg makes so readily and yet the Google Scholar search suggests many have. This is confusing, but revealing. It highlights how non-academic search engines (like Google Scholar) may be useful, but also misleading. If we had restricted our search to Google Scholar, we could have concluded that Mintzbergs paper had been influential on subsequent academic work. However, the search results from EBSCO suggested the exact opposite, that strategy researchers had not taken up Mintzbergs idea in any way. I found these results surprising when I did the two searches, but ultimately my conclusion is that Mintzbergs notion of strategy as comprising five Ps has not been accepted by the academic community, and yet the same community seem to still talk about it! What are the articles strengths? For me, the key strength of Mintzbergs paper is his central argument of providing alternative and sometimes complementary conceptualisations of strategy. It is well-written, accessible and helps develop a fundamental argument that strategy may be much more than we ever thought. What are the articles weaknesses? If we draw upon Whittingtons (2006) notion of praxis, practices and practitioners, we can identify that the abstracted nature of the article means that readers are left uninformed about who are strategists (practitioners)? how they do strategy (practices)? and what activities they need to do to accomplish their tasks (praxis)? From Whittingtons (2006) and Jarzabkowski et al.s (2007) perspective, discussions about the concept of strategy (Mintzbergs title) should not be held at a broad abstracted level, removed from the nitty gritty of the doing of strategy. To do so raises questions about how relevant such discussions are (however well they are worded) to the messy worlds practitioners inhabit and researchers study. Are limitations acknowledged? Limitations to the conceptualisations Mintzberg proposes are not openly acknowledged. This may relate to where the article is published, California Management Review. Remember, this journal is aimed at a practitioner audience more than an academic one. Academic journals tend to require their authors to write a short section that identifies the limitations of their work, which usually highlight their doubts and contingencies, and where further work is required to more broadly validate their findings and increase their generalisability. However, the assumption among academics is that practitioners are uncomfortable with doubt or ambiguity, and that they demand certainty and unequivocality. Journals like CMR therefore, are less inclined to require their authors to include a section on limitations, as this suggests doubt and ambiguity, and their view is that this is not what the audience wants. 3 Compare and apply information Are the main points relevant for your organisation or industry, if so why?

Are the main points not relevant for your organisation or industry, if so why? Here you need to consider how using the concepts in your own organisation or industry would advance your understanding, providing useful insight into strategy within your own specific contexts. It is important not think about how you can fit your organisations activity to Mintzbergs concepts, but how his framings of strategy represent your organisational activity if they do they may be useful, if they dont you may want to consider alternative conceptualisations. What are the wider societal implications of the article, if any? Mintzberg is a leading figure in strategy, his thoughts and ideas are influential across the globe as business schools and practitioners pick up on them and seek to apply his theories. By advancing the notion of multi-dimensional strategy he questions uni-dimensional understandings influencing how strategy is interpreted and made sense of. Whats missing from the article that you feel should be there? To most effectively answer this question it is perhaps best to have a framing of strategy you have in your minds that you can assess the article against. This does not need to be a rigid definition of strategy, but some understanding about the sort of things you would expect to read in any article that seeks to conceptualise strategy. This needs to be firm enough so that you have a clear understanding of strategy, but sufficiently loose so that your thinking can be challenged and developed through exposure to new ideas, and cutting-edge research and thinking. As you progress through the course you will hopefully build up an interpretation of strategy that will allow you to assess Mintzbergs article more fully than you perhaps can do at the moment. Reflexivity-in-action Here, I give some thought to how my own preferences have influenced the criticism of Mintzbergs paper I have just done. First, I recognise and acknowledge that what I did was my own subjective and biased construct. However, hopefully it was insightful, in that it identified some of the taken-for-granted, assumptions present in the article that were not acknowledged by Mintzberg. Second, my own views about how strategy is most effectively studied and written about meant that I focused on some aspects of the paper that others, who dont share these views, would have passed over. Similarly, I have passed over aspects that colleagues would have picked up on, simply because their focus would have been different to mine. My preference for more micro explanations of strategy mean that I focus in on Mintzbergs very macro and abstracted (in my view) level of analysis. Others, who share Mintzbergs perspective would probably not aim their critique at this. And last, I have to acknowledge that my criticism isnt right, but for me it is useful, as I have drawn out aspects of the paper that I could integrate into an essay or exam question answer that could be used to support an argument I am trying to make. By going through Mintzbergs Five Ps paper and asking these questions I was able to engage with the article on a deeper level than merely reading what is there. From a critical perspective, what is not there is as important as what is on the page. It is this sort of questioning attitude we want you to take as you progress through the course.

Summary This session has concentrated on the skills you will develop through the course particularly on the vital cognitive skill of critical thinking. Being able to identify and describe what you achieve from the course in terms of knowledge and skills (cognitive, or thinking skills; key, or doing skills; and professional skills related to the specific context of business strategy) will increase your effectiveness as a learner and enhance the benefits to be gained from the course. Because strategy is a practical subject, there is a strong link between knowing and doing, and we would encourage you to make relevant connections between your own experience (whether personal, professional or academic) and the models and concepts you study as part of the course. We argued in this session that, in particular, your learning can be improved by the judicious application of a version of the process model of strategy with its iterative stages of analysing, choosing and implementing. We then outlined an approach to critical thinking using questions or prompts and applied this to Mintzberg 5 Ps article. We would reiterate that there is no one right way to do a critical analysis or to perform critical thinking, but that these illustrations will help you develop an approach based on close examination of an article, argument or piece of information, careful analysis of its claims and comparison with what you already know.