New criticisms of international management: An analytical review

The eight new criticisms of International Management (IM)—Academy of Management Review, 2008—embodying feminist-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives, employ organizational discourse analysis as the main framework. The main theme, while digressing from the Western capitalistic market maxim, is one of dismantling the theoretic structure of IM research of the last half century. Even so, these new criticisms merit a methodical appraisal. We undertake, in this conceptual paper, an analytical appraisal of these criticisms, thus: first, we critically analyze the salient points of each paper and its proposed future IM research direction; secondly, we place the eight criticisms within the framework of ‘culture politics’; and finally, we maintain that these criticisms are focused exclusively on non-market factors. In the MNE context, although non-market factors may have to be assigned a greater weight, both market and non-market factors are best viewed as two sides of the same coin. Overemphasizing one can only jeopardize the other. Moreover, in the absence of a lucid definition of international management, the new criticisms might linger as infertile intellectual ideas.