Thinking with AND: Management Concepts and Multiplicities

Management and organizational studies have directed attention towards the continuous change of, and introduction of, management tools such as models and concepts. In this perspective, management appears as a texture of concepts that are interrelated in a multiplicity of ways. To grapple with the expanding space of management concepts, the production of concepts in management has been problematized from a number of perspectives such as semiotics, discourse theory and deconstructive approaches. Most contributors who have demonstrated a frustration over the inability to fix management concepts see this as a flaw of management studies. This paper has two objectives. First, to discuss Gilles Deleuze's theory of language and the concept as a fruitful way of dealing with uncertainty of meaning, and, second, to point out the possibilities rather than the shortcomings of `unfixed' management concepts.

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