At the Dawn of a New Age

In the introduction to this thematic edition, I explore the relevance of Critical Management Studies (CMS) in its contribution to organizational and social change, and to management studies in Hungary. I argue that CMS has achieved a lot in terms of the critical reconsideration of widely accepted ideas in management and organization theory; in extending the conceptual and methodological framework, and topics covered in the fi eld; as well as in uncovering and documenting historical and currently existing alternatives. Despite the discipline’s contribution, it has not generated the intended level of social change, and this lack of relevance has led some commentators to envision the demise of CMS. In this context, the fact that the fi rst explicitly CMS works have appeared in Hungarian academia only recently is relatively surprising, and I close the article by off ering three possible alternatives for further research in search of an explanation.