Alison Pullen

Managing difference in feminized work: Men, otherness and social practice:

This article presents a qualitative study of men who do traditionally female dominated and feminized work (specifically nursing and primary school teaching). Men are often seen as not only a minority to women in these contexts, but also their Other. The article explores the processes of doing gender as a social and discursive practice, highlighting the necessity to manage difference and the processual, emergent, dynamic, partial and fragmented nature of gendered identities. We show some of the complex ways in which men manage difference and how they transcend Otherness by doing masculinity and appropriating femininity so that masculinity is partially subverted and partly maintained. This analysis not only relies on the doing of gender through the doing of difference but also surfaces the undoing of gender and difference to disrupt gender norms and practices in work organizations.

Gender as multiplicity: Desire, displacement, difference and dispersion

This article argues that although gender is no longer widely considered to be a property of individuals, the alternative of viewing it in terms of performativity, where it is the outcome of linguistic and social performances, unnecessarily limits the possibilities of thinking of gender as a form of multiplicity that is both internally and externally differentiated. Any attempt to move beyond binary thinking in gender relations initiates a consideration of multiplicity, and the way in which multiplicity is conceptualized exerts a critical influence on the possibilities that are opened up. This article interrogates existing understandings of multiplicity and finds three actual or possible types - multiplicities of the same, characteristic of feminist approaches which we critique through a reconceptualization of desire; multiplicities of the third, characterized by anthropological, transgender and queer theory approaches; and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, typified by the rhizomatics and fluid theorizing of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz and Olkowski. We propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire, realized as proliferation in Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome. Gender identity is accordingly rethought as immanence, intensity and consistency.

Writing Organization as Gendered Practice: Interrupting the Libidinal Economy:

While gender very much holds a place in organization studies, this is primarily in relation to being an object of study. Still largely silent and inexplicit is the gendered nature of what organization studies researchers themselves do when they research and write. Our overarching project in this essai is to render the gendered character of organization studies writing open for discussion, to disturb the taken-for-granted gender neutrality of the ways that organization studies is written, as well as to outline how it might be otherwise. The specific contribution we are led to is the setting out of the possibilities for, following Hélène Cixous, a bisexual writing of organization studies. We suggest that organization studies has been dominated by a participation in what Cixous calls a ‘masculine libidinal economy’. This is a system of exchange where science, mastery and rigour are not so much an effort in inquiry, but more a form of (rough) trade through which to appease the fear of castration; the fear of not-knowing. In looking for alternatives we review recent developments in narrative methodology in organization studies and extend this through the idea of the feminine libidinal economy and towards a consideration of Cixous’s practice of bisexual writing – a writing that challenges masculine orthodoxy by confusing it rather than attempting to replace it with another (feminine) orthodoxy.

Corporeal ethics and the politics of resistance in organizations

This article offers an understanding of organizational ethics as embodied and pre-reflective in origin and socio-political in practice. We explore ethics as being founded in openness and generosity towards the other, and consider the organizational implications of a ‘corporeal ethics’ grounded in the body before the mind. Shifting focus away from how managers might rationally pursue organizational ethics, we elaborate on how corporeal ethics can manifest in practical and political acts that seek to defy the negation of alterity within organizations. This leads us to consider how people’s conduct in organizations might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Such an ethics manifests in resisting those forms of organizing that close down difference and enact oppression; a practice we refer to as an ethico-politics of resistance.

Hidden contexts and invisible power relations: A Foucauldian reading of diversity research

This article joins recent critical diversity studies that point to an urgent need to revitalize the field, but goes further by showing the inherent contextual issues and power relations that frame existing contributions. Based on a theoretical reading inspired by Michel Foucault, diversity is presented as discourse that is not independent of the particular research exercise of which it is part but, rather, remains contingent on the prevailing forms of knowledge and choices made by researchers. By attending to more refined understandings of power and context within diversity discourse, this article makes visible and calls into question the categorization and normalization of diversity and its management. It contributes to existing research by suggesting that the knowledge produced by mainstream and critical diversity scholars alike is biopolitical and governmental. To do diversity research differently or ‘otherwise’ requires finding ways to develop theorizations and practices that turn this modality of power against itself.

Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering

This paper examines the relationship between ethics and politics in organizations with a specific focus on ethical subjectivity—that is, how people at work constitute themselves as subjects in relation to both their conduct and their sense of ethical responsibility to others. To investigate this we consider those ethics that were politically mobilized when five clinical partners tendered to buy out the medical practice in which they worked. We provide a detailed reading of a letter of complaint written by one of the partners and sent to their employer—a letter we consider to be a deliberate, political, ethically motivated and overt act of resistance. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas we argue that the practice of ethics is characterized by a tension where ethical commitments and realpolitik come crashing together. The implication we draw from this is that in organizations the ethical subject is always a political subject; the one who takes action in response to the call of the ethical demand. It is answering the call to political action by the ethical subject—a subject prepared to act in response to the experience of injustice while not resting easy on their own ethical righteousness—that provides an affirmative possibility for researching and theorizing ethics within a critical framework.

Organization and Identity

Contents. Notes on the Identities of Contributors. Acknowledgments. 1.Organizing Identity Part 1: Confronting Identity: Selves and Others 2. Now Where Was I? Questioning Assumptions of Consistent Identity 3. Theorizing Narrative-Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneutics 4. Self and Other in Everyday Existence: A Mystery not a Problem 5. Living a Story and Storying a Life: A Narrative Understanding of the Distributed Self Part 2: Performing Identities: Selves for Others 6. Career as a Project of the Self and Labour Process Discipline 7. Fetish Failures: Interrupting the Subject and the Other 8. The Mission Statement as Epideictic Rhetoric: Celebrating Organizational Identity 9. Other Work: A Dividual Enterprise Part 3: After Identity...?: Selves in Question 10. Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the Control-Resistance-Identity Triangle 11. Casting the Other to the Ends of the Earth: Marginal Identity in Organization Studies 12. Making Global Subjects: Diasporic Identity as a Media Event 13. Fluid Identities and Ungendering the Future 14. Identity Aesthetics: Asymmetry and the Assault on Order

Ethics, embodiment and organizations:

Noting that ethics and responsibility in business are well established fields of research and practice, we suggest that the limits of dominant approaches lie in their privileging of rationality, penchant for codification, tendency to self-congratulation, predilection to control, affinity to masculinity, blindness to social injustice, and subsumption under corporate goals. We observe that such lines of thought are blind to affectual relations, care, compassion or any forms of feeling experienced pre-reflexively through the body. We argue that this begs the rethinking of ethics in organizations from an embodied perspective. On this basis, and on the basis on the work herein, we retain the hope that our interaction with each other and with the world, might foster ways of organizational life that resist domination and oppression in favour of the enactment of care and respect for difference as it is lived and experienced.

The materiality of leadership

There is a growing body of research that has advanced knowledge of the embodied nature of leadership, and its relationship between aesthetics and affect (Hansen et al., 2007; Ladkin, 2008; Ropo and Sauer, 2008; Sinclair, 2005). The relationship between the surface or exterior of the body and embodiment have developed rich insights, yet we suggest that the ways in which affect, materiality and leadership connect requires space to change the ways in which we think about ‘leadership’. Acknowledging the sea of literature on embodied organisation (see for example, Dale, 2001; Lennie, 2000), this special issue creates a space for the basic assumption that leadership is embodied – leadership is practised through and between bodies, where matter matters, and body challenges leadership as an over-cognitivised phenomena. Despite extensive research on ‘emotion-based’ or ‘instinctual’ forms (Harung, 1993) of leadership such as transformational leadership and charismatic leadership, we suggest that the body becomes the carrier of emotion, desire or motivation. In such cases, the body is subordinated to an overarching regime of instrumentality and commodified in the pursuit of organisational effectiveness. Moreover, when the body is considered it is done so superficially, for example by associating leadership effectiveness with physical characteristics such as height, weight, and body type, and/or assuming that the leader is able bodied and ostensibly Western. Popular managerialist concepts such as emotional intelligence, while bearing a loose acknowledgement of the body, are also deeply entwined and understood as being deferent to organisational effectiveness (Goleman, 2006). Whilst not wanting to labour ‘the body’s neglect’, we claim that more often than not the body is enrolled in the process of organising, often in impoverished ways which do not consider the inter-connections and inseparability of mind/body and subject/object – a relation that Merleau-Ponty (1968; see also Crossley, 1995) refers to as ‘chiasm’. As a result of

Affective politics in gendered organizations: affirmative notes on becoming-woman

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.