Stephen Linstead

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.

Masking Subversion: Neocolonial Embeddedness in Anthropological Accounts of Indigenous Management

Sustainability and sound ecological management of the natural environment, allied to the expanding body of work on managing tacit and explicit knowledge, has led to an increased interest in the contribution which anthropology can make to the practical adaptation of indigenous environmental knowledge and practice to the improvement of organization in western societies. In an exemplary ethnographic study of an indigenous beaver trapper belonging to the Cree Nation, Whiteman and Cooper introduced the concept of ecological embeddedness. Their study could be considered a model that reverses the traditional practice of viewing managers as though they were primitives and applying concepts employed in studying native communities to organizations. They consider indigenous practitioners as managers, identify their management practices, and then reconsider contemporary management practice towards the environment in this light. They argue that to be ecologically embedded as a manager is to identify personally with the land, to adhere to beliefs of ecological respect, reciprocity and caretaking, actively to gather ecological information and to be located physically in the ecosystem. The present article provides a critique of Whiteman and Cooper’s argument and explores the ways in which, at the same time as it is purportedly represented, indigenous thought is masked and thereby subverted. We argue that much of their theorizing - as in so much anthropological accounting - is rooted in neocolonial thought and despite the authors’ claims, a so-called ‘indigenous land ethic’ has limited, if any, relevance to current management theory and practice. This is because such a land ethic is disembedded from the indigenous consciousness of their own economic, social and political history; and similarly for its reception requires a similar disembeddedness in the receiving culture - which then applies a loose analogy or even caricature of indigenous behaviour to its own practices. Such a consciousness remains, therefore, unreflexively embedded in its own neocolonialism. We argue that these problems are not confined to Whiteman and Cooper’s work, but are, to a greater or lesser degree, found in a wide range of anthropological accounts and constitute a problem with which the field is still struggling. To import these features into organizational theorizing without recognizing the deeply problematic nature of contemporary anthropological practice can only produce a reductionist and romanticized picture of native ontologies.

Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization: The Contribution of Gilles Deleuze

Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true — that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive — not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.

Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization

The paper offers an introduction to research that concerns itself with the ‘dark side’ of organization and attempts to bring theoretical resources from a range of disciplines to bear upon the problem. This stream of research has emerged most visibly since the 1990s, although its concerns can be found in much earlier research. Frustrations with the tendencies of mainstream work to overlook, ignore or suppress difficult ethical, political and ideological issues, which may well mean life or death to some people, has in recent years led to a research that self-identifies its concerns as being with the dark side. We structure our review around key contributions on the dark side of organizational behaviour, mainly in psychology but also including the concept of organizational misbehaviour; the sociology of the dark side, with particular reference to mistakes, misconduct and disaster; and a wider range of critical approaches to the dark side including Marxist, post-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives. We also undertake a review of methodologies for investigating dark side phenomena, and finally introduce the five papers that comprise this special issue.

Objectivity, Reflexivity, and Fiction: Humanity, Inhumanity, and the Science of the Social

Problems of perspective, proximity and distance, objectivity, and self-interest perpetuate tensions in the social sciences. In positivistic research, still dominant in the organizational sciences, attention has been concentrated on the eradication of bias in the researcher. The effects of this approach have extended into areas where it is implicit and remains unrecognized, particularly in the tradition of “reflexive sociology.” The focal problem here is one of self-knowing and declaration. Focusing on distanciation, the problem of stepping outside ones data, is an alternative perspective. Esthetic approaches to this issue demonstrate that the processes of fictionalization are endemic to the interpretation of data and the production of research accounts. Language is the central element in creating accounts which are constitutive of the world rather than revelatory of its essence, and hence are partial and persuasive versions of reality. This is discussed with reference to the work of organizational and occupational ethnographers. It is argued that research accounts are inescapably an order of fiction, representations of a world which is unknowable in any “objective” sense. However, the process and products of social science have a dehumanizing effect on social research in failing to recognize this. This cannot be countered by humanist strategies (e.g. self-declaration, confessional, etc.) which preserve misconceptions of authenticity but by exploration of what Lyotard calls the inhuman, those subliminal aspects of experience which are at or beyond the boundaries of articulation. This needs to be done by a greater incorporation of other forms of investigation of the human condition-literature, poetry, art, music-which habitually work at or on these boundaries into the form and processes of “normal” social science.

Leading and Managing

When those masters of business redesign, McKinsey and Co., went to see John Prescott about shuffling the management structure of BHP, Australia’s largest company, they took with them models of the way the best in the world run shows. But the McKinsey team never got to strut its stuff. Instead, Prescott showed them what he wanted to do and the McKinsey team left knowing they might have a radical new model to show prospective clients. Yesterday Prescott lifted the curtain on BHP’s new shape, unveiling structural change of an unprecedented dimension, at the same time anointing a new generation of senior managers, giving them the opportunity to stake their claims on his office. From today, BHP will take on what is, in Australian business at least, a unique configuration, with the greatest oddity being the holy trinity which now tops the management tree.

Comment: Gender Blindness or Gender Suppression? A Comment on Fiona Wilson's Research Note:

This comment takes one term which Fiona Wilson in her excellent and useful review of the research on gender in organization studies makes central to her thesis. Whilst this term may be meaningfully applied to more recent studies of organizational behaviour with a largely technical emphasis, it cannot be applied accurately to the classical and human relations theorists — Taylor, Weber, Mayo and Maslow. Here they are very much aware of gender, and because of the nature of their particular knowledge projects, they actively suppress it. Contemporary reflexivity has again made blindness no longer an option — organization theory has to either embrace gender or suppress it, and acknowledge the motivations behind and the consequences of that suppression.

Gender and management

Matthew looked at his watch as he locked his car and began to hurry across the car park. ‘7.45 am,’ he thought, ‘I really should have got in earlier today.’ Slightly breathless, he pushed open the doors of TransCorp, pausing only briefly to nod to the caretaker, and ran up the stairs to his office two steps at a time. The office looked less than welcoming — desk positioned strategically to face the door, filing cabinets gleaming, the only personal touch a small cactus on his windowsill — as he removed his jacket and sat down at his PC. It seemed only minutes later when there was a knock at the door and his boss David entered. He began immediately:

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

Theorizing Chinese Employment Relations Comparatively: Exchange, Reciprocity and the Moral Economy

This paper contrasts the socio-cultural systems underpinning employment relations in the West and in the Overseas Chinese case. The analysis centres on the norm of reciprocity which, whilst taken as a universal phenomena, exhibits significant cross-cultural variation. Western employment relations are characterised by a model of impersonal rational economic exchange in which individuals engage in a utility calculus. Chinese employment relations remain more fully embedded in the wider socio-cultural system of which reciprocity is a vital and integral part. Employment relations are sustained by a personalistic tacit moral order. The implications for managing employment relations in changing and multi-cultural situations are discussed. The sustainabilty of the different employment relations systems are also discussed.