Middle managers occupy a central position in organizational hierarchies, where they are responsible for implementing senior management plans by ensuring junior staff fulfil their roles. However, explorations of the identity of the middle manager offer contradictory insights. This paper develops a theory of the identity of the middle manager using a theoretical framework offered by the philosopher Judith Butler and empirical material from focus groups of middle managers discussing their work. We use personal pronoun analysis to analyse the identity work they undertake while talking between themselves. We suggest that middle managers move between contradictory subject positions that both conform with and resist normative managerial identities, and we also illuminate how those moves are invoked. The theory we offer is that middle managers are both controlled and controllers, and resisted and resisters. We conclude that rather than being slotted into organizational hierarchies middle managers constitute those hierarchies.

This article develops a performative theory of resistance. It uses Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity to explore how resistance (to organizational strategies and policies) and resistants (those who resist such strategies and policies) co-emerge, within and through complex intra-actions of entangled discourses, materialities, affect and space/time. The article uses empirical materials from a case study of the implementation of a talent management strategy. We analyse interviews with the senior managers charged with implementing the strategy, the influence of material, non-sentient actors, and the experiences of the researchers when carrying out the interviews. This leads to a theory that resistance and resistants emerge in moment-to-moment co-constitutive moves that may be invoked when identity or self is put in jeopardy. Resistance, we suggest, is the power (residing with resistants) to say ‘no’ to organizational requirements that would otherwise threaten to render the self abject.

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Queer theory, understood here as a set of political/politicized practices and positions which resist normative knowledge and identities, has emerged as a theoretical perspective having important emancipatory and explanatory power in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Queer theory resists defi nition ipso facto , residing as it does within a postructuralist paradigm. It has not hitherto featured within the discipline of public administration and we argue the case for its utilisation in this fi eld by fi rst explicating the theory. Here we develop a way of using queer theory to analyse data, notably through the identifi cation of the ' moments ' of a queer theory analysis: identifi cation of the norms that govern identity, analysis of what is allowable within those norms, and exploration of what is unspeakable. We demonstrate its use via an empirically-based case study. The lessons from this exercise are then applied to some of our earlier work which we re-read through a queer theory lens. This shows the great explanatory power offered by the theory, in that it can develop insights that previously have been inaccessible. We conclude with recommendations for its broader application and wider use within public administration.