introduced the formulation 'performative utterance' in his 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors' analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors' aim is to provoke a 'performative turn' in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of 'critical performativity', a concept designed to debate relationships between theory and practice and encourage practical interventions in organizational life. Notwithstanding its laudable ambition to stimulate discussion about engagement between CMS researchers and practitioners, we are concerned that critical performativity theory is flawed as it misreads foundational performativity authors, such as Austin and Butler, in ways that nullify their political potential, and ignores a range of other influential theories of performativity. It also overlooks the materiality of performativity. We review these limitations and then use three illustrations to sketch out a possible alternative conceptualization of performativity. This alternative approach, which builds on Butler's and Callon's work on performativity, recognises that performativity is about the constitution of subjects, is an inherently material and discursive construct, and happens through the political engineering of sociomaterial agencements. We argue that such an approach -a political theory of organizational performativity -is more likely to deliver on both theoretical and practical fronts than the concept of critical performativity.

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.

There is increasing recognition in management and organization studies of the importance of materiality as an aspect of discourse, while the neglect of materiality in post-structuralist management and organization theory is currently the subject of much discussion. This paper argues that this turn to materiality may further embed gender discrimination. We draw on Luce Irigaray's work to highlight the dangers inherent in masculine discourses of materiality.We discuss Irigaray's identification of how language and discourse elevate the masculine over the feminine so as to offer insights into ways of changing organizational language and discourses so that more beneficial, ethically-founded identities, relationships and practices can emerge. We thus stress a political intent that aims to liberate women and men from phallogocentrism. We finally take forward Irigaray's ideas to develop a feminist écriture of/for organization studies that points towards ways of writing from the body. The paper thus not only discusses how inequalities may be embedded within the material turn but it also provides a strategy that enriches the possibilities of overcoming them from within. IntroductionThe neglect of materiality in post-structuralist management and organization theory is currently the subject of much discussion, notably in an important recent review article by Phillips and Oswick (2012), and Ashcraft, Kuhn and Cooren's (2009) excellent summary of approaches to exploring materiality. There is therefore recognition of the need to return to a continental philosophical tradition that attempts to transcend the subject-object dualism undergirding much of modernist knowledge production, and thus to avoid 'the bifurcation of the material and discursive' that is too often present in the texts of the proponents of discourse (Mumby, 2011). Academics are included in this turn: they are not disembodied subjectivities but sexuated subjects that are implicated in the accounts they produce. The material bodies that sit pounding keyboards will have different musculatures and organs; they may be perceived as leaky or hard; and they may also experience pains peculiar to one or other sex. While such bodies themselves can only be understood through and indeed as constituted within discourse, at the same time discourse is material and cannot be separated from such (academic) bodies (Butler, 1990(Butler, , 1993. Furthermore, academics are gendered embodied subjects, and as such are not only subject to forms of gender domination and subordination; they also may (albeit unwittingly) reproduce those forms. In other words, we argue that when bodies enter then so does gender and gender discrimination. To take forward the material turn through introducing methodological plurality and combining discourse with non-discursive approaches, as suggested by Phillips and Oswick (2012), without awareness and understanding of gender could therefore perpetuate inequalities. To avoid this danger, we propose that the turn to materiality requires fundamental...

'Authentic leadership' is increasingly influential, with its promise to eliminate, and thus surpass, the weaknesses of previous models of leadership. This article uses object relations theory to argue, firstly, that authentic leadership as an indication of a leader's true self is impossible and, secondly, that attempts at its implementation could lead to destructive dynamics within organizations. The authentic leadership model refuses to acknowledge the imperfections of individuals and despite its attestations to seeking 'one's true, or core self ' (Gardner et al., 2005: 345), it privileges a collective (organizational) self over an individual self and thereby hampers subjectivity to both leaders and followers. The paper thus contributes to emerging critical leadership studies by introducing the psychoanalytic approach of object relations theory to the study of leadership.