This paper critically examines a twenty-first century online, social movement, The Everyday Sexism Project (referred to as the ESP), to analyse resistance against sexism that is systemic, entrenched and institutionalised in society, including organizations. Our motivating questions are: what new forms of feminist organizing are developing to resist sexism and what are the implications of thinking ethico-politically about feminist resistance which has the goals of social justice, equality and fairness? Reading the ESP leads to a conceptualisation of how infrapolitical feminist resistance emerges at grassroots level and between individuals in the form of affective solidarity, which become necessary in challenging neoliberal threats to women's opportunity and equality. Our contribution conceptualises affective solidarity as central to this feminist resistance against sexism and involves two modes of feminist organizing, the politics of experience and empathy. By addressing the ethical and political demands of solidarity we can build resurgent, politically vibrant feminist organizing and resistance that mobilises feminist consciousness and builds momentum for change. Our 2 conclusion is that an ethico-politics of feminist resistance moves away from individualising experiences of sexism towards collective resistance and organizes solidarity, experience and empathy that may combat ignorance and violence towards women.
General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. AbstractAffect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the 'pulsing refrains of affect' that accompany our lived experiences.
Practice-based studies of organization have drawn attention to the importance of the body as a site of knowledge and knowing. However, relational encounters between bodies and objects, and the affects they generate, are less well understood in organization studies. This article uses new materialist theory to explore the role of affect in embodied practices of craft making. It suggests that craft work relies on affective organizational relations and intensities that flow between bodies, objects and places of making. This perspective enables a more affective, materially inclusive understanding of organizational practice, as encounters between human and nonhuman entities and forces. We draw on empirical data from a qualitative study of four UK organizations that make bicycles, shoes and hand decorated pottery. We track the embodied techniques that enable vital encounters with matter and the affective traces and spatial, aesthetic atmospheres that emerge from these encounters. We suggest that a concern with the vitality of objects is central to the meaning that is attributed to craft work practices and the ethical sensibilities that arise from these encounters. We conclude by proposing an affective ethics of mattering that constructs agency in ways that are not confined to humans and acknowledges the importance of orientations towards matter in generating possibilities for ethical generosity towards others.
This paper engages with what it means to write love and poses the question: what does love do for feminine writing? I move beyond the concept of love as an ideology or condition of work (such as 'for the love of the job') and draw on a feminine poetics of organisation that highlights its disruptive potential. Love, in this sense, breaks the rationality and order of the 'masterful' text and alters gendered academic writing. The power of writing with love and effecting change in organisations is developed through a discussion of three feminist writers. The paper explores three significant texts:Kristeva's Tales of Love; Irigaray's The Way of Love; and hooks' All About Love in order to examine the problematic representation of love and to advocate a turn to an ethics of love as a basis for selfother relations that points us to defiant, activist and transformative forms of feminine writing. These writers bring to bear practical politics and possibilities through political interruption -namely through three modes: reconstruction, reclamation and activation and I discuss the implications of these modes for work and organisation, notably that writing and thinking the wisdom of love offers insight into how we creatively imagine socially just organisations of the future.
This article presents data from a comprehensive study of hyper flexible and precarious work in the service sector. A series of interviews were conducted with selfemployed personal trainers along with more than 200 hours of participant observation within fitness centres in the UK. Analysis of the data reveals a new form of hyper flexible and precarious work that is labelled neo-villeiny in this article. Neo-villeiny is characterised by four features: bondage to the organisation; payment of rent to the organisation; no guarantee of any income; and extensive unpaid and speculative work that is highly beneficial to the organisation. The neo-villeiny of the self-employed personal trainer offers the fitness centre all of the benefits associated with hyper flexible work, but also mitigates the detrimental outcomes associated with precarious work. The article considers the potential for adoption of this new form of hyper flexible and precarious work across the broader service sector. 2
This paper problematises the ways women's leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrate how leadership ethics based on feminised ideals such as care and empathy are problematic in their typecasting of women as being simply the other to men. We apply different strategies of mimesis for developing feminist leadership ethics that does not derive from the masculine. This offers a radical vision for leadership that liberates the feminine and women's subjectivities from the masculine order. It also offers a practical project for changing women's working lives through relationality, intercorporeality, collective agency and ethical openness with the desire for fundamental political transformation in the ways in which women can lead.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
In the era of uncertainty, the body re-emerges as the place where we may begin to know again.' (Bhattacharyya, 2001: 38) 'The body. .. . is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body'. (drawing on Mary Douglas, Bordo, 1992: 13)
This paper investigates the intersections between psychoanalysis and feminist thinking as they may be applied to organization studies by problematizing sexual difference. By critically engaging with the influence of (primarily Lacanian) psychoanalysis, I explore feminist psychoanalytic approaches with their close attention to patriarchy and phallocentrism. More specifically, I engage with the work of Luce Irigaray, whose influential role in French feminist philosophy has occupied what could be termed a difficult or sacrificial position in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I argue that the focus of psychoanalysis on the Phallus as a primary signifier may be fruitfully problematized through a feminist lens (Grosz, 1990), conceived here through Irigaray, and that its usefulness for organizational analysis depends on an ability to recognize, invite and attend to its gendered core. It is argued that Irigaray brings fruitful resources to this debate. Irigaray is concerned with the significant political and ethical dilemmas resulting from the systematic suppression of femininity and this is why her work is significant for a better understanding of gender relations in organizations relating to the exclusion of women, and for new spaces of symbolization and representation. My discussion reveals that, by scrutinizing sexual differences that constitute the subject, one is able to unearth implications for the study of organizations.
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