Accumulation through derealization: How corporate violence remains unchecked

Abstract

This study examines the alleged organisation of violence by Coca Cola through a field-study conducted in a village in India. It draws on the works of Judith Butler to show how subaltern groups are derealised and made into ungrievable lives through specific, yet recurrent, practices that keep violence unchecked. Many participants attempt to resist derealisation through protest activities that showcase their vulnerability. However, the firm appropriates their claims to vulnerability through a paternalistic discourse that justifies intensified violence and derealisation. This research offers insights into accumulation through derealisation and on the effects of resistance to it.

Mental Heath as a Weapon: Whistleblower Retaliation and Normative Violence

“…Normative violence was not simply enacted by retaliating organizations drawing on the language of mental health to undermine the character of the whistleblower and present him or her as untrustworthy and unreliable, but rather subjects participated in this violence even as they tried to defend themselves against organizational attacks. Building upon existing Butler-inspired 'recognition-based critiques' of power within organizations (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1693, we contribute insights into the role of organizations and subjects in deploying normative violence (Butler 2009;Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016). We add to existing understandings of how normative violence against whistleblowers operates through recruitment practices and social networks, postdisclosure (Kenny 2017), specifically by showing how this can occur where mental health is deployed in cases of whistleblower retaliation.…”

“…She shows how such practices are effective because capitalist forms of organization elicit from us the kinds of passionate attachments to dominant social norms, values and rules, which are re-affirmed and re-embedded through circulating discourses in ways that ultimately represent normative violence, suggesting that power is both an intra (psychic)-and intersubjective (social) process rather than a property or attribute that one can obtain at the expense of the other. While Butler does not expand on this in the context of work organizations, others have recently illustrated how her 'recognition-based critique of the conditions governing viable subjectivity' (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679 can shed light on dynamics of normative power in organizations (Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2013Harding et al , 2014Riach et al 2016), not least in relation to sexuality and gender (Tyler and Cohen 2008) but also the consumption of management textbooks (Harding 2003), ethical workplaces (Kenny 2010) and organizational violence (Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016). This theory has recently been applied to understand the experiences of whistleblowers in the aftermath of their disclosures (Kenny 2017) and their exclusions from recruitment practices and friendship circles because of having engaged in 'impossible speech.'…”

Censored: Whistleblowers and impossible speech

“…As recent scholars of this theory have noted, it is important to explore these (Varman and Al-Amoudi, 2016;Riach et al, 2016: 4). It is to this specific issue that the current article aims to contribute, in part through drawing on Butler's ideas on censorship, described next.…”

Introduction: de/humanization and critical realism

“…Porpora's tour d'horizon is succinct, incisive and insightful. Although some of us (the guest editors) might feel a tad more charitable than Porpora towards poststructuralism (Al-Amoudi 2007; Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016) and Actor Network Theory (O'Mahoney, O'Mahoney, and Al-Amoudi 2016), we nonetheless agree that Porpora makes an important point when he suggests that CR's strength lies in an ontology that refuses to conflate subjects, objects and relations. This ontological stance allows, in turn, to cast the I-Thou relationship at the heart of analyses of social phenomena and thus maintain what Lawson termed a 'minimal humanism'.…”