Beyond ourselves: Passion and the dark side of identification in an ethical organization

Abstract

How are organizational discourses enacted by people at work? In this article, instead of treating subjects as somewhat distinct from such discourses, I argue that the two are inescapably intertwined. The concept of 'ek-stasis' helps us to understand this. Ekstasis invokes an idea of the 'self' that, through processes of identification, is always located outside of itself, embedded in a wider sociality. I explore this dynamic through an in-depth study of the powerful discourse of 'ethical living', and its enactment in one contemporary development sector organization, EWH. This ek-static enactment was somewhat ambivalent: involving mutual recognition between colleagues, but also processes of exclusion and policing. I highlight how attention to feeling and passion was important in understanding the relation between workplace discourse and identification processes, in this setting. This study shows that a view of workplace selves as ek-static is useful for understanding the enactment of discourse at work, and that this enactment can be both passionate and ambivalent.

Mental Heath as a Weapon: Whistleblower Retaliation and Normative Violence

“…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.'…”

“…Specifically, there is no attention paid to how the wrongdoing organizations deploy various discourses including that of mental health, to undermine the claims of whistleblowers who often internalize and enact these. In this article, we contribute to research on this important issue by drawing on Judith Butler's 'recognition-based critique' of subjectivity and power, a growing area of interest in organization studies (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679; see also Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2014;Kenny 2010Kenny , 2017Riach et al 2016;Tyler and Cohen 2008). This view builds on the resource-based approach because it sees power as inherent to the very formation of the subject, as she constructs a sense of self through identification with discourse, rather than simply an entity that is either possessed or not.…”

Writing materiality into management and organization studies through and with Luce Irigaray

“…Yet while the work of female scholars who draw on feminist 9 writers is now appearing in major journals (Höpfl, 2000(Höpfl, , 2007Marshall, 2000;Tyler and Cohen, 2009;Kenny 2010;Vachhani, 2012, Fotaki, 2013Ford and Harding, 2008) too often female voices continue to be silenced, discounted and/or misrepresented. This situation is problematic: since writing involves and is concerned with corporeal practices (Pullen, 2006), we need to explore fully what it means to write gendered research from the feminine perspective/body.…”

Género y management en el marco neoliberal. Un análisis crítico para la emergencia de liderazgos feministas

“…Al mismo tiempo, desarrollan una teoría de las identidades a través de analizar las complejidades, subtextos y contradicciones inherentes a la construcción de las identidades en las organizaciones (Parker y Jary 1995;Harding 2003;Harding et al 2011;Borgerson 2005;Hodgson 2005;Kenny 2010; Melissa Tyler y Cohen 2010; Ozturk y Rumens 2014).…”

“…Situándonos en esta segunda concepción, añadimos que para fomentar una interacción entre la identidad, a nivel organizativo y la construcción de la identidad, a nivel individual y de grupo, se vuelve vital la relación entre género e identidad ( Kenny 2010;Laine et al 2016). Y es que dentro de esta confluencia se produce en muchos casos la negación de grupos dentro de la organización, sujetos o identidades que son rechazadas ( van Gennep 1960;Turner 1969).…”