Deferring Difference No More: An (im)modest, relational plea from/through Karen Barad

This piece reflects on the untapped potential of feminist theories and activist practices to address vital organizational issues and societal challenges such as inequality, sustainability, and care for the environment. While we recognize and briefly review the progress on gender issues in organization studies achieved over the last decades, our focus is on identifying the critical and underutilized strands of feminist thinking offering fresh responses to these problems, including decolonial feminism, feminist ethics of care, posthuman feminism, and ecofeminism. By way of illustrating our theoretical arguments, we discuss how five different papers recently published in Organization Studies address some of these issues, including the uncovering hidden entanglements of power and performativity in a global bank and in the beauty industry by paying attention to body and affect, the underrepresented struggles of women in the Global South as they disrupt gendered practices through consciousness raising, contesting gender regimes at organizational social events, and finally, how the social media operate at the intersection of gender and occupation. We conclude by outlining future directions for research as we discuss the contributions of anti-racist feminist theory and decolonial feminist practice to completing the unfinished project of social change while making our scholarship more reflexive and inclusive.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Feminist Approaches To Embodiment Body and Affectmentioning

confidence: 98%

Feminist Theories and Activist Practices in Organization Studies

Fotaki,

Pullen

2023

Politics in Organization Studies: Multi-disciplinary traditions and interstitial positions

O’Doherty,

De Cock

2024

This Perspectives article delves into the archives of Organization Studies covering the period 1986-2010 to advance and develop our thinking of politics and political thinking in organization studies. In our Benjamin-inflected reading (Benjamin, 2002), we look for the revolutionary energies that reside in what may at first appear as perhaps ‘outmoded’ articles in an intellectual environment where the obsolescence of ideas and concepts seems to increase at pace. The purpose of the excavation of our six chosen texts is to build a constellation of what we call ‘interstitial positions’ that reside within and outside the analytical contours of these texts. In this way we bring these texts into a critical condition in the hope that their constellation can act as a real force in the present and help illuminate our contemporary situation. We might then renew our sense of possibility and choice about the organizational worlds we inhabit and to open future avenues for thinking politics informed by the distinctive disciplinary traditions of organization studies.

Heat and Organization Studies: Organizing in a world approaching 50°C

Dentoni

2024

As a symptom of the current global climate emergency, rising temperatures pervade organizational lives. Yet, organization studies have hardly investigated the everyday organizing necessary to cope and adapt, here and now, to life in a world approaching and even surpassing 50 degrees Celsius. This essay seeks to open spaces of collective inquiry to grapple with practices of organizational co-evolution with heat. I apply Barad’s post-humanist notion of diffraction – patterns of interference in entangled agency – through warming organizations, as rising temperatures intra-act with the matter, materials, bodies and discourses that co-constitute them. Diffractive inquiry helps organization studies understand how rising heat alters and amplifies bodily differences across families, communities, firms, societies and ecologies. This post-humanist view forces to rethink theories of organizational resilience, inequality and identity in co-evolution with heat and other ecological phenomena as part of a relational whole.