Judith Butler and Organization Theory The year 2020 marks thirty years since the first publication of Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book Gender Trouble. Here, and in subsequent work, Butler argues that gender and other forms of identity can best be understood as performative acts. These acts are what bring our subjectivities into existence, enabling us to be recognized as viable, employable social beings, worthy of rights, responsibilities and respect. The three decades since the publication of Gender Trouble have witnessed Butler become one of the most widely cited and controversial figures in contemporary feminist thinking. While it is only in her most recent work that Butler has engaged directly with themes such as work and organization, her writing has profound implications for thinking, and acting, on the relationship between power, recognition and organization. Whilst her ideas have made important inroads into work, organization and gender studies that are discussed here, there is considerable scope to explore further avenues that her concepts and theories open up. These inroads and avenues are the focus of this book. Judith Butler and Organization Theory makes a substantial contribution to the analysis of gender, work and organization. It not only covers central issues in Butler’s work but also offers a close reading of the complexities and nuances in her thought. It does so by ‘reading’ Butler as a theorist of organization, whose work resonates with scholars, practitioners and activists concerned to understand and engage with organizational life, organization and organizing. Drawing from a range of illustrative examples, the book examines key texts or ‘moments’ in the development of Butler’s writing to date, positing her as a thinker concerned to understand and address the ways in which our most basic desire for recognition comes to be organized within the context of contemporary labour markets and workplaces. It examines insights from Butler’s work, and the philosophical ideas she draws on, considering the impact of these on work, organization and management studies thus far; it also explores some of the many ways in which her thinking might be mobilized in future, considering what scope there is for a non-violent ethics of organization, and for a (re)assembling of the relationship between vulnerability and resistance within and through organizational politics. Melissa Tyler is a professor of work and organization studies at Essex Business School, The University of Essex, UK. Routledge Studies in Gender and Organizations Series Editor: Elisabeth K. Kelan Although still a fairly young field, the study of gender and organizations is increasingly popular and relevant. There are few areas of academic research that are as vibrant and dynamic as the study of gender and organizations. While much earlier research has focused on documenting the imbalances of women and men in organizations, more recently, research on gender and organizations has departed from counting men and women. Instead research in this area sees gender as a process: something that is done rather than something that people are. This perspective is important and mean- ingful as it takes researchers away from essentialist notions of gender and opens the possibility of analysing the process of how individuals become women and men. This is called ‘gendering’, ‘practising gender’, ‘doing gender’ or ‘performing gender’ and draws on rich philosophical traditions. Whilst Routledge Studies in Gender and Organizations has a broad remit, it will be thematically and theoretically committed to exploring gender and organizations from a constructivist perspective. Rather than focusing on specific areas of organizations, the series is to be kept deliberately broad to showcase the most innovative research in this field. It is anticipated that the books in this series will make a theoretical contribution to the field of gender and organization based on rigorous empirical explorations. Gender and the Professions International and Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Kaye Broadbent, Glenda Strachan, and Geraldine Healy Postfeminism and Organization Edited by Patricia Lewis, Yvonne Benschop, and Ruth Simpson Women and Careers Transnational Studies in Public Policy and Employment Equity Marilee Reimer Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions Edited by Marta Choroszewicz and Tracey L. Adams Judith Butler and Organization Theory Melissa Tyler Judith Butler and Organization Theory Melissa Tyler First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Melissa Tyler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-04834-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16433-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Ellis—with love, and the hope that you will continue to always be audacious Contents ContentsContents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Making Trouble: Organizational Performativity and Parody 29 2 The Organizational ‘Matter’ of Bodies at Work 60 3 Un/Doing Organization—Coherence at the Cost of Complexity 85 4 Accounting for/in Organization: Giving and Working an Account of One’s Self 109 5 Organized Dispossession: The Organizational Politics of Precarity 140 6 Organizational (re)Assemblage: Towards a Plural Performativity 165 Postscript 197 References 206 Index 215 Preface PrefacePreface The year 2020 marks thirty years since the first publication of Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. The three decades since have witnessed Butler becoming one of the most widely cited yet controversial figures in contemporary feminist thinking. Her performative ontology of gender has led many to worship at the altar of ‘St Jude’ with a fanzine in the 1990s and now various social media groups devoted to her. In Buenos Aires in 2019, queues formed outside the hall where Butler was speaking more than seven hours ahead of the scheduled start time such was her popularity, while in Brazil in 2017, she was burned in effigy by Far Right protestors who had interpreted her work as ‘anti-family’. Butler has been hailed as ‘a genius for insubordination’ (Fraser, 1995a: 65), celebrated as a public intellectual whose work reaches well beyond the confines of academia (Fischer, 2016), yet she is also the notorious winner of a ‘bad writer’ award (see Butler, 1999) and has been derided as a ‘professor of parody’ who is capable of little more than setting the femi- nist movement back through her ‘hip defeatism’ (Nussbaum, 1999: 37). Responses to Butler’s work from within work and organization studies have tended to sit somewhere between these extremes. A growing number of scholars, practitioners and activists have drawn on her ideas and have applied and developed her insights, often re-framing her thinking through an organizational lens where her writing, particularly her earliest work, tended to lack this substantive focus. As Butler’s own thinking about organizational lives and contexts continues to evolve so too do the pos- sibilities, as well as the challenges and limitations, of drawing her work into a dialogue with organizational scholarship, activism and practice. Butler’s performative theory of gender in particular has made a sig- nificant contribution to work and organization studies in the years since the first publication of Gender Trouble. As Lloyd (2007) notes, it is this aspect of her thinking for which Butler continues to be best known, and it is her performative ontology of gender, in particular, that has been the most influential aspect of her writing for organizational scholars. Kenny’s (2019: 33) book on whistleblowers is a notable exception, drawing together insights and ideas from across the full breadth of Butler’s work