On Being At Work

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MANAGEMENT, ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MANAGEMENT,

ORGANIZATIONS, AND SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS, AND SOCIETY

Gender Equity in Science and Engineering

Advancing Change in Higher Education
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Commitment to Work and Job Satisfaction

Studies of Work Orientations
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Managing Corporate Values in Diverse National Cultures

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Philippe d’Iribarne

Leadership as Emotional Labour

Management and the ‘Managed Heart’
Edited by Marian Iszatt-White

Nancy Harding
Gossip and Organizations
Kathryn Waddington On Being At Work
On Being At Work
The Social Construction of the Employee
The Social Construction of the Employee
Nancy Harding

Nancy Harding

www.routledge.com

9780415579711_Full Cover.indd 1 1/21/2013 4:32:14 PM

On Being At Work

Inspired by the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, influenced by Marx’s

theory of alienation and intrigued by theories of death, this book develops
an anti-methodological approach to studying working lives. Distinctions are
drawn between labour (the tasks we do in our jobs) and work (self-making
activities that are carried out at the workplace): between the less than
human, zombie-like laborer and the working human self. Nancy Harding
argues that the experience of being at work is one in which the insistence on
practising one’s humanity always provides a counterpoint to organizational
demands.

Nancy Harding is Professor of Organization Theory at Bradford University

School of Management. She is currently writing a series of books on the
social construction of, respectively, the manager (Routledge, 2003), the em-
ployee (Routledge, 2013) and the organization (forthcoming).
Routledge Studies in Management, Organizations, and Society

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Satisfaction Chapters in organizational
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Kristina Håkansson and Jan Ch.
Karlsson Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling
Women, power and leadership in
17 Fair Trade Organizations agricultural organizations
and Social Enterprise Margaret Alston
Social Innovation through
Hybrid Organization Models The Poetic Logic of Administration
Benjamin Huybrechts Styles and changes of style in the
art of organizing
18 Organizations and the Kaj Sköldberg
Bioeconomy
The Management and Casting the Other
Commodification of Maintaining gender inequalities
the Life Sciences in the workplace
Alexander Styhre Edited by Barbara Czarniawska
and Heather Höpfl
19 Managing Corporate Values in
Diverse National Cultures Gender, Identity and the
The Challenge of Differences Culture of Organizations
Philippe d’Iribarne Edited by Iiris Aaltio and Albert J. Mills

20 Leadership as Emotional Text/Work

Labour Representing organization and
Management and the organizing representation
‘Managed Heart’ Edited by Stephen Linstead
Edited by Marian Iszatt-White
The Social Construction of
21 Gossip and Organizations Management
Kathryn Waddington Texts and identities
Nancy Harding
22 On Being At Work
The Social Construction of Management Theory
the Employee A critical and reflexive reading
Nancy Harding Nanette Monin
This page intentionally left blank
On Being At Work
The Social Construction
of the Employee

Nancy Harding
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harding, Nancy, 1952–
On being at work : the social construction of the employee / by Nancy
Harding.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in management, organizations, and
society ; 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Work—Social aspects—History—21st century. 2. Women professional
employees—History—21st century. 3. Women employees—History—21st
century. I. Title.
HD6955.H3527 2012
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2012038919

ISBN: 978-0-415-57971-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-55903-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is dedicated to my siblings:
Dawn Mary Parkes
Robert Davies
Julie Davies
Shan Stockwood
Fiona (Fifi) Wake
Adrian (Adey) Davies

And to the memory of our parents

William (Bill) Davies (1920–2010) and
Bessie Davies (1925–2003)

And, as always, to the lights of my life, Brychan and

Dylan Harding, their parents, Iorwerth and
Clare Harding, and their Uncle Gareth
and his partner, Cerys.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: Inspirations, Aims, Debates, Reflexivity

and Anti-Methodology 1

1 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 14

2 The Master’s Tale 38

3 The Bondsman’s Tale 64

4 Becoming Human 86

5 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 114

6 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag: Organizations and

the Murder of the Me’s-I-Might-Have-Been 144

Conclusion: From Poverty of Aspiration to a Politicised,

Ethical Me-I-Might-Become? 175

Appendix 185
Notes 187
References 189
Index 203
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgements

Firstly, to Sandra Thomas (1948–2011), a Valleys intellectual, fount of wis-

dom, giggles and fun, who has left a big gap in many people’s lives.
I am grateful to Bradford School of Management, which has given me a
congenial place in which to work for the past five years, as well as my first
ever sabbatical (yippee!), in which I was able to finish a book that I had
started eight years previously. I have been able to discuss aspects of the work
with various colleagues, and Anna Zueva-Owens and Rob Wapshott com-
mented on early ideas. The wonderful Eva Niemann has taken too much of
the load of the DBA while I’ve been completing this book.
I owe more than can be said to my ‘virtual university’ of people who are
friends more than colleagues and whose willingness to comment on draft
chapters has far surpassed the call of duty. Marianna Fotaki of Manchester
Business School has seen drafts of every chapter and provided congenial
company, insightful comments, scintillating conversation and Greek sun-
shine in the early summer of 2012. She has challenged my thinking and
made me push my ideas beyond what would have been possible without
her care and friendship. A day and more in deep conversation with Sarah
Gilmore of Portsmouth Business School brought Chapter Five, on gender,
to life. Numerous long conversations with Sarah buoyed up my spirits when
I thought I’d never finish writing the manuscript, and she is a constant source
of new ideas, intellectual inspiration and ‘wow’ moments. Kate Kenny of
the University of Galway has provided extremely insightful comments in
regard to Butler’s work, along with a magical evening in an Irish pub, an
introduction to several Irish restaurants, an opportunity to rehearse Chapter
Three in public (thank you to her colleagues for listening and for generat-
ing a very lively debate) and much more beside. Mark Learmonth’s paper
with Patrick Reedy on death and organizations was the original stimulus
for Chapter Six; Mark read a draft of that chapter, and his challenge to my
thinking helped develop Chapter Seven. Mark’s influence goes way beyond
a single chapter, although I never got to grips with Derrida. Jackie Ford has
been there through bad times and good, keeping me on track when I needed
a shove, ensuring the light of the ‘Foucault and lippie’ conversations never
went out, commenting on drafts, pointing me to literature, giving me far
xii Acknowledgements
more than I can ever put down in words and generally living and breathing
the ideas I discuss in Chapter 4. Finally, major thanks must go to my chief
nag, the force of nature that is Hugh Lee. Our long discussions mean that
it is difficult sometimes to know whose idea is whose, although the jokes
are usually Hugh’s. The discussion of violence in this book reflects aspects
of our joint work. Hugh has been responsible not only for commenting on
most chapters in this book but also for helping the ideas develop and for
cutting through weaknesses in my arguments. His friendship defines what
friendship should be.
Introduction: Inspirations, Aims, Debates,
Reflexivity and Anti-Methodology

This book seeks to develop a theory of being at work in the 21st century:
what does work mean for us, what does it do to us and what sort of persons
does it allow us to become? It has three interrelated arguments. First, in
Western societies we grow up with dreams of the person we will one day be,
dreams we do not necessarily abandon as we get older. Work is one of the
major forums in which we believe we will constitute those future, dreamed-
of selves. Second, labour, or the tasks we perform in fulfilling the terms
of the employment contract, should therefore be distinguished from work,
which involves processes of self-making over and above the ‘mere’ doing
of labour. Third, the organization’s desire is that we be reduced to zombie-
machines which labour and that are less than human, and although we try
to circumvent this desire in various ways, organizations always limit the
possibilities for achieving the self I/we wish to be(come). The dreams of the
me-I-might-become through work are therefore shattered by the organiza-
tion’s compulsion that forces me to labour. In brief, the thesis of this book is
that organizations murder the me’s-that-might-have-been.
I borrow the term ‘less than human’ from the philosopher Judith Butler,
whose work provides much of the theoretical frame for the book’s argu-
ments. In ‘Butler-speak’, the questions I am seeking to answer are: what
does it mean to be a being doing paid work in/for that thing we call ‘an or-
ganization’, who is this being that is doing the doing and how is this subject
brought into being through the doing?

BEYOND THE CONTROL/RESISTANCE BINARY

Although this work emerges out of both Marxist and Foucauldian labour
process theory’s hugely significant analysis of managerial control and em-
ployee resistance (Braverman, 1974; Littler and Salaman, 1982; Knights
and Willmott, 1989; Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Cooper and Burrell,
1998), its trajectory is somewhat different in that it investigates what goes
on beyond the control/resistance binary. The control/resistance coupling
2 Introduction
ineluctably ties the working self into a relationship with management, so
that staff are management’s other and therefore can know one another only
through a managerial lens. Although that is an important aspect of what it
is to be a being at work, there are spaces and places where management is
not omnipresent, where selves are constructed not only in resistance to or
conformity with management but also beyond the purview of management.
In this book I conceive of employees, not managers, making a working place
out of the space in which work is carried out (Lefebvre, 1991). So, rather
than starting from the position of management organizing and controlling
work in ways that result in more or less resistance from employees, that is,
locating management as the powerful and the normative, I am starting from
a perspective that regards the workplace as a social sphere where life, in all
its glory, is lived by beings who are seekers after dreamed-of selves and into
which management intrudes. In this reading, a social workplace is the norm,
and management, or ‘the organization’, transgresses the norm.
Alongside Butler’s work, the inspiration for this book was a somewhat
un-nuanced reading of Marx’s theory of alienation (Marx 1988, originally
published in 1844). In that early work (which I discuss in more depth in
Chapter Six), Marx argued that the employee is alienated within capital-
ism in four ways: from the product, from the self, from the social and from
nature. Turning this on its head suggests that the non-alienated employee
is someone who is engaged meaningfully in producing a product or service
they value, who works in a social environment where they can develop a
strong sense of self and in conditions that are aesthetically pleasing (and
obviously not controlled by capitalism). In contemporary parlance, we can
envisage a utopia in which people constitute confident, fulfilled workplace
selves through the work they do and the people they do it with. This changes
the focus so that economic exploitation and the managerialist compulsion
to maximise productivity are somewhat decentred. Although these must, of
course, remain highly pertinent, there are other conditions in 21st-century
workplaces that require our attention. A brief detour through some of
Bauman’s work and his articulation of a major change between early and
late modernism will explain.
In Consuming Life (2007), Bauman proposes that we live in an era of
a society of consumers, in which the boundary between commodities and
consumers is effaced. That is, in order to have selfhood, individuals must
work on themselves, must indeed manufacture themselves, become a com-
modity that is to be ‘consumed’ by self and others. How one looks, how
one behaves and how one develops one’s skills and expertise must add up
to a package (the self) that can be ‘sold’ to an employer or be judged by
oneself and fellow citizens in much the same way as we judge objects of-
fered for sale in shop windows. In Bauman’s words (2007:12), ‘no one can
become a subject without first turning into a commodity, and no one can
keep his or her subjectness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resur-
recting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable
 Introduction 3
commodity. . . . The “subjectivity” of the “subject”, and most of what that
subjectivity enables the subject to achieve, is focused on an unending effort
to itself become, and remain, a sellable commodity’. When one looks in
the mirror, one judges what one sees as if it were offered in a marketplace.
Subjects must turn themselves into commodities so as to lift themselves out
of a ‘grey and flat invisibility and insubstantiality, making themselves stand
out from the mass of indistinguishable objects’ (12). Bauman argues that
whereas, in the society of producers that previously held sway, commodity
fetishism hid from view the human substance involved in the production
of objects (Marx’s thesis), in its successor, the society of consumers, sub-
jectivity fetishism hides this new, commoditised reality. Now the emotions
are dominated by the constantly revivified abilities of wanting, desiring and
longing that have become the ‘principal propelling and operating force of
society’ (28).
In the society of producers, Bauman argues, work played the lynchpin
role in organizing society. Now, he argues, work is secondary, and con-
sumerism has become not only the lynchpin but an attribute of society: it is
consumerism that holds society together and provides the ‘specific param-
eters for effective individual life strategies’ (29). Rather than gratification
of needs, there is an ever-increasing volume and intensity of desires and a
belief, always impossible to prove, that commodities will satisfy insatiable
needs. The supreme value of such a society is happiness (44), and there is a
promise that happiness is available through the consumption of objects, but
this promise is always unfulfilled, the pursuit of yet more objects to consume
must be continuously repeated and so the promise of happiness brings only
unhappiness.
Moreover, and importantly for this book, in the society of consumers the
self becomes an object for consumption by both self and others: the self is
commoditised, has to be worked on and made into a sellable commodity.
To be ‘fully and truly human’ requires making the self into both an ideal
commodity (59 et passim) and a competent consumer (64): failure results in
exclusion and ‘Promethean shame’ (59 et passim).
Although Bauman captures extremely well the importance of working
on the self so that it becomes a commodity to be consumed by both self
and others, I diverge from his thesis on two points. The first is his sharp
distinction between work and consumerism. We do not compartmentalise
our lives so neatly, so the work we do is and indeed must be a major aspect
of the selves we constitute, as the vast literature on identities in organi-
zations testifies (see Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas, 2008, for a review).
Work on constituting the self, on identity-making, is another way in which
organizations may seek to control us (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). But,
although there is increasing pressure to turn ourselves into the sort of work-
place commodity that the organization will desire to hire (Sabath, 2007),
the workplace is also a social world, so we may constitute ourselves as
commodities for consumption by ourselves and our fellow employees. This
4 Introduction
work, in which recognition is given, is productive and may (or should) be
pleasurable. Second, and relatedly, Bauman’s pessimism can be parried with
Foucault’s exploration of the ethics of working on the self, that is, ‘an exer-
cise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform
oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being’ (Foucault, 1997a:282).
This is a ‘practice of freedom’ (not of liberation) that should be conducted
ethically (ibid.:283). In other words, whilst work on the self is in many
ways concerned with commoditisation of the self, it does not have just that
one, singularly pessimistic, interpretation. There are other explanations and
other possibilities, and Foucault’s thesis brings with it implications of an
ethical duty to constitute workplace selves that nourish other workplace
selves.
In summary, the earliest inspiration for this book’s arguments was Marx’s
theory of alienation within modern capitalism. Its more recent inspiration is
Judith Butler’s analyses of abjection in postmodern capitalism’s conditions
of subjection and subjectification. We move, it seems, from alienation to
abjection. This book takes Butler into the workplace, along with an unem-
ployed person, a boss, a manual worker, an archaeologist and two academ-
ics, so as to explore the forms that alienation and abjection may or may not
take in 21st-century working lives.

ON THE OTHER HAND . . .

Those are the academic inspirations for the arguments in this book. There
are other, more personal reasons for needing to write it. I have been im-
mersed in ‘critical management studies’ for a quarter of a century, and what
bothers me in many of its debates is the absence of explorations of work
other than through the lens of control and resistance. Much working life
goes on despite, rather than because of, management, and there is much
about the sense of a working self that is not encapsulated within concepts of
control and resistance. The conditions of possibility that led this particular,
authorial ‘I’ to be concerned with how organizations render subjects abject,
nonhuman, beyond the reach of ethics and within the reach of only limited
definitions of justice, arise from memories of my life before I became an
academic, a life in which I took for granted my feelings of inferiority. I was
a working-class girl who was told subtly when I watched films or television
or read a novel or a newspaper that I was, in my class and gender status, in-
ferior. That inferiority penetrated the psyche. I swam in inferiority like a fish
swims in water: it was so much a part of my sense of self I hardly noticed
it, although I constantly felt it. It fuelled resentment and despair and a sense
of the impossibility of ever being good enough to pass as ‘normal’. Marx’s
theory of alienation, when I encountered it as a mature student, described
some of this experience, but I have found it explained best by postcolonial
theory, notably Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks (2008). These authors articulate in a way that theories of economic
 Introduction 5
exploitation never do the subjective experience of being an abjected (infe-
rior, despised) self.
A sense of the injustices of what labouring (and thus class identity) does
to people seems, looking back on my childhood and early adulthood in a
coal-mining village, so deeply part of the mining quotidian, of the sense of a
community that defined itself as ‘not-manager’, that this need to explore the
different forms by which work oppresses us is part of my personal always-
already there, waiting only for me to gain knowledge of the language neces-
sary for the undertaking of such an exploration. On the other hand, the ‘I’
referred to throughout this text, that is, ‘I’ the author, is an academic sitting
at her desk typing, referring to texts, evading the direct gaze of a managerial
other although indirectly measured by it. There are many frustrations in this
job, but in many ways it is a dream job, one with status and self-respect.
I have become in some ways the me I dreamed of being when I made the
first, faltering inquiries about the possibilities of going to university as a
mature student. This book is therefore an attempt in some ways to under-
stand my own experiences; it is the personal become philosophical.
My aim, therefore, is to develop a theory on what it is to be at work,
that is, to be engaged in workplace activities (the doing of work) in which
the ongoing processes of the becoming of the workplace self simultaneously
take place. I will appropriate Butler’s arguments, weaving them through the
work of some other theorists and individual’s accounts of their working
lives, all the time delighting in the licence she gives to meld together different
theoretical perspectives when so doing facilitates explanation and under-
standing. There is also some optimism in Butler’s later work in which she
develops a new form of left-wing politics based on ethical relationships. It is
that optimism that I want to use in order to avoid a patriarchal pessimism
that otherwise could emerge from a study such as this one.

ESTABLISHING TERMS

Social Constructionism
This is the second book in a planned trilogy that focuses on the social con-
structions of management (2003), the employee (2013) and the organiza-
tion (as soon as possible). As in the first book, I am using the term ‘social
constructionism’ very broadly, to refer to a critical, relativist, interpretivist
position (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Crotty, 1998) that adapts itself as new
theoretical positions become available or as authors become tired of meth-
odolatry (Janesick, 1994).

The Zombie-Machine
I am using the term ‘zombie-machine’ as shorthand to capture that form
of the self which organizations seem to prefer in their employees: devoted
6 Introduction
to the work, devoid of any objectives or pleasures save those which relate
to the organization’s purpose and little more than extensions of organiza-
tional technologies—that is, computerised machines made out of human
flesh but without any desire for agency save that which is required to fulfil
organizational objectives. This description emerges out of four decades of
antiperformative (Fournier and Grey, 2000) approaches to understanding
management and organizations, inspired notably by Braverman’s seminal
Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), taken forward in various forms of
labour process theory (see Littler and Salaman, 1982, for a review) and in
the various antiperformative approaches more or less encapsulated in the
category ‘critical management studies’ (see Grey and Willmott, 2005, for
‘classic’ papers, and O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001, for an analysis of the
relationship between labour process theory and critical management). I will
use the phrase ‘zombie-machine’ throughout the book, relying on these four
decades of work by academics major and minor to justify its use.

The Human and Less-than-Human

Implicit in Butler’s body of work on abjection and her more recent devel-
opment of a new, left-wing politics is a concept where all people are born
into the human and into an ethical domain arising from recognition. Some
have that humanity taken away from them because of the absence or refusal
of recognition. This allows others to treat them as if they were inanimate
rather than sensate beings. I equate zombie-machines with the status of the
less-than-human, because the zombie-machine is an organic tool designed to
achieve organizational ends.

A RATHER LONG NOTE ABOUT METHODOLOGY, OR,

TOWARDS A SOCIOCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY OF
MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES

When I started writing this Introduction, I aimed to keep it as succinct and

to the point as possible. The discussion of ‘methodology’, however, betrays
this aim. Rather than justifying the choice of methodology (using one per-
son’s working-life story), I want to critique the limitations to thinking that a
focus on methodology brings with it, and this cannot be done in just a few
paragraphs. It requires first setting out my unease about regarding manage-
ment and organization studies (MOS) as a social science and second the
articulation of an alternative means of understanding the world of work.
Chapters One to Four of this book are each based on an ‘interview’ with
one person about his or her working life, and Chapter Five is based on an
‘interview’ with two people. I will start this section by outlining the reasons
for putting scare quotes around the word ‘interview’ and the related term
‘data gathering’.
 Introduction 7
The interview is the most popular and widely used method in qualitative
research in management and organization studies. Its use is advocated by
positivist and postpositivist researchers alike, and increasingly sophisti-
cated methodologies of interview data analysis are generating what seem
to be more insightful understandings of what goes on in organizations.
This is perhaps aided by the development of technology for recording
interviews. It is only in the past 20 or 30 years that portable tape recorders
have become available; before that time, the researcher made written notes
of the conversation, and it was those notes which were analysed. Today we
can work with transcripts that note every pause, cough and stammer, and
correspondingly sophisticated methods of analysis have emerged. And yet
there are many flaws in interviews.
One of the most obvious is problems of recall and bias in interviewees’
accounts. With Jackie Ford and Brendan Gough (2010), I sought to over-
come problems of recall by asking interviewees to keep a diary of one day
in their lives, which we used as an aide-memoire for interviews held a week
or so later. What we saw was a process of condensing and forgetting. The
diaries were a maximum of about 1,000 words, so the complexities of 12
to 16 hours in a person’s life were fundamentally reduced. Interviews lasted
between 60 and 90 minutes, so those hours were again shoehorned into
some proportion of the actual time we were exploring. Much must have
been left out of each person’s description of the working day, but we cannot
know what was omitted in this condensation, because only a week after
keeping the diary many of the interviewees reported their surprise at being
reminded of things they had already forgotten. This leads to the question of
the relationship of an interview account to the experiences that are suppos-
edly reported: what is omitted, and what forgotten? It is well known that
the people we interview may censor what they tell us, sometimes because
they are striving to give us the information they think we need, sometimes
because of their needs for privacy. However, problems of recall, selectivity
and bias are only the most obvious of problems.
If we look at the context of interviews, then what we have is a somewhat
peculiar social practice involving an encounter between two strangers in
which one is licensed to ask the other questions that in other social en-
counters might be regarded as rude and intrusive. The participants speak
from the subject position of interviewer and interviewee, constituting these
identities through their interactions (Harding, 2007), so the record of the
interview, the transcript, may in some ways be little more than an account of
the social encounter we call ‘the interview’ (Alvesson, 2003). Further, partic-
ipants move between subject positions, sometimes because of the language
used by the interviewer (Alvesson, 2003), leading to the question not only
of which version of the self is speaking at any specific point in the interview
but which version of the self is allowed to speak. Various versions of the ‘I’
and the ‘me’ may be ready to appear (Harding, 2008), but only one can have
control of the tongue at any one moment (Lee, 2005).
8 Introduction
So, we engage in discussion with another person whose account may
already be greatly edited. But much more happens besides this that is prob-
lematic. We use interviews as a means of discovering something about the
subjectivities of participants. However, the ‘interviewee’ has to translate
complex realities into language, and language can convey only a limited
sense of one’s experience. Bollas (1995:147) articulates this through a small
experiment. Try to describe your mother, he suggests: you will find it im-
possible to ever reach a point at which you are satisfied you have conveyed
‘that inner presence which you carry within you and which is evoked by her
name’. Rather, she is ‘a complex inner constellation always sponsored by
the name . . . but with discrete representations emerging upon each rethink-
ing’ (ibid.). This is not unique to our parents: in all of our encounters, we
are immersed in a ‘matrix beyond representation’. So the interview’s access
to subjectivities is limited by the difficulty for interviewees of translating
thoughts and experiences into words. Relatedly, these words then come up
against the problem of the listener’s interpretation, leading to much discus-
sion about the need for reflexivity and reflection about the researcher’s influ-
ence upon data analysis.
Further, the analysis is normally restricted to the words contained in
the transcript that is laboriously typed up after the interview. The living,
breathing human being who has sat opposite us is progressively reduced
to about 10,000 words in a computer file. The individual’s ‘idiom’, ‘itness’
or ‘aesthetic of being’; his or her ‘own very unique configuration in being’
(Bollas, 1989; 1993); the ways in which the person interacts, consciously
and unconsciously, with others; the response the person evokes in others;
the texture the person adds to the room while in it and the shape of the
person’s absence after s/he leaves—all of these important features of uncon-
scious communication (Bollas, 1993) are lost, and we work with only the
words spoken in the fleeting hour of the interview.
These 10,000 words are only that—words; they are not discourses, as all
images and pictures are removed from them. We then reduce them further, to
major themes. If we have interviewed, say, 25 people and produce 250,000
words, then these quarter of a million words are successively reduced to a
small number of major themes—perhaps six words. All 25 people disap-
pear into, are reduced to this small number of words. There is nothing left
of them save a small number of words that we then proceed to analyse in
huge depth. What we are studying, therefore, is not a phenomenon, or sub-
jectivities or understandings of the world of work but words to which we
have given the label ‘data’. We have persuaded ourselves (perhaps through
operations of power) that these words represent the phenomenon we are
studying. In some ways, this reduction of reports of experience to a limited
number of words parallels that of quantitative research’s reduction of the
complexities of the social world to numbers (Valsiner, 2006).
In short, when we interview people, we engage in a process that system-
atically strips their account of any relationship to the social world and the
 Introduction 9
subjectivities we are ostensibly exploring. By reducing to nothing but a few
words the full humanity of the people who give us their time and their ac-
counts of that social world, we decaffeinate them. This is my concern about
the interview as a research tool—it is a process of aetiolation that reduces
complex, multidimensional people involved in multilayered social worlds
to nothing more than a few words. At the same time, the requirement that
we write ever more sophisticated accounts of our research methods seems
to be intensifying: methodolatry (Janesick, 1994) rules. There is something
unethical about this: we have to give ever more rigorous accounts of our
research methods and, in so doing, have to maintain the impression that
we are exploring subjectivities, understandings and interpretations held by
real, fully formed human beings when many of us recognise that we do no
such thing.
There has been much discussion about epistemology and ways of work-
ing with, if not overcoming, such limitations and problems. However, these
discussions are always located within a scientific discourse: MOS is located
in the social sciences, and the lens through which we understand our subject
is therefore scientific. The label ‘science’ brings with it scientistic demands
so that even poststructural researchers who abhor such grand theories as
‘the scientific method’ are caught in its net. But why is MOS regarded as a
social science, and could there be other ways of knowing? The reasons why
MOS is located in the social sciences can be traced to the struggle for le-
gitimizing its domain of study and its recommendations, even though much
that was claimed by management researchers to be ‘scientific’ is dubious
(Harding, 2003). This is in the context of a birth myth of the social sciences
(Jovanovic, 2011:17), in which can be seen a cascading series of binary
categories: science is defined as separate and distinct from and superior as
a form of knowing to all that is nonscience; under the category of ‘science’,
the physical sciences are separated from the social sciences; under the cat-
egory of social science, the quantitative are separated from the qualitative;
and under the category of the qualitative, the positivist becomes separated
from the postpositivist. Such processes of categorisation inhibit the poten-
tial for thought, as Foucault has argued, because they prevent our thinking
about what has been left outside these categories. In MOS, one of the things
left outside is the arts and humanities.
By categorisation Foucault means the discursive compulsion to sort
things into groups. He argues that the criteria by which we catalogue and
categorise may seem superficially self-evident and obvious but that what
falls logically into categories in one episteme may differ from what seems
rational in another (Foucault, 1966). Categorisation and classification facil-
itate control and discipline (Foucault, 1977) and refuse the possibility of dif-
ference (Foucault, 1994:357). In preventing a ‘univocity’ of being wherein
each thing can be different and distinct from all others and thus in some
ways beyond the purview of control, the possibilities for selfhood are stifled.
In terms of qualitative studies in MOS, to be categorised as social scientists
10 Introduction
makes academics knowable and controllable, reduced to nonbeing and the
‘dissolution of the Me’ (Foucault, 1994:357) who has forfeited the right
to individuality. We know this—when we rail against the need to limit our
aspirations within unexciting and unchallenging parameters so as to win
research grants, we know we are conforming to the demands of a scientistic
approach. There is little chance that we will foment any revolution against
capitalism—we are too busy conforming to the requirements to publish in
the best journals whilst also being evaluated highly by our students for the
quality of our teaching and carrying out one of the many administrative
tasks that permeate every level of university life. Conforming to rules set by
a seemingly apolitical scientistic agenda is therefore one symptom of ways
in which academics are controlled/fail to resist.
Further, the question of what science is must be posed. Arguing from the
basis of research within the sociology of scientific knowledge, Law (2004)
launches a devastating attack on the Euro-American metaphysics of knowl-
edge that is encapsulated in the term ‘science’. He argues that the world is
a ‘generative flux that produces realities’ (7) but that research ‘attends to,
amplifies and retransmits only a few while silencing the others’ (144). Many
realities are therefore rendered invisible to the researching eye. Not only do
research methods construct the realities they attempt to describe, he argues;
they also (1) enact presence and (2) manifest an absence that is understood
to be relevant to understanding presence but also (3) produce absence as
Otherness, that is, that which is absent because presence enacts it as irrele-
vant, impossible or repressed. In terms of MOS, research methods enact: the
presence of organizations; the manifest absence of any activities not related
to ‘the organization’; and absence as Otherness, or workplace cultures not
recognised as part of ‘the organization’ which are therefore placed outside
existence. Law’s argument is that

Euro-American (research) manifests a world in its depictions that is on-

tologically single, and therefore inhabited by a finally limited number of
objects, forces and processes that may be more or less well known. . . .
[T]he possibility of a practice for knowing which recognises that entities
are being endlessly enacted and (as a part of this) are being differently
enacted in different locations and in different contexts, is repressed.
. . . . In the midst of representational singularity there is multiplicity. But
this is not seen. The multiple or the fractional, the elusive, the vague, the
partial and the fluid are being displaced into Otherness. (Law, 2004:137)

He argues (2006:10) that what we can see involves ontological politics:

in terms of this discussion, to regard MOS as a social science is an ontologi-
cal politics that limits the possibilities of understanding which unwittingly
represses anything that ‘fails to fit the standard package’ of scientific regula-
tions (ibid). In such a context, Law argues (2004:148), ‘imaginaries, fluxes,
indefinitenesses and multiplicities’ are regarded as the domain of the arts
 Introduction 11
rather than being aspects of ‘serious research methods’. He concludes that
such a division of labour is no longer tenable.
If ‘imaginaries, fluxes’, and so on are the domain of the arts, then it may
be useful to have aspects of MOS that are located in the arts and humanities
rather than in the social sciences. However, the arts and humanities explore
the works of great novelists, filmmakers, playwrights and philosophers to
give insights about ‘the world’, and in privileging the few they silence the
voices of the ‘ordinary’ citizens who participate in social scientific research.

A Sociocultural Philosophy for MOS

There are currently two approaches to (categories for) developing under-
standing within MOS: empirically based (as discussed here) and purely
theoretical, in which the academic follows a long philosophical tradition
of developing ideas through interaction with other thinkers (Alvesson and
Skoldberg, 2009). These two approaches can be regarded perhaps as the
social scientific, which uses empirical material, and the philosophical, which
does not. This binary closes possibilities for different ways of developing
understanding of organizations, a problem which Parker in his recent book
(2011) struggles with but has to gloss over if he is to achieve his aim of
articulating how motifs from within popular culture inform and articulate
people’s feelings about their working lives. What I am proposing is that
we can break out of this binary by adding an alternative way of studying
organizations, that is, through MOS as a sociocultural philosophy. I am not
suggesting anything very revolutionary, merely pointing out that the taken-
for-grantedness of MOS as a social science, the impossibility of thinking
otherwise because of the lack of awareness of other possibilities, has po-
litical consequences that call for a different form of reflexivity beyond that
which has become de rigueur in qualitative research. As well as exploring
how our subjectivities have influenced how we have done our research, we
should also explore how that research has become an aspect of our subjec-
tivities and identities and how it has restricted the possibilities for academic
thought.
The method I am proposing involves dismantling the boundary between
the social sciences and the arts and humanities through regarding the quali-
tative interview as a boundary object that is applicable to both social science
and the arts and humanities, although its analysis will differ according to
the disciplinary focus. That is, the interview-provided account of a single
employee would, following the example of the social sciences, privilege the
voice of the ‘ordinary’ citizen but, following the example of the arts and
humanities, would regard their account as containing their theory of the
issue being explored. Rather than the six metaphors of the social science
interview outlined by Alvesson (2003), there would be one metaphor for
what I am calling a sociocultural philosophy of MOS, that is, the metaphor
of theory. This theory can then be interrogated in similar ways to, say, the
12 Introduction
theory contained in a novel or in a philosopher’s works. Each person would
be regarded as a theorist of his or her own experiences, and our role as re-
searchers becomes that of interrogators of those theories. We thus become
concerned with a poetics of organizational analysis that combines elements
of the social sciences, arts and humanities and which relishes that which is
non-sense (or outside the parameters of what the disciplinary gaze judges as
sense) (Linstead, 2000).
We qualitative researchers are convinced of the value of qualitative meth-
ods compared to quantitative methods, because the latter ignore subjec-
tivities, lived experiences, and so forth. Despite the problems of interviews,
good interview-based research studies produce exciting, thought-provoking
insights that can, at best, change the world for the better. This sociocultural
philosophy of MOS would retain the value of the interview but, in abandon-
ing claims to be a science, thus moving away from the worship of methodol-
ogy (methodolatry), would open up possibilities for using them differently.
These thoughts about anti-methodology inform the ways in which I have
discussed their working lives with a small number of people, and later sat
down and worked with the recording of each interview. This takes us neatly
to a summary of the structure of this book.

STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

In Chapter One, using the contrast between the lives of two sisters (myself
and my sister Julie) and Butler’s recent work on recognition, I argue that we
desire (paid) employment not only because it provides the means of suste-
nance but also because it is one of the primary locations where work on the
self is undertaken. I distinguish in this chapter between labour (the tasks
of doing the job) and work (the possibility of developing a self through
the doing of the job). Chapter Two explores how managers themselves, the
people who do the work of management, are as caught up in this desire
as are other staff. Using a discussion of the working life of the owner of a
small business which I read through the account of the master/slave dialectic
in Butler’s work, this chapter argues that the ‘boss’ is as controlled by the
title ‘boss’ as is staff. The argument is that the will of the manager requires,
for that person to know that s/he is a manager, that staff be reduced to the
status of zombie-machine. I therefore trace through the psyche and desires
of one manager the inscription of centuries of capitalism, colonialism, class
and hierarchy that constitute the speaking subject as ‘manager’. The para-
dox of this is explored in Chapter Three, the Bondsman’s Tale, in which
I use Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (1997) to explore the working life of a male
manual worker, Shakeel. In that chapter we, in the guise of a male manual
worker, go into the cave where Antigone was to die and see how arbitrary is
the division between management and staff. Shakeel despises managers even
as he speaks the idiom of management.
 Introduction 13
Chapter Four builds further on Butler’s thesis on kinship in Antigone’s
Claim to analyse the working life of an archaeologist. This illuminates the
distinction between labour and work and argues that the friends with whom
we work provide that recognition through which we become human. Chap-
ter Four is therefore a thesis on friendship and work. Chapter Five turns to
Butler’s early work and explores organizations and gendering. It argues that
we are surprised into gender, with labour requiring a compulsory gendering
of the subject and work allowing (some of us, some of the time) to escape
from the pall that gender casts on the psyche and on selves. Chapter One
therefore articulates a desire to constitute a self through the work we aspire
to, and the succeeding four chapters explore how that desire is frustrated
by the organization’s proscriptions so that, even though self-making is un-
dertaken, circumstances limit the possibilities for being selves. Chapter Six
argues that this is a form of murder, of the me’s-I-might-have-been. Rather
than Butler’s work, which says little directly about death, I turn in this chap-
ter to Jonathon Dollimore’s book Death, Desire and Loss in Western Cul-
ture (2001). Similarly, where other chapters work with interviews with one
or two people, this chapter deviates from that modus operandi in that it
draws on a cultural product, the whodunit, to help articulate and expound
its arguments. I return to Marx’s theory of alienation in that chapter. Finally,
the book concludes, in Chapter Seven, with an exploration of the ethics of
organizational self-making.
1 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale
of Two Sisters

I am writing this opening paragraph on a July night in 2009. As I type, there

is a thunderstorm raging outside my window, a window that looks, from its
fifth-floor vantage point, over the rooftops of a city in northern Sumatra.
I am here to do research, and the hotel in which I am staying has a swimming
pool, a gym and all the accoutrements of a four-star business hotel any-
where in the world. It is a Saturday night: I have spent the morning explor-
ing the working lives of women in the emerging industrial powerhouse that
is Indonesia and the afternoon being treated like royalty by schoolchildren
keen to rehearse their English with a native English speaker. Is this work,
and, if so, what is it about it that qualifies it as ‘work’?

Figure 1.1 Five siblings (Mary, Shan, Robert, Fifi, Julie, and with apologies to Adey
who had wandered off)
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 15
In contrast, my sister Julie will have spent today much as she has spent
every day for the past 15 years. She will have walked to our father’s house
in the village a mile from where we grew up, will have lit his fire, cooked his
breakfast, done his shopping and cleaning, and gone back to her own home
to cook the midday meal for her sons before continuing with the chores
necessitated by caring for a frail elderly relative. Her day is full of what she
describes as drudgery. Is what Julie does ‘work’, and, if so, what is this thing
called ‘work’ that encompasses two such very different ways of employing
one’s time?
Here are two sisters carrying out very different forms of labour for which
the rewards are hugely different: Julie receives in return for her labours min-
imum state benefits, while I receive the salary of a senior academic, which
is extremely generous in contrast to my sister’s income. My job allows me
to travel; Julie has never been out of the UK and has not had a holiday for
15 years. My working life is adventurous, challenging, stimulating, reward-
ing, prestigious and (save for time spent in meetings) extremely interesting;
my sister’s, as we will see, is full of unremitting toil, care and responsibility
and deprives her of ‘a life’. In this chapter I am using this account of two
sisters whose destinies have diverged so greatly to develop the thesis that, in
the 21st century, labour and work are two very different, albeit conjoined,
things: labour refers to the tasks that one does as part of one’s job; work to
the aspects of one’s job through which the (working) self, that ongoing proj-
ect through which one constructs the ‘me’, is constituted. This, of course, is
only one of the forums in which the self is constructed, but my focus in this
book is on working lives and workplace selves. I introduce in this chapter
the thesis that the desire for work is a desire to construct the ‘me’ I wish to
be. I will argue in Chapter Six that these future me’s are killed, or murdered,
by organizations.
My inspiration in this chapter is what was at the time of writing Judith
Butler’s most recent book, Frames of War (FW, 2009), and the related Precarious
Lives (PL, 2004). Frames of War is Butler’s response to the violence
perpetrated on Moslem and other cultures by the US and its allies following
the 9/11 atrocities in New York. In it, she calls for a revivified left politics
based on a new ontology of the body. Her analysis focuses on how atroci-
ties may be freely committed upon some people by others because those
upon whom violence is visited are not recognised as living human beings.
This requires Butler’s development of a thesis of what is ‘a life’ and what is
‘a human being’, with the first being a condition for but not a guarantor of
the latter. In other words, the very fact of being born into the species Homo
sapiens does not necessarily allow the individual to become human. The
questions to which she pursues answers are therefore:

• What are the conditions that facilitate the recognition of some people
as human and others as less than human?
• What forms are taken by the violence enacted in and as a consequence
of the process of exclusion from the categories of the human?
16 On Being At Work
Butler’s distinction between ‘a life’ and ‘a human being’ set me wonder-
ing if such a distinction could be usefully transposed to the workplace. Criti-
cal analyses of management and organizations that focus on management’s
desire to control every aspect of working lives (see Jermier and Knights
[1994] for an overview, Thomas and Davies [2005] for an insightful discus-
sion and other recent useful analyses in Fleming and Spicer [2003; 2008])
suggest the utility of such a distinction in that it offers ways of thinking
through the effects on the person of being treated like some recalcitrant and
particularly complicated piece of machinery. This leads to the distinction
in this chapter between labour and work. My thesis is that it is ‘a life’ (or
what I am calling a zombie-machine) that labours, but ‘work’ elevates that
life to the status of the human; management1 requires that we labour (as
material objects that are alive but not human), but we, as living, breathing,
emoting human subjects, desire to work and, through so doing, constitute
a sense of self. Labour is carried out by zombie-machines who are denied
access to the human; work encompasses activities over and above labour so
that selves which are human are performatively constituted. In other words,
paraphrasing Butler, my questions are:

• What are the organizational conditions that distinguish between the

human and the less than human?
• What are the forms of that organizational violence which places la-
bourers outside the categories of the human? and
• In what ways do we evade that violence and constitute ourselves as
human while at work?

These questions will not be answered in this chapter alone but will
be developed as the book progresses. The book’s thesis is that organiza-
tional violence takes the form of the murder of the selves who might have
been had they been nurtured through work rather than suffocated by
labour.
Butler seeks to explore in Frames of War two problems, one epistemo-
logical and the other ontological. The epistemological problem concerns
the issue of framing, or how we develop the politically saturated ‘frames
through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of oth-
ers as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable)’ (2009:1). The ontological issue
is: what is a life? Questions about how ‘life’ is defined and understood and
what brings into visibility those who are regarded as alive, rendering others
invisible, never having lived, arise, she argues, from operations of power.
Her thesis concerns the wars that the American state and its allies have
perpetrated since 9/11, but similar questions can be asked about organiza-
tions. I am thinking particularly of abuses in workplaces, some of which
critical theorists are very much aware of (such as the pain experienced by
many people following mergers and acquisitions ‘justified’ on the grounds
of competitiveness [Ford and Harding, 2003]) and others that are so taken
for granted they are regarded as ‘normal’ or as impediments to productivity
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 17
(for example, the relentless tedium of many jobs [George and Jett, 2003]).
What frames are used when organizing people at work, and how are the
lives of working people defined and understood?
However, in turning the lens away from war and towards organizations,
the ontological and epistemological questions I must pursue involve not
only what is life but its very necessary other: what is ‘death’? In arguing that
death takes forms other than that of biological death, as I will do in Chap-
ter Six, I would seem to be traducing Butler’s intent, while at the same time
predisposing my arguments towards an angry denunciation of workplaces.
In doing this, am I not stealing a necessary spotlight away from where it
matters, those injured and killed in wars, so as to shine it, again, on the
privileged West?
My answer to the first charge is that I am borrowing the questions posed
by Butler and asking them of my own field of interest because such an acute
thinker as Butler facilitates our reframing our thoughts and asking questions
which otherwise lie dormant, albeit waiting to be asked, at the very tips of
our tongues. And indeed Butler provides a licence for the extension of her
arguments to the field of work. She calls, in Frames of War, for a new bodily
ontology that would imply ‘the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability,
injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and
the claims of language and social belonging’ (FW:2, emphasis added). She
thus calls specifically for a rethinking of work, providing a licence for the
arguments in this book. We must rethink work: what would be a rethought
bodily ontology of work in which the structure of bodies is ‘socially ecstatic’
(FW:33):

We can think about demarcating the human body through identifying

its boundary or in what form it is bound, but that is to miss the crucial
fact that the body is, in certain ways and even inevitably, unbound—in
its acting, its receptivity, in its speech, desire, and mobility. It is outside
itself, in the world of others, in a space and time it does not control, and
it not only exists in the vector of these relations, but as this very vector.
In this sense, the body does not belong to itself. (FW:52–53)

The body is given over to others, cannot exist without others—and in

workplaces another dimension is added to this ek-stacy, that of giving over
one’s body to labour for a certain time each day in exchange for a wage or
salary. It is this condition of interdependency that is, in my reading, the most
important aspect of Frames of War, for Butler’s arguments in this book form
a sustained and profound critique of individualism and the Western cult of
the self. Her argument is that the self can exist only through its connectiv-
ity with others. She develops a thesis on modalities of violence, and in this
book my intention is to use Butler’s thesis on one modality of violence to
think through another such modality, that is, the violence that organizations
do in inhibiting the constitution of aspired-to selves. This may occur when
recognition is refused or when the only recognition that is forthcoming is
18 On Being At Work
that of a denigrated identity; it may arise when possibilities for flourishing
are so restricted that only stunted forms of the self can live; it may just be
the casual destruction of dreams and aspirations.
That my ‘empirical data’ in this chapter come from the life story of one of
my sisters is not self-indulgence nor guilt nor gloating at being the one who
has escaped from the working-class poverty of our childhood. Rather, it is a
recall of the feminist slogan of, as we might term it nowadays, the imbrica-
tions of the personal and the political: that two sisters who are in many ways
similar could live such different lives and have such divergent experience of
their selves as a result of the occupations they follow reveals much about the
labour/work split, as the chapter will show. I am the oldest of the seven sib-
lings, Julie the middle child (there are almost four years, as well as a brother
and a sister, between us). We are about the same height, weight and shape,
and our hair colouring is similar, although Julie was the pretty one of the
family, while I was the brainy one, with Mary not far behind. We had simi-
lar childhoods: ate the same food, wore similar clothes, shared a bed with a
third sister, Mary, quarrelled over toys, went to the same village school until
we were 11, and grew up with a love of reading and writing (Julie nearly
published children’s books when she was younger). We each suffered from
crippling shyness as children and young adults, had our first children in our
late teens and settled into relationships at what seems, in hindsight, like a
precocious age. We are both now divorced (and very proud) grandmothers,
and each of us lives days bursting with activity. So, to tease out a thesis of
what ‘work’ is, this chapter draws on two hard-working women whose life
trajectories would seem to have been destined to run in parallel but whose
positions are now fundamentally different. I will first summarise Julie’s story
of her life, told to me using the interview format followed when gathering
the other working—life stories found in this book, interposing some aspects
of my own life as I do so. That will provide the focus for the introduction
of Butler’s thesis of what it is that defines the human at and through work.

TWO SISTERS

In contrast to my own memories of a tough childhood, Julie’s are of a happy

time when

‘we didn’t have much but there was always things going on’ . . . I knew
[emphasis on ‘knew’] we didn’t have the money other people had, we
didn’t have all the clothes and that, but when I look back I remember the
nice things like going to chapel in our new dresses, all looking the same.2

The little mining village in which we grew up, surrounded by farms, was
an idyllic place for this animal lover, and she spent as much time as possible
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 19
riding a friend’s horses and smuggling a menagerie of pets into the bedroom
we five sisters shared. (Because of these activities, I always saw her as con-
fident and outgoing: not until I used a formal interview format for our talk
did I find out that we had shared a crippling shyness.) She left school at the
first opportunity when she was 15, after having opted out of education at 13
because of that overwhelming shyness, which made her feel as if she didn’t
and couldn’t fit in. Julie’s first job was 100 miles away from home, working
at a zoo, but she left after six or nine months because she couldn’t stand the
cruelty of keeping animals in cages. Her next job was at a kennel about 40
miles from home, but she was expected to spend the nights alone in a remote
mansion, so one night she left, walked miles to the nearest bus stop and,
having missed the last bus home, waited until daylight in the women’s toilets
at the bus station. Her next job was in a local dry cleaners where she ironed
clothes all day. She remembers hating the work but loving the camaraderie
of her colleagues. She worked there for two and a half years and left to have
the first of her four sons, just before her 19th birthday. Apart from some
part-time work as a barmaid she has not been in paid employment since.
At the time of our discussion she was 52, living on an £85-a-week3 carer’s
allowance paid by the State.
I, meanwhile, left school at 16 with a clutch of G.C.E certificates, and
went to work in London as a trainee typist. I returned to Wales nine months
later and worked on the lines in a factory, making condensers for the insides
of radios, experiencing at first hand what I was to learn much later were
Taylorist principles of production. I married at 18, had my two sons within
15 months of the marriage, worked part time in the factory for a while, was
registered as unemployed for a short period, got onto a government-run
course to learn shorthand and refresh my typing skills, and then worked as a
secretary for two years, studying ‘A’ level G.C.E’s at evening class, until, at 27,
I went to university. It is at this point that our lives diverged, so that my
income is now ten times that of my sister, and the other rewards of my job
(despite its many frustrations [Willmott, 1995; Harding, Ford and Gough,
2010; Fotaki, 2011; Clarke, Knights and Jarvis, 2012]) are inestimable.
I need not describe the life of an academic, familiar to most readers. What
follows is an account of the life of a carer.
Julie’s first experience of caring was for our widowed aunt, Ethel, who
shared her house with Julie and her four sons after Julie’s marriage broke
down. As Auntie Eth grew older and more frail, Julie, who was then in her
late 30s,

had to bathe her . . . and then when she had cancer was down [the spe-
cialist hospital] everyday and then it was the worry then, cos I mean not
only is she going to die but it was was I doing everything right for her,
so er [pause] you know it was, it’s hard because you’ve got that focus,
that’s your focus, even though you’ve got the boys, you’ve got to focus
20 On Being At Work
on make sure she’s alright, as you know she was back and fore hospital,
she’d broke her hip and um and then she was in [the specialist hospital]
and it was always, got to do this, got to do that, so you forget about
yourself. . . . I worry so much if I had a chance of a night out I’d worry
about leaving her.

But eventually Auntie Eth became very confused and needed to go into a
home, where she was happy, but, Julie said,

I always feel guilty about it, and I will say I will go to my grave guilty.

A few years later our mother’s health deteriorated. Julie, now in her mid-
40s, took on more and more responsibility for her care.

I started coming up quite a few times a week, and then when she was
really ill I was up every day then, and sometimes twice, twice a day
from Aberbargoed [two miles away, up a very steep hill], walking up,
cos they would phone me, I’d come up, do what I had to do, go home,
and then they’d phone me that they didn’t have no milk, . . . so I’d have
to come all the way back up, so through all winds and weathers, every
day then.
N: That was walking?
J: That was walking, yeah.

Our mother died four years before this interview, when our father was
84, after which Julie became his carer. I asked her to describe a typical week:

A typical week apart from being boring, it’s, it’s just [coughs] it’s com-
ing over, doing his tablets, every morning and every evening, do his
lunch and cook his dinner, do his shopping for him, get his prescrip-
tions, go up [to the local town, five miles away] get his prescriptions,
um. . . . .
N: That’s on the bus?
J: Yeah, on the bus there and back, and that’s twice in a week that
is, because the prescription ends so I go up and get it. Um, do his shop-
ping, keep him company, listen to him whinging, so that’s a typical
week, and it’s always like, it’s never ending, it’s Christmas Day it doesn’t
matter. It’s 24 hours he’s on your mind and if he’s ill and if he’s at the
hospital you’re back and fore there, the same as it was with Mam, it was
always back and fore the hospital, and the same now if like oh, every-
body’s going out but I can’t go out cos I’ve got to do this for Dad, and
er that’s a typical, a typical week that is. Every day, seven days a week,
yeah, and it’s boring inasmuch as you are tied, it’s tied down, you’ve got
to be there, you’ve got to do this, to make sure he’s alright, and that’s
that’s my typical time.
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 21
Caring combined with money worries from living on such a small income
takes over her emotions and controls her mind:

If the money was better it could be fair enough, but the money is
poor . . . you’re full of worry all the time, and believe me it is when
you’ve no money and that you’re worrying from one day to the next,
you just can’t get in that frame of mind to [return to the writing for
which she showed an early talent]. . . . You just haven’t got that bit of,
it’s not get up and go, it’s the frame of mind, you’ve got to be in that
frame of mind to write and when you’ve got constant worries you just
can’t get into that frame of mind.
It’s not just physically hard, it’s mentally challenging, it does get on
top of you, and like I say when you see the other sisters and they have
their hair nice and have nice clothes and you’re in hand-me-downs, it
is hard.

This is not a study of ‘informal’ carers but a comparison of two contrast-

ing working lives that aims to use the differences to tease out answers to
the question of what is work in an epoch when the self is a project that
is worked on for consumption by the self and others. I will develop the
thesis in this chapter, through interweaving Julie’s story through But-
ler’s analysis of what it is to be human, that labour and work should be
distinguished from each other: labour involves the tasks that are done
as a means of sustaining life or fulfilling the conditions of one’s job and
is carried out by the nonhuman (the zombie-machine). Work encompasses
workplace possibilities, over and above labouring, of constituting selves
recognised as human.
Having introduced the sharp differences between two sisters whose
working lives have taken very different paths, I now turn to a question that
needs clarification if my arguments, and the borrowings from Butler, are to
make sense: what do we mean by ‘the human’?

WHAT IS ‘THE HUMAN’?

At first sight this would appear to be a ridiculous question, but it is one

that haunts popular culture and therefore circulates throughout the wider
culture. Zombie films, for example, revolve around the suggestion that the
body of a human being, although it may be capable of motion, may not be
human: there is something missing, some spark of life which animates the
body so as to define it as human, and without this spark the body is horren-
dous. Zombies, Webb and Byrnand (2008) write, are ‘disturbingly like us’;
not an actuality but a trope, they tell us something of the ontology of the
subject, and the something they tell is that there is a ‘zombie’ in each of us.
They are not radically Other but remind us of the inaccessible aspects of the
22 On Being At Work
self that are beyond laws of language, culture and society. Their ‘remark-
able similarity’ to ‘us’, that is, the human, means they can be used in helping
our understanding of ‘embodied knowledge, embodied cognition, embod-
ied identity’ (ibid.:95) and so turn us towards an aesthetics of ourselves as
human. They tell us of the ‘unendurable, unending story of otherness . . .
and bring our attention to the limit and the boundary of life and meaning
in part because they themselves have escaped this Other’ (96). They tell us
of the fragility of the boundary between the human and the nonhuman and
so return us to Butler’s thesis and that of the distinction between the human
and the nonhuman, between labour and work.
Science fiction is replete with explorations of the precarious status of the
human. Its popularity suggests that at some level it is articulating for us an
otherwise unvoiceable question: what is it that marks us out as ‘human’
(Parker, 2011)? In the highly popular Star Wars films and in the cult classic
Star Trek television series, it is often visual appearance, together with being
born on Earth, that distinguishes the human from the nonhuman. Other
science fiction films and television series play upon a fear that merely look-
ing the way a human should look is insufficient to qualify one as human,
for looks (and other attributes) can be deceiving. Because there is some-
thing that looks like a human, talks, feels, thinks and emotes like a human,
does that mean it is human? What if it has been manufactured and should
therefore be classified as a robot or a cyborg? This is the premise explored
in the classic sci-fi story by Philip K. Dick (2007/1962), Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? and the film of that story, Blade Runner, where
Harrison Ford’s character is responsible for eradicating replicants that are
indistinguishable from human beings and which do not know they are not
human, for they have (implanted) memories, are intelligent and experience
emotions. The horror at the heart of Blade Runner is in Ford’s slow realisa-
tion that his memories may have been implanted—or were they? How can
he know if he is cyborg or human? The most successful science fiction series
of the first decade of the 21st century, Battlestar Galactica, similarly ex-
plores the diffuse and inarticulable dividing line between the ‘machine’ and
the human. In zombie movies and science fiction films and programmes,
the nonhuman has to be eradicated, even though it is the nonhuman, as its
Other, that defines the human. Our cultural unconscious (Jameson, 1991)
seems to want to defeat that very thing against which we might define our-
selves as human.
The issue of what it is to be human therefore circulates in and through
popular culture and also, of course, in academic theory, most influentially
perhaps in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985), in which
Haraway describes a globalised world that resembles more and more an
integrated circuit, where individuals can be read off and understood as tech-
nological (Parker, 1998), so the human/machine distinction breaks down.
She argues for a celebration of the cyborg: it shatters the old binary dual-
isms that gave the illusion of autonomy of the self but delivered domination.
Indeed, while at work, we interact with people and artefacts and so become
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 23
‘cyborg—a temporary assemblage of person and things’ (Parker and Cooper,
1998), and the boundary between the metal of the machine and the flesh
of the body is overcome (Parker, 1998:511). As I tap the keyboard, writing
these words, and see the contents of my thoughts appearing on the screen,
where is the line that distinguishes ‘me’ from the technology I am using?
I have a strong sense of myself as human, but is it not in capitalism’s interests
that that part of me that is human recedes in favour of the zombie-machine
that churns out products and services?
In other words, the question of what it is to be human, although seemingly
outrageous, circulates throughout culture and, we will see, is echoed in Julie’s
account. In the Introduction I argued for a sociocultural philosophy of orga-
nization studies in which the theories that ‘lay philosophers’ hold about their
lives should be interrogated in much the same way that we interrogate the
works of ‘great philosophers’. This approach is supported both by Sedgwick’s
(2003:145) suggestion that there may be far less ‘ontological distinction be-
tween academic theory and everyday theory’ and by a comparison between
Butler’s and Julie’s theses of what is ‘life’ and ‘the human’. Although Butler’s
is couched in far more complex language, the ideas are very similar.

Julie’s Theory about What It Is to Be Human

Julie’s answer to my question of what she would do when her caring respon-
sibilities come to an end was given without hesitation:

Somebody said to me weeks and weeks back what will you do when
your Dad’s eyes close? And I looked at them and said ‘get a life’, and
that’s the first thing that came to my mind. Without even thinking about
it, get a life, that’s what I’m going to do.

She uses that familiar phrase, sometimes used as an insult: ‘get a life’. She
does not have to think about it; her response speaks for her before she can
think: she will ‘get a life’. ‘Life’, it seems, is somewhere out there, something
that has to be ‘got’, something she does not have at the moment. To be alive
is therefore commonly distinguished from having a life. Julie’s account is
reminiscent of zombie films—what are portrayed in films such as The Cat
and the Canary (1939), Night of the Living Dead (1968)4 and Shaun of the
Dead (2004) are living beings who do not have lives but go through their
days doing the tasks required of them by their controllers. These mindless
creatures labour but cannot think or emote or have relationships, pleasure
or fun. This is how Julie describes her existence—she does not have ‘a life’,
and thus she has few of those rights which attach to being human.

Butler’s Theory about What It Is to Be Human

Butler poses her question starkly: what is it that defines the human? She ar-
gues (FW:76) that the human is a ‘differential norm’ in that what is human
24 On Being At Work
is defined by what it is not at the same time as it governs what should be
‘human’. The human can be thought of as

a value and a morphology that may be allocated and retracted, aggran-

dized, personified, degraded and disavowed, elevated and affirmed. The
norm continues to produce the nearly impossible paradox of a human
who is no human, or of the human who effaces the human as it is oth-
erwise known. (FW:76)

For there to be a ‘human who is no human’, there have to be living beings

who cannot or do not fulfil the norms that would allow them to be classified
as human. In Butler’s words (FW:95), ‘There are instances where human life—
a human animality—exceeds and resists the norm of the human’. This leads
to the further question of what is meant by ‘a life’, and again the definition
rests upon both norms and the existence of an opposite: that which is a life is
known through its difference from that which is not-life. Butler states:

The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent

on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life
or, indeed, as part of life. (FW:3)

Life is therefore something that is recognised by other living beings as ful-

filling the criteria for ‘being alive’. An immediate response might be (to Julie
as well as to Butler): but surely every living creature is/has a life! Isn’t it easy
to distinguish between a pebble, which is inanimate, and a human being,
which is animate and to all intents and purposes is alive/has life? I have
to admit that this was the naïve question I asked when I first read Butler’s
statements about the less-than-human. Then Foucault’s remarkable Preface
to The Order of Things (1966) came to mind: this shows the arbitrariness
of all classification systems. His laughter at a passage in a story by Borges,
Foucault writes, shattered ‘all the familiar landmarks of my thought’ (xvi).
This passage contains a quotation from a Chinese encyclopaedia:

animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed,
(c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just
broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

The strangeness of the categories in this list caused Foucault to ponder

how systems of categorisation work so as to make it possible for us to ‘name,
speak, and think’ (xxi). Clearly, Butler is pointing out how difficult it can be
to identify categories that pertain within one’s own culture. It follows that
it is possible to be categorised as a human animal, something that would be
radically different from a human being. Butler distinguishes between life,
the animal organ upon which the human is inscribed, and the human, so it
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 25
is possible to, indeed we must recognise that we do, exist as both at one and
the same time: the vulnerable flesh of the animal can be excised from the
mind but not separated from the actuality of the human being. However,
the human animal/life that is not yet human or whose humanness is denied,
in Butler’s thesis, can be regarded as somewhat akin to pebbles—inanimate,
anonymous objects that we may walk over and use as we may. Should they
be destroyed, we cannot grieve for them because we do not know even that
they have lived.
Importantly, for Butler, judgements are made about who is and who is
not human:

The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent

on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life
or, indeed, as part of life. (FW:3)

In Frames of War, the judge that apprehends a life is the privileged West,
with its riches, its weapons of war, its power and its desire to control the
world. In other words, life is defined by those with the power to define it.
In organizations, we will see as the arguments in this book progress, that
although it may be management’s desire that staff be less than human, staff
themselves disagree and find ways of circumventing that desire.
This leads to the question of how one becomes human/not-human, a liv-
ing being that has or does not have a life.

HOW DOES ONE BECOME ‘HUMAN’?

Julie and Butler again have similar ideas, albeit couched in very different
language. Both refer to the face and the importance of recognition.
Julie said that to have a life:

I’d have to get a job but it would be nice to go and do something, have
money, have my hair cut and buy some nice clothes, and just do what
I want to do. If I want to go out for the day, get on the bus and go
somewhere I could do it. Just simple things like that.

A job is something to be deeply desired because it would give her not only
‘a life’ but the life she dreams of having. To have a life means having paid
employment that provides the money to work on one’s appearance (have my
hair cut and buy some nice clothes) and to have the freedom and resources
to do ‘simple things’. In Butler’s terms, these are not simple things at all, for
they all involve being made visible (working on one’s appearance, travelling
in the public domain) for

the norms that would allocate who is and is not human arrive in visual
form. These norms work to give face and to efface. Accordingly, our
26 On Being At Work
capacity to respond with outrage, opposition, and critique will depend
in part on how the differential norm of the human is communicated
through visual and discursive frames. (FW:77)

Butler, grounded in Hegelian philosophy, argues that one becomes human

through acts of recognition, as articulated through the master/slave dialectic
(see Chapter Two for explication and a discussion). She distinguishes be-
tween ‘apprehend’ and ‘recognise’. Recognition, with its connotations of an
act, practice or scene between subjects, is, Butler points out, the stronger
term, but the master and slave did not appear from nowhere—they were
already constituted as master and slave before their encounter. It is necessary
therefore to examine the stage that facilitates this first encounter: what are
the conditions of possibility which instigate the scene in which recognition
takes place? In Butler’s words, ‘We do not simply have recourse to single and
discrete norms of recognition, but to more general conditions, historically
articulated and enforced, of “recognisability” ’ (FW:5). There are ‘categories,
conventions and norms’ which induce a subject, make it ready for recogni-
tion and therefore capable of being recognised as more than a life, as human.
Apprehension, on the other hand, falls short of recognisability and thus of
recognition; it is a way of knowing that does not institute a subject, so that
‘something is not recognized by recognition’ (FW:5). This ‘something’, this
‘figure of the non-human’ (FW:64), cannot be recognised because it falls out-
side the field of what is perceived as reality. We must therefore

understand the differential of power at work that distinguishes between

those subjects who will be eligible for recognition and those who will
not. In other words, what is the norm according to which the subject
is produced who then becomes the presumptive ‘ground’ of normative
debate? (FW:138)

In Butler’s thesis, those who are invisible, who do not enter the scene of
recognition, can be trampled on, disposed of, destroyed at will, with no one
speaking on their behalf because no one (with power) is aware of their exis-
tence, and thus they cannot be recognised as human. They are apprehended,
that is, it is known that they exist, but without recognition they are not
categorised as human and so are not accorded rights to be represented and
defended. My sister says something similar: her current labours, as a carer,
render her invisible. Trudging the roads of the village each day, she is ap-
prehended (one of the many millions of carers in the UK), but she is invisible
and not marked out as human (a living, breathing, emoting being) and thus
the category ‘carer’ is overdetermining. The strong theme about freedom in
Julie’s narrative emphasises the need to be able to go out in the world. In
remembering the jobs she held in her teens, she constitutes a human self:
as an animal lover with high ethical standards (she left the zoo because of
its cruelty in caging animals); presenting a strong articulation of how staff
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 27
should be treated (not left alone miles from anywhere at dead of night); and
enjoying the pleasures of companionship (while ironing clothes). In thinking
about what paid work would allow her to do, she has a dream of that earlier
freedom: she could ‘go out for the day . . . and go somewhere’. She knows
that if she can buy clothes, have her hair done and travel out into the world,
she will be made visible and thus recognisable. That is, she could go out in
the world where, having worked on herself (new haircut and clothes), she
would be recognizable as human.
My sister’s life is similar in many ways to those of the housewives of the
East London working-class community studied by Michael Young and Peter
Willmott in 1957 (Young and Willmott, 1969). Her days revolve around
the family and the related tasks of caring and housework. Travel remains
a distant prospect, and shopping for anything other than day-to-day neces-
sities is a rare luxury. The satisfaction in being a housewife at the centre of
a family and kinship circle 50 years ago was in the doing of the activities
pertaining to that position. Times have changed: identity has shifted from
doing to being, and doing as an end in itself has switched to doing as the
means by which being may be facilitated (Butler, 1990; 1993). Julie, unlike
her predecessors, is constantly bombarded with injunctions of how to work
on the self: the television in the corner of her living room, the magazines
she leafs through at the doctor’s surgery, the conversations with sisters who
are able to participate in the project of the self—these all bring with them
instantiations of the norms of the human in a culture of consumption. That
Julie cannot participate renders her a failure in her own eyes: she is not
working on the self. Julie’s own theory is thus that work will allow her to
work on herself so that she can make herself visible and thus recognisable.
Her desire for work is therefore a desire for recognition, because through
work one attains ‘a life’ or, in Butler’s terminology, becomes human. It is a
dream of the self I wish to construct, the me I want to be.
The very paragraph with which I opened this chapter shows that I, on
the other hand, am engaged actively in this project of the self. Not only did
I show that I travel to seemingly exotic locations, I could also look at myself
in that location, comment to myself on my being there and project myself
forward (Fuery and Wagner, 2003) to the accounts I would tell family and
friends of my being there—Nancy Harding, world traveller, and therefore a
self in process. I have the photographs to prove it.

DISCUSSION: DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN LABOUR AND WORK

The argument so far is this: I have taken two sisters whose lives have devi-
ated in ways that could not have been foreseen in our childhoods. Each
of us works long hours, but only one of us in a job that enables working
on, constructing, the self as human and fully alive (although the manageri-
alisation of higher education threatens this [Prichard and Willmott, 1997;
28 On Being At Work
Chandler, Barry and Clark, 2002]). The sister whose labours do not facili-
tate such work on the self classifies herself as outside life. In Butler’s terms,
she is outside the human. She labours but does not work, so cannot even get
to the scene where the master and slave encounter each other to receive, or
not receive in the master’s case, recognition. She cannot therefore enter the
frame of visibility, and so she cannot enter the category of the human, for
to be human is to work actively on the self so that the self becomes visible.
When I have discussed this thesis with friends and colleagues, they have
pointed out examples of friends and family who choose not to work; how
can I, they ask, say that such people are removing themselves from the
human? This is to misread my thesis, or, rather, I have not articulated it suf-
ficiently clearly, for someone who chooses not to work will have other fora
and other activities in which they prefer to spend their time, and in which
they will be able to work on, and thus constitute, a self, because in those
places they are visible, have a face. Indeed, the majority of the population
will have spaces and places separate and apart from their labouring and
working lives in which they are able to work on the self.
What I am focusing upon here is the position in which many of us find
ourselves: we have little choice about whether or not we should be in paid
employment, and much of our time is therefore taken up in labouring, but
our labours do not allow us to participate in the construction of anything
other than an abject self. This clarifies the distinction I am drawing between
labour and work, where ‘work’ involves the possibility of working on the
self as part of the process of being engaged in a job. My sister is therefore
akin to a Weberian ‘ideal-type’; she labours but cannot work on the self. By
focusing on someone whose labour does not allow work on the self, I can
make a clear distinction between labour and work, between a life and being
alive. The body while labouring becomes that of the zombie-machine: alive
but without life, outwith the human. The body that labours is little more
than a machine for doing work, and as machine it is without recognition.
The body that works is involved in working on itself, constituting identity
or selfhood. Julie exists as the former, labouring body (as zombie-machine)
and dreams of a job that will allow her to do more than labour: to work on
the self or selves she aspires to be.
I move on now to exploring how recognition requires a face and how
labour renders labourers faceless. That is, I will pick up Julie’s discussion
about how work would give her the chance to change her appearance and
Butler’s development of Emmanuel Levinas’s thesis on ‘the face’ in Frames
of War.

BUTLER AND JULIE ON THE FACE

I have put a photograph of my siblings at the top of this chapter so as to

make them visible—to give them faces by which they become recognisable.
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 29
In this section I will take forward the distinction between labour (where one
is a zombie-machine who carries out the tasks required) and work (where,
over and above the tasks one does, one can constitute a self that is human)
through arguing that one is rendered invisible (faceless) as a labourer and
thus emphasising the importance of ‘the face’ to the becoming human af-
forded by work.
I am made visible to many people through my School’s web pages, where
there is a photograph of me, looking for all the world like my father in
drag, plus a summary of my career and a list of my responsibilities and ac-
complishments. There are similar pages for my academic colleagues, most
of which have a photograph attached. However, colleagues with whom
I work closely and who are vital to the efficient running of the School, col-
leagues whose job title is ‘administrator’, are listed with no more than a
name, a phone number and an e-mail address: they appear interchangeable.
Other staff at the School—the cleaners, porters, maintenance staff and oth-
ers without whom things would grind to a halt—have neither photos nor
names on the site. They are invisible to us except when we bump into them
during the daily round (and often they work outside normal office hours, so
we may rarely see them). My School is not unusual—I have looked through
a variety of websites, and this, it would appear, is the norm. Even Schools
that are proud of their radical traditions feature only the images of academic
and senior managerial staff. Academia is not alone in this: there are photos
of senior staff on many company websites, but everyone else remains face-
less. This is in huge contrast to the social networking sites now springing up,
such as Facebook, where people are encouraged to upload photos of them-
selves, making themselves visible to friends and family. Butler shows that it
is necessary to be recognised, that is, to have a ‘face’ that can be recognised,
so as to participate in the social world in which work on the self is under-
taken. My sister argues something very similar. The argument I will develop
here is that to labour is to be rendered invisible, to be denied a face and thus
recognition. To work (on oneself while at work) renders one visible, that is,
as having a face that is discernibly human.
In Butler/Levinas’s view, the face may not be an actual face but a projec-
tion of one; it can both humanise and dehumanise: some faces are recog-
nised as human and worthy of care, while others are demonised and deemed
best destroyed. To recognise and be recognised is to give and receive ac-
knowledgement that one is human; failure to do so renders one abject. The
reference to recognition is an allusion to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, a
mythical scene that establishes the importance of intersubjective recognition
for subjectivity, which is a major influence on Butler’s work and thus also
the arguments developed in this book. She notes in Frames of War that for
Hegel’s master-slave encounter to take place a stage must already have been
set: there must already have been people allocated the names of ‘master’ and
‘slave’, with the positions from which they can speak already clarified. This
encounter is foundational to much Western thinking about how selves come
30 On Being At Work
into being, that is, they emerge not fully formed from the womb, as it were,
but are ongoing accomplishments constituted in interactions with others
(see Chapter Three for a fuller discussion). It seems to me that Butler’s work
is developing an intense account of what went on in that seminal encounter,
through which she weaves her evolving reading of Althusser’s myth of being
hailed. The latest evolution in this account is the insights she draws from
Levinas’s thesis on the face.5
Her articulation of the master-slave encounter in Chapter Five of Precari-
ous Lives is of the demand for recognition as an ethical scene focusing on
the responsibility each has to all others. That is

The structure of address is important for understanding how moral au-

thority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address
others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it
were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our ex-
istence proves precarious when that address fails. More emphatically,
however, what binds us morally has to do with how we are addressed
by others in ways that we cannot avert or avoid; this impingement by
the other’s address constitutes us first and foremost against our will or,
perhaps put more appropriately, prior to the formation of our will. So
if we think that moral authority is about finding one’s will and standing
by it, stamping one’s name upon one’s will, it may be that we miss the
very mode by which moral demands are relayed. That is, we miss the
situation of being addressed, the demand that comes from elsewhere,
sometimes a nameless elsewhere, by which our obligations are articu-
lated and pressed upon us. (PL, 2004:130)

We must therefore, she goes on, think seriously about modes of address
and moral authority. By the very fact of being in the world, one has a re-
sponsibility to all others who, even if we do not hear or see them, address
us and allow us our selfhood. Levinas’s value for Butler is linked to this
development of responsibility in the scene of recognition. He first provides
a way of thinking ‘about the relationship between representation and hu-
manization’, the aspect I draw on in this book, and, second, offers Butler
an ethics of Jewish nonviolence that she uses to develop her new politi-
cal theory. Levinas (in my interpretation of Butler’s interpretation) argues
that slaughter of the masses becomes possible when they are faceless, that
is, anonymised beings without identity and for whom, therefore, neither
compulsion to care nor responsibility for their flourishing is forthcoming.
That is, in seeing people’s faces we accord them recognition that they are
human, and after recognition is given different imperatives arise in regard
to what can be done with and to them. When we do not see people’s faces,
when they are anonymous crowds, they are like pebbles on the beach: we
can trample all over them because they have no humanity. I am arguing
that the labourer is faceless, that is, management feels free to use labour-
ers to churn out products and services as if they were machines because
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 31
their faces are not seen and they are therefore not accorded recognition as
being human.
Julie’s theory of the face expounds this notion from the perspective of
someone who has no recognizable face. Her understanding of herself in-
cludes a theory of being rendered faceless, and this self-understanding arises,
I suggest, from her current position of being a labourer who cannot work on
the self. Her desire to earn sufficient money to work on her appearance be-
comes a desire to have a face, for being faceless, having no face, places one
outside the human. Working on the self, constituting an identity, involves
making oneself visible to those who can grant recognition. This is Julie’s
theory of the difference between two sisters, one who has a public face and
one who doesn’t. I did not ask her a specific question on this but made a nar-
cissistic statement that stimulated her theory of why our lives are different:

N: I’m fascinated by how my life has taken such a different trajec-

tory, and we are so similar. I was painfully, cripplingly shy as a child in
school. And we had such a similar childhood, and are so similar, but
we’ve had such different experiences.
J: But I think, like Dad used to say, you were always determined.
If you were going somewhere when they were going out, you knew
where you were going and you were ahead and you were gone. With
me, I would be around the back. I knew the back. Where you had deter-
mination I was the day-dreamer dragging behind. So that’s the big big
difference. Having it in your mind and doing it, rather than just dream-
ing about it, like I was a dreamer and you were the doer, and that’s what
it was, cos I was always hiding behind mam’s skirts, but you were in
front all the time, I’d see that, and I’d say well I’d come but I’ll stay by
here behind. So I think that’s the difference between us.

I suggest that this is not a memory of an event but a theory of the present,
one in which a light is retroactively shone upon what may be an imagined
past so as to understand what is understood as the present. As Lacan ob-
serves, there is no present, only a remembering of the past and a projection
into the future:

What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since
it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am,
but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the
process of becoming. (Lacan, 1977:86; 2002:300)

Julie presents a complex theory in which a present-day sense of self is

projected into a past self and that self is then projected forward into the fu-
ture. She draws a sharp divide between the mind and the (active) body: there
are things in the mind (dreams) that can be achieved through the actions of
the body (doing it). The person who does is ‘ahead’ and ‘gone’. This person
is at the front and is visible to anyone she meets. The dreamer, on the other
32 On Being At Work
hand, ‘drags[s] behind’ and ‘stays here behind’, hiding behind her mother’s
skirts where she cannot be seen. Julie’s theory is that from a very young age
one sister had effaced herself (literally, here, denied herself the possibility
of having a face), while the other had strode out and shown her face to
the world. Her own early experiences belie the foundations of this theory:
she’d gone to work in a zoo, hundreds of miles from home, when she was
15! The statement ‘I’d say well I’d come but I’ll stay by here6 behind’ is not
quite rational, suggesting some complex ideas at work. ‘I would come but
I will stay by here behind’. Are there two ‘I’s’ here, one who would stride
out but another (who eventually overrides the first) who remains invisible,
so the ‘difference between us’ refers not to the two sisters but the two I’s?
If so, then one ‘I’ desires to stride out, to have agency, while the other has
no face and thus no agency. In other words, Julie’s thesis is one where the
person who has a face has agency—to be able to act in the world (in Butler’s
terms, to be human) requires having a face. This thesis is remarkably close
to Butler’s, save that Butler explores how it is that a person can be denied
a face by others, whereas Julie locates the responsibility in her own person.
Crucially, Julie also shows the desire of the effaced person to have a face, to
be ‘by there in front’. Butler’s work has throughout shown that the demon-
stration of such negative feelings about the self arise from discourses that
inform selves which cannot live up to cultural norms and therefore have a
denigrated status. So, Julie’s thesis allows us to see what otherwise remains
hidden: the face that is rendered invisible, the suffering that follows, and
thus the impact of being rendered faceless. Julie labours but does not work:
as labourer she has no face, and therefore she cannot be recognised—and
so she cannot enter into that agonistic encounter between master and slave
that gives identity.
Julie’s account is a theory of the distinction between labour and work.
This is: Julie labours, so has little opportunity to work on the self; she is
therefore hidden, out of sight and faceless. Her sister who is in a profes-
sional career that allows opportunities to work (on the self) faces outwards,
where she is recognisable to the world, which grants her recognition. In
other words, work constitutes recognition (literally, one has a face to which
a name can be put); labour negates the face, and one has no chance of rec-
ognition and therefore no identity.
However, Julie blames herself for her invisibility and her abject position,
whereas Butler argues that some faces are facilitated in their visibility, while
others are denied that opportunity. Butler calls the process by which this
happens ‘framing’. This allows further interpretation of the labourer as hav-
ing no face and therefore being denied identity and the status of the human.

FRAMING

It is in Frames of War, and specifically in its concluding chapter, that Butler

develops the claim of the need for the ‘face’ so that its claims can be heard
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 33
and an ethical response given. This replicates Julie’s thesis—without a face,
there is no recognition, no possibility of being a subject to whom an ethical
response is due.
Butler writes that the response to any claim ‘has everything to do with
how the claim is formed and framed, but also with the disposition of the
senses, or the conditions of receptivity itself’ (165), for the respondent
is ‘crafted forcibly by norms that often do a certain kind of violence as
well’ (ibid.). So the conditions of receptivity to being called into being as
a subject (here she alludes to Althusser’s thesis on interpellation) mean
that the subject who is called ‘is in the process of avowing its own social
ontology’. In Julie’s terms, the subject who is forced to hide her face
has no such ontology; can she exist therefore as a social subject? Butler
emphasises the interdependence of each with all others and the struggle
for an individuality that is inevitably socially achieved, for I cannot be
an ‘I’ without others to affirm me in my difference from them. In Butler’s
words, the

singular ‘one’ arises through social determination, while the social is

based on the presumption of ‘singularization’—‘who we “are” involves
an invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation. . . .
That is the dehiscence at the basis of the “we”, the condition under
which we are passionately bound together: ragefully, desirously, mur-
derously, lovingly’. (FW:183)

This leads to a non-moralised ethical responsibility to safeguard the life

of the other by protecting that other from one’s own potential for destruc-
tion. It is the self’s desire to destroy the other, an other upon whom one
is dependent if one is to be a self, that brings with it the responsibility to
protect that other. Always there is this ambivalence, this desire to be unique,
alone, an individual, that rests within a need to be part of the social. And so
if ‘the claim of the other upon me is to reach me, it must be mediated in some
way, which means that our very capacity to respond with non-violence . . .
depends upon the frames by which the world is given and by which the
domain of appearance is circumscribed’ (FW:180).
In other words, our capacity to respond with care depends upon the
means by which we are encouraged and allowed to ‘see’ the world and our
fellow human subjects. We do not enter the stage of recognition without
power already having worked on us, telling us not only who we are but
also who are our others, and power will have crafted the ways in which we
identify others, as enemies or friends, as subjects or objects, as human or
nonhuman. Faces may be the primary aspect in identification, but we may
not look at faces innocently, untouched by power: our looking at faces,
including our own, may be skewed by the power that shapes the prism of
the lens through which we look. When Julie looks in the mirror, she sees an
abject self that has not had an opportunity to work on its self, hence her de-
sire for a haircut, new clothes, and so on. That is, she sees a representation
34 On Being At Work
of an image rather than the face of a human subject. What we see is influ-
enced by ‘framing’. In Chapter Two we will see how the manager ‘frames’
staff so that s/he sees them as zombie-machines who desire no existence
except that of the worker. There is no human behind that representation.
Butler argues that we need to be able to see beyond the representations of
others to the human that lies behind the representations. For this purpose,
she continues, ‘we do not need to know in advance what “a life” will be,
but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance
that allow the claim of life to be made and heard (in this way, media and
survival are linked)’ (FW:181). Ethics follow from ‘being addressed and ad-
dressable in sustainable ways’, which requires that there be a ‘you’ who can
be heard and seen. This means we must interrogate the conditions by which
persons can be seen and heard, or in Butler’s terms how they come or fail
to come to be framed. We can see that Julie, as labourer, can be neither seen
nor heard, because she is representable only as an abject labourer, isolated
from the work that would give her identity. In Chapter Three we will see
that Shakeel, a manual worker, is regarded by management only as a pair of
hands to be ordered to do specific jobs: he has been ‘framed’ in such a way
that any other identity has been denied him. Importantly, we will see how
he evades this imposition of the requirement that he labour but not work.
Framing, for Butler, is an epistemological problem, concerned with how
we develop the politically saturated ‘frames through which we apprehend
or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able
or injurable’ (FW:1). This involves a consideration of ways in which suf-
fering is presented to us and how our response is predicated upon the pre-
sentation (FW:63), for the form of presentation will define some as human
and some as unnameable or non-regardable as human—as a figure of the
nonhuman that ‘negatively determines and potentially unsettles the recog-
nizably human’ (64). The ‘frames’ that work to differentiate the lives we can
apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum
of life) not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontolo-
gies of the subject.
When discussing the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay photographs
which shocked the world in their portrayal of US soldiers raping, tortur-
ing and abusing prisoners of war, Butler defines a frame as ‘active, as both
jettisoning [that which the viewer should not see] and presenting [what it
is wished that the viewer should see], and as doing both at once, in si-
lence, without any visible sign of its operation. What emerges under these
conditions is a viewer who assumes him- or herself to be in an immediate
(and incontestable) visual relation to reality’ (FW:73). This operation of
the frame is ‘not normally representable’, that is, we do not know how
the framing itself is carried out—who is the photographer, and what rules
was that photographer following? What did s/he wish to show? How did
the photographer choose what to include and what to exclude? There is
thus a ‘nonthematized background’ within an unmarked, delimited field.
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 35
The framing of the frame generally remains out of sight. However, what is
shown is governed by norms, and at the same time it enacts norms (FW:75),
for photographs structure how they may be interpreted: they omit some
things, include others, limiting at the same time as expanding our field of
vision. Viewers are encouraged to believe they are seeing an unmediated
reality. It becomes necessary therefore to consider the forms of power ‘em-
bedded’ in the frame (FW:72).
Thus the decision (or nondecision) about whose photos should be exhib-
ited on departmental and organizational websites is an act of framing that
has political consequences. The head-and-shoulder photographs of academ-
ics suggest a transcendence of the body, in de Beauvoir’s (1953/2007) terms,
so all that is made visible is the head—the seat of the brain and, in Western
thought, of the mind. The only work that is done here, the photographs say,
is that of the mind. In a distinction that reverberates in our interpretations
of ancient Greece and Rome, there is a sharp division between the polis and
those who do the work. Only those who are members of the polis may vote
and thus speak. All others are labourers—they ensure that the community
can actually function, but their work is that of the body and is denigrated.
I am not saying that this distinction has reached us directly from ancient
Greece and Rome (although see Steiner, 1986), but our continued fascina-
tion with those civilisations may rest in part in our projecting onto them un-
regarded parts of our 20th- and 21st-century cultures. Those whose photos
are not placed on websites, in this reading, become the invisible labourers
who keep things going—they labour, but their labours are not involved in
constructions of selves, only with getting tasks done.
In other words, the presence or absence of a photograph is a designator
of the difference between ‘work’ and ‘labour’ or, in Butler’s terms, of who
it is that is human and who it is that is not.7 The labourer, since Taylor
(1911/2003) is a ‘hand’ and thus devoid of a face and incapable of being
recognised (as human).

CONCLUSION: DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN LABOUR (DOING)

AND WORK (BECOMING)

In this chapter I have interwoven an account of two sisters’ working lives

within and through Judith Butler’s thesis in Frames of War. Butler’s work,
inspired by 21st-century warfare, has provided concepts I have adopted and
adapted for thinking through what makes us recognizable and how (as I will
argue in later chapters) we may reproduce ourselves through feeling and act-
ing as subjects in the social realm of work, when under an imperative that
we become zombie-machines whose working lives are not lived by ourselves.
I have used my sister’s lay theory of who she is and why we live such
different lives to argue the case for a distinction to be drawn between work
and labour in an era when the self has become an ongoing project that
36 On Being At Work
must be worked on. To labour, I have suggested, is to do the physical and
mental tasks required of us by those by whom one is employed and because
of which one’s time is so taken up that there is neither opportunity to nor
resources for work(ing) on the self. To labour is therefore to be a life, but
not a human life. To be a human requires that one can work on the self: to
work is to be able to constitute identity or selfhood as part of the processes
involved in our jobs. To labour is to occupy the subject position of a faceless
zombie-machine; to work is to have a face and thus to have recognition of
one’s self as human. To labour is therefore to do; to work is to become. To
labour is to be not recognised, to have recognition withheld. For those of us
in privileged positions—as professionals, managers, academics, perhaps—at
least some aspects of our work allow us to work (on the self) and to consti-
tute an identity.
In later chapters I will show how management imposes the requirement
that staff labour but not work and how staff evade that demand by look-
ing elsewhere for the recognition that accords them status of the human.
For now I will conclude by returning to the issue of the face. The face is
inevitably part of the materiality of the body. Let us conceive of the self as
being/having/doing (Turner, 2008) two bodies while at work: there is the
body I have given over to the organization for the duration of the working
day, that body often denied a face, and there is the body I call ‘mine’, the
one whose reflection I see when I look in the mirror. The one I have given
over to the organization is to a certain extent outside my control: it has to
do what the employer requires that it do. The body I retain, which I call my
own, is the body I can work on as part of the presentation and achievement
of the 21st-century ‘me’, a body that is always social, always given over to
others (Butler, 2009), for it is the body I present to the other in the scene of
recognition. The first body is the material body of traditional capitalism: the
body that exists only to labour and whose labour power is what is sought
by the organization. This is the body still desired by organizations—it is a
zombie-machine there to do physical, mental or aesthetic tasks—but always
a body that should show no desire other than to work. This is a body that
has life but is not alive because it is not human. Denied recognition, it is a
deadened body in a deadened/deadening organization. The second body is
the body caught up in the production of the I, always social, always outside
itself, always contributing to the I’s participation in being human. The first
is the body that labours; the second is the body that works. The first is the
body that is rendered faceless and denied recognition. The second is the
body that has a face that looks out to others for recognition.

POSTSCRIPT

But there is one further issue that needs discussion. Throughout this chap-
ter I have offered an uncritical perspective on academic work, with only
 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters 37
minor asides referring to some of its frustrations and the dangers some com-
mentators identify that academics are being reduced to labourers as higher
education becomes managerialised. In that way, I adopted Julie’s perspective
on my job: it is she who frames it as glamorous and exciting (which it is
in many ways). But if we reflect on academic working days (and nights),
we know that we too are often positioned as zombie-machines, albeit with
many more privileges than my sister would dream of. We are productive
paper-writing, lecture-giving, administration-doing, exam-marking, confer-
ence-attending zombie-machines. Therefore I must qualify somewhat the
allusions to the photographs of faculty that appear on websites. Although
they accord us recognition, when we look at them we see reflected back
a labourer, even though we might frame ourselves in such a way that we
refuse that aspect of the self. I see very little resistance to the denigration of
our work as it becomes a production line off which plops, spasmodically,
another paper or, more regularly, another graduate. Indeed, tomorrow I will
see my head of department for my annual performance review: have I been a
good girl this year? I will answer yes, and the evidence is there in papers ac-
cepted for publication as listed on the forms I filled in. A complex working
life is thereby reduced to a number of boxes ticked on a form.
This gives another reason, following those outlined in the Introduction,
for looking not at resistance towards management but at other ways of
being at work, because, although ‘the management’ reduces me to a series
of numbers and I seem to offer no resistance to that demand, in other ways
I evade their judgements and work on the self. This book, indeed, is a small
act of resistance (to the preference in business schools for journal papers),
but in the light of the dreams I had when I first became an academic, of the
thoughts I would think, the books I would read and those I would write, it is
a paltry souvenir of the me I had hoped to be. This book is therefore also a
work that is thinking through, tangentially and opaquely, what it is to be an
academic in the 21st century. The tension I note in my own work, of moving
between zombie-machine and human, will be evident throughout many of
the chapters of this book, save in the one which follows, in which, despite
looking actively for it, I could not find in a manager’s account of his working
life any hint that he tried to evade the imperative to be a zombie-machine.
2 The Master’s Tale

I was browsing in Leeds University’s bookshop a long time ago and picked
up a book, The Psychic Life of Power (PLP, 1997), by an author then un-
known to me, Judith Butler. The opening paragraph was enthralling:

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a

power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes.
To find, however, that what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject,
is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We
are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the
outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower
order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But
if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as
well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory
of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a
strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we har-
bour and preserve in the beings that we are. (1–2).

I was captivated (and confused—what did it mean?). I bought the book

and then spent six years and three attempts at reading it before I could say
that I understood at least some of its arguments. Reading it for the fourth
time while writing this book, I became intrigued by how Butler’s elabora-
tion of Hegel’s master/slave or lord/bondsman dialectic, referred to briefly
in Chapter One, might be applied to interpreting accounts of working lives.
This chapter is an exercise in doing that. Its aim is to develop a theory of the
subjectivity of ‘the boss’, or how someone is subjected and subjectified by
being called ‘manager’ or ‘boss’.
Throughout this book I am referring to a management which requires
that staff become zombie-machines. I am eager to maintain a distinction be-
tween managers, that is, the people who carry out the tasks of management,
and management, that is, the profession, practice (Parker, 2002), discourse
and subject position. Managers (people) are located within managerial sub-
ject positions, and it is important to remember Butler’s point (PLP:10) that
individuals are not reducible to subjects. Subjects are constituted through
 The Master’s Tale 39
webs of discourse, psyches, bodies, cultures, history, in interaction with oth-
ers and so on; they are ‘a linguistic category, a placeholder, a subject in
formation’ (ibid.), so the subject position of ‘the manager’ influences how
individuals (while) in that position constitute a sense of self in relation to
others (see Harding, 2003, for a sustained exploration of this). However,
it is on the body of ‘the boss’ or ’the manager’ that capitalism is inscribed,
and it is through the boss/manager that capitalism speaks. Who, then, is this
person, the manager/boss? And what is the manager/boss’s desire in regard
to staff?
Despite the ubiquity of managers in management and organization stud-
ies, we know surprisingly little about the persons, subjectivities or identities
of the individuals who labour under that job title (Hales, 1999). There is,
arguably, an absence of curiosity about managers as people in ‘mainstream’
organization research which focuses on performativity (Fournier and Grey,
2000) and, through a preference for quantitative research methods, limits
the possibilities for understanding subjectivities. There is a fantasy of man-
agers in such work—they are creatures that are totally devoted to their
work, and are rational and logical (Reed, 1989; Townley, 2008; Cabantous,
Gond and Johnson-Cramer, 2010; Cabantous and Gond, 2011), even
though more recently they are required to be reflexive, emotionally intel-
ligent and self-aware (see, for example, Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999; Singh,
2006). They are leaders whose charisma is presumed to ensure that staff
will follow them unquestioningly (see Harding et al., 2011, for a discus-
sion). Such managers should have none of the usual human idiosyncrasies
or failings, and within such a perspective there is room for neither sub-
jectivity nor identity, save for the singular prescription of ‘rational man’.
That some managers fall from grace is increasingly acknowledged, but
researchers then turn their minds to finding out how to ensure that the
original state of perfection is restored (Sinha et al., 2012; Hochwarter and
Thompson, 2012).
When we are analysing managers, a problem arises from the term’s en-
compassing a diverse range of organizational actors. Middle managers are
seen as a form of knowledge worker (Delmestri and Walgenbach, 2012) that
has in some ways become disposable. They suffer from career insecurity
(Rabin, 1999), routinization of their work (Redman et al., 1997), subjec-
tion to surveillance and direct and indirect forms of control (Ogbonna and
Wilkinson, 2003), perhaps even proletarianization (Scarbrough and Burrell,
1996). There is concern about middle managers’ work/life balance (Ford
and Collinson, 2011), in a context in which organizations ‘increasingly
colonize . . . all the spaces in the manager’s life with identity as partner and
parent subsumed under the “greedy” discourses of management and organi-
zation’ (Thomas and Linstead, 2002:88). This is a far cry from the manage-
rial elites that hold power over the lives of those who work for them (Zald
and Lounsbury, 2010; Reed, 2012)—it seems ridiculous to categorise them
under the same label as middle managers.
40 On Being At Work
Another issue is the generally low regard in which managers are held
in Western Europe in the opening years of the 21st century. Handy (2002,
in Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2007) cites statistics which state that
90 percent of Americans do not trust managers to look after employees’
interests, and only 18 percent agree that they look after shareholders’ inter-
ests. Brocklehurst, Grey and Sturdy’s (2009) study of the subjective experience
of being a manager shows a reluctance on the part of managers to designate
themselves using that term, ‘manager’. The ‘image and ideal of management
has become tarnished’ (15). It now signifies very little, and what it does
signify is undesirable in that it denotes inflexibility, a brake on productivity
and thus the opposite of what it meant in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury. People find it difficult to equate management, and thus managers, with
goodness (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2012), thus contradicting arguments
about ways of constituting the ethical managerial self as one responsible
to others (Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2007). If people do not identify
themselves as managers, how then can we study them as managers? Not-
withstanding this point, it is still the case that organizations are hierarchical,
and the majority of people are governed by a ‘boss’, managed by managers,
and perhaps led by leaders.
The more sociologically oriented studies of managers are not as informa-
tive as might be hoped in telling us about who it is that is ‘the manager’ or,
more colloquially, ‘the boss’. We presume that managers are possessors of
competencies (e.g. Gilley et al., 2010), reflect upon themselves (e.g. Roan
and Rooney, 2006) and have long been known to spend their working days
in activities that differ radically from those that they should, in theory, be
undertaking (Stewart, 1967; Mintzberg, 1980). They spend much of their
time talking, and we know something about what they say and how that
talk constitutes both ‘the organization’ (Ford and Harding, 2004; Spee and
Jarzabkowski, 2011) and ‘the manager’ (Iedema et al., 2003; Watson, 2008).
Studies of managerial identity work (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003;
Watson, 2008) go some way towards illuminating the person who is (always-
becoming) the manager, because they focus on the questions of ‘who am I’
(or ‘who are we’) and ‘what do I (we) stand for?’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson,
2003:1164). These studies, heavily influenced by Foucault, focus on the
place of discourse in constituting identities. For example, Sveningsson and
Alvesson (2003) argue that ‘individuals create several more or less contra-
dictory and often changing managerial identities (identity positions) rather
than one stable, continuous and secure, manager identity’ (1165). They
analyse one manager and her positioning within ‘a complex of discourses
and roles’ in which her identity work is located and argue that managerial
and identity work ‘mutually define each other’; that is, what the manager
does is constitutive of her identity/ies, and her identity/ies constitute what
she does. Similarly, Clarke et al. (2009) have studied how antagonistic dis-
courses are ‘drawn on’ in constructions of versions of the self. Others use
 The Master’s Tale 41
narratives rather than discourses for their analysis of identity formation
(cf. Sims, 2008). However, a shortcoming of discourse- and narrative-based
identity research for those following a Hegelian-influenced path is that such
research analyses participants only in interaction with discourses. There is
little about how interactions with other subjects and objects serve in the
constitution of managerial subjectivities; the manager appears to exist in
isolation from the social world.
We therefore know little about managers’ ‘subjective views and attitudes’
(Pendleton, 2003:91) and even less about how managerial subjects are, in
Butler’s (1997) terms, subjected and subjectified, that is constituted as sub-
jects within relationships of power.
This chapter’s aim is to develop a theory of managerial subjectivity that
explains the desire of the boss that the people s/he governs be reduced to zom-
bie-machines. It is modelled on Butler’s Psychic Life of Power (1997), as this
is the text that, arguably, develops the most insightful explorations of subjec-
tivity. The Psychic Life of Power is an exegesis and development of Hegel’s
master/slave or lord/bondsman dialectic. Its first substantive chapter analyses
the dialectic itself, and its successive chapters expand on each of its major
aspects. This chapter replicates that structure, but, as throughout this book,
I am not concerned with an exposition or critique of Butler’s work. Rather, I
use Butler’s insights firstly to rewrite the master/slave dialectic by inserting a
manager between the master and slave. This gives the bare bones of a theory
of managerial subjectivities. I will then draw on the theoretical elaborations
she pursues to develop four propositions about managerial subjectivities.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. I firstly introduce Frank, the
person on whose account of his working life I am building here, and then
summarise Butler’s interpretation of the master/slave or lord/bondsman dia-
lectic. That summary takes us away from management and organization
studies for a while, but it provides the background to the experiment in
writing a master/manager/slave dialectic that follows. This has four major
points, which I then develop in the form of four propositions that together
add up to the theory that is the chapter’s conclusion. The propositions are:
(i) bad conscience propels the boss to be a zombie-machine; (ii) the boss is
seduced by an erotics of power; (iii) subjection as ‘the boss’ requires that
s/he work harder and harder; and (iv) managerial melancholy arises from
grieving the loss of pleasure. The conclusion is that managerial identity,
or the recognition of the self as manager when in the managerial subject
position, requires that one work as hard as one possibly can, that is, as a
zombie-machine. To be a manager, to have identity as ‘the boss’, is therefore
to be a zombie-machine whose success is dependent upon driving all plea-
sure and joy out of (conscious) working life, so that staff likewise should be
zombie-machines.
I am drawing on an interview with a man who, together with his wife,
started a successful company after working for 30 years as a manager in
42 On Being At Work
the leisure industry. I am a family friend and know him as a humorous and
generous person (even though his political views are very different from
mine). I will call him Frank. I was initially struck by how he changed when
being interviewed. Since I have known him, conversations with both him
and his wife have always turned to their problems with staff and the ec-
centricities of customers. However, while the tape recorder was running,
he spoke very differently: he has few problems with staff, and customers’
feedback is what motivates him most. It is this change in his narrative that
initially intrigued me. I had not seen such a marked difference when talking
about their working lives with the other people who feature in this book.
Why, then, did Frank speak very differently about staff and customers when
being interviewed? I suggest that possibilities for speaking and being recog-
nised change between subject positions. When I am a ‘friend’ and he is ‘off
duty’, the recognition we seek from each other is as people able to share a
joke, maintain a conversation and actively listen to what each other is say-
ing. However, when I am a professor of management doing research and he
is speaking as ‘the boss’, we have someone who is supposedly an expert in
management able to pass judgement on whether the other speaker deserves
the status of ‘the boss’. This change arising from our different subject posi-
tions does not weaken the discussion, I suggest, but can be used fruitfully
when exploring the manager’s desire for recognition.
It is time to introduce Frank.

FRANK

In his mid-50s at the time of the interview, Frank had been born in a very
tough, working-class neighbourhood in one of Britain’s industrial cities. His
father was an alcoholic who was violent to Frank’s mother. His childhood
was a repetitive cycle of his parents separating from each other and then
getting back together. His mother would refuse to put up with the violence,
take the children with her to live elsewhere, then relent and return home.
When Frank was 15 and old enough to leave school, he gave his mother the
ultimatum that it was either his violent father or him, after which his father
was evicted permanently from the family home. Frank found a job as an ap-
prentice for a national company, using his wages to help support his mother
and three siblings. He finished his apprenticeship but realised he was more
interested in management and persuaded the company to send him on its
management training course. His subsequent rise through the company was,
to use the old metaphor, meteoric. He was given his first general manager
position at 22, breaking a company rule that managers had to be at least
27 years old before becoming general managers. As a 22-year-old manager,
half the age of most staff in the branch of the organization he now managed, he
instigated performance appraisals, consultation exercises and multiskilling,
and within two years he had increased profits by 100 percent and won the
 The Master’s Tale 43
title ‘manager of the year’. He moved to a bigger branch of the organization,
where, within 18 months, he won a major award for the company, after
which they asked him to take on one of their more prestigious subsidiar-
ies. His speciality became that of ‘troubleshooter’, taking over company
branches that were in difficulty and turning them around. Eventually, after
Frank went to work for a different organization that insisted on centralised
policies that would not allow him the autonomy he needed to be a successful
manager, he and his wife set up their own company. Within 10 years they
had turned a mediocre business into a very successful one.
There seems little that relates Frank to the lord and bondsman in Hegel’s
master/slave dialectic, but through introducing them to each other I aim to
establish a fruitful relationship.

REREADING BUTLER REREADING HEGEL: INSERTING THE

MANAGER INTO THE MASTER/SLAVE DIALECTIC

In this chapter I restage Hegel’s master/slave dialectic for the conditions

of 20th- and 21st-century capitalism through inserting a manager between
the lord and the bondsman. Since Taylor advocated the separation of the
organization of work from its undertaking and argued that managers knew
better how to do the work than did staff, managers have become a ubiq-
uitous presence in organizations. They have to look at both the lord (their
boss) and the bondsman (their staff). Does the peculiar position of this in-
termediary change the terms of the dialectic, and can it explain managerial
subjectivities? Answers to these questions require first an analysis of the
dialectic itself as interpreted by Butler, and this requires a deviation from
management and organization studies for a while.
Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, outlined in The Phenomenology of Spirit,
is a mythical scene which encapsulates the conditions by which European
subjectivities are constituted. It has been much analysed and is very influ-
ential in numerous theorists’ work, although Butler points out that an im-
portant section has been virtually ignored. Her task in The Psychic Life of
Power is to introduce this ignored section and develop its insights by draw-
ing on Foucault, Nietzsche, Althusser and Freud. Throughout she ‘let[s] the
bondsman occupy the site of presumptive masculinity’ (38), that is, she uses
the masculine pronoun. For ease of explication I will follow her practice in
much of this chapter.
This is the scene that Hegel described and Butler (1997) expands upon.
There is a master and a slave, each of whom cannot exist as social beings
(become self-conscious) without recognition from the other, but the seeking
of recognition is dangerous, so they are caught on the horns of a dilemma.
To be subjects, they need to be recognised, but in reaching out to be recog-
nised they could be annihilated. That is, they turn to each other for recogni-
tion but have to go through negation, or the individual consciousness has
44 On Being At Work
to get out of itself (negate itself) to meet the other consciousness, an other
that is threatening and can undo or disavow the self (Benjamin, 1988). Each
reaches out to this dangerous other, so each risks life/identity because only
one of the parties can win and earn recognition from the other. Gurevitch
(2001) illustrates this through a discussion where individual voices struggle
to be heard but only one person can speak at any one time if anyone is to be
heard. The silenced party is not recognised. This is a struggle in which there
is a desire to eliminate the other (Benjamin, 1988), but, by finding ways of
remaining in a relationship of interdependency, albeit one based on inequal-
ity, both parties survive and possess a sense of self (as self-consciousness)
(Cole, 2004), although survival means one is superior and the other sub-
missive. The slave, forced to produce goods for the master, eventually sees
himself reflected in the products he has created for the master and realises
he has produced the world; through this he comes to self-consciousness. The
master, however, is dependent only on the lesser form of life, the slave, for
recognition, and as the recognition from such an inferior form of life can-
not be counted as recognition, the master cannot attain self-consciousness.
Jean Hyppolite suggests this shows that ‘the truth of the master reveals that
he is the slave, and that the slave is revealed to be the master of the master’
(Hyppolite, in Cole, 2004:579).
Butler shows how the lord ‘postures as a disembodied desire for self-
reflection’ who desires that the bondsman be the lord’s body (PLP:35). The
master’s wish requires that the bondsman become complicit with his ruse, so
the imperative placed upon the bondsman is ‘you be my body for me, but do
not let me know that the body you are is my body’ (35). This has fundamen-
tal implications for the bondsman: the very body that allows him to make
the objects that enable him to recognise himself as a subject freed of the need
for recognition from the master is the very body that, he realises, is destined
to die. As an embodied being his life is transitory, and this awareness brings
with it a recognition of his own inevitable death. His newfound freedom
therefore brings with it terror (who am I? how will I survive?).
In desperation, he turns for reassurance to anyone who can help him
cope with the fear of his own mortality. Religion offers that reassurance,
but religion brings with it norms of behaviour that must be followed if life
after death is to be achieved. The bondsman now judges himself against
these principles and finds himself wanting. He constantly judges and berates
himself because of his weaknesses. He thus moves from unhappy servitude
to an unhappy consciousness.
Moreover, the freedom from the master is illusory, because the bonds-
man’s psyche is split into two parts, ‘a lordship and a bondage internal to a
single consciousness’ (PLP:42).
Hegel’s conclusion is that redemption is eventually found through mem-
bership in a religious community. This contradicts his earlier arguments and
Butler is unhappy with it. She turns to Nietzsche and Freud to argue instead
(PLP:57):
 The Master’s Tale 45
If the suppression of [what we might loosely call] the body is itself an in-
strumental movement of and by the body, then the body is inadvertently
preserved in and by the instrument of its suppression. The self-defeating
effort of such suppression, however, not only leads to its opposite—
a self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing assertion of desire, will, the
body—in more contemporary formulations it leads to the elaboration
of an institution of the subject which exceeds the dialectical frame by
which it is spawned.

What does she mean by this? Her discussion at this point revolves around
how the act of negation or repression actually constitutes that which is ne-
gated or repressed. So the act of refusing identification with a body whose
animal functions shame us actually constitutes the body as such, that is, as
a shameful animal. This is a ‘dialectical reversal’ whereby what is censored
by the law actually sustains that law (PLP, 58) and is Foucault’s repres-
sive hypothesis—that repression does not act on pre-given fields of pleasure
and desire but constitutes the fields that are to be regulated and, as such,
expands and proliferates them. In Freud, as well as in Foucault and Hegel,
‘the instrument of suppression becomes the new structure and aim of desire’
(PLP:60). But, Butler goes on to argue, the regulatory regime that produces
desire is itself produced by attachment to the rule of subjection (60). If so
(and here she returns to Hegel), then subjects will ‘attach to pain’ when
regulatory regimes ensure that it is only painful sites that are available for
attachment (61).
We therefore have a further stage in the lord/bondsman dialectic, one
that is the thesis of The Psychic Life of Power: to become a subject requires
that one absorb and enact requirements that can cause one pain. In short, if
one is to be a subject and have a liveable life, one requires recognition from
an other, including an internalised other, who not only establishes the laws
one must obey if one is to be a subject but judges one’s performance in obey-
ing those laws and often (always?) finds one wanting. Despite this ‘unhappy
consciousness’, we cling to the recognition that is offered, because without
that recognition we cannot become subjects.
To 20th- and 21st-century organization theorists, there is something
missing from this account: there is need for a manager to be inserted be-
tween lord and bondsman if the mythical scene is to hold good for ana-
lysing organizational encounters. In pursuit of understanding managerial
subjectivities, I will therefore, perhaps wildly and unwisely, reimagine the
scene, but I will insert Frank between the bondsman and the lord. In such
a position, he looks both ways, to the lord and to the bondsman. Indeed,
Butler’s observation that the lord ‘postures as a disembodied desire for self-
reflection’ who wants the bondsman to be the lord’s body (35) suggests
that for ‘lord’ we could read ‘organization’, whose metaphysical presence is
inscribed on the bodies of its managers whose task is to articulate its desires
(as if ‘it’, the organization, has an ontological reality that can have desires).
46 On Being At Work
In what follows, I will reenact each stage of the master-slave dialectic identi-
fied by Butler. This is therefore an experiment in staging a master/manager/
slave dialectic as a scene that has four acts.

ACT ONE

The bondsman, forced to produce goods for the master, eventually sees
himself reflected in the products he has created for the master, realises he
has produced the world and through this comes to self-consciousness.
The master is dependent only on the lesser form of life, the slave, for
recognition and therefore cannot attain self-consciousness.

Frank became a successful manager at a very young age, increasing profits

and winning industry awards while still in his 20s. His working week was
six days and more, and his off-duty hours were (and still are) very few. In
those early years, everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. In his ac-
count of this time Frank, as the manager, mediated between the organiza-
tion and the staff, but, although he refers to senior managers by name, there
is very little reference to staff save when he is recounting a few difficulties
that, he says, he easily overcame by introducing good management practices
(e.g. performance appraisals). In those early years Frank therefore sought
recognition from the lord/organization of himself as a manager, and it ap-
peared to be freely forthcoming. In recompense for his hard work he was
moved from one challenge to another. At this stage, we could say that he
has an identity (the manager) but not subjectivity, because he is in thrall to
the lord/organization, working hard to produce the goods that it will ap-
propriate as its own.
However, Frank eventually met his nemesis in the form of promotion to
a branch that required a great deal of refurbishment. Despite promises that
money for the necessary investment would be available it was not forthcom-
ing. Frank therefore refused to take that job further as he knew he could
not succeed at that particular task without sufficient funding. He was then
moved back to a branch of the organization near where he had started. Al-
though he was to manage several prestigious subsidiaries, he was never to
rise above the rank of branch manager.
There is in Frank’s account therefore a story of a manager who is also
a ‘bondsman’ who keeps working and working and working in order to
obtain recognition from the lord. His staff, just like the slave to the original
lord, cannot seem to give him the recognition he seeks. To achieve recogni-
tion from the organization, he works seven days a week, 52 weeks a year,
trying to fulfil what he imagines is the master’s desire. Staff, in this account,
are not so much slaves as the objects on which the manager must work
if he is to obtain the recognition he craves from the lord. The harder he
works, the harder the organization makes him work—the only recognition
 The Master’s Tale 47
it gives is of the managerial self as a hard worker (and therefore award
winner). When he fails to achieve what the organization desires, that is, to
turn around a failing branch without any funds for investment, they with-
hold recognition of any status above that which he has already achieved.
The result is that he carries on working extremely hard, perhaps trying to
reverse that decision, but doing the only thing he knows that could accord
him recognition, that is, constant hard work.
At this point, the dialectic seems to hit irresolvable buffers: the manager
just keeps on working as hard as possible to achieve a recognition that does
not arrive, so he does not attain subjectivity. He will never be seized with
terror at the recognition of his own freedom and will never engage in ‘the
simultaneous fabrication of ethical norms and the beratement of the bodily
condition of his own life’ (PLP:32). Although the organization may be in-
scribed on his body, it would appear not to be in his psyche. However, there
is something else happening: the organization allowed Frank to feel as if he
was free. His talk about this stage of his career is littered with references to
the autonomy that he desired and was apparently given. The organization
had a policy:

You’re the general manager, you run the operation, um, [pause] and
we’ll have regular meetings, and providing, you know, everything is
going well that’s it.

This organization was then sold to another company, and the new owner

believed the general manager should run the [branch], as had [the first
company]. [They said] ‘If you operate it and you meet your budget you
don’t get a lot of interference’. So that was fine. That went on for a few
years.

However, things were to change:

Unfortunately [the owner] had overstretched himself and had to sell

the company. They brought in a guy called Smith. ‘I think all the gen-
eral managers should be known by their Christian names, you know,
we’re a friendly [cough]’. Being a suspicious [person], I thought uh uh
this is going to be fun. The problem with him was that yes he was very
friendly, but he wasn’t going to consult, he was going to do it his way.
Um. [Pause.] That’s when I decided it was time to move on.

Frank does not break free of the master/lord/organization until he re-

alises that his autonomy is a sham. He had thought he was free but became
aware that he had been deluded when he became subject to a centralised sys-
tem of control. Within the terms of the dialectic, it is only at this point that
Frank, the manager, attains subjectivity. He went through a difficult period
48 On Being At Work
when he became more and more aware of how limited was his freedom to
act and then handed in his notice:

I was offered a position in a [big-city establishment]. There you are

responsible, but you have no authority. Very much like that. You know.
You are totally going to be responsible for everything in this place,
but you can’t make any decisions without asking. Dreadful. So I went
through, opened the [branch], got through the Millenium, and then
phoned [my wife] one day and says ‘look, this is not on’. Er, and that’s
we looked at 30 establishments up and down the country, er . . .

He left the company he had worked for for most of his adult life to set
up his own business. So Frank had thought he was free, and only when that
felt freedom was taken away did he realise he had never been free. In Hegel’s
terms, he attained that freedom which leads to subjectivity only after he had
left the lord/organization that had governed the first 30 years of his working
life. However, we will see that, as Butler points out, the lord/organization is
incorporated into the psyche of the freed manager/slave, so freedom contin-
ues to be illusionary.

ACT TWO

With freedom comes the recognition of one’s mortality and a fear of

death that invokes an ethical norm linked to the desire for eternal life.
This can harden into a domineering religious stance—the subject has to
fulfil certain laws if s/he is to earn a place in the next life.

We have seen that the manager is able to feel that s/he is free, but this is an
illusionary freedom. Frank, who here stands in for all managers, feels that
he has autonomy, but this is strictly circumscribed within limits set by the
organization: it is not therefore autonomy but the opposite, the doing of the
organization’s will.
The fear of death engendered under illusionary freedom is, I suggest,
that of the death not of the self but of the organization/lord. So long as
the manager represents the organization, so long as the organization is
inscribed on his/her body, then the manager has no identity of his/her own,
no self that can die, but only identification with an organization whose
death therefore is greatly feared (if the organization dies, the manage-
rial self dies). Indeed, the business pages of newspapers and management
journals, as well as academic texts and courses, repeat this message of
the imminent death of the organization (Grey, 2009) and how it can be
staved off only if the manager is sufficiently clever, resourceful and hard-
working. This suggests that fear of the death of the organization imposes
a dominant imperative towards maintaining the life of the organization.
 The Master’s Tale 49
The manager’s task is therefore that of working as hard as possible to en-
sure that the organization does not fail. The need to work hard, cleverly,
and resourcefully and indeed to find ways of manipulating staff identi-
ties, motivations, feelings and psyches (Hochschild, 1983; Alvesson and
Willmott, 2002) means that managers must work ever harder. Hard work
therefore becomes understood to be an ethical demand, because hard
work comes to equal the staving off of (organizational) death. So we have
a curious reversal when we insert a manager into the master/slave dialec-
tic: the organization comes to have an identity that, mediated through
the manager, requires that managers and staff work as hard as possible in
order to stave off the organization’s death.
However, Frank’s working life changed very little after he had set up his
own business. Asked what was the difference between running a large com-
pany and the much smaller one that he owned, he replied:

We probably do the same job, but it’s done on a more informal basis.
Where with a large company everything has to, you know, i’s dotted and
t’s crossed, you know. A lot of what we do here. We have had various
er appraisals on the place and they say, ‘God, it’s still got the discipline
of a large business, but it’s but it’s done, you know’. I don’t think in a
place like this you can sit down with a part-time member of staff and
say, ‘right, you fill out that three-page appraisal. Tell me what you think
and then come back to me, and I’ll spend an hour going through it with
you’. Where you will sit down and say, ‘look, you are really doing well
and but however if you just look at this and look at that’, so it tends to
be done less formally, but it’s still being done.

The distinction between ‘manager’ and ‘boss’, if there ever were one,
disappears. Frank has learned one way of running a business, and he has
taken that method into his new company. There is no freedom from the
relentless hours he must work if he is to stave off the death of that organiza-
tion, which, although he owns it, is his master. Although he may think he
is free, because he has no boss to whom he must report, this freedom is the
freedom to work as hard as ever: it is still illusionary freedom, as he is the
slave of his own company.

ACT THREE

With ethical norms comes a realisation of the difficulties in living up to

them. This invokes an unhappy consciousness that constantly judges
and berates itself. Self-beratement evolves into self-mortification, in
which the ‘continuing inadequacy of the self in relation to its transcen-
dent measure’ is painfully acknowledged. The wretch seeks ways out of
his predicament.
50 On Being At Work
Hegel’s argument is that through various stages, the unhappy consciousness
of the freed bondsman becomes a consciousness that constantly judges and
berates itself for its contradictoriness. The lord is internalised within the
psyche, from where it continues as the conscience of the freed slave and,
it follows, uses the criteria set by the master in its judgement of itself. The
wretch comes to rely on a mediator (such as a priest) to relieve the abject
consciousness of responsibility for its own actions (PLP:51), resulting in rit-
uals (such as fasting and mortification) designed to cleanse the body. Now,
the manager must look in two directions at once for recognition: just like the
bondsman, s/he desires recognition from the lord/organization for identity,
and, just like the lord, s/he must desire the recognition of the bondsman/
worker. What does the lord want of the manager, and what does the bonds-
man want of the manager, if they are to accord him/her recognition? The
manager cannot know the answers: all s/he can do is guess. In relation to the
master, s/he guesses that what is desired if s/he is to be accorded recognition
is that s/he work extremely hard, and so we see that Frank works extremely
hard. With regard to what the bondsman would require for recognition to
be given, Frank’s account suggests he imagines that staff judge him by the
criteria he sets himself, that is, the criteria set by the organization/lord—that
they will judge him on how hard he works, on his always being there and
always being in charge:

We probably [emphasis] because it is our own business, we are reluctant

to [have a break]. Um. Unfortunately on the few occasions we have tried
[laughs], it hasn’t been too successful. It would be nice, we were talking
the other night and saying, it would be nice just to go and, forget
two weeks holiday, but maybe three or four weekends away, um [long
pause] and that’s ideally what we would like. . . . But it’s just that
[exasperated sound] in a place like this the customers get used to seeing
you and even if you have a night away there’ll be something that’s said
when you come back. That in itself isn’t a problem, but it’s probably
because of the level of staff that we have, um, because you don’t have
the formal duty managers and the heads of department, when you go
away they they they tend to rely on you to guide them. Um. And in
theory they should be able to do it, but in practice they just seem to
kinda lose the plot somehow.

Frank is still judging himself in the same way as he did when employed by
a big corporation: he cannot take any time off because if he does, then he is
not devoting himself 100 percent to the organization. Indeed, he can justify
this on the grounds that staff are incapable of taking his place, but we must
pose the question whether any member of staff would ever be good enough:
does not Frank need them to be ‘poor’ so that he can justify to himself his
continuous presence in the organization? Again we see that the freedom the
bondsman earned is beyond his grasp: all he has is a simulacrum of freedom.
 The Master’s Tale 51
But there is another twist here: note how staff are seen to ‘kinda lose the
plot’. I asked if Frank ever saw people who, at 22, showed the promise he
had shown:

Er [pause], here, no, when I was in the corporate [business] yes. . . .

They were really ready to develop, but there was a process and that.
Because we have a lot of part-time staff, some are second jobs, some,
they don’t, I mean, recently I’ve sat some of them down and said look,
what about training courses, you know, but it’s a part-time job to them
and it’s not a not a career . . . we have tried to run various courses but
you know [sound of moaning].

Frank made few references to staff during the interview, but when I meet
him as a friend the topic of conversation always turns, almost obsessively, to
the problems he and his wife have with their staff and the idiosyncrasies of
their customers. Formally, on tape, none of those complaints were forthcom-
ing. The quotation just presented is as near as he came to voicing his thoughts
about staff. There is therefore a disjuncture here: when we talk as friends, he
gives one version of his life, but when he talked to me in the formal position
of academic researcher/interviewee, he gave another account. One aspect of
this, I have suggested, is that when I was in the formal position of ‘academic’
I was ostensibly in a position to recognise Frank as a ‘good manager’. It fol-
lows that when he discusses himself formally and on record as a manager
or business owner with someone whose formal position is that of a business
school academic and therefore supposedly with expertise in management, he
has to present himself as having ideal staff, because the ideal manager would
have only ideal staff, that is, people he has successfully developed, motivated
and rewarded and now successfully leads. In other words, Frank the zombie-
machine requires that his staff become zombie-machines if he is to be known
as ‘the boss’. That is, a sign of the success of the manager is his/her ability to
reduce staff to the status of zombie-machines.
However, there are other explanations, and one of these is to be found in
‘the plot’ that the staff are losing. They have lost the script of the play they are
supposed to be enacting, but what is this play? It would seem that it is a play
about emulating the example of the boss in working hard and that the lost
plot arises from failing to do that. Frank’s account suggests that he sees him-
self as the ideal manager: utterly devoted to the job, working very long hours,
implementing policies and practices designed to motivate staff and ensure
that everything works extremely well. His personal and family life is bound
up in the business: he and his wife work together, and many of their friends
work in the same field. In other words, Frank is a zombie-machine that eats,
sleeps and dreams the business. It is his major focus, he rarely takes time
off from it, and he is good at it. This is how he wants his staff to be, that is,
versions of himself, and these are the criteria by which he assesses them. But
they have lost the stage directions and do not, it seems, know how to do that.
52 On Being At Work
ACT FOUR

To become a subject requires that one absorb and enact requirements

that can cause one pain.

There are two constant themes throughout Frank’s theory about what
drives him; one is the need to do hard work, and the other is freedom. We
have seen that the freedom he thinks he has is illusory. First, as a manager
working in a big organization, he thought he had freedom to be an autono-
mous manager, making his own decisions. However, those decisions had
already been taken elsewhere. Second, Frank desired recognition as a suc-
cessful manager, and this required that he work very hard, efficiently and
effectively, within limits imposed by the organization/lord’s desire. Now, as
a business owner, he finds his freedom is as illusory as when he worked for
a large corporation: he is tied to the business, working just as hard as previ-
ously, but now he is his own judge, as he said himself, when asked about the
difference between being the owner and being a manager.

Eh, well, you as an owner you don’t, you you you put the pressure on
yourself. Um. If if if you think about it, if you if you work for a for a
corporate [company], you’ll have an area manager, you’ll have directors
and various specialist departments. They will dictate things like pur-
chasing policy, they will dictate things like um marketing policy, well,
when you’re an owner that’s all down to you. The only, as I always say,
the only person I have to convince once a year is the bank manager, you
know, as long as he’s happy, that’s it.

However, there is a chink in Frank’s self-image: the body is mortified in

that it becomes tired out. There are nascent plans for Frank and his wife to
sell the business. I asked why. Frank almost shouted as he said ‘probably’

Probably, [long pause] the hours you work. You’re you’re you’re then
beginning, you’re beginning at the end of the night to feel it, you know,
you kind of say, well, wait a minute. The other thing is when you see
your friends getting ill and dying round about you. . . . I think it’s now
time we have got to think that’s it, we’ve done our, because I’ve done
40 [years] . . . and at the end of the day you want to enjoy yourself
a bit.

Note how the long hours and the hard work are seen as part of a judge-
ment: how much should people work before they can be deemed to have
made a fair contribution? His statement is redolent of a prison sentence.
In many ways, we are seeing in Frank’s account Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’
(1930/2001), an injunction that one must work as hard as possible in order
to secure a place in heaven. The catch, however, is that one cannot know
if one is one of those chosen from the hard workers until after one’s death.
 The Master’s Tale 53
The imperative is therefore to devote oneself to one’s work in the hope of
being one of the chosen ones. Frank’s closing words suggest that the work
has not been enjoyable—pleasure will come when Frank is freed from the
constant responsibilities and pressures of the manager/boss.
Therefore, becoming managerial subjects requires that people attach
themselves to an identity that causes them to suffer: they must become zom-
bie-machines, be judged as such, and judge others as such. There is a ‘dialec-
tical reversal’ (PLP:58) here in that the requirement to work very hard and
with total devotion to the business becomes something that is not imposed
but is desired. ‘The instrument of suppression becomes the new structure
and aim of desire’ (PLP:60).

SUMMARY: THE MASTER/MANAGER/SLAVE DIALECTIC

By inserting the manager into the master/slave dialectic, we have moved

away somewhat from Hegel’s mythical scene of encounter, but a theory of
why managers require staff to be reduced to the zombie-machine, the non-
human, is starting to emerge. The account so far is this:

• Thesis: inserted between the master and the slave, the manager thinks
s/he is free but this is an illusion of freedom;
• Anti-thesis: deludedly thinking that s/he is free, the manager works
extremely hard to achieve recognition from the lord, under the im-
perative of an ethical norm which requires that managers be utterly
devoted to their work and that they prove their worthiness as man-
agers by managing staff who they ensure work just as hard and ef-
ficiently as the managers do. The manager must therefore become
a zombie-machine that works extremely hard at turning staff into
zombie-machines;
• Synthesis: the requirement to work hard becomes a (managerial) desire
to work hard. I work hard therefore I am (a manager).

To be a manager, to have identity, requires that the manager attach him/

herself to this subject position of something that is less than, or beyond, the
human, and thus be subjected and subjectified as zombie-machine.
In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler progressively develops her
understanding of each aspect of the lord/bondsman dialectic. I will now
follow the twists and turns of her arguments, expanding upon this initial
conclusion of managers as subjected and subjectified as zombie-machines,
requiring that staff emulate their performance. However, some of the in-
terpretations that follow may be speculative leaps triggered by thinking
through ways in which Butler’s arguments in relation to sex and gender
can be applied to developing a theory of managerial subjectivities. I will
therefore label the conclusions to each section as propositions. These are
not propositions designed to be tested but are the building blocks of theory
54 On Being At Work
(Sedgwick, 1991). Each one arises from interpretations Butler offers as she
expands, chapter by chapter, upon Hegel’s thesis of the master/slave or lord/
bondsman dialectic.

PROPOSITION ONE: BAD CONSCIENCE PROPELS THE BOSS

TO BE A ZOMBIE-MACHINE

How does bad conscience (which is a turning on the self) serve the social
regulation of the subject (PLP:66)? This is the question Butler next explores
so as to better understand the formation of the subject within a manda-
tory passionate attachment to subjection, where a repeated self-beratement
functions as that person’s ‘conscience’ (67). Drawing on both Nietzsche
and Freud, she argues that conscience is self-derived, that it arises not from
external punishment but from the venting of one’s aggression internally,
that is, against oneself. From Nietzsche (72) she can argue that man is a
promising being who establishes a continuity between a statement and an
act—what he says he will do he will do. This ‘protracted will, which is self-
identical through time and which establishes its own time, constitutes the
man of conscience.’ However, there can be no ‘I’ without a moral labouring
on the self: the ‘I’ takes itself as its own object, and it is this reflexive turning
on the self that produces ‘the metaphorics of psychic life’ (76).
Bad conscience is the perverse joy taken in persecuting oneself in the ser-
vice of, in the name of, morality. This arises from a prohibition against de-
sire and that desire’s turning back upon itself. This turning back upon itself
becomes the very inception, the very action of what is rendered entitative
through the term ‘conscience’. We can imagine this as a scene. There is a de-
sire for something, but, as the desirer reaches out towards what it wants, it
realises that it is in danger of breaking the norms of its culture and therefore
of losing the love of others, so it turns back on itself reflexively and chastises
itself for wanting what it should not want. Eventually, what it desires is this
self-chastising, because, according to Freud, prohibition reproduces the pro-
hibited desire, preserves and reasserts it in the very structure of renunciation
(81). Conscience is then figured ‘as a body which takes itself as its object,
forced into a permanent posture of negative narcissism or, more precisely, a
narcissistically nourished self-beratement’ (82).
There was no talk of desire for anything when Frank recounted his
life working for big corporations, but when he discussed his current po-
sition, a desire for time away from the company, a weekend break, was
articulated, as we saw earlier. Briefly, he said that ‘it would be nice just to
go and—forget two weeks holiday—but maybe three or four weekends
away . . . and that’s ideally what we would like’. Here, the desire, the turn-
ing outwards, is for time away, to be off duty, to be someone other than
the boss. But he then represents customers as a cause that prevents his
having a short break. If he is using the (imagined) responses of customers
 The Master’s Tale 55
to articulate his own concerns about being away from the business, then
we have this scene:
It is my desire to have time away from the business. But, as I reach out-
wards to fulfil that desire, I am pushed back against myself. I am a business
owner, and if I am not there then the business cannot function, or perhaps
even I myself cannot function. That could lead to the death of the business.
I therefore cannot leave it for even a short time as that would be to break the
law that the business must survive. Because I have to be physically present,
then I know that I am the boss, and I am certain in that identity.
My first proposition therefore is that the bad conscience of the boss or
the manager (this applies equally to those who work for others as managers
and those who run their own businesses) is the feeling that one is not doing
one’s duty if one is not physically there, running the business. In Freudian
terms, there must be a certain libidinal joy in this feeling—the boss both
wants to be there and does not want to be there, but his/her identifica-
tion with the business is such that s/he gets a thrill from being so attached
to something that any time away from it would be a source of guilt. This
is understood more clearly through the quote from Foucault which opens
Butler’s next chapter (p. 83): ‘My problem is essentially the definition of the
implicit systems in which we find ourselves prisoners; what I would like to
grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice without know-
ing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent’. The boss, it
seems, is a prisoner within his/her own identity.

PROPOSITION TWO: THE MANAGER IS SEDUCED

BY AN EROTICS OF POWER

From Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Butler writes, we get the under-
standing that we can become autonomous only by becoming subjected to
a power and thus radically dependent on that power. Foucault saw sub-
jectivation taking place through the body (and we saw with Frank how he
felt the need to be physically present in the workplace). Butler interweaves
Foucault’s ideas with those of Freud and Lacan to expand upon Foucault’s
arguments about the prison:

There is no prison prior to its materialization; its materialization is co-

extensive with its investiture with power relations; and materiality is the
effect and gauge of this investment. The prison comes to be only within
the field of power relations, more specifically, only to the extent that it
is saturated with such relations and that such a saturation is formative
of its very being’. (PLP:91)

As with the prison, then so with the organization: it is saturated with

power relations, as is the body of the boss, the materialization of which, just
56 On Being At Work
like that of the prisoner, is co-extensive with that of the materialization and
investiture of the organization. Where Butler asks about resistance to the
disciplinary apparatus of the modern state (101), I ask about the disciplin-
ary apparatus of the organization. This leads to the question of how manag-
ers turn the disciplinary apparatus of the organization to their own ends, to
achieving their will to power or what I suggest is an erotics of power over
others. Managers have the whole panoply of organizational law (Harding,
2003) to assist them: they can discipline those who fail to achieve their ob-
jectives or break any organizational rules and regulations. They have brute,
direct power over others.
This power, I suggest, has a libidinal energy arising from managerial power
to require others in the organization to do one’s bidding. Such power can
substitute for Butler’s discussion of sexuality in The Psychic Life of Power.
That is, where Butler suggests that there is something about the relationship
of sexuality to power that conditions and makes possible resistance (101),
I suggest the fruitfulness of thinking about the boss’s equally strong libidinal
investment in power over others. We could call this an erotics of power.
Proposition Two is that there is an erotics of power within organizations,
which is a power that seduces managers but to which they are also sub-
jected, because they too have to do the bidding (of the organization). That
power which managers desire therefore is the very means of controlling and
subjecting managers; the boss desires that power over others to which s/he
is him/herself subjected.
This leads us back to Butler’s main thesis in The Psychic Life of Power—
‘how are we to understand the disciplinary cultivation of an attachment to
subjection?’ (102). She answers this by drawing on Freud’s argument of the
subject emerging through its formation of attachment to prohibition and
Foucault’s analysis of the formation of a (sexual) subject through regimes of
power that both prohibit desire and at the same time form and sustain that
very (prohibited) desire. That is, in order to be, to have identity, to be a sub-
ject, we are passionately attached to subjection, to the name we are called
and through which identity is granted. Althusser’s thesis on interpellation
helps understand the mechanisms in operation here.

PROPOSITION THREE: SUBJECTION THROUGH

INTERPELLATION REQUIRES THAT THE BOSS WORK
HARDER AND HARDER TO BE A BOSS

Althusser’s theory of interpellation is influential throughout much of Butler’s

work, and it is in The Psychic Life of Power that she develops his thesis
in some depth. Althusser, like Hegel, illuminates his arguments through the
use of a mythical scene: a police officer calls out to a passer-by ‘Hey you’.
The passer-by turns in response to that hail and, in turning, takes on an
identity, that of the criminal.
 The Master’s Tale 57
Butler points out (106–7) that this exemplary allegory literalizes the pro-
cess of subjectification: it encapsulates a demand that one must align oneself
with the law (that is, a generalized rather than state law) if one is to be an ‘I’.
In replying ‘Here I am’ to that call, one becomes a guilt-ridden subject able to
reflect on its self. That is, Butler takes further the concept of conscience in the
constitution of the self: to be a subject, that is, to be subjected and subjecti-
fied, requires that one have a conscience, defined as ‘the psychic operation
of a regulatory norm’ (5) or, more colloquially, an internal voice with which
one berates oneself. The law which governs the manager, as seen in Frank’s
account, is that of a demand to work hard. The manager, it follows, is defined
by this law and is dependent on it for his/her existence: the person who does
not work hard is not a manager. Thus, the manager’s social existence or exis-
tence as a subject, in Butler’s terms, is located in a reprimand that establishes
subordination as the price of subjectivation (112). Existence as a subject ‘can
be purchased only through a guilty embrace of the law, where guilt guarantees
the intervention of the law and, hence the continuation of the subject’s exis-
tence’. In Frank’s case, perhaps it is a customer who climbs onto the police of-
ficer’s podium and shouts out, ‘Hey you, why were you away from your work
this weekend?’ Indeed, Frank himself notes that when he returns after a rare
weekend away, ‘things are said’ by customers. Frank turns, and in turning he
becomes guilty of the crime of forgetting his managerial responsibilities.
It follows that there is a need to prove one’s innocence, and Althusser
argues that this is done through labour. As Butler interprets his arguments,
‘To acquit oneself “conscientiously” is . . . to construe labor as a confession
of innocence, a display or proof of guiltlessness in the face of the demand for
confession implied by an insistent accusation’ (118). Frank, the boss, claims
innocence through working hard: I work hard; therefore I am a boss. To be-
come a subject therefore involves: accusation; necessity to provide proof of
innocence (through one’s labour); execution of that proof (labouring); and
subjectification within and through the terms of the law. ‘To become a “sub-
ject” is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent’
(188). Importantly, because this declaration is not a single act but a status
incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the
process of acquitting oneself of a crime which, in Frank’s case, is idleness.
There is here ‘a lived simultaneity of submission and mastery’ (117)
which I interpret as meaning that one becomes a master at achieving one’s
own submission, in each of the incessantly repeated acts of turning towards
what Butler argues is a voice that need not be present, need not indeed be ar-
ticulated, but is there within the norms and laws of a culture. One becomes
a subject through mastery of the skills of submission which requires not sim-
ply acting according to a set of rules, but also embodying and reproducing
those rules as rituals in one’s actions (119). Through such rituals a ‘belief is
spawned which is then incorporated into the performance in its subsequent
operations’ (ibid.). There is in all this a compulsion to ‘acquit oneself’, so
the subjectified subject is an anxious subject.
58 On Being At Work
Frank recounts an incident in his early career that can now be seen to
inaugurate him as ‘the boss’. He had then been an under-manager for about
18 months:

After about a year and a half, this is very interesting, um, [my boss]
called me into the office and said, ‘it’s time you moved on’. I said,
‘sorry’. He said, ‘it’s time you moved on’. He says, ‘If I’ve been off duty
and I come back and you’ve done everything then I worry about my
position so it’s time you moved’. [Laughter] Which I thought was a very
nice way of putting it.

We have here the following ‘very interesting’ scene:

• The voice of authority shouts out, ‘hey you, come into my office—it’s
time you moved on’;
• The passer-by turns round, feeling guilty. Is he being given the sack?
Will he lose his job? He asks a question that is also an apology for the
crime he is being accused of: ‘Sorry?’;
• But he is proven innocent because of his labours (he has done every-
thing the manager should do), and he is therefore equipped to be a
manager.

I suggest that this is the scene of inauguration of the manager, one in

which the difference between ‘manager’ and ‘worker’ is achieved. To be
called ‘the manager’ is to always have to prove oneself as a manager, and
this is done through constant work. But the first two propositions suggest
that the name ‘manager’ also incorporates secret thrills and pleasures that
will introduce guilt or bad conscience into the managerial identity. This is
a deviation from what the identity of ‘manager’ should incorporate, and
therefore even harder work must be undertaken to overcome the guilty plea-
sures. Proposition Three is therefore: to be proven innocent in the court of
law of the boss’s conscience requires ever-greater focus on working hard at
fulfilling one’s managerial duties.

PROPOSITION FOUR: MANAGERIAL MELANCHOLY ARISES

FROM REFUSED SYBARITISM, OR GRIEVING
FOR THE LOSS OF PLEASURE

The final, powerful chapters of The Psychic Life of Power form ‘a certain
cultural engagement with psychoanalytical theory that belongs neither to
the fields of psychology nor to psychoanalysis, but which nevertheless seeks
to establish an intellectual relationship to those enterprises’ (138). In them
Butler develops a thesis of the melancholy induced in the psyche through
its having to give up potential sexed/gendered identities. I am not exploring
 The Master’s Tale 59
sex/gender in this chapter, but Butler’s arguments provoke the question of
what is given up, what objects are lost, to the boss when s/he is under a
compulsion to work, and work, and work. I suggest (perhaps because of my
own desires) that what is given up, the opposite of hard work, is sybaritism.
The term (according to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybaris, ac-
cessed 13 July 12]) is synonymous with pleasure and luxury, and originates
in a Greek city, Sybaris, which in the sixth century BCE was so rich that it
was widely envied and admired. This contrasts markedly with Christianity’s
imperatives, as discussed by Hegel, Althusser and Weber, echoes of the last
of these resonating, I have suggested, through Frank’s account. In other
words, Christianity’s influence on Western European subjectivities is that
they emerge out of bad conscience; I am suggesting (and this is Proposition
Four) that what is suppressed by the internalised judgemental eye is the wish
for pleasure, laziness and self-indulgence.
The argument is this (and I paraphrase Butler for much of this argument).
From Freud (PLP:134) comes the thesis that the lost object haunts the ego
as one of its constitutive identifications. That is, what is given up does not
disappear but is internalised, although the regret or grief over what has been
lost means that this is a melancholic incorporation. For Butler, what is given
up is the possibility of different gendered identities and different loves. For
the boss, I am arguing that what is given up is indulgence, pleasure and en-
joyment. The memory of these, of what might be, is, however, incorporated,
and their loss is a melancholic loss.
Second, just as heterosexuality (and sexed identity) is cultivated through
prohibitions such as restrictions on whom one can love, so managerial iden-
tities are cultivated through what cannot be done (stop working and start
playing). This is because, just as becoming a man requires repudiating femi-
ninity (137), becoming a manager or a boss requires repudiating everything
that is other to the requirement for hard work. One’s secret, guilty desires,
those which one cannot allow to be articulated, are, however, projected
onto one’s other. The male knows he is male (rational, logical, transcendent)
because he is not woman (emotional, close to nature); the manager knows
s/he is manager (disciplined zombie-machine) because s/he is not worker
(undisciplined, self-indulgent, needing to be controlled). But

One of the most anxious aims of his desire will be to elaborate the differ-
ence between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install proof
of that difference. His wanting will be haunted by a dread of being what
he wants, so that his wanting will also always be a kind of dread. (137)

That is, staff become for the boss the receptacle of his/her repudiated
desires: the manager dreads giving in to his/her own desire for pleasure and
indolence, cannot articulate that dread wish to be lazy, but installs proof
of the difference between him/herself as manager and the not/manager, the
staff, by seeing in staff those repudiated aspects of him/herself. Where s/he
60 On Being At Work
is hard-working, s/he sees staff as trying to avoid work; where s/he is com-
petent, s/he sees them as incompetent; and so on. This puts the manager in
a psychic quandary. If it is the mark of the good manager to lead, develop,
train, control and motivate staff so that they work hard as zombie-machines
but the manager also needs to see staff as poorly disciplined and slothful,
then the manager is in a double bind. If his/her staff become controlled,
highly motivated and hard-working, then they will not carry his/her repudi-
ated desires and s/he will feel him/herself to be a failure for having to admit
to that desire for pleasure. But so long as staff embody (in the manager’s
eyes) those despised aspects of the managerial self, they cannot be hard-
working, and so s/he will have failed as a manager. All s/he can do to escape
from this bind is to push him/herself to work ever harder.
However, Butler’s argument is that such loss brings about a ‘disavowed
grief’ (139), resulting in a melancholia for what cannot be grieved (in our
case, freedom from the necessity of constant hard work). This melancholia,
Butler argues, becomes part of the operation of regulatory power (143),
because such a radical refusal suggests that an identification has, at some
level, taken place, but the disavowal of that identification results in the over-
determination of the identification (149). In other words, the boss recognises
him/herself at some level as someone who desires to be lazy, indulgent and
free from responsibilities, so, to disavow him/herself of that identification,
works ever harder to prove that s/he is not that which s/he, at one level,
desires to be.
Melancholia returns Butler (168) to the figure of the ‘turn’ as a founding
trope in the discourse of the psyche, that is, the turning back on oneself and
the berating of the self for its failure to achieve normative ideals. In Hegel,
turning back upon oneself comes to signify the ascetic and sceptical modes
of reflexivity that mark the unhappy consciousness; in Nietzsche, turning
back on oneself suggests a retracting of what one has said or done or a
recoiling in shame in the face of what one has done. In Althusser, the turn
that the pedestrian makes towards the voice of the law is at once reflexive
(the moment of becoming a subject whose self-consciousness is mediated by
the law) and self-subjugating. For Freud, the ego turns back upon itself once
love fails. But it is melancholia, Butler argues (191), that links the psyche
to the norms of social regulation. This is because the power that is imposed
on the self and animates its emergence as an ‘I’, that power which makes
selfhood possible, at that very instant also imposes limits upon selfhood, so
in order to be one must sacrifice possibilities for the self one could be, and
what is sacrificed is grieved (198). Thus, the discourses of a culture that
make possible ‘the boss’ or ‘the manager’ provide the motive power that
constitutes the identity of ‘the manager’, but at the same time they impose
norms of what the boss can or must do if s/he is to sustain that identity as
the boss. To be a manager requires giving up possibilities for joy, leisure,
self-indulgence, play and so on, and at the same time it requires that the
manager bar staff from sybaritic pleasures.
 The Master’s Tale 61
The figure of the ‘turn’ in management thus becomes something like the
following, not quite mythical scene:

A manager is walking down the corridors of an organization and sees

a group of staff by the photocopier machine, conversing and laughing.
S/he stops, desiring to join in the conversation and the pleasure in col-
leagues’ company. ‘Hey you, you human being’, they seem to have been
calling out, ‘come and join us’. But they become silent and turn to get-
ting the photocopying done. S/he realises s/he has misheard the voice:
it had been drowned by his/her presence, which had said, ‘hey you, get
on with your work’. S/he sees him/herself reflected in the backs now
turned towards him/her: his/her conscience is clear because staff are
busily working; his/her conscience is not clear because the pleasure of
genial company has been lost, and s/he is the cause of that loss.

Proposition Four is therefore: what is suppressed by the internalised

judgemental eye is an injunction to enjoy and indulge oneself. To be a man-
ager or a boss requires that one sacrifice possibilities for pleasure, self-
indulgence, and so on. This is an ungrievable loss which must be guarded
against, and it becomes projected onto the not-I, the worker. The manager
must strive to ensure that staff do not enjoy themselves save when pleasure
becomes a tool for control (Fleming, 2005), and this at the same time en-
sures that the boss is a melancholic subject.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A THEORY OF

MANAGERIAL SUBJECTIVITIES

In this chapter I used the life story told me by a boss who had spent 30 years
as a manager before setting up his own business, and I have read his ac-
count with, through and alongside Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power. This
has led to an outline of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in which I inserted
the manager in between master and slave and to the development of four
propositions designed to expand upon the stages within the dialectic. These
together lead to the following theory of the subjectivity of the boss/manager
and why the manager desires or requires that staff become zombie-machines
and less than human.
Managers think they are free, but this is an illusory freedom. Even when
they set up their own businesses, they are governed by cultural norms and
discourses that both make the identity of manager possible and place lim-
its upon what can be done if the attempt at the impossible identity of self
as manager is to be sustained. Within those cultural norms is a require-
ment that managers work, and work, and work (that is, become zombie-
machines). The person who does not work hard cannot be a manager.
Hard work is therefore an ethical norm. Any desire for a break from work
62 On Being At Work
provokes feelings of guilt (bad conscience) and fear of the failure of the
company. This drives the manager to work even harder. However, there is
a thrill of pleasure in the knowledge that the boss appears to be indispens-
able, along with an erotic thrill of power over others. These contradict the
definition of what it is to be a manager, to be called by that name, and they
induce guilt (bad conscience). Managers therefore have to prove that they
are not guilty of failing to fulfil the normative ideal of ‘the manager’, and to
do this they have to work ever harder at fulfilling their managerial duties.
However, this drive to refuse all sybaritic pleasures, to disown one’s capac-
ity for joy and pleasure in things other than work, produces the managerial
self as a zombie-machine suffering an ungrievable loss, the loss of pleasure.
Unable to indulge in pleasure at work, managers are driven to ensure that
no one else can enjoy what they cannot themselves enjoy.
To be a good manager requires that staff work very hard, efficiently and
with devotion to the business (staff must become zombie-machines): staff
who do not do this testify to the manager’s failure to motivate, lead, con-
trol or in other ways get them to perform. However, staff are receptacles
of managers’ repudiated selves, that is, their desire for sybaritic pleasures,
and so managers have to seek to drive those pleasures out of staff. They
are therefore in a double bind, because whichever of these tasks they fulfil
negates the other. The only way out is to work harder, and thereby sustain
the norm and the status quo. Management is therefore a melancholic func-
tion where the success that is desired by managerial subjects is impossible
to attain but what is lost in the striving cannot be regained. The power that
subjectifies the managerial subject, which facilities the identity of ‘manager’,
thus subjects the manager within a melancholic subject position.
In terms of the distinction between labour and work introduced in Chapter
One, there is no distinction for the manager. That is, to labour as a manager
is to work on oneself as manager, and thus to be a manager is to work on
oneself.
This is a theory of how the norms that govern managerial identities play
out in practice. It is not necessarily a description of how all managers actu-
ally behave all of the time, and indeed Butler illuminates ways in which such
normative requirements can be evaded or even fail in their enactment. There
may be misrecognition in interpellation when the name is a social category
such as ‘manager’, because it then is a signifier that can be interpreted in
a number of ways (96). The strict connection between name and identity
may also be derailed in the imaginary, which disorders and contests what
is attempted in the symbolic. Indeed, she suggests that identity always fails.
Further, Foucault’s thesis on resistance as an effect of the very power that
it is said to oppose is important (PLP:98). There is the dual possibility of
being both constituted by the law and an effect of resistance to the law. For
Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and
these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations (99).
The iterability of the performativity of the subject allows a ‘nonplace’ for
 The Master’s Tale 63
subversion, where the reembodying of the subjectivating norm can redirect
its normativity (99). Butler suggests (100) that the strategic question for
Foucault is: how can we work the power relations by which we are worked,
and in what direction? Finally, a failure of interpellation may mark the path
towards ‘a more open, even more ethical, kind of being, one of or for the
future’ (131). There are therefore possibilities for change.
What I have aimed to do in this chapter is not to demonise the manager
but to try to understand the imperatives that constitute managerial subject
positions and impose limitations on what managers can do if they are to
sustain that identity of manager. In Chapters Three and Four I will show
how people evade or sidestep requirements about how they should act as
zombie-machines and, in so doing, constitute the self as human. I have not
done that with the manager. Partly this is because Frank’s account is one
of relentless hard work, and numerous statistics show that he is not alone:
the length of managers’ working weeks is a cause for concern (Ford and
Collinson, 2011). But also there is within his account a sense that this person
is a good man. He rescued his mother from a violent husband, rose out of
the slums to become a successful businessman and enjoys the generosity
that comes from running a successful business. My concern is how that
person is, when in the subject position of the manager, so driven, and driven
to drive others. If we are to move towards 21st-century organizations in
which domination, exploitation, aggressive control over people’s lives and
the reduction of working selves to disposable pieces of furniture are to be
challenged, we need to find ways of including managers within the category
‘human’. Indeed, it will be impossible to change the terms within which
working lives are lived without doing so. This chapter therefore finishes
with a question that cannot be answered here: how do we change the norms
within and through which managerial identities are constituted and mana-
gerial self-making occurs?
3 The Bondsman’s Tale

In Chapter One I drew a distinction between labour and work: the former
involves undertaking the tasks required to fulfil the terms of the job and is
undertaken by a zombie-machine; the latter is concerned with constituting
selfhood in which the status of the self as human is claimed. Chapter Two
introduced the boss my sister Julie might meet if she found paid employ-
ment. I argued that bosses are melancholic subjects who, seeking recogni-
tion and identity, are driven to work themselves harder and harder and
harder. It is imperative for them, in their quest for managerial selfhood, that
staff do likewise. In this chapter I explore the encounter between manager/
lord/master and worker/bondsman/slave from the latter’s perspective. The
person whose working-life story informs this chapter is not and has never
been one of Frank’s staff, and rather than delving further into The Psychic
Life of Power I am now drawing for inspiration on Butler’s Antigone’s
Claim (2000), a book that also informs the next chapter. Antigone’s Claim
explores another mythical encounter, but it focuses in some depth on the
person who faces the lord/master rather than the lord/master him- (or in-
creasingly) herself. It is a scene in which recognition is refused and carnage
follows. The greater part of this chapter focuses on The Antigone and how
Butler’s reading can illuminate a person’s account of his/her working life; it
then returns to the scene of recognition.
Antigone’s Claim is an analysis of Sophocles’s ancient tragedy The An-
tigone. It may seem peculiar to turn to an ancient Greek tragedy to under-
stand 21st-century organizations, but I suggest that there is much to be
learned from them that management and organization theorists have not
yet touched on. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle are
referenced by management theorists, especially in discussions of business
ethics (for example, Parker, 2003; Rämo, 2004; ten Bos, 2003), but their
near-contemporaries, the dramatists Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides,
are rarely so. There are a few references by organizational analysts to
the gods who inform the works of these earliest playwrights, including
Cummings (1996), Handy (1995), who developed a typology based loosely
on Greek gods, and Gabriel (2003), who looked to Homer’s Odyssey for
illumination. But, apart from a tangential recourse to Oedipus by means of
 The Bondsman’s Tale 65
the Oedipal complex (Stein, 2007), the tragedies remain largely unexplored
by organization researchers. In this we differ markedly from many disci-
plines, for philosophers, cultural theorists, psychoanalytical theory, feminist
theory, political science and film and theatre studies have found in ancient
Greek tragedies a fecundity of thought that, though 2,500 years old, assists
the development of important insights into contemporary issues. I therefore
start this chapter’s discussion by outlining the influence of ancient Greek
tragedy in the contemporary academy. I then introduce Shakeel, whose
story becomes the bondsman’s response to the boss’s desire that he, feck-
less being that the manager thinks he is, work and work and work, like a
zombie-machine. An outline of The Antigone is included as a short appen-
dix for those unfamiliar with the tragedy. The play has three acts, a struc-
ture mimicked in the main part of this chapter. The theory which emerges
suggests that employees do not require recognition from the manager if they
are to have selfhood, although the manager, as we have seen, requires recog-
nition from staff. Staff seek recognition elsewhere.
But first, I justify the reasons for turning to Greek tragedy for under-
standing contemporary organizations.

THE INFLUENCE OF ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA IN

THE CONTEMPORARY ACADEMY

Anyone who has eaten popcorn and sipped a cola (or, in this grannie’s case,
drunk a cup of tea) at the cinema with young relatives watching Percy
Jackson, Lightning Thief or Clash (then Wrath) of the Titans will have seen
Greek dramas and mythologies re-presented to 21st-century audiences, so
will have witnessed the continuing circulation of these ancient stories. A
more intellectual reading was offered by Freud (1915–17/1973), who, of
course, recognised in the Oedipus tragedy an issue he thought fundamental
to the entry of every (male) child into the social world. Other psychoanalytic
theorists, of the stature of Lacan (2002) and Irigaray (1985), have followed
his lead and turned to ancient Greece for inspiration and understanding.
More recently, Mitchell (2000) drew on the Medusa to fill in a major gap in
Freudian thinking.
Philosophers turn in a major way to the Greek tragedies: Most influential
of all, perhaps, is Hegel’s interpretation of The Antigone. He draws on the
play, albeit without referring to it by its name, in the section of Phenom-
enology of Spirit (1977) entitled ‘The Ethical Order’, in a discussion entitled
‘Ethical Action. Human and Divine Knowledge. Guilt and Destiny’. His
analysis revolves around the distinction between divine and human law:
the former is that of the family, the household gods and the female; the lat-
ter that of the public realm, of rationality, objectivity and masculinity. He
writes (1977, para. 475, p. 287) that ‘Human law in its universal existence
is the community, in its activity in general is the manhood of the community,
66 On Being At Work
in its real and effective activity is the government’. This law is dependent
upon the Family, which is ‘presided over by womankind’ (1977, para. 475,
p. 288), and Antigone, it is clear, becomes his model for womankind. Wom-
ankind threatens ‘the earnest wisdom of mature age’ that is ‘indifferent to
purely private pleasures and enjoyments’ (ibid.) and thinks only of the com-
munity. The confrontation between King Creon and his niece, Antigone,
therefore marks for Hegel the emergence of the distinctive realms of the
public and private. Creon insists that his loyalty to his kin should be subor-
dinated to his loyalty to the state; if not, he takes the denigrated female po-
sition. Antigone, the female, represents the family, its role being to provide
sons who will support the state while keeping the female safely outside the
public realm (a position Antigone notably refuses). Hegel thus interpreted
Sophocles as articulating the emergence of, and the difference between, the
public realm of the state and the private realm of the family, issues that con-
tinue to perplex 21st-century societies (Stroud, 2005) and that would seem
applicable to organizations as public realms.
The Antigone proved similarly influential in the works of Fichte, Holderlin
and Kierkegaard (Steiner, 1984). In the wonderfully titled On Germans and
Other Greeks, Schmidt (2001) explores the influence of Greek tragedy in the
work not only of Hegel and Holderlin but also of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
For Schmidt (2001), the importance of the tragedies lies in the assumption,
derived from Plato and Aristotle, that tragic art informs the development of
ethical and political thought.
Feminist theorists find emancipatory potential in the tragedies. Kristeva
(1982) argued that Sophocles was representing the death of matriarchal
culture following its overthrow by patriarchy, demonstrating that the
current gender order is not immutable. Jacobs (2006), inspired by The
Oresteia, identifies in Athena’s mother, Metis, swallowed by Zeus after
he had raped her, a symbol that contributes to development of a feminist
agenda for the 21st century. Scott (2005) has a similar intention: she also
turns to the Oresteia, and specifically to the matricidal Electra, to achieve
her aim.
Butler and other feminist thinkers ask, in reference to Freud’s choice of
Oedipus rather than Antigone as his archetype for the psyche, what is fore-
closed by ‘rendering one imaginative device and narrative an authoritative
canon’ (Pollock, 2006:89) and what would be made possible using differ-
ent imaginative devices. The artist Bracha Ettinger’s response (in Pollock,
2006), arising from her interpretation of The Antigone, is a matrixial border
space, where matrix, or womb, countermands phallic imaginaries. That is,
‘the condition of being humanly generated and born is an ethical ground ab
initio, a form of linking . . . that appears transgressive to a phallic autism
when its archaic foundations are activated and invoked politically, ethi-
cally, aesthetically, symbolically as the basis for human thought and action’
(Pollock, 2006:104). In other words, rather than psychoanalytical theory’s
isolated ego, the matrixial border space emphasises the co-emergence of
 The Bondsman’s Tale 67
subjectivity and thus connectedness and, it follows, a responsibility towards
the other and possibilities of a new organizational ethics.
Pointers towards such an ethics are given by Chanter (2010), who sug-
gests that tragedy can be used to bring about an epistemic shift through
identifying and registering how regimes of suffering render some forms
of pain meaningless: we need new ways of understanding what suffering
means. Sjöholm (2010) looks to The Antigone and to Sappho for an alter-
native to Foucault’s history of Eros. Her argument is that we should dis-
tinguish between active/passive, rather than male/female, and imagine an
erotics that goes beyond sex, a suggestion I drew on in the previous chapter
to argue about an erotics of power. In the same volume, Bernstein’s (2010)
sympathetic rereading of Hegel’s account of The Antigone provides a rec-
ognition of an absence in Greek ethical life not only of any concept of a
self independent of its roles but also an absence of knowledge of any self
expressing a singularizing ‘who’ through its actions. Bernstein argues that it
is the woman, Antigone, who carries for Hegel the task of instigating the ‘I’
or the ‘me’, separate from a collectivity of roles.
Through popular culture, as noted earlier, we are invited, again and
again, to explore ancient Greek myths. The focus of this chapter, The An-
tigone, has been used by dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht (1984) and Jean
Anouilh (1951/2000) to help explain the incomprehensible in the 20th cen-
tury. For artists, as the frontispiece of Seamus Heaney’s (2004) verse transla-
tion explains, the play explores how ‘language speaks truth to power, then
and now’. Theatres regularly hold performances of the plays: in the north of
England, where I live, I was able to see the Oresteia one month and in the
next watch a live transmission into cinemas of London’s National Theatre’s
staging of Phèdre.
The reasons for the continued circulation of these ancient texts have been
debated. McCarthy (2003) argues that social scientists in Europe peer at the
world through a Greek lens, whether they know it or not, for Marx, Weber
and Durkheim were all heavily influenced by their studies of the dramatists
and philosophers of ancient Greece and absorbed those ideas into their own
theories. Steiner (1984), meanwhile, suggests not only that their continuing
resonance lies in their having articulated nearly all of the major problems
that continue to bedevil Western nations but also that, in that articulation,
they entered these problems into the syntax and semantics of European lan-
guages. Foley (1995), however, is adamant that the continuing relevance
of the Greek tragedies to ways of thinking through intractable problems
of the modern, industrialised and postindustrialised world lies in the way
they break free of the linearity of writing and thought. They offer ‘multiple
codes’ that educate us in appreciating ambiguity and ‘refusal of easy closure’
(Foley, 1995:131).
Greek dramas ‘work’ because they focus on families and their members:
they propel us into identification with individuals thrown into the most ap-
palling of circumstances. Our response, if the actors are skilful, is visceral.
68 On Being At Work
After Medea has murdered her children in an act of desperate revenge on her
unfaithful husband or Queen Agavë has ripped the heart from the chest of
her son in The Bacchae, one leaves the theatre with the breath punched out of
one. Philosophers, meanwhile, or, more precisely, those rare ‘master readers’
(Steiner, 1984:291) who bring together ‘text and consciousness’ offer inspired
interpretations of the plays, casting light on current dilemmas and, in their
own way, take away the breath with the brilliance of their analyses. They
offer different, insightful ways for understanding organizations and working
lives in the 21st century. As Foucault suggested when looking at other aspects
of ancient Greek culture, they allow us to ‘think differently than one thinks,
and perceive differently than one sees’, and this is ‘absolutely necessary if one
is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (Foucault, 1985:8).

INTRODUCING SHAKEEL AND ANTIGONE

I am not suggesting that Shakeel’s life is in any way a tragedy, although

it is in many ways an account of triumph over adversity. Rather, I want
to place him analogously opposite Frank, to explore how the slave might
respond in the conditions of 21st-century working lives to the boss’s de-
sire for recognition. The story of a working life that Shakeel tells us was
of himself, age 30, then working in a mail-sorting office (he has since
emigrated to Canada). Originally from Pakistan, he had come to Britain
four years previously. He was employed doing manual work in a mail-
sorting office but has a master’s degree in the sciences. He is a gay man
working in a still-homophobic working environment. His ethnicity, edu-
cation and sexuality would seem to place him multiply ‘outside’. His ac-
count, read through a Sophoclean lens, suggests something very different.
It shows that Shakeel the worker speaks in the idiom of management, that
he weaves his way in and through spaces and places in which managers are
intruders and spaces and places of which management are unaware. He
refuses to conform to the position of the bondsman/slave, as he demands
recognition of himself as separate and distinct from the manager/master/
lord. He refuses recognition to the manager.
Butler (2000) uses The Antigone and influential commentaries by Hegel
and Lacan to analyse issues surrounding ‘gay marriage’, thus putting into
question laws concerning kinship (a topic I will return to in the next chap-
ter). In so doing, she shows that it is not the state that is the maker of the law
about who can and cannot marry; rather, it is the law that informs Lacan’s
and Hegel’s analyses, an unwritten general law, the law of the Other, operat-
ing at the level of the psyche and perpetuated through philosophical and psy-
choanalytical works. Although Butler’s focus is upon kinship, the questions
she asks of the play are questions that can be fruitfully applied to studies
of workplaces. This again involves not giving an exposition of her account
but, rather, drawing on it to delve more deeply into the interpellative scene
 The Bondsman’s Tale 69
in which manager and worker emerge. For example, Butler asks (2000:5)
two questions. The first is: can there be kinship without the support and
mediation of the state, and can there be a state without the family as its sup-
port and mediation? The second is: can the terms sustain their independence
from each other? Her answers are that state and kinship are in a chiasmic
relationship; neither can exist without the other, whilst, at the same time,
state and kinship are articulated through the law of the Father. This analysis
is what renders Butler’s Sophoclean thesis so useful for organization theory,
for it allows us to think of managers and staff experiencing a similar mutual
dependence but within cultural laws that prescribe and proscribe possibili-
ties of being, doing, thinking and, it follows, giving recognition.

Scene One: The Encounter

Creon, King of Thebes, has issued a decree that the body of his nephew,
Polyneices, son of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta,
shall remain unburied following an act of treachery against the state. Twice,
the guards report, someone has broken that law, and they have now dragged
the lawbreaker before the king. The criminal is his niece Antigone, sister of
Polyneices. The penalty for breaking this law is death by stoning: Creon
appears caught on the cusp between family and state—is his loyalty to his
kingship or his kin? Antigone has no such quandaries:

Antigone: Would you do more than simply take and kill me?
Creon: I will have nothing more, and nothing less.
Antigone: Then why delay? To me no word of yours
Is pleasing—God forbid it should be so! –
And everything in me displeases you.
Yet what could I have done to win renown
More glorious than giving burial
To my own brother? These men too would say it,
Except that terror cows them into silence.
A king has many a privilege: the greatest,
That he can say and do all that he will.
Creon: You are the only one in Thebes to think it!
Antigone: These think as I do—but they dare not speak.
Creon: Have you no shame, not to conform with others?
Antigone: To reverence a brother is no shame.
(Sophocles, 2008, p. 18, lines 499–511)

Butler’s aim in her reading of The Antigone is to generate a ‘productive

crisis’ (Butler, 2000:29) between Hegel’s and Lacan’s readings, and it is this
70 On Being At Work
‘crisis’ that facilitates our using The Antigone for theorising organizations.
Rather than state and families, our reading is of organizations and the peo-
ple who work in them. In this reading, organizations are analogous to the
state, as are managers to Creon and staff to Antigone. However, we rarely
see in organizations such direct encounters between a defiant individual and
a manager as that which we see between Antigone and Creon. Such a direct
encounter may be missing from Shakeel’s account, but the organization is
a scene of repeated encounters in which master and bondsman face each
other, either directly or obliquely.
I had asked Shakeel to describe the previous week’s work. It was the end
of November and the start of the Christmas rush period, when work intensi-
fies as the volume of mail posted increases.

Well, we had an extraordinarily busy week last week . . . and the man-
agers were falling [over] themselves to get the work through because,
well I think there is a tension building . . . in the workforce and the
management. Management is under pressure to cut down costs and so
they are trying to get through as maximum amount of work as pos-
sible . . . with less number of people, so they are trying to utilise . . . the
available people and they didn’t [ask for extra staff as is normal at this
time of year]. So we are under pressure to get the work through. . . . It’s
difficult because when you are receiving an extra volume of work you
aren’t gonna get through at the finishing time. So everybody is strained
and you can feel it, and . . . there is tension that is bound to build up
between the workforce and managers.

This tension is not articulated through encounters between managers

and staff, so we do not apparently see replicated here that encounter be-
tween Creon and Antigone that has influenced so many scholars. For But-
ler, however, Creon and Antigone are mirroring rather than opposing each
other, because, in one representing kinship and the other the state, ‘they
can perform this representation only by each becoming implicated in the
idiom of the other’ (Butler, 2000:10). The state cannot be represented sep-
arately from kinship, and kinship achieves its identity through the state.
Similarly, we see deployed in Shakeel’s account a managerial idiom, for
he is concerned that managerial aims are instigating the problems that
will prevent achievement of those aims. This is emphasised in the follow-
ing description of how the tension was exacerbated by overcrowding and
managers’ constant presence:

There are certain areas which become the centre of the attention of
managers, or that area takes precedence over other areas, so they will
pull people from other areas and bring them here. [This] makes it
crowded, and then people who don’t work usually with you in that area
 The Bondsman’s Tale 71
they don’t know the codes of how to work or what to do . . . and you
feel like you’ve been encroached . . . we are like well, you shouldn’t do
that, and why is he throwing a package in my . . . container because
if he keeps throwing[them] in my container [then it] will be full before
I’ve checked it.

Shakeel represents himself as a worker within and through a managerial

idiom of getting the work done: he is critical not of the job that is to be done
but of the inefficiency that arises from management tactics. Indeed, as his
description of his working week continues, he develops a theory of manag-
ers encroaching on staff territory, that such encroachment demotivates staff
and reduces their willingness to perform their work, and that his role is
therefore one of undoing the damage done by managers. I will illustrate this
by juxtaposing two accounts from Shakeel’s narrative, one of being watched
by managers and another of escaping from their gaze.
Of one particular manager, he says his

entire body language is so full of malignance and malign, he’s so vicious

in his posture. People hate him when he’s stood [behind] their back,
and he likes to be where he shouldn’t be. . . . So this sort of character or
attitude draws some ire and people don’t feel comfortable, because why
is he here, why is he looking at us, like we owe something to him?

However, Shakeel escapes from this oversight:

I am not a robot. . . . I would wilt and wither if I don’t talk to people . . .

so . . . I would find the time even after 5 o’clock when we’re so busy
to wheel round containers [and] stop by let’s say for 30 seconds to say
‘hello’ or ‘how are they doing’, also sometimes [say] something funny
you know and they will burst out into a fit of laughter and you know
my job done, and then move on to other people. . . . But for me it’s im-
portant that people are smiling and laughing and so that’s a typical day.

‘Job done’—Shakeel’s job, as defined by himself, involves ensuring that

other people are absorbed into the social whirl of the place of work. He is
enacting much of the advice given since Douglas McGregor’s (1989) influ-
ential work, that those who would be good managers should interact with
staff so as to motivate them. What could be interpreted as resistance or
disobedience (Shakeel leaves his workplace) is, from Shakeel’s perspective,
a critique of managers’ ability to motivate staff. Shakeel implies that he not
only knows how to keep the work flowing but knows better than managers
how to do so.
There are marked similarities here with empirical studies of managers that
show they spend the vast proportion of their working day communicating
72 On Being At Work
with others (Stewart, 1967; Mintzberg, 1973): not only is talking their
major form of doing, but it is advocated as a way of practising excellent
leadership (Kotter, 1990). Shakeel sometimes appears to be rebelling against
managerial rule and escaping managers’ gaze. Indeed, he says at one point,
‘sometimes I do wonder you know . . . how I can get away with it the way
I do’. But what he is ‘getting away with’ is motivating his colleagues—his job
is done if he can make people enjoy their work. He thus appropriates from
managers what is claimed to be one of their major functions—motivation—
and he does it through the very act that managers are supposed to use to
fulfil that function: talking.
In terms of the master/slave dialectic, not only is there no recognition
forthcoming from Shakeel for the manager; there is, rather, an active denial
of recognition. Shakeel does not see in the manager someone working as
hard as possible to ensure the continued success of the organization; he
instead gazes on someone who, from his perspective, is inefficient and an
impediment to effective working. I suggest that what we see in Shakeel at
this point is the first act of the master/slave dialectic, in which the bonds-
man comes to self-consciousness. He has recognised his own worth through
the work he does but is frustrated at the master’s continuing imposition of
his will. Further, there is in Shakeel’s account no evidence of a recognition
of mortality and fear of death (Act Two of the dialectic) or of an unhappy
consciousness that constantly judges and berates itself (Act Three). There is,
rather, the final act of the dialectic, in which the bondsman has absorbed the
master into his own psyche. The recognition his labours bestow on him are
given in the master’s voice: he has internalised the law that is management
into the ways in which he speaks, and he judges managers using the very
criteria they adopt to judge him and his colleagues.
This can be understood by following Butler’s distinction between Anti-
gone’s two deeds: the doing of the act of scattering dust over her brother’s
cadaver and her use of language to claim that deed. The description of what
she has done thus becomes an act in itself, and actions can be reported
or understood only within language: embodied actions become meaning-
ful only through language. Shakeel’s work can similarly be seen as having
two parts: that recognised as legal by the organization and that as illegal,
the latter taking him away from his post and enacted through his verbal
interactions with colleagues. However, the acts the organization regards as
illegal Shakeel articulates through the language of the organization/master.
Antigone’s act can be performed only through ’embodying the norms of the
power she opposes’ (Butler, 2000:10), for the power of her verbal acts lies in
‘the normative operation of power that they embody without quite becom-
ing’ (ibid.). Shakeel opposes management, as we have seen, but his opposi-
tion arises from his critique of managerial abilities—he does not question
the organizational norms of efficiency and effectiveness. The person who
appears to be a rebel, a transgressor of organizational laws, is, rather, some-
one who upholds those laws.
 The Bondsman’s Tale 73
Butler, in arguing forcefully that it is through language that Antigone acts,
shows that it is the language of the ‘authoritative voice of the one she re-
sists’ (2000:11). In appropriating the other’s voice, she gains her autonomy,
but this appropriation ‘has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and
assimilation of that very authority’ (ibid.). Creon and Antigone, state and
kinship, are thus chiasmic (chiasmus: a repetition of ideas in inverted order;
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/C/Chiasmus.html, accessed
9 November 2012); what is of the one is also of the other. It is not just
that a subject knows itself through not being its inferior other but that the
subject defines itself through appropriating and inverting the language and
actions of the other. Shakeel’s verbal acts reverse the normative operation of
power; he uses a managerial idiom and takes on the position of the (good)
manager, even as he defies managerial rules by wandering away from his
work station. The result is that which Butler observes in Antigone: acts
performed in the name of one principle, if taking place in the idiom of the
other, ‘bring into crisis the stability of the conceptual distinction between
them’ (10–11). Who is the manager and who the worker? What recognition
is given by whom and to whom, and what possibilities for selfhood emerge?
These are the questions this account of one working life, read alongside
The Antigone, leads us to ask.
In Shakeel’s account we have therefore a curious reversal: the manager
is granted recognition qua manager when s/he is physically present, as staff
bend to doing the job in the way the manager requires. That is, staff give
the impression of recognising the manager’s status, but this is a recognition
given only under the duress of the manager’s power to require that staff
conform to his/her orders. There is no erotic charge to this power from the
staff’s perspective: it is felt as heavy and oppressive. Staff, meanwhile, do
not recognise managerial expertise and authority but find managers inef-
ficient and intrusive.
At this stage of the encounter, therefore, we could say that Frank (the boss)
requires Shakeel (the worker) to carry out workplace tasks, and he desires
that Shakeel become a zombie-machine. Shakeel gives the impression of con-
forming to this requirement while Frank is present, but he does this because
he is forced to and not out of respect for Frank, or because of his leadership
skills or abilities to motivate staff. In fact, his opinions about Frank are dia-
metrically opposed to what Frank expects them to be. Shakeel has no need for
Frank at all: he has secured his own identity. There is no hint of an unhappy
consciousness or of bad conscience in his account. Rather, there is a bad pres-
ence (Frank’s), which forces Shakeel to enact the role of zombie-machine, an
illusion he disallows at every opportunity, as the next Scene will show.

Scene Two: The Organization in Question

The laws of the gods do not allow Creon to condemn Antigone to death by
stoning, so he sentences her to be walled up in a cave, for by such means
74 On Being At Work
he will not be directly responsible for her death. Despite the pleadings of
his son, Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone, Creon will not revoke the
sentence. We see Antigone one last time before she is led away to the cave.
She is in dialogue with the Chorus.

Chorus:
There was one in days of old who was imprisoned
In a chamber like a grave, within a tower;
Fair Danaë, who in darkness was held, and never saw the pure daylight,
Yet she too, O my child, was of an ancient line,
Entrusted with divine seed that had come in shower of gold.
Mysterious, overmastering, is the power of Fate.
From this, nor wealth nor force of arms
Nor strong encircling city-walls
Nor storm-tossed ship can give deliverance.
(Sophocles, 2008, p. 33, lines 944–950)
The Chorus warns that, even when entombed in a cave a person may
engage in activities unbeknownst to and so beyond the knowledge of those
who have entombed them. I turn now to Butler’s reading of the state in
Antigone’s Claim, in which she aims to bring about a crisis in its legitima-
tion (Lloyd, 2005). Using her arguments to analyse Shakeel’s description of
his working week brings about what could be called a crisis of legitimation
of management, for, as well as speaking in the idiom of management while
doing some part of his work and thus putting into crisis the question of who
is the manager, he also constitutes other spaces and places within the orga-
nization that are inaccessible to the manager/master/lord.
Butler’s reading of the State in Antigone’s Claim is located within her
demand for ‘a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psycho-
analysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory’ (2000:19).
The state thus figures not as an overarching national organizational func-
tion represented by government, the judiciary, the police, and so on, but as
the law of the Father. In challenging psychoanalysis, Butler therefore chal-
lenges conceptions of ‘the state’. In this, her arguments echo those chal-
lenges found in poststructuralist theories of organization to any overarching
presence of ‘an organization’ (Burrell, 1988a; 1988b; Chia, 1994; 1995;
2000; Cooper and Burrell, 1988; 1989).
Butler argues that when her critics object that she is challenging the law,
their utterance that ‘It is the law’ becomes the ‘utterance that performatively
attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise’
(2009:21). The state, and it follows for this book, organizations, can thus
also be challenged as laws that are performatively achieved. It is through ac-
knowledging their powers that we retroactively bring those very powers into
being. In doing this, theorists elevate those ‘things’ we call organizations to
‘the status of a certain order of linguistic position without which no signifi-
cation could proceed, no intelligibility could be possible’ (2009:20), and so
 The Bondsman’s Tale 75
they become one of the ‘elementary structures of intelligibility’ (ibid.). I have
substituted organizations here for kinship, for Butler’s arguments on kinship
are equally applicable to organizations: we cannot, it seems, think of how to
do work without thinking of ‘organization’.
If this is so, then we must interrogate the performativity of the term ‘or-
ganization’. Poststructural theories of the becomingness of organization/
selves (Burrell and Cooper, 1988a; 1988b) dismiss the idea that organiza-
tions could either be separate from organizational subjects or enjoy a su-
perordinate position ‘over’ those who work ‘in’ them. However, the word
‘organization’ continues to circulate. In previous work, Jackie Ford and I
(2004) showed that organizations appear as only metaphysical presences for
the nonmanagerial staff who work ‘in’ them. In a reanalysis for this chapter
of a random sample of the interview transcripts from that study, I found
that eight managers used the word ‘organization’ a total of 192 times while
eight members of the nonmanagerial staff used the word only seven times
between them. Shakeel, like the nurses and doctors in that earlier study,
never uses the word ‘organization’. In a transcript that is 8,700 words long,
he uses the name of the company ten times but uses the word ‘company’
only four times, three of which are in its meaning of being in the presence of
others. The fourth use of the word ‘company’ is ambivalent. He says ‘we are
all working in the same company’, which can be read as meaning ‘the same
organization’ or ‘the company of the people brought together to work in
this place’, an ambiguity that is potentially highly productive. It thus seems
that people are introduced to the word ‘organization’ when they work in
managerial positions or study management degrees.
In light of what Butler argues, this presence in managerial narratives
and absence from staff narratives of the word ‘organization’ is significant,
for managers, it would appear, work ‘in’ organizations that become en-
dowed with a presence (the ‘rational’ organization) that is very different
from the territory occupied by nonmanagerial staff. Staff do not utter the
word ‘organization’, so for them there can be no performatively enacted
law of the organization. They would occupy spaces (not places) (Lefebvre,
1991) very different from those occupied by those who would otherwise
appear to be co-occupants, managers. In Shakeel’s account, this distinc-
tion is material as well as discursive. The place in which he works is big
and noisy, as huge machines are used to sort the mail. Managers occupy
a physically different place, and they do not seem to enter the noisy shop
floor: so invisible are they that Shakeel is not sure whether or not they
work a five-day week:

We have a three-storey building in the first part and a small adminis-

tration block, so all the office management, like the human resource
department, and accounts and the rest of it, they are there so you don’t
see, we don’t see as many people on Fridays as we see during the week,
so probably I don’t know if they’re working Monday to Thursday
or what.
76 On Being At Work
Managers do appear to watch over the work, and indeed each section of
the shop floor has a line manager but

his duties will take him somewhere else, you know, so now he’s here,
now he’s not here

The appearance of other managers is treated with suspicion:

the numbers of managers has gone up in the last couple of years . . .

the higher management wants to recruit more managers and then
if the workforce go on strike . . . they can utilise the managers to get
the work through . . . and so that is why they encourage the managers
to work with us so at least they know . . . how we are working, how
the work is done.

There is in this account a description of a working space in which manag-

ers, normally absent, are seen as intruders into the territory of staff. Manag-
ers are resented and distrusted; they interfere with the smooth operation of
the production process. There is no respect shown to them; they are not ac-
corded any status other than that of inefficient intruders. The master might
look to this bondsman for recognition but gets no more than a workforce
that seemingly fulfils the management’s wishes; when the manager’s back is
turned they themselves determine how the work shall be done.
However, Shakeel has no language in which to articulate the intrusion of
managers into his working territory. Butler points out (2000:39) that Hegel
interprets Antigone as acting at the intersection of two opposed laws: that of
the state and that of the gods, with the latter being unrepresentable. She shows
that Hegel attends to Antigone’s act but not to her speech, perhaps because
her speech would be impossible were she to represent this other, unrepresent-
able, law. If, Butler writes (ibid.), what Antigone represents ‘is precisely what
remains unconscious within public law, then she exists for Hegel at the limit
of the publicly knowable and codifiable’. This law, she goes on to say, ‘leaves
only an incommunicable trace, an enigma of another possible order’ (ibid.),
for the law that Antigone is representing is that of alternative models of kin-
ship, of a type that is inaccessible within (Western) culture. It is important
to remember, from Butler’s reading of Lacan in Antigone’s Claim, that when
something appears to hold true universally, it is not that it does so but that it
appears to do so. As such, ‘organizations’ become ‘contingent social norms’
(30) which work on the psyche and give rise to permissible forms of being
that prevent the conception or articulation of other ways of organizing work.
Or at least that is the case for those who use the word ‘organization’. Sha-
keel does not. Rather, the space(s) he occupies is/are on the ‘horizon of the
zone of intelligibility’ (Butler, 2000:22) to those of us who conceive of ‘or-
ganizations’. The representative function of the word is cast into doubt, so
much so that it is difficult to talk of the place Shakeel occupies in language.
 The Bondsman’s Tale 77
There are organizations run by managers and organizations researched and
pondered by academics. The ‘bondsman’ (a term it seems we must refuse
because the master/slave dialectic has failed because of Shakeel’s disinter-
est in recognition from the master) seems to work elsewhere, in some other
space. In Shakeel’s account, there is a sense of other spaces and places in
which staff meet and work. They are spaces that are perhaps coterminous
with management space but that are constituted very differently by its occu-
pants. These are spaces not governed by managers, who organize everyone
else’s work and ensure it is carried out effectively. Rather, these are spaces
in which work is done but in which managers are intruders who disrupt the
efficient flow of work. This is ‘organization’ turned on its head, one almost
unrepresentable in language. Managers here are not rational and organized
pursuers of efficiency and effectiveness, not organizers, illegitimate usurpers
of other’s territory.
The word ‘organization’ thus fails to encompass lived, working spaces.
It figures managers’ working spaces in which staff must become zombie-
machines but does not figure other working places that are beyond the purview
of managers, in which work (that very same work the manager desires be
done) is done by people who are not reduced to zombie-machines.
Just as Antigone’s possibilities of selfhood were foreclosed by a political
power that enforces rigid rules over what sort of lives can be lived, Shakeel
cannot represent the shop floor as ‘his’ territory, even though, in the absence
of managers and in his own account, he and his colleagues govern it. There
is no language in which he can discuss this. In the absence of the word ‘orga-
nization’, there is a discursive space, one that is lived but within which there
is a lack of a language to report on the deed of enacting it. It is, as Butler
suggests of Antigone (2000:52), following but critical of Lacan, a place that
is on the threshold of the symbolic and the social and thus is a place that
cannot become assimilated to a symbolic order and so remains on the side of
the incommunicable sign. Shakeel cannot turn to managers and show them
how the work should be organized, for organizational language does not
allow that. There is thus a foreclosure of the possibilities of speaking about
work and the lives that are lived on the shop floor, save in the language of
management theory. However, there is not a foreclosure in doing—he can
do the deeds he feels are necessary for getting the work done.
I have shown that Shakeel, when speaking about work, speaks in the
idiom of management. But we can also now see that what he does is outside
that idiom. He walks around, talking to and laughing with people. As he
does his rounds, he has a different topic of conversation to suit each group:
with some, he talks about ‘what we watched the previous night on TV or
some music or some important political event’; with some women, he talks
about fashion and ‘will point out some nice-looking man over there and
we’ll laugh’. He will move on to another group of women who ‘are talking
about work and talking about management you know how cunning and
how vicious they are, so I’ll drip some vitriol into the conversation’.
78 On Being At Work
Where Butler shows that it is words that compel Antigone, it is deeds
that compel Shakeel. Antigone’s words are her deeds; Shakeel’s deeds are
his words. As he takes his container and moves from one work group to
another, talking in the idiom of management even as he undermines manag-
ers, his deeds trace a place that is different from ‘the organization’. Here is
a company, that is, a place in which people spend time together. Acts, and
not just those concerned with output, are performed. Friendships are made,
collusion against managers forged and the exercise of the self as an autono-
mous person, separate and distinct from both organization and manage-
ment, is put into process. There is no language in which to describe these
acts, for they break the laws of organizational hierarchy.
The scene of recognition between master and slave cannot take place
in such unrepresentable space. Rather, it would seem that recognition is
accorded by staff to other staff (such as when Shakeel joins in the anti-
management conversations), and managers are excluded.
So, interpreting Shakeel’s account of his workplace through Butler’s in-
terrogation of The Antigone allows us to speak about different scenes of
recognition, where the scene itself must be recognised. Within the physical
places of work, those who appear to share the same physical place may
actually be occupying different spaces. To Frank, the manager, there is
one organizational space, that which he occupies and where staff follow
his orders—this is the space of labour undertaken by zombie-machines. To
Shakeel, there are at least two organizational spaces. One, the place of
work, is devoted to getting the work done while enjoying the company of
colleagues and having fun as the work gets done and in which a sense of self
(as a social creature who has fun with friends and colleagues but is opposed
to management) is constituted. The other space he occupies is that of the
labouring zombie-machine, in which all pleasure is expunged because it is
governed by the manager’s intrusive and disruptive presence. It follows that
the scene of recognition differs, something that needs teasing out.

Scene 3: in the (Organizational) Cave

The tragedy reaches its climax in the absence of Antigone, after she has
been led away to be entombed in the cave. Her final words are spoken at
line 908, and we hear no more from her, even though the play is only two-
thirds through. All we know is that at some point between her being walled
up alive and the cave being opened, she has hung herself, with tragic conse-
quences for Creon and his family. The Chorus has the last words:
The proud man may pretend
In his arrogance to despise
Everything but himself. In the end
The gods will bring him to grief.
Today it has happened here. With our own eyes
We have seen an old man, through suffering, become wise.
(Sophocles, 1988, p. 188)
 The Bondsman’s Tale 79
The gods are unseen but govern the fate of individuals. In 21st-century
organizational terms, there is much beyond immediate understanding
that prevents organizations from being managed in the rational, logical
way in which management theory dreams it should be. Here the argu-
ments seem to end. It is only the encounter between Creon and Antigone
that has been much analysed, so it is only their words that have seemed
to need analysis. But theorising about organizations brings a different
curiosity to bear: I wonder what went on in that cave? That is, what if
we conflate organization and cave as a way of attempting to gain a bet-
ter understanding of the curious spaces that Shakeel occupies but that
are outside vocabulary? This chapter continues with another imaginary
scene, or rather three scenes, in which Antigone and Shakeel enter the
cave/organization together.

MOMENTS IN/OF THE CAVE

Most of us have to go to work: we have no choice if we are to acquire

the means of sustenance, make that contribution which is demanded of
us as members of our societies and, as this book argues, engage in pro-
cesses of self-making. This is a Creonic decree we cannot gainsay. As we
arrive at the office, shop, factory, farm, mine, sailing ship, restaurant, call
centre, lecture theatre or wherever, we engage in the master/slave dialectic
in some way, seeking recognition so that we can exist as subjects. In this
chapter, the Bondsman’s Tale, we have seen that Shakeel does not turn to
the manager for that recognition which is necessary to recognition and
thus to selfhood. Shakeel constitutes a working space that is very different
from that imagined by management, and he speaks in the idiom of man-
agement while regarding managers as intruders who disrupt the efficient
working of his working space. He does not, it seems, concede recognition
to managers.
If we ask Shakeel to shadow Antigone as she enters the cave/organization, we
can tease out what this means in regard to the constitution of subjectivities
and selves at the workplace. I have suggested above the need for exploring
the scene of recognition. Butler suggests that the stage had already been set
on which the master and bondsman faced each other. This book suggests
the need to consider how power occludes other possible scenarios. There are
at least three: different scenes of recognition, three different ‘caves’: that of
the manager, that of the managed worker who conforms to the manager’s
presence and that of the insouciant worker who ignores management.
Furthermore, we can imagine four ‘moments’ in the cave: as Antigone
enters the cave, she is a living being but dead to the world; then she becomes
the living dead, having taken the decision to end her life; then there is the
time when she is dead but the world thinks she is still alive; and finally
there is the moment when the cave is opened and the world knows she
is dead.
80 On Being At Work

In the Master’s Cave

Let us start with the Master’s Cave, that is, the organization as apprehended
by managers, where staff appear to conform to the self as a zombie-machine.
As Antigone enters the cave, she is a living being but no longer in or of
the world. This is both Creon’s position in regard to Antigone and the work/
life balance debate in relation to staff. As we cross the threshold at the start
of our day’s work, we traverse the hyphen/slash from ‘life’ to ‘work’.
There is a moment next when Antigone perhaps is alive to herself, and
she is undoubtedly alive so far as the audience and participants in the im-
pending tragedy are concerned: in this time, Teirisias can give his warning
and Haemon beg for his father’s change of mind. Perhaps there was also a
moment (we can only imagine it) when Antigone’s will to life forced itself
to the surface and she hoped to be saved. In our own case, as we clock in or
register our presence at the start of the working day, we imagine ourselves
to be alive. We are immersed in cultures which think of death largely in
biological terms: social death, that death of identity I am discussing here, is
not in our vocabulary. ‘Social death’ is a term used to describe both slavery
(Patterson, 1982) and the condition of people who are terminally ill and
who, in this transitional stage between life and death, become isolated and
alienated as if they were already dead (Mulkay, 1993:49). That is, Western
culture recognises conditions where the body lives but the person is dead, a
knowledge lived out vicariously through watching films about zombies. At
this moment of entering work, we become zombie-machine: we think we
are alive, but our capacity for being human, for anticipating and fulfilling
future selves, is dead.
In the next moments, Antigone becomes the living dead—she has decided
to kill herself, so at this time she will be dead to herself although her body
still lives and goes about its task of preparing to hang itself. But is this sui-
cide, or is it murder? Although she has hastened her own death, her own
hand is nothing but the tool used by the state. Her death sentence means
she has been murdered by a state that cannot allow her that expression of
individuality which signals the birth of the Western ego and its distinctive-
ness from its role. The worker’s position in the master’s cave echoes this: we
are reduced to nothing but role, all individuality lost. In Shakeel’s case, as
a manual worker, he is a ‘pair of hands’. Neither brain nor heart is located
in the hands: all they have is motor power that allows them to do activi-
ties. Similarly, for those of us who are knowledge workers, we are reduced
to brains that work for the organization, while those of us who are in the
caring or service professions become bodies that are designed to do nothing
more than offer care or provide services. We become task-doing mecha-
nisms whose thoughts and feelings must be limited to those required for this
doing. That is, we become zombie-machines.
And then comes the time when Antigone has hanged herself and her body
is lifeless. However, Haemon (and others) believe she is alive. This is the
 The Bondsman’s Tale 81
point where the worker has succumbed to the master’s demand that he work
and work and work. There is nothing alive but the body bent to its tasks.
Shakeel sorting the mail became an extension of a machine, a pair of hands
attached to a body that is devoid of that which would make it human, where
the human has memories of its past and visions of its future self, the me it
anticipates it may be. He has not killed himself, save through the necessary
activity of going to earn his living, an activity without which he cannot live.
Therefore, the very act of clocking on for his job is a form of suicide: he
has to give up all that is Shakeel in order to carry out this workplace role,
subsume himself within a body that works but a mind that is denied the pos-
sibility of activity. At this point I suggest we see the archetypal management
textbook position—working out how best to use the ‘hands’ (or brains,
emotions or beauty) but unaware of the impact of those recommendations
on anything but profits.
Finally, Antigone is physically dead, and, the cave being opened, the world
knows she is dead. For centuries, people have puzzled over why she refuses
the possibility of being a wife or mother, why she sees these future roles as
secondary to her relationship to her unburied, dead male sibling (although
not to her living, female sibling). The symbolism in terms of the arguments
of this book is, I suggest, profound, because with Antigone’s death dies her
line: fecundity and the future are sacrificed, and the past is worshipped. I
suggest that this is analogous with organizations—what Taylor laid down
a century ago, in very different cultural, social and economic conditions,
prevents ways of thinking different futures of organizations. Staff should be
treated as if they have few powers of judgement of their own and must be
constantly watched over by managers or other supervisors. This is a very
different sentiment from the concept of the human in the 21st century, one
in which individuals claim their rights for recognition.
The master’s cave is therefore a place where staff are voided of any iden-
tity beyond that of the zombie-machine. As such they cannot give recogni-
tion to the manager: all they can do is give the impression of conforming,
and thus the manager can feel confident in his/her identity as manager be-
cause staff appear to be obeying him/her. That is, the recognition of the self
as a manager requires that staff appear to be zombie-machines, or as if they
are dead. The master/manager knows s/he is a manager if staff cease to live
for the duration of the working day. We will see next that in the managerial
interpretation of the organizational cave, although staff do not recognize
managers, their very presence allows managers to see a reflection of the self
that provides recognition and thus selfhood and thus identity.

The Seemingly Submissive Worker’s Cave

Let us now follow Antigone into the self-same cave, but now a cave that
represents the workplace as seen by staff members when the manager is
present. From Shakeel’s account we know that staff may be bent to their
82 On Being At Work
tasks, but their subjective experience is very different from that imagined by
the manager.
As Antigone enters this cave, she is a living being who, although dead to the
world, is alive to herself. As she passes into the cave and hears the rocks being
piled up over its entrance, she no doubt feels a turmoil of emotions. Such fears
and grief are not ordinarily the lot of those going to work, who as they enter
this cave/organization are similarly fully alive to themselves as human.
However, Antigone next becomes the living dead, having taken the deci-
sion to end her life. She has one form of agency (she can kill herself) but
few other possibilities (she has been walled up alive by those who enact the
powers of the state). For Shakeel, this is the point where the manager ap-
pears on the shop floor. Shakeel must immediately look as if he is working
hard and obediently. But subjectively, he has told us, there is much going on
that the manager cannot see.
So, that next moment, when Antigone is biologically dead but the world
thinks she is still alive, represents for Shakeel/the worker the time when
the manager thinks the worker is alive and working hard but the worker is
dead to him/herself, just a set of body parts that work. Although for Hegel
it was the bondsman’s production of goods that eventually allowed him
subjectivity, Marx retorted that the goods were taken away by the master,
so the bondsman could not possess them as his/her own and so could not
have subjectivity. This is what we see in Shakeel’s case: when the manager
is present, all that he does must be done as if he were an attachment to a
machine, with no possibility for demur or active contribution. He exists not
as an individual, merely as a cog in an organizational machine. The master
knows that s/he is master through seeing that the bondsman has bowed to
his/her will and, as we saw in Frank’s case, seeing this as a sign of his/her
own abilities.
Finally, there is the moment when the cave is opened and the world
knows Antigone is dead. In this cave, the cave of the seemingly submissive
worker, this would appear to be the moment when work ceases for the day
and the staff are free to go home, crossing over the threshold in the opposite
direction to the start of the shift, returning to ‘life’ from work.
In this ‘cave’, therefore, we see a much more nuanced sense of a working
self, one that moves in and out of agentive positions. When the worker is ap-
parently bent to undertaking tasks in the manner of the zombie-machine, her/
his mind may insist on its freedom to escape from the confines of the cave,
even as the body is bent to the task. There is therefore subjectivity and sense
of self here, although sometimes there will be lapses into the unthinking body
that goes about doing workplace tasks. The worker gives the appearance of
being a zombie-machine but is never fully incorporated into that role.

In the Insouciant Worker’s Cave

Shakeel has told us that as soon as managers have left the shop floor or even
under their gaze if he is clever enough, a different organizational world is
 The Bondsman’s Tale 83
constituted, one in which work is carried out more efficiently and with fun
and laughter.
As Antigone enters this cave, we can imagine her feeling that she is free
at last. All the terrible responsibilities she has borne are now behind her.
She is out of sight of Creon and therefore free to do whatever she wishes,
although she is under the dire restrictions of the confines of the cave. This
is the insouciant worker’s position: there are managers somewhere, but, for
the moment, while they are somewhere else, there is the freedom of con-
centrating on the task in hand and doing it as they feel most fit, and there
are options for doing other things. The freedom is highly bounded (by the
walls of the cave), but still there are possibilities for agency unrestricted by
managerial diktat.
Becoming the living dead, having taken the decision to end her life, must
also now be rethought. What life is it that must be ended? In this space where
there is fun to be had and pleasure to be wrought from doing the work and
socialising with colleagues, the life that is refused is that of the zombie-
machine. Shakeel insists on agency, the capacity to circumvent management
and spend his working days within conditions of limited autonomy. He can
act, albeit not within conditions of his own choosing.
Finally, the moment when the insouciant worker’s cave is opened and
the world knows s/he is dead must also be read differently. I have suggested
above that Shakeel occupies space that is on the threshold of comprehen-
sion: we do not have the words through which to describe it. This is the mo-
ment in the cave when we again encounter that threshold: as we (that is, we
the organization theorists or managers) peek into the cave as it is opened,
we see what we expect to see: a cave occupied by a young woman in the case
of The Antigone or a workplace where staff work diligently when managers
are present in the case of Shakeel. However, what Shakeel and others see is
very different—they may see the young woman lying there, but they know
that, just out of the onlooker’s sight, something else is going on.
The scene of recognition between master and bondsman is thus seen to be
far more complicated and tentative than anticipated. We have a bondsman
who does not require recognition from the master, because the master is
someone s/he despises. Thus, the terms of the original master/slave dialectic
are reversed; Hegel thought the slave not worthy enough to grant recogni-
tion to the master, but here we see the master is thought not worthy enough
by the worker for recognition to be granted. In Chapter Two we saw that
the manager requires that staff become zombie-machines in order for the
master to be secure in his/her identity as master. We can now restage the
master/slave dialectic in the form of the following scenes, in each of which
the master requires that the bondsman become a zombie-machine so that
the manager knows him/herself as master:

(a) The bondsman acquiesces because of the power of the boss. Such
a recognition can be no more than tentative, always liable to being
withdrawn should the balance of power change;
84 On Being At Work
(b) The bondsman appears to acquiesce but nurtures some resistance
within him/herself, notably a critique of the managerial abilities of
the boss and a belief that s/he can do the job of the manager far bet-
ter than can the manager him/herself, so that although the worker’s
body may appear to conform, his/her mind does not. If the master
senses this, then s/he will be engulfed in an existential crisis, not
knowing whether s/he is or is not the boss and therefore uncertain
about the extent to which s/he can demand that the worker become a
zombie-machine;
(c) The scene of recognition is a charade: the bondsman gives recognition
only grudgingly and withdraws it as soon as possible.
(d) The scene of recognition is a fantasy, borne of the managers’ or orga-
nization theorists’ theory of what exists. Just out of sight, just round
the corner, just in another construction, another scene is occurring.

And so the scene of recognition breaks down, or perhaps there never was
a scene of recognition between manager and staff member. Each party may
look elsewhere for recognition, for the achievement of selfhood.

CONCLUSION

This is the theory that is now developing: in Chapter Two I argued that the
manager is driven by hard work, which becomes an ethical norm to which
the manager must conform if s/he is to be recognised as a manager, so the
manager him/herself must become a zombie-machine. This zombie-ma-
chine is dependent for its identity as manager on staff’s conforming to the
requirement that they too labour as zombie-machines. From the master’s/
boss’s perspective, there can be no pleasure at work, nothing other than
the duty to work extremely hard, although there is a guilty, erotic pleasure
in the power over others. This chapter uses another interview, with a man-
ual worker, and another scene of encounter, that between King Creon and
his niece Antigone as interpreted by Butler. This suggests that staff do not
provide recognition to the manager, save grudgingly and tentatively. Staff
themselves do not require recognition from the manager: they achieve it
elsewhere. Rather, they go through the motions of conforming to the man-
ager’s requirements but experience the manager as a bad presence, one
that inhibits the efficient accomplishment of work. It is not that staff do
not want to work or prefer, in Taylor’s terms, to ‘soldier’; it is rather that
they have different ideas about how the work should be done, and so they
speak the idiom of managers even though they cannot be recognised as
managers. They must conform to management’s requirements about how
to do their work when the manager is present, but when the manager is
out of sight they take charge of the working space, transforming it into
a different type of space in which much more takes place than the mere
 The Bondsman’s Tale 85
doing of workplace tasks. However, that which is done is always restricted
by the limitations imposed by management—there is no freedom of choice
of task or means to its accomplishment. The possibilities for being there-
fore appear very limited.
In Hegel’s outlining of the lord/bondsman dialectic, the slave eventually
achieves identity through producing the world, while the master does not
attain identity and so the roles are reversed. The theory I developed through
building on Frank’s thesis of his working life is that the manager/boss strives
for recognition through evidence of his/her extremely hard work, but in this
chapter we have seen that Shakeel, as worker, withholds recognition from
the manager. What the manager regards as extremely hard work the worker
regards as inefficient intrusion into working space. The manager must there-
fore look elsewhere for recognition, and we saw in Frank’s case that this
elsewhere is ‘the organization’ which demands that s/he work and work and
work, with the evidence of his/her abilities qua managers resting on his/her
ability to make staff into zombie-machines that work and work and work.
Shakeel has shown us that although managerial power means that staff
must appear to conform to the requirement to be a zombie-machine when
under the gaze of the manager, staff evade that identity. The worker becomes
alive, becomes human, when out of the direct control of the manager. This
does not mean that the worker can produce ‘the world’, because what can
be produced, what work on the self can be undertaken, is always limited in
some ways by what the organization deems permissible. Shakeel, for exam-
ple, must sort the mail, and even though he carries out the tasks of manage-
ment he is not recognised or recognisable as doing so. Limited in the work
s/he can do, existing in the eyes of managers only as a zombie-machine, still
the bondsman achieves recognition of the self as a living human subject. It
is in the social life of the workplace, that which Shakeel constitutes when he
evades managerial oversight, that he would appear to gain such recognition
of the self. How this occurs will become clearer in the next chapter.
4 Becoming Human

Julie’s story (Chapter One) introduced a distinction between labour (the

doing of tasks by the zombie-machine) and work (through which one con-
stitutes one’s identity and the self as human), arising from her dreams of
what she could become if she found paid employment after years as an
‘informal’ carer. Frank (Chapter Two) acquainted us with the boss as a
zombie-machine who needs staff to become zombie-machines if the boss or
manager is to have the identity of manager. Meanwhile, Shakeel (Chapter
Three) showed the extent of the gulf between managers and staff and how
the boss’s need is denied: staff become zombie-machines while under the
watchful eye of the manager, but this is only a temporary subject position,
one that is moved into and out of. At other times, in other subject posi-
tions, staff insist on becoming human. They do not respect managers or
managerial knowledge, feel they know better how the workplace should
be organized and find ways to escape from the manager’s watching eye so
as to get the work done. In these and other ways they insist on their status
as more than zombie-machine, as subjects constituting self-hood while at
the workplace. At the same time, staff are severely constrained in what
they can do.
This chapter develops the distinction between labour and work, between
the zombie-machine and the human. It follows one person through a work-
ing week and takes us deeper into the territory alluded to by Shakeel. I am
calling her Alex. Her work is short term, physically hard, uncomfortable
and low-paid. Staff move from one temporary job to another, with peri-
ods of unemployment in between. They often have to live far from home,
sharing inadequate accommodation with strangers. They labour largely
outdoors; their tasks involve much shifting of soil and mud and the day
may finish with the worker wet through, freezing cold or sunburned (ac-
cording to the season) and exhausted. Yet this is work that is regarded by
its participants as high status and rewarding. Alex is not a fruit or potato
picker, moving from farm to farm, but an archaeologist moving from dig
to dig. Although there are major similarities between the physical work of
potato pickers on farms and archaeologists on excavations, their status is
remarkably different. The distinction between labour (here digging) and
 Becoming Human 87
work (constitution of the self that occurs despite rather than because of the
actual labouring carried out) becomes clearer. My particular focus here is
on what it is, over and above the physical doing of a job, that facilitates
self-making, the making of the me, in which one’s status as human is con-
stituted and recognised. Alex’s account leads me to explore work-based
friendships as fundamental to such recognition.
What struck me as I read and reread the record of our discussion was a
number of what Critchley (2012:22), referring to Althusser and in the con-
text of an analysis of Rousseau’s Rights of Man, calls ‘décalages, displace-
ments or dislocations’. These are contradictions in meaning or arguments
whose sense is questionable. There are three of these in Alex’s account. The
first is the nature of the job itself: it requires hard physical labour in often-
difficult conditions, yet is a high-status profession. The second is Alex’s
induction into excavation as a university student. It was horrendous, and
she felt put off for life; however, she underwent what could be described
as a neo-Damascene conversion during a temporary job after graduation.
Finally, running through Alex’s account is the importance of the bonds of
friendship within archaeology. Her contrasting account of interactions in
the administrative roles she takes between digs tells us a great deal about her
archaeological self-making, and it is the account of friendship that allows
us to make sense of how Alex becomes, constitutes herself as, an archaeolo-
gist. Friendship is a little-studied area within management and organization
studies, yet Alex’s account shows that workplace friendships are fundamen-
tal to recognition of the self as human rather than zombie-machine. Analysis
of these three displacements leads to a thesis of the importance of workplace
friendships in the recognition and affirmation of the self as human.
I draw on two aspects of Butler’s work to analyse the three displacements
in Alex’s account: her development of Althusser’s theory of interpellation
(already discussed in Chapter Two) and further aspects of her reading of
Sophocles’s tragedy The Antigone in Antigone’s Claim (2002) (already dis-
cussed in Chapter Three). It was Butler’s Antigone’s Claim that led me to
wonder about workplace relationships because it is in this book that Butler
challenges the heteronormative presumptions that define our understanding
of kinship. Alex is the partner of an old friend. I visited her at their home,
where we sat down with mugs of tea and the tape recorder running. Our
discussion of her working-life story lasted two hours. As with records of all
the people who have discussed their working lives with me for this book,
I have not ‘subjected’ the transcript to an intense analysis but have read it
alongside the works of Judith Butler as if they were the works of another
philosopher that I am now interpreting with and through Butler’s work. In
Alex’s case, her account of an archaeological dig brought to mind Butler’s
analysis of Sophocles’s tragedy The Antigone because Antigone attempted
to bury her dead brother’s body by throwing earth over it. Alex does the
opposite—she attempts to uncover what has been buried by taking away
the earth that has covered it. The metaphors of burying and uncovering
88 On Being At Work
informed how I read Alex’s account: what has been buried in our under-
standing of organizations that Alex uncovers in her description? That led to
identification and interpretation of the three disjunctures.

DISPLACEMENT ONE: LABOUR AND WORK—THE

ARCHAEOLOGIST IN THE TRENCH

Archaeologists, in Alex’s account, are peripatetic workers hired on short-

term contracts. In eight years she had worked for 27 different companies
in the UK, for many of them more than once, and she had worked on sev-
eral excavations outside the UK. This is how she described a typical week’s
work.
The working week starts on Sunday afternoon, when she packs her equip-
ment and work clothes, which include waterproof clothing, a steel hardhat,
and a flash jacket, because often she will be working on construction sites
cataloguing evidence of past histories before they are buried beneath layers
of 21st-century concrete. If the dig is far from home, she drives there late on
Sunday night or early on Monday morning to get to the accommodation,
usually a rented holiday cottage, which she shares with five or six people
who may never have met before they were hired for this excavation. It in-
volves sharing a twin bedroom, perhaps with a stranger. The day starts at
6 a.m., and work starts at 7 a.m. She takes a packed lunch and ‘quite large
volumes of food’ because the work is ‘quite physically demanding’ but ‘in
the middle of nowhere’, so all provisions have to be obtained beforehand. If
there are no facilities for boiling water for drinks on site, she takes a flask of
hot water, but ‘if you are lucky they might boil a site kettle, but if you’re quite
far away from the site there might not even be time to do that’. It ‘would be a
dreadful catastrophe if you forgot your flask because you’re outside’.
At the site, the workers put on their protective clothing, and the site
supervisor

would either give you your tasks not finished off on Friday, or perhaps
explain to you the next section of work that he wants to do, um, and on
most sites you have a rough idea of what you are expecting from either
a geophysics survey done previously or a desktop study where they look
at records of what’s previously been found, so you would know perhaps
that we’re on a mediaeval site and we’re expecting to find lots of rub-
bish pits, so someone might set to and go to that section and dig out half
of it and then draw the cross-section and plan them.

She takes her equipment, including lamp, spade and drawing equipment,
to the site where she will be working. If it is a ‘large feature’, she may

work in a pair. Alternatively I work by myself with some other people

a few metres away from me, doing individual work, and there’d be a
 Becoming Human 89
supervisor probably for every 10 to 15 people who would come across and
check our work. . . . But for the most part I would be expected to go onto
site, select my own order of work for the day, and study the different
features, remove all the soil and take it away, and do the drawings.

There are standardised recording sheets to be completed, and ‘If we have

found any artefacts then we might bind those up separately’ and number
them. They usually have two or three breaks in a day: a 15-minute break in
the morning, a 30-minute lunch break and a 15-minute tea break. There is
little socialising during the working day, and much of the work is done in
isolation and in silence:

Someone might call and ask your opinion over what you think, but if
you’re seen just talking the supervisor might glare at you or come across
and shout, but it’s usually the young ones who’ve just started who do
stuff like that.

The terms and conditions of employment are not good: ‘It’s standard
practice to lay people off at Christmas and the New Year’ and to be on
fixed-term contracts: ‘I know someone who had a two week contract . . .
which of course is illegal now’. Many employers, Alex thought, try to
circumvent employment laws. The longest contract she has been on was
‘11 months and 2 weeks because they laid me off a few weeks before I
got any employment rights’. This she regards as ‘typical’, but she sees no
point in protesting because ‘getting a reputation as a troublemaker would
effectively blacklist your career, that’s something you don’t tend to do’.
Further,

Career progression is very difficult, and I certainly have been up

to four or five grades above a basic figure and then gone right the
way back to the bottom again on the next position simply because
I would rather stay in work rather than worry too much about pay
and progression.

In many ways, then, Alex’s account is of an exploited workforce. Archae-

ologists’ work has similarities with that of ‘precarious workers’ (Anderson,
2010) such as migrant workers recruited to work on temporary contracts in
factories and farms all over Europe (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009). They en-
gage in hard, manual labour in often-appalling working conditions, have no
security of employment, move from one job to another, and cannot organize
or complain for fear of not getting the next job. The first thesis of this book,
discussed in Chapter One, is that labour and work should be distinguished
from each other: labour involves the tasks we do, and work is the processes
of self-making over and above the mere doing of tasks. In relation to Alex’s
work, archaeologists’ labour involves tasks that largely exclude anything
other than the construction of abject selves.
90 On Being At Work
However, many archaeologists, Alex said, are from rich backgrounds
(Alex is an exception), and entry is to a profession (rather than an ordinary
job) via a university degree. There is therefore much about the job that el-
evates the labour into work that allows construction of a (professional) self.
Alex loves her work and self-consciously revels in the identity of ‘archaeolo-
gist’. She described advertising for someone to share a flat with her:

A: I put ‘female archaeologist, 24, seeks flat mate’ and I looked at it

and I thought well, [pause] that’s what I think of myself, I don’t
think, you know, Aquarian, or, you know, I don’t think female
rugby lover, I think female archaeologist, that’s what I’ve always
identified myself as.
N: So you define yourself by your job?
A: Pretty much, yeah.
N: And your gender.
A: But I think I had to tack the female on because I had a few mixed-
sex flat shares and wasn’t too happy about them . . . but I think
I also thought that being an archaeologist, people see you as an in-
teresting person and that I might get someone like-minded to share
with if I sort of emphasised that part of my personality.
N: So why do you think of the archaeologist as interesting?
A: [Long pause] Certainly a lot of archaeologists are considerably better
travelled than people in more conventional jobs. . . . And again
[raising voice], it does tend to be called a glamorous job, which it
isn’t in the slightest, it’s a very wet, cold, miserable job.

Earlier, when talking about why she had chosen to pursue an archaeology
degree, Alex had said, ‘I just wanted to do something more interesting and
more unusual, I didn’t want to do what everybody else expected’, so she
chose a career that she understood to be different from other careers and,
she understands (hence the raised voice when referring to a general other
that calls the job glamorous), one with a reputation for glamour.
So, Alex knows the physical reality of the job (‘very wet, cold, miser-
able’), but she also engages with a fantasy of it as ‘glamorous’. She engages
in a fantasy in which material experience is subordinated to an image of the
job. I suggested in Chapter One that fantasy is important in the distinction
between labour and work, between the doing of tasks and work on the
construction of the self who does those tasks. In this chapter we delve into a
shared fantasy, in which the camaraderie of the dig is the site of self-making,
of mutual recognition of the archaeologist self. Fantasies about work fa-
cilitate my development of the me I aspire to be; in Alex’s case, this is a me
who does glamorous, exciting work and who is therefore a glamorous and
exciting person.
There is an analogy here with The Antigone, because Alex is burying an
unpalatable issue. I do not want to stretch that analogy too far, but there
 Becoming Human 91
is further inspiration to be found in the pages of Antigone’s Claim (2000).
Although I was intrigued initially by the analogy between soil and burying/
disinterring when I heard Alex’s account of her work, it was the importance
of friendships within that telling of the archaeologists’ world that first took
me back to Antigone’s Claim, whose main thesis concerns kinship, for a
more meaningful way of understanding Alex’s working life.

Reading the First Displacement through Antigone’s Claim

Butler’s interpretation of The Antigone facilitates her critique of the limita-
tions psychoanalysis places upon who can be classified as kin. I will draw
directly on that argument later; at this point I am using only a small part
of her analysis of Antigone’s encounter with Creon to pursue Alex’s experi-
ence of the labouring involved in her job. This contradicts the fantasy of
the work that she does, that is, constituting a professional identity as ‘the
archaeologist’. Butler’s interpretation of that seminal encounter, transferred
to an understanding of Alex’s account, establishes that for labour to become
work requires that recognition be afforded. That is, Antigone’s deed of car-
rying out the funerary right of scattering soil over her brother’s body is not
what turns her into a lawbreaker. The fact that she has done what she sees
as her duty to her dead brother becomes a fact only when she is hauled
before Creon and other witnesses and affirms what she did: it is the act of
speaking about the deed, rather than the doing of it without witnesses, that
is the deed itself. In other words, I am developing further the distinction
between labour and work and between the zombie-machine and the human
by exploring the importance of speech rather than labour for recognition.
Alex illuminates the distinction between labour (the work that is done by
the zombie-machine) and work, wherein the self is constituted as human.
The crucial statement here is Alex’s definition of what makes her, as an ar-
chaeologist, interesting and glamorous:

it does tend to be called a glamorous job, which it isn’t in the slightest,

it’s a very wet, cold, miserable job.

The important reference here is to what the job is ‘called’, that is, how
it is articulated in language. Butler (2002) draws out the distinction be-
tween Antigone’s two deeds: the doing of the act of scattering dust over
her brother’s cadaver and her use of language to claim that deed. In Alex’s
account, we have a similar distinction between the act itself (digging in the
dirt of the archaeological excavation) and her describing it to me. Butler
argues that Antigone’s description of what she has done is an act in itself,
for actions can be reported or understood only within language, so embod-
ied actions become meaningful only through language. It is when affirming
her act in language that Antigone becomes criminalised; prior to that mo-
ment she was, it could be argued, doing nothing other than performing the
92 On Being At Work
required funerary rights for a dead brother (Blundell, 1995). The same act
could be interpreted in very different ways. It is in her speaking about it and
her refusal to deny that she had done this deed that, Butler argues, renders
Antigone a criminal.
I suggest that in Alex’s account, the mechanisms are similar, but the
outcome is very different: that is, through affirming her act in language,
she transforms mundane labour into glamorous work. That is, it is the act
of talking which performatively constitutes archaeological labour as that
which is done by exciting and glamorous professional staff.
Antigone’s act can be performed only through ‘embodying the norms of
the power she opposes’ (Butler, 2000:10), for the power of her verbal acts
lies in ‘the normative operation of power that they embody without quite
becoming’ (ibid.). We saw earlier how Shakeel, a sorting-office labourer, em-
bodies managerial norms even as he appears to resist them. Alex, however,
does not oppose the power of the employer but instead uses the normative
operation of power of the professions (Friedson, 1986; McMurray, 2011)
to claim a professional identity. She refuses to acknowledge that the messy,
dirty labour is merely digging in the dirt. The scraping away of soil and the
poor working conditions are described as something that is palpably differ-
ent from how we must imagine the material reality and thus Alex, through
the words that are her deeds, can transform labour into work on the self.
In other words, Alex can speak from the position of archaeologist only
if she accedes to that prior claim that archaeology is a glamorous, exciting
profession. To be an archaeologist rather than a labourer requires that she
talk about glamour and excitement and about being a member of the profes-
sion. In her speech, she must refuse her work’s mundane everyday charac-
teristics even as she acknowledges them. Through defining the profession as
exciting and glamorous she upholds the law of the language of the profes-
sion of archaeology, a language that belies, at the same time as it redefines,
its material practices.

DISPLACEMENT TWO: BECOMING AN ARCHAEOLOGIST—FROM

HATRED TO LOVE

Alex’s words are her constitutive deeds: through speaking, she becomes
archaeologist.
The second major contradiction in Alex’s account concerned how she
was converted from hating excavations to loving the experience of them.
Analysis of this second displacement shows the importance of witnesses to
speech acts.
Students of archaeology at the university where Alex studied went on
their first excavation at the end of their first year. She hated the experience.
Looking back at it, she said, the archaeology was ‘the best archaeology I’ve
ever seen’. She ‘made some really good friends when I was there, but the
 Becoming Human 93
weather was abysmal and there was a lot of very hard physical labour that
I wasn’t used to and I hated it’. She said that

we weren’t really in any way trained to dig, and so you were almost
thrown in at the deep end and that combined with . . . really poor
weather made it six weeks of hell for me.

She therefore decided to focus on working in museums. However, forced

to take the first job that came her way after graduating, she found herself
working as an archaeologist at an excavation that involved teaching stu-
dents. She did not have a car at that time, so the journey to this first dig
involved a daily four-hour commute, but:

it was AMAZING. . . . I spent a lot of time hiding behind a Land Rover

reading the manual to work out what skills I was supposed to be teach-
ing, and then I’d sort of read this secretively and then walk round the
Land Rover and tell everybody what they were supposed to be doing. It
was an Iron Age excavation, and it was one of those golden summers.
It was beautiful weather, the people were really nice, both professionals
[and mature students], and they were the most amazing bunch of really
dedicated people who were really passionate about it. And the site was
really interesting, and good fun. Suddenly all the problems that I’d had
long ago [on the students’ dig] didn’t seem to matter. I realised it was
just that place at that time that I didn’t enjoy.

There are many similarities between the two occasions: in each, Alex felt
underprepared for the tasks she had to do, but she reports that the archae-
ology itself was interesting at both sites. She had made really good friends
on the student dig and enjoyed the company of the people on the second
excavation. The weather was very different, but she has subsequently come
to take it for granted that the weather will generally be awful—surely one
‘golden summer’ could not have accustomed her to the physical experiences
of her many later digs? We saw earlier that Alex is able to hold comfortably
two contradictory perspectives of her profession, that it is hard, dirty work
and that it is glamorous. I will suggest that her first experience of a dig, at
the end of the first year of a degree that she thought would prepare her for
a glamorous profession, revealed its physical reality to her and shattered her
original fantasy. However, her second experience was as a graduate who
could now call herself ‘an archaeologist’, and I will argue that the experi-
ence of being an archaeologist required that the fantasy be restored. This is
because of the performativity of the identity ‘archaeologist’.
There are two scenes of encounter in Alex’s story of a neo-Damascene
conversion from hating archaeological digs to loving them. In the first, Alex
is a student in company with fellow students being taught by archaeolo-
gists; in the second, she is an archaeologist who is teaching students and
94 On Being At Work
working alongside fellow archaeologists. At this point, what is important
is the performativity of the terms ‘student’ and ‘archaeologist’, so Butler’s
development of Althusser’s theory of interpellation offers most help in ex-
ploring the scenes in which Alex is interpellated first as ‘student’ and second
as ‘archaeologist’.

Butler on Interpellation
Butler challenges ontologies: rather than there being preexisting domains,
domains are materialized through discursive, material practices. There is
thus, Butler told us in her early work (1990; 1993) no gender prior to its
citation: no male or female preexists the discursive, material practices which
bring about their masculinity or femininity. Butler (1993:7) eliminates cau-
sality: there is neither precedence nor succession, but,

Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes

nor follows the process of this gendering but emerges only within and as
the matrix of gender relations themselves’. (Butler, 1993:7)

The materiality of the body, its sex and gender, the ‘I’ that locates the body
as the site of its emergence, are all thus performatively achieved through a
constantly reiterated process of becoming. Applied to Alex, this means there
is not a ‘student’ or ‘archaeologist’ who precedes the identity but one that
comes into being, is constituted within and through the terms of these ap-
pellations. The ‘student’ and the ‘archaeologist’ are sites in which identities
are constituted through reiteration, reestablishment and sedimentation of
discourses, materialities, psyches and affect, with the terms themselves act-
ing in, through and upon the materiality of (performatively achieved) bodies
and, in so doing, constituting subjects and subjectivities.
Most fundamental, perhaps, the ‘I’ depends upon recognition that it is a
human subject, a recognition given through language and interaction:

We have a primary dependence upon language because it is through lan-

guage that we are constituted. Language, and the address of the Other,
is what makes us recognisable, and therefore gives us both identity and
a place in the community. (Butler, 1997:5)

The subject is constituted by, within and through language, so language

is ‘the condition of possibility for the speaking subject’ (Butler, 1997:28).
We have already seen that in Alex’s case, it is the speaking about archaeol-
ogy as an exciting and glamorous profession that facilitates the constituting
of the archaeological self. That speech acts ‘constantly renew’ sets of rela-
tions and practices which traverse human and nonhuman domains (Butler,
2010:150) means that the very use of the terms ‘student’ and ‘archaeologist’
re-cites a history which, without needing conscious articulation, speaks of
expectations of how tasks shall be undertaken, hierarchies maintained and
 Becoming Human 95
economic and social practices sustained. Further, Butler (1997) shows how
power, in the ways in which it works on and through the psyche, both sub-
jects and subjectifies. Power makes identity possible but at the same time
constrains and subordinates subjects’ possibilities for existence. The subject
must conform to cultural norms that work in and through the psyche if it is
to be recognized and thus be able to be. All of this takes place within a scene
of recognition (Butler, 1997). Butler builds on Althusser’s model of interpel-
lation to explain how language constitutes the self. Briefly, as discussed in
Chapter Two, Althusser famously outlines a scene in which a police officer
hails the passer-by with “hey you”. The passer-by, in turning to answer the
call, comes into being (takes on an identity). Butler shows that the one who
recognizes him/herself and turns around to answer the police officer’s call
does not, strictly speaking, preexist that call. The act of recognition is thus
an act of constitution: the address animates the subject into existence and
provides identity (1997:108).
This takes us back to Alex and the two contrasting scenes of recognition.
Imagine ourselves for a moment with Alex in that first summer on a dig.
We are trudging through mud, are cold from the wind and the rain, and
are scrabbling to remove soil, no doubt encountering worms and creepy-
crawlies, seeking to find anything that might tell us about the earlier occu-
pants of the site. We are students: that we do not know much about what
we are doing and have to turn to lecturers for advice about every little aspect
of the work means we are interpellated, at each of those turns for advice,
as ‘student’. The history of the term carries with it a baggage of meaning
that involves study, revelry, rebellion, and initiation into adulthood. There
is within this history of the term ‘student’ no hint whatsoever of working
outdoors in mud, wind and rain. In the subject position of ‘student’, Alex
saw what she was doing through the lens of the student, and she saw not
glamour but drudgery. The physical reality proved much different from the
fantasy of glamour and excitement that, for her, was part of the ‘inherited
set of voices’ about archaeology. Hailed ‘Hey you, student’ she turned and
slipped in the mud.
Move forward now to the second excavation. Alex has graduated and is
an archaeologist, although she has not yet done anything other than volun-
tary work in a museum. At the dig, she works with fellow archaeologists and
teaches students about archaeology. The terms through which she is interpel-
lated, the possibilities for being, have changed dramatically. Now, when she
is called, she hears ‘Hey you, archaeologist’, and she turns in response to a
name that carries with it a history of glamour, excitement and professional-
ism. To be that person, the archaeologist, requires that she see what she is
doing through a different lens: rather than mud and dirt, she will now see
ancient historical sites that are in danger of disappearing forever if she is
not there to catalogue them. The mud and the dirt are regarded from this
subject position not as the cause of personal discomfort and unhappiness
but as the sediment of centuries that has kept safe the artefacts she will dis-
inter. Her whole physical experience changes because, qua archaeologist, she
96 On Being At Work
undertakes her work from within a different subject position: she is a member
of an exciting, important profession, and every movement of her body consti-
tutes that archaeological self. She must guard herself against the worst preda-
tions of the weather and equip herself with the wherewithal to withstand its
discomforts, but those acts are now part of the performativity through which
‘the archaeologist’ is constituted. Removing the soil becomes not drudg-
ery but an act through which, reiterated time and time again, she becomes
‘archaeologist’; every little movement of fingers and bending of back repeated,
over and over again, and (more important) every recounting of these experi-
ences to the witnessing interviewer constitutes Alex ‘the’ ‘archaeologist’.
Alex’s conversion, in this reading, arises from her occupying different
subject positions, in which the name that she is called facilitates different
interpretations of exactly similar acts. Within the subject position of student
she sees material surroundings and bodily acts very differently from how
she sees them when in the subject position of archaeologist. In the first, the
bending of the back and the digging away of the dirt, moment to moment to
moment, carry with each movement a history that she refuses: that of toiling
as a labourer in the soil, rather than achieving the intellectual distance of
the student with her books. In the second, the bending of the back and the
digging away of the dirt, moment to moment to moment, carry with each
movement a history and an understanding that performatively constitutes
the idea of ‘archaeologist’. It is not merely the acts that are important but the
very names, ‘student’ and ‘archaeologist’, which facilitate her interpretation
of the acts. These names encapsulate the sedimented meanings and histories
of the identities. They reverberate in the psyche, calling forth despair and
loathing or joy and determination, according to subject position.
Further, Althusser’s thesis on interpellation, as expanded by Butler, shows
that it is not the person who calls out ‘hey you’ that is important but the
identity or subject position of that person. It is only because the individual
is in the subject position of police officer that I become a criminal in that
moment of turning. Thus Alex qua student is constituted in that identity
through fellow students and their teachers; Alex qua archaeologist is con-
stituted through the conferring of recognition by fellow archaeologists and
her students.
Alex’s account shows that it is not the supervisor, manager or employ-
ing organization that accords her the identity of archaeologist (and thus
of the human). The supervisor allocates responsibilities and ensures that
everyone’s attention is given to the tasks of the job: no talking is allowed
on the dig save that which is directly concerned with progressing the ex-
cavation. In the sight of the supervisor, the people employed on the dig
do nothing but labour. They scrape away soil, catalogue and record what
they find and try to make sense of the history they are uncovering. They
are digging/cataloguing/interpreting zombie-machines. How then do they
become archaeologists, proud of their profession? Who interpellates them
into that identity? In the two scenes examined here, it was the people
 Becoming Human 97
with whom Alex had been working and sharing time, to which must be
added the third scene, that of the interview, in which I addressed Alex as
an archaeologist. The third displacement in Alex’s account elucidates the
crucial importance of friends in recognising the self as a human rather than
a zombie-machine.

DISPLACEMENT THREE: WORKING AS AN ARCHAEOLOGIST:

THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

It is necessary to understand the contradictions in Alex’s account, between

the manual labour she does and the glamorous professional status she
claims and her sudden conversion from hating to loving the labour, in order
to comprehend the place of friendship in the transitions between labour
(digging in the dirt and hating it) and work (regarding the self as a profes-
sional and loving it).
Displacement One showed that Alex’s words are her constitutive deeds:
through speaking, she becomes archaeologist. Displacement Two shows
that the witness to her words, the witness that hears her speak and, in re-
sponding, confers recognition, must return her words to her if she is to be
interpellated as human. The supervisor does not do this—his/her hail is to a
digging machine. It is fellow archaeologists who call out ‘hey you, archae-
ologist’, and it is by responding to that call that Alex becomes archaeolo-
gist. The third displacement explores further who it is at the workplace that
affords that recognition. The contradiction in Alex’s account in this third
displacement is her contrasting the friendships she has when working on
a dig with the absence of friends when working temporarily in offices in
between excavations. Whereas ‘the organization’ as embodied by the su-
pervisor recognises only zombie-machines, Alex’s account illuminates that
workplace friendship does the work of identifying the self as human.
Alex alluded, in her description of her working week, to sharing a house
with five or six strangers. As she expanded on her description, the im-
portance of these people and the camaraderie of the work featured very
strongly. Although much of the work is carried out in isolation and chatter
is frowned upon, ‘there’s a big sense of camaraderie on site’. Alex gave a
thick description of the establishment of the group of comrades:

I think when you start a dig it’s quite often almost there’s a sensing
out of the pecking order. . . . There’s a lot of questioning, you know,
have you worked a few years, are you friends with this person or that
person. . . . It’s quite a small profession, pretty much everyone knows
each other or they know a friend of a friend, so you might have heard
stories about the people who, or you might randomly bump into some-
one that you’ve done work with previously. Which sometimes is great
and you bump into friends, sometimes it’s dreadful when you bump
98 On Being At Work
into ex-boyfriends or, um, people that you literally cannot stand or you
think they are dreadful and they’re childish, and so those first couple of
days are always a lot of stories, setting out you know . . . who’s better
than me, who’s worse than me, is there somebody who perhaps is very
new to this and needs looking after, is there somebody who’s lazy and
needs a kick now and then, is there somebody who is a brilliant fount of
all knowledge and a really, you know, somebody that you would want
to pick their brains and learn from them.

There are opportunities for discussions during the dig:

People have to go back and forth to collect equipment and deposit re-
cords, and that takes place all the time, so quite often as they go past
you they’ll sort of stop and make a few comments or ask how your
work is going, and that’s accepted because somebody else might have a
perspective on what you’re doing. A lot of these things come down to
interpretation, to what do you think is going on, . . . so it’s quite impor-
tant to have opportunities to speak to people working in the same area.

But it is the pleasure of the company outside the actual working hours
that is very much valued:

Well, it’s great. I’ve spent hours and hours with a radio next to me and
been perfectly happy knowing that in two hours time I’m going to be
in a small metal site hut with 20 people that are all laughing and joking
and I’ll go off by myself again tomorrow.

There are many opportunities for interactions away from the dig itself
(where talking is not allowed):

You’re with people 24/7, usually away from home, you work with them,
live with them, you socialise with them.

There is time spent in the pub and time spent in the shared accommoda-
tion. Care is an important part of the time spent together:

I have REALLY good friends in my work. [They leave] cups of tea out-
side my bedroom door. I’d come home and someone would have been
to the shop and bought a chocolate bar, you know, and it’s thousands
of times, you know. . . .

People help out with some

of the heavier or more brutal chores, removing spoil works. . . . It’s those
little kindnesses that make the site feel like a family.
 Becoming Human 99
Archaeology supervisors not only have a policing role—they inhibit talk
on site—but also are described at one point as having an emotional role, as
if they are an important part of this family: they

almost take on like an avuncular role. . . . They tend to look for the
emotional well-being of their staff or the best supervisors do, as well as
just the progress of the work.

Alex compares this with what happens in the offices she has worked in as
an administrator between digs:

when I’ve done office work, temporary, in between digs, I’ve always
been struck by how supervisors are there to concentrate on the work,
and it’s very [physically] close to people, but it’s quite isolating, you
don’t end up in personal chitchat, you don’t get to know these people,
you just work with them. . . . I get the impression that people [in offices]
go there and then they go home to their friends.

How Alex constitutes the role of the supervisor is important here. It was
only when drawing a contrast between office work (denigrated) and archaeo-
logical work (lauded) that Alex introduced the idea that archaeology supervi-
sors have an emotional (and therefore valuable) role that is absent from office
supervisors’ role, which she reduces to solely that of policing. In other words,
Alex has to do repair work to her earlier statements in order to sustain her
account of the differences between archaeological and administrative work.
I will argue later that this contrast with office work is informative: the
people Alex works with as a temporary administrator cannot give her the
recognition of herself as an archaeologist but recognize her only as an ad-
ministrator, an identity she does not want.
Why is friendship so important? What is constituted within and through
these interactions with workplace friends? I suggest that these encounters
between workplace friends are not ‘innocent’ but are constitutive of work-
place selves. It is in these moment-to-moment encounters that the self is in-
terpellated, on each temporary stage where that self meets its other. During
the interview, I was also witness to (and thus was able to re-cognise) Alex’s
constitution of herself as an archaeologist. In what follows, I will argue that
each encounter between workplace friends does a similar service, over and
over and over. It is they who give us recognition that we are human and who
therefore help us refuse the identity of zombie-machine. First, I will stage
Alex’s encounters with supervisors, fellow archaeologists and office work-
ers as scenes of recognition such as that between Creon and Antigone. This
will lead into the final part of this chapter, where I will develop a theory of
workplace friendship’s place in the recognition and thus in the elevation
of labour to work, or self-making, and in the movement from the zombie-
machine to the human.
100 On Being At Work
ALEX AND RECOGNITION

Butler’s reading of The Antigone facilitates her critique of Western psy-

choanalytical theory’s perpetuation of the Oedipal triangle and thus the
possibilities for kinship. That interpretation is vital for the theory I will
develop in this chapter because it asks questions about whether or not
‘blood’ can be the sole arbiter of who it is that we are, can or should be
close to. However, I am not interrogating that aspect of Butler’s reading
in this chapter, but rather keeping its query in mind as we explore what
‘workplace friendship’ may be. At this point, I want to continue to ex-
plore interpellation within the scene of the encounter, and particularly the
limitations on identity in the scene between Creon and Antigone: Creon
can accord Antigone the identity of kin or tragic criminal; Antigone can
accord him that of kin, king or tyrant. I am reading Creon as analogous
to the organization and Antigone as analogous to a member of staff and,
more specifically, to Alex. Creon/organization demands conformity to its
power to state what can and what cannot be done. That is, it demands
that the staff member become zombie-machine, and Antigone/employee
must either bow down to that power and become zombie-machine or
escape from the site of Creon/organization into spaces where friendships
flourish and the self can become human. Alternatively she may do both,
as we will see. At the same time, I want to keep in mind Bernstein’s (2010)
sympathetic rereading of Hegel’s account of The Antigone. She teases
out of his writing recognition of an absence in Greek ethical life both of
any concept of a self independent of its roles and of knowledge of any
self expressing a singularizing ‘who’ through its actions. It is the woman,
Antigone, who carries for Hegel the task of instigating the ‘I’ or the ‘me’,
separate from a collectivity of roles. In this scene of encounter between
Creon/organization and Antigone/employee, we will therefore be explor-
ing how the ‘I’ or the ‘me’ can constitute its self when the organization
allows no such identity.

The First Encounter: Organization and Self

When Alex arrives at a dig, the supervisor allocates work for the day or
the week and monitors the activity of each archaeologist. The supervisor
prevents any socializing at the dig itself. Discussions, Alex points out, are
limited to talking about the job they are doing:

People have to go back and forth to collect equipment and deposit re-
cords, and that takes place all the time so quite often as they go past you
they’ll sort of stop and make a few comments or ask how your work is
going. . . .

But ‘just talk’ or non-work-related talk is a ‘waste of time’, and if the

supervisor sees that happening, then
 Becoming Human 101
the supervisor might glare at you or come across and shout, but it’s usu-
ally the young ones who’ve just started who do stuff like that.’

Alex will therefore spend ‘hours and hours with a radio next to me’.
This first scene of encounter therefore involves supervisor/organization/
Creon, who demands that archaeologists be no more than digging/catalogu-
ing machines. Antigone disappears from this scene: she perhaps joins her
sister, Ismene, in the ‘women’s quarters’, that place reserved for those who
are not allowed participation on the public stage. There is conformity to the
tyrant’s rule, so only labour can be carried out. The work of self-making, of
becoming human, must go on elsewhere, in the spaces and places where the
acts of talking about the work are responded to by those with a different
power, that of interpellation into the human.

The Second Encounter: Friends and Self

We must therefore look to another scene of encounter, one that must per-
force take place away from the site in which labour is carried out. Alex
recounts numerous interactions between her and her fellow archaeologists
who spend every moment of their waking days in each other’s company. In
these encounters, no Creon-like figure appears. Power is not evident, and in
its stead there is freely given recognition.
Archaeology is ‘quite a small profession, pretty much everyone knows
each other or they know a friend of a friend’, so when people arrive for
the first time at a new dig, they spend some time identifying who is who.
Alex’s account gives precedence to the personal characteristics of the new
colleagues: is this a person that is liked or not? The ordering of a profes-
sional hierarchy comes next, with the self locating itself as an archaeologist
(who’s better than me, who’s worse than me). Finally, the self accords recog-
nition to other archaeologists: should individuals be looked after, kicked or
approached as a brilliant fount of all knowledge? In the shared accommo-
dation, participants are acknowledged as humans with professional skills.
The pleasure of the company of these people is very much valued. Alex is
perfectly happy to be isolated, ‘knowing that in two hours time I’m going to
be in a small metal site hut with 20 people that are all laughing and joking’
and later sharing accommodation with really good friends who provide care
for each other (making tea, buying chocolate, helping with some of the more
difficult workplace tasks).
The recognition of the self as something different from zombie-machine
therefore takes place away from the watchful eye of the supervisor.
As soon as the physical labour stops socializing begins. The labourer puts
down her tools for the day and, walking away from the site, turns to talk
to friends and colleagues and, in so doing, becomes something more than a
labourer: she is transformed into archaeologist. This is a very different scene
of encounter, in a place or space where not only does the rule of Creon/or-
ganization have no sway but it is as if it does not exist.
102 On Being At Work
Recognition as an archaeologist comes through interaction with other
archaeologists—in the metal hut, the pub and the living accommodation—
where the person is recognised as an archaeologist by fellow archaeologists
who do not recognise themselves or their colleagues as digging machines.
The limitations on recognition imposed by Creon/organization disappear.
When archaeologists face each other in joking, laughing and socialising,
they do so not as labourers but as fellow archaeologists in a ‘glamorous and
exciting’ profession. They accord each other this identity but, in so doing,
also recognise each other and are in turn recognised, as human. The act of
talking about their labour, away from the site of that labour, resignifies that
labour as work (on the self). It is in these encounters that the self, sharing
with others its understanding of the profession, is called into its desired
identity, that of (glamorous, exciting) archaeologist, and thus the fantasy of
the selves they want to be informs the selves they constitute when in interac-
tion with fellow archaeologists.
The recognition of the archaeological self as fully human and therefore
with the weaknesses and need for care of the human is recorded in all the
little kindnesses mentioned by Alex: the purchasing of bars of chocolate,
the making of mugs of tea, the offering of help when a colleague is moving
large amounts of soil. All these are done by the friends who work together
and who provide recognition of the self as not a labourer but a worker who
constitutes an identity or self beyond that of labourer.
The scene of recognition here is therefore, as Bernstein observes in Hegel’s ac-
count, a separation of individual, or subject, from its role: the subject becomes
distinguishable from its labour. However, what is not recorded in the Antigone
is any account of friendship. There is family and there is the state, with nothing
else between. The Antigone fails us at this point, albeit only temporarily.

The Third Encounter: Self and People Who Share a Work Space
Alex’s reference to her experience of the temporary office work she carries
out between digs shows that it is not just any colleague or friend who can
accord recognition. The desired recognition can be constituted only through
interaction with others occupying the desired subject position. I will repeat
here what Alex says about temporary office work:

I’ve always been struck by how supervisors are there to concentrate on

the work, and it’s very [physically] close to people, but it’s quite isolat-
ing, you don’t end up in personal chitchat, you don’t get to know these
people, you just work with them. . . . I get the impression that people [in
offices] go there and then they go home to their friends.

Her description of what is happening here is in many ways similar to her

description of a dig, where there is also no ‘personal chitchat’ on the job
and where supervisors focus on keeping people working. What is different
is that she does not develop friendships with other people in the offices in
 Becoming Human 103
which she has worked. As a temporary worker, she remains something of
an outsider, and it could be that she is not accorded recognition because she
will be in that job for only a short time. However, this contradiction in her
talk with regard to supervisors suggests something else. She has to correct
herself in her account of archaeological supervisors after this point, describ-
ing them as ‘avuncular’, in order that her arguments do not contradict her
stated dislike of what goes on in offices. That repair work not only hints at
the work she has to do to maintain her story of archaeology and herself as
archaeologist but also directs us to look more closely at this statement about
office work. Where here is the scene of encounter?
There does not appear to be one. The work is ‘isolating’, and, as ‘you just
work with’ people, there is no scene in which interpellation and recogni-
tion of the self can take place: Alex refuses to turn when called to be office
worker. The self she desires to be, that of the exciting and glamorous archae-
ologist, cannot be constituted in the office. In other words, Alex refuses any
working identity other than that of archaeologist, so she turns away from
encounters that accord her anything other than her desired identity, of the
me she wishes to be.

SUMMARY

An archaeologist’s account of her working life contains three displacement,

or points where there are contradictions or where the sense of what she
is saying breaks down. Analysis of these three disjunctures leads to the
thesis that it is through speaking about herself qua archaeologist that Alex
constitutes her desired identity, of the me she wishes to be, which is that
of a member of an exciting and glamorous profession. However, she re-
quires witnesses to her words who go beyond the position of listener to
that of active interpellator—for her to recognise herself as an archaeologist
requires that fellow archaeologists recognise her as archaeologist. With-
out such recognition, she is someone whose work involves hard manual
labour in poor and difficult conditions. The recognition that allows her
to work on herself, as well as to labour in the dig, comes not from the or-
ganization but from her friends, fellow archaeologists/diggers in the dirt.
Where witnesses are ignorant of her work or lack the power to re-cognise
her, she does not turn to their call. When the witness is the supervisor or
perhaps another representative of the employer, Alex is interpellated as a
zombie-machine, a position in which she labours but does not work and
where the power of speech is (literally) denied her. When the witness is a
fellow archaeologist, recognition is given and received, and Alex can work
on herself, constituting herself as an archaeologist which, in her fantasy of
this self she desires to be, elevates her into the human. One role of friend-
ship in the workplace is therefore highlighted. It is the friends with whom
we work who have the power to interpellate or to recognise one as human,
so it is our workplace friends and not the organization that facilitate our
104 On Being At Work
constitution, so far as is possible, of that aspired-to self, the me-I-desire-
to-be. The organization demands that one labours and so become no more
than a zombie-machine. Agency thus arises outside the place of labour and
in the company of friends.
Workplace friendships are therefore vital in the becoming-human at
work. However, workplace friendships are largely ignored in management
and organization studies, as I will now show, and friendship is a topic that
has been little studied in the social sciences more generally. Indeed, although
Butler’s Antigone’s Claim is a critique of the narrow limits imposed upon
kinship within Western cultures (that is, based on blood relationships within
and around the heterosexual couple), she does not explore friendship per
se. This chapter’s next task therefore becomes that of outlining some steps
towards a theory of workplace friendships. I will start with summarising
what is currently known about friendship.

Friendship in Management and Organization Studies

Studies that look specifically at friendship in MOS are few and scattered.
Although the term ‘friendship’ is often used in passing, its meaning is not
explored. There are only a limited number of empirical studies but numer-
ous conflations of friendship with managerialist terms such as ‘networks’.
Gender, or the biological categories of male and female and the descriptors
that are presumed to attach to those categories (see Chapter Five), informs
some of the limited number of empirical studies of workplace friendships.
For example, Elsesser and Peplau’s (2006) US-based study found that pro-
fessionals are inhibited in developing cross-sex friendships because of fear
of negative third-party judgements (such as expectations that friends are in
a sexual relationship). These studies are part of a wider tradition that pre-
sumes, first, that men’s friendships are instrumental and much weaker than
women’s and, second, that women are more successful than men at friend-
ships and value them more highly. Such essentializing and homogenizing of
men and women is now widely criticised (Rumens, 2010), with norms gov-
erning the constructions of gender shown to precede rather than constitute
friendship practices (Smart et al., 2012).
There is another tradition which presumes that workplace friendships
are agentive and instrumental and should be contrasted with the presumed
communal and intimate friendships of private life (see Rawlins, 1992). Not
only has the drawing of such boundaries been criticised for its heterosexist
and familistic presumptions (Siltanen and Stanworth, 1984), but Pettinger’s
(2005) study of female shop assistants in the UK proves the opposite. She
found that friendships blur boundaries between work and non-work lives
because socialising at and outside work is interrelated. She argues that
friendship has instrumental purposes, in that it is important in the getting
and keeping of a job and in the capacity for coping with a job’s demands,
but it also has emotional and social value, as workplace friendships may
replace kin networks in an era of family breakdown.
 Becoming Human 105
A small body of work continues the agentive/instrumental perspective
and argues the benefits to the firm of workplace friendships. For example,
Riordan and Griffeth’s (1995) survey of staff in one company explores the
implications for management of their finding that friendships directly influ-
ence job involvement and job satisfaction and indirectly affect organiza-
tional commitment. A similar finding is reported by Dickie (2009), who
assessed the viability of a Workplace Friendship Scale developed by Neilson
et al. (2000). This instrumental view advocates that organizations actively
encourage the development of workplace friendships, because it presumes
direct links among good friendships, the happier working lives they engen-
der and productivity. The instrumental view of friendship at the individual
level is seen also in those accounts whereby friendship is regarded as useful
in, for example, career development (Kram and Isabella, 1985); an inabil-
ity to form friendships can be a ‘career disadvantage’ (Elsesser and Peplau,
2006:1078).
In total contrast to the instrumental perspective on workplace friendship,
some studies show how organizations impede, if not damage, non-work-
based friendships. Careers in accountancy, for example, require that train-
ees sacrifice non-work-related friendships (Anderson-Gough et al., 2000),
and the film industry’s pattern of intense immersion away from home in
short-term contracts disrupts non-work friendships (Rowlands and Handy,
2012). Furthermore, in the film industry, intense relationships that flourish
over the short course of a project are replaced by distance and competition
(for further work) at its end, so that both workplace and private friendships
are damaged.
On the other hand, Rumens’ (2008; 2010) and Rumens and Kerfoot’s
(2009) exploration of gay men’s workplace friendships shows the value of
workplace friendships not only for support and pleasure but also as ‘rela-
tional sites for interrogating heteronormative definitions of themselves as
organizational Others’ (Rumens 2010:1556). Friendship, in Rumens’ stud-
ies, is therefore seen as a site of self-making.
Grey and Sturdy (2007:166), arguing for research into workplace friend-
ships, conclude that ‘it is increasingly clear that we cannot understand pro-
cesses such as networking and knowledge management and transfer if we
denude them of their emotional and experiential meaning and of friendship
in particular, but also if we conceive of them solely in terms of their contri-
bution to organizational or individual performance’. They allude here to the
ways in which friendship haunts the margins of much writing in management
and organization studies. There are numerous references in research papers
to friends and friendship, but these tend to be made in passing, with the terms
neither defined nor examined. For example, a study of workplace humour
(Korczynski, 2011:1427), shows that, ‘For many, the key redeeming factors
in their working lives at MacTells were the friendships and community among
their co-workers’, where ‘[b]onds of togetherness and friendship ran deep
on the factory floor’. Implicit but unexamined in Peirano-Vejo and Stablein’s
(2009:451) study of resistance to organizational change was fear of losing
106 On Being At Work
close friendship ties. Sometimes research participants use the terms ‘friends’
and ‘friendship’ only to have researchers relabel them. Vogl (2009), for
example, subsumes under the term ‘community’ quotes from interviewees
that are replete with references to ‘friendships’, ‘mateship’ (4.8) and ‘your
mates’ (4.25). Korczynski and Ott (2005:721) similarly transliterate inter-
viewees’ use of ‘‘friends’ and related terms such as ‘mates’ into ‘trust-based
networks’.
There are numerous studies of ‘networks’ which, in reference to ‘weak
and strong ties’ that are ‘at the core of the debate about network benefits’
(Elfring and Hulsink, 2007:1849), imply the existence of friendships but
leave the topic unexamined. This is seen in an early paper by Lincoln and
Miller (1979) which conflates friendships and networks. A more recent ex-
ample that refers in passing to friends is that of Kikjuit and van den Ende
(2010:452), who explore networks of people involved in ideas generation
and development. They argue that ‘network relations with friends or good
colleagues outside one’s own subunit are particularly important for idea im-
provement and survival’: the question of the distinction between ‘friends’
and ‘good colleagues’ is not posed. These authors advocate ‘strong ties and
dense networks’, where network density refers ‘to the degree to which actors
within a network are tied to each other’ (455), but what, we must ask, is the
nature of these ‘ties’? High density, they argue, includes development of a
shared language, an increased willingness to help and the creation of trust, so
where, then, is the dividing line between ‘networks’ and ‘friends’? Strong ties
combine ‘time, emotional intensity, intimacy and reciprocal services’, trust,
psychological safety and mutual understanding (456), a list of characteristics
that could equally well define friendship (see Grey and Sturdy’s [2007] folk
definition, later in this section). Other studies offer a range of terms that
perhaps encompass friendship and further bedevil the distinction between
friendship and other workplace relationships. One such term is ‘embedded-
ness’ (Mitsuhashi, 2003), that is, ‘the process by which social relations shape
economic action’ (Uzzi, 1996, in Mitsuhashi, 2003:321). Others are ‘com-
munity’ and ‘teamwork’ (see Vogl, 2009): the distinction between ‘commu-
nity’ or ‘team member’ and ‘friend’ are unclear: the terms need unpacking.
The explicit use of the word ‘friend’ may pose more questions than it an-
swers. For example, Essers (2009) discusses how a relationship with a par-
ticipant in her research study became a friendship, yet one always troubled
by concerns over power and exploitation: was she using a friendship to elicit
more interesting information? A friendship emerged gradually after the first
interview, she said, through her stopping at the interviewee/friend’s shop for
a chat, a drink and discussions of ‘all kind of things’ (168). This poses the
question of how the boundaries between the identities of ‘interviewee’ and
‘acquaintance made through an interview’ successively gave way and the
identity of ‘friend’ emerged.
The absence, if not the impossibility, of definition confounds some re-
search. Haythornthwaite and Wellman’s (1998) exploration of the use of
 Becoming Human 107
electronic media in a university research group distinguishes between ‘work
and friendship ties’ (1102). It uses a ‘social network approach’ that exam-
ines patterns of ties among people, organizations and other institutions:
‘ties are functions of pairs of actors’ (1102). They distinguish between ‘for-
mally constituted work ties, actual work relations, and friendship relations’
(1102). Work ties are defined as describing what there is, in practice, in con-
trast to work status, which describes what ought to be (1101). ‘Informal’
contacts characterise work ties—the example given is of faculty members
who offer informal advice to students they are not supervising. Friendship
ties are described rather than defined (1103)—‘the intimacy of coworker’s
friendships can range from just working together, through acquaintanceship
and friendship, to close friendship’. Intimacy seems to be here the term that
distinguishes between friendship and what Allan (1979, in Silver, 1990, and
referring to Adam Smith) calls ‘strangership’. Haythornthwaite and Well-
man’s (1998) study shows more frequent interactions between those with
intense work ties and intimate friendships, again leading to the question of
what distinguishes the two, a question we can also ask of Rowlands and
Handy (2012). Where is the boundary between friendship and colleagues in
‘the intertwined social and professional networks that . . . enable [freelance
workers] to secure future employment’ (Rowlands and Handy, 2012:660),
especially when they are members of ‘closed’ networks that ‘comprise
people who have worked together previously and actively seek to re-create
themselves as project teams whenever possible’ (ibid.)? These questions are
difficult to answer, because often the division of subjects of research into
networks, teams and other interpersonal relationships eliminate from analy-
sis the embodied, breathing, emoting individuals who staff organizations:
they are hidden behind such euphemisms as ‘ties’ and ‘market actors’
(Elfring and Hulsink, 2007).
The paucity of studies of workplace friendships has not gone unre-
marked. Grey and Sturdy’s (2007) exploratory article suggests that this
neglect is due in part to the subject’s being relegated to the ‘informal or-
ganization’ where any deviations from the achievement of organizational
goals are regarded as problematic. Second, the focus on the functioning of
work groups, evident since the Hawthorn Studies of the 1930s, has subor-
dinated friendship beneath the group. Friendship is therefore ‘in some sense
the “other” of formal organization’ (160). Third, very long-standing tradi-
tions in sociology have maintained a dualism between work and friendship.
Fourth, friendship may not be regarded as a proper or serious topic for
study (162). Grey and Sturdy point out the difficulties of defining friendship
and observe that most attempts at delineation ‘rely on the drawing of three
boundaries between friendship and, respectively, kinship, sexual relations,
and paid work’ (160). They argue that friendship should be regarded as a
folk concept ‘where what is emphasized is shared cultural and situational
understandings of meaning’ (158) and in which friendship is typically under-
stood as meaning ‘a relationship of relative and, typically, mutual affection,
108 On Being At Work
support, intimacy, and freedom that may be discursively, if not always
experientially, distinguished from some familial and sexual relations on one
hand and “casual acquaintances” and “just work colleagues” on the other’
(163). It also involves trust.
Another paper that starts to theorise workplace friendship is that of
Marks (1994), who, pointing to evidence that about one-half of American
workers have close friendships with coworkers, argues that at workplaces
‘intimacy appears to be a rather pervasive phenomenon’ (853). He argues
that human actors construct places of intimacy, ‘new private niches’, in
whichever part of the organization their work takes them. Rather than
dividing societies into sharply differentiated nuclear families, with intimacy
found only within the family, he argues that ‘institutional differentiation on
the macrolevel, and individuation, dyadic intimacy, “self-disclosure”, and
privatisation of space and time on the microlevel march together, and these
processes unfold in full force both inside and outside families and organiza-
tions’ (1994:846). In Marks’ (1994) study, friendship is defined as emerging
from self-disclosure.
Although studies of workplace friendship are sparse, those which avoid
an instrumental approach point towards some propositions of a theory of
workplace friendship. That is, workplace friendships include emotional
bonds and are aspects of self-making. Alex provides insights as to the pro-
cesses through which self-making occurs. She referred often to the social
bonds she shared with her archaeological friends, but she went further in de-
scribing the caring work they afforded each other and still further in illumi-
nating how friends confer recognition of the self in its identity. We therefore
have some emergent propositions for a theory of workplace friendships,
which sociological research, as I will now discuss, can augment.

Sociology and Friendship

In sociology, as in management and organization studies, friendship has not
been a major focus of study. However, recent empirical research suggests
that boundaries between friendship and kinship are disintegrating.
The most sustained sociological research into friendship is perhaps that
of Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl. Their recent empirical work in the United
Kingdom (Spencer and Pahl, 2004; 2006) suggests that we bundle under
the single label of ‘friendship’ a wide array of relationships. Participants,
asked to outline their ‘personal communities’, described some friendships
as very close and others as distant. They looked to some people for ‘fun’
and to others for nurturing, care and intimacy. Some friends and relatives
were trusted with the most closely guarded secrets, whereas others were
told only superficial details of thoughts and feelings. Some blood kin were
close and described as friends; others were unimportant, even estranged,
and friends provided the closeness that otherwise may have been missing
 Becoming Human 109
from their lives. Friendships ranged from the superficial to ‘soulmates’, with
some friends described as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’. Close kin were described as
if they were friends and best friends as if they were kin. Most people have in
their personal communities a variety of close and distant friends and family
members. It is personal communities, Spencer and Pahl suggest, that provide
a sense of belonging and identity through ‘biography and the active main-
tenance of longstanding relationships’ (2006:210) and in which friendship
and friend-like kin provide ‘an important form of social glue’.
The workplace, Spencer and Pahl (2006) report in a frustratingly brief
discussion, is an ‘extremely important context in which friendships can
be made’ and where shared interests or beliefs can be ‘a powerful basis
for friendship’ (96). However, the heterogeneity of forms of friendship is
seen also in workplace friendships. Some are ‘of the moment’ and do not
survive after people have changed their jobs; others continue and deepen
over years. Some workplace friends do not socialise outside work, whilst
others do. Workplace friendships suffer sometimes from strains of competi-
tiveness or hierarchical status, but work often takes its toll on non-work
friendships.
All this leads Spence and Pahl to conclude that there is a ‘suffusion’ be-
tween friends and family: the boundaries between the two have become
blurred. There is no ‘polar opposite’ between them; rather, there is ‘sub-
tlety and complexity [in] people’s micro-social worlds’ where ‘Not only can
friends and family play overlapping roles, but kin and non-kin can occupy
similar positions in terms of the degree of choice and commitment the rela-
tionship entails’ (125).
Similar conclusions are reached in the work of Shelley Budgeon and Sasha
Roseneil (Budgeon and Roseneil, 2004; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004), who
maintain that ‘the category of the family is increasingly failing to contain the
multiplicity of practices of intimacy and care which have traditionally been
its prerogative and its raison d’etre’ (Budgeon and Roseneil, 2004:127).
Rather, relationships now cover a broad range, including household com-
munities, non-coresidential intimate partnerships, friendships, and so on,
which provide ‘intimacy, care and companionship in an individualizing
world’ (128).
In their recounting of their empirical research, Roseneil and Budgeon
(2004) begin by opposing ‘family’ and ‘networks of friends’ and end by
collapsing the distinction between them. The family, they write, is an ‘idea’
which ‘retains an almost unparalleled ability to move people, both emotion-
ally and politically’ (135), for this is where ‘cultures of care’ are presumed to
be located. Networks of friends, meanwhile, are located in ‘the burgeoning
diversity of contemporary practices of intimacy and care’ (136) which are
hidden within a heteronormative sociological imaginary which inadequately
analyses contemporary changes in cultures of care and valorises the hetero-
normative family. Friendship’s importance is emphasised:
110 On Being At Work
Across a range of lifestyles and sexualities, . . . friendship occupied a
central place in the personal lives of our interviewees. There was a high
degree of reliance on friends, as opposed to biological kin and sexual
partners, particularly for the provision of care and support in everyday
life, to the extent that it could be said that friendship operated as an
ethical practice for many (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004:146).

Importantly, ‘care and support flow between individuals with no bio-

logical, legal or social recognized ties to each other’ (Roseneil and Budgeon,
2004:153). Indeed, Smart et al. (2012) found depth and intensity of emo-
tions between close friends. Friendships, they write (2012:99), ‘can be onto-
logically unsettling. By this we mean that the more “complex” the friendship
the more it engages the “self” and is part of a process of the formation of
one’s self-identity or sense of self’. Friendship is thus an intersubjective en-
tanglement involving trust and self-questioning.
Workplace friendships may be one of those areas of understanding that
are constantly visible yet whose very commonplaceness makes them invis-
ible (Dollimore, 2001). Have they existed since the days of the first manu-
factories, ignored except by those involved in them? Before the industrial
revolution, households consisted of people who were and were not related
by blood. The emergence of a middle class able to invest in its own accom-
modation led to a movement out of a more generalised, shared household
and into ‘houses’. Now there emerged changes in the language, by means of
which ‘relation’ and ‘relative’ were endowed with the property of kinship,
in other words, being defined as related by blood and marriage (Strathern,
2005). Although we know that the home became the domain of private
relationships, we do not know what forms of affective relationships flour-
ished in the public space of manufactories. Did remnants of the relation-
ships of the shared household inform how people adapted to each other as
they began to learn to obey clock-time and the dictates of the supervisor?
What we do know is that workplace friendships have been ignored in the
context of a heteronormative matrix in which power dictates which rela-
tionships can and cannot be valorised (Borneman, 1996). Modern forms of
marriage, Borneman (1996) argues, instigated a series of Derridean ‘violent
hierarchies’ where the lesser (the non-married or those in different forms of
affective relationship) are always the abjected supplement upon which the
dominant relies for its completeness. Kinship has been regarded as superior
to friendship (Schneider, 1984). Strathern (2005) writes that forms of kin-
ship and selves that have held sway for two centuries may be malleable if
‘the signs’ are changed. It may be that other forms of affective relationships
have flourished throughout the centuries since the industrial revolution but
have remained largely unmarked and unremarked. Alex’s experience shows
that workplace friendships provide care, support and, most important, rec-
ognition. We know from anthropological research (Douglas, 1997) that
the sharing of space and eating together, constitutive of kin relationships in
 Becoming Human 111
some cultures, are also constitutive of close relationships in the West. When
we share the space of the office or the factory floor and eat together over a
snatched lunch, are we therefore constituting some form of relationship that
is perhaps not kin but is important in the constitution of the self? We there-
fore need more understanding of workplace friendships. For now, I can only
draw together the threads of this chapter to see how they contribute to a
theory of workplace friendships. This theory is that it is through workplace
friendships that recognition of the self as human and constitution of the self
as a me that does more than labour are achieved.

TOWARDS A THEORY OF WORKPLACE FRIENDSHIPS

Alex’s account of herself as an archaeologist has three curious contradic-

tions or dislocations. She does hard, physical labour in poor conditions but
regards herself as a member of a glamorous profession. She hated the la-
bouring when she first tried it as a student but had a Damascene conver-
sion during her first experience as a graduate archaeologist. Friendships are
vitally important aspects of working as an archaeologist, but she does not
seek them when working in other jobs. I have argued that it is the friends
with whom she works, fellow archaeologists, who grant to one another rec-
ognition of themselves as professionals, a recognition that is not granted by
employers. To the employer and the student, archaeological labour is hard,
physical work carried out by people who must follow rules and regula-
tions (that is, zombie-machines). To the archaeologists themselves, however,
their labour is an aspect of the work involved as members of a glamorous
profession, and it is the function of their fellow archaeologists to grant one
another recognition of that identity and thus to turn their jobs into work.
Friendship’s role thus includes care and nurturing but extends further into
recognition. Friendship’s recognition of the other allows constitution of that
archaeological subject that can be cared for and nurtured. The archaeologist
is not cared for by colleagues but rather is constituted through the care they
lavish on him/her. In the terms used in this book, friendship lifts one from
zombie-machine and into the human.
However, friendship has been largely ignored by researchers in manage-
ment and organization studies, perhaps indicating further the heteronorma-
tivity of much MOS research. Research confirms that social relationships
in western Europe in the 21st century are in flux, and individuals are turn-
ing to friendships, including workplace friendships, for the physical and
emotional sustenance that was previously presumed to exist in the domain
of the family. This suggests that boundaries between work and non-work
lives are now difficult to draw, as emotional and other needs are articulated
and succoured in the workplace as well as in the home. Some research has
shown how organizations try to exploit people’s needs for the sort of se-
curity that friendship gives (Hochschild, 1997). Costas’s (2012) important
112 On Being At Work
study of how management attempts to foster a friendship culture designed to
achieve organizational ends shows that the results are ambiguous. The strat-
egy’s emphasis on choice, openness, egalitarianism and diversity actually
propagated dependency, social exclusion, hierarchy, competition, ambiguity
and inauthenticity. Friendship thus became a form of normative control,
although one with unintended outcomes. This chapter’s study is very dif-
ferent, as it explores friendship in a context where these relationships had
little to do with management. They exist in those aspects of working lives
into which management cannot reach, where there is rather than was not
so much resistance to as insouciance towards management. We cannot be
in isolation; we are always ek-static, outside ourselves, in the constitution
of that which we call an I or a me (Butler, 2000), and so we turn to others,
to friends, for the granting of recognition, as well as for care and support.
At its most mundane level, this can be seen in Vogl’s (2009:5.5) observation
that ‘Feeling connected and a sense of relatedness to others in the workplace
was very important for the participants in this study. A general sense of
community existed across all the workplaces [studied], despite attempts by
management in some of the workplaces. . . . to undermine this community’.
Workplaces are therefore important sites for the relatedness that is vital in
the constitution of the self, and this relatedness is found in close workplace
friendships.
Despite the pretence that organizations are governed by the imperatives
of rationalism and logic (Townley, 2008), they are constituted through inter-
actions between the people employed to work in them. People are complex
turmoils of emotions, feelings, affect, needs, desires, psyches, sexualities,
embodiedness and so forth (Bollas, 1993; 1995). Workplace friendships,
I am suggesting, are sites of reassurance against the torments of the labour
and the problems that accompany being with others in a place of work. At
the same time, they are sites in which pleasure and joy found in the work
and in the company of others can be experienced. They protect us against
the worst that the organization can do and offer some of the best that being
at work can provide. Workplace friendships therefore are sites of affect and
intimacy in which members of our personal communities provide a sense
of belonging (Spencer and Pahl, 2006). However, and this is the thesis I am
developing here, they extend beyond non-work caring relationships, even
though they are similar in so many ways, because of the ways in which they
confer identity.
Alex’s account shows that workplace friendships perform the function of
recognition, allowing constitution of the self as human rather than zombie-
machine. This is supported also by hints in other research, such as the
observation that friends are ‘two women who recognise each other (Kaplan
and Rose, 1993, in Andrew and Montague, 1998:355), and friendships ‘do
indeed play a particularly important part in reflecting and maintaining iden-
tity’ (Andrew and Montague, 1998:360). ‘The organization’ may refuse us
recognition as selves, but we find it nevertheless in the social spaces and
 Becoming Human 113
places beyond the purview of the management that allows recognition only
as a labourer.
However, workplace friendships are not recognised by the organization,
and so management can trample over them at will, breaking up groups of
friends during restructuring, mergers and acquisitions or other processes of
change. This is a form of violence because it inflicts emotional pain that is
not recognised or even recognisable and thus cannot be articulated as ‘real’
pain. Where kinship is recognised in law and has certain rights, workplace
friendships are unrecognised and have no rights. The harm that organiza-
tions can wreak on employees’ lives includes the destruction of friendships
and thus of identities. This needs to be challenged by making workplace
friendships visible, giving recognition to their importance and ensuring that
they become governed by a range of rights.
5 Becoming and Not Becoming
Gendered

The category of women does not become useless through deconstruc-

tion, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as ‘referents’,
and which stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming
to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance. (Butler,
1993:29)

When I was seven or eight years old, I read an Enid Blyton story in which
the Famous Five went on holiday to Wales (I think it must have been Five
Get into a Fix [1958]). I remember that the farmer’s wife who featured in
the story said ‘look you’ at the end of many of her sentences. I never used
that phrase, resulting in what I would now call an identity crisis: could I be
Welsh if I did not say ‘look you’? If I wasn’t Welsh, what, then, was I? Simi-
lar questions beset me as I read lists of the attributes of the male and female
culled from the literature cited in this chapter. The male is/must be rational,
non-emotional, strong and disembodied/close to culture, the female caring,
nurturing, emotional and embodied/close to nature. My body is biologically
female, and, after it has fallen out of bed each morning, I dress it up so that
it conforms to its biological identity (makeup, hair, nail varnish, clothes,
shoes); after 30 or 40 minutes’ labour, I turn the requisite set of arms, legs,
torso, and the rest into a semblance of a woman. Much of this work is plea-
surable; what can be painful is the outcome, which places me in a category
in which my career prospects may be limited by gender rather than capabil-
ity (Fotaki, 2011) and in which I may become invisible and silenced. When
one’s ideas are dismissed not because of their content but because of the
body that articulates them, that body flinches and shrinks as it experiences
the insult as if it were an act of physical violence.
However, it takes just a few minutes’ thought about norms to realise that
these basic distinctions between male and female/masculine and feminine
arise (in the first instance) from categorizations according to physically evi-
dent (albeit socially interpreted) characteristics: with/without breasts, vagina
and penis. To these are attached normative attributes, widely mistaken for
positive differences: rational/emotional; strong/weak; public/private; logi-
cal/caring. If one is to be a ‘real’ man, that is, if one does not have breasts or
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 115
a vagina but does have a penis, then one has to conform with the norms on
the left side of each slash in this list. Those with or without the other requi-
site bodily protuberances and orifices must constitute themselves according
to the appropriate set of norms. Failure to approximate sufficiently well
these normative attributes jeopardises, if not makes impossible, recognition
and therefore selfhood (Butler, 1990; 1993). This is despite their being cul-
turally variable and arbitrarily, albeit historically, allocated. When I stumble
across myself thinking or debating or working, in those times when I be-
come consciously aware of both body and mind, it strikes me that I am not
conforming neatly to gendered categories: although I am sometimes within
them, at other times I straddle both sides of those boundary lines, and I am
sometimes outside them altogether. What gender therefore is the (apparently
female) me that is rationally and unemotionally (in an apparently masculine
way) considering how it genders itself? More pertinent, what is this ‘gender’
that Butler has shown I am performatively achieving?
Much research contradicts the belief that sex/gender is a given and im-
mutable biological category, that men are born men and women, women. If
that were the case, there would be no need for a chapter on gender, unless
it was to explore the continuing inferior position of women and women’s
jobs. However, that path is very well trodden and I would add little to it.
Rather, it is the changes in occupations that intrigue me, notably in manage-
ment and the professions into which women have made many incursions so
that, at least at junior and middle levels, they are very visibly present.1 This
is very different from when I looked for my first job, at the age of 16, when
clerical posts were advertised with two pay scales for the same post, one for
men and a lower one for women.
Women today are in some ways very different from the matriarchs who
crowded in on my mining community childhood a half-century ago. How-
ever, I look round at family gatherings and see how my own sisters have in
their turn become matriarchs, provoking thoughts about the possibility of
the influx of women into management and the professions constituting an
organizational matriarchy. Such thoughts would be misplaced, because they
imply in some ways a fixity to gender identities that contradicts four decades
of feminist and gender studies that attempt to interpret what is going on ‘out
there’, outside the concrete and glass towers of modern universities, and
which try to understand what gender is. When gender theorists let down
their hair and used it to climb out through the windows of the masculine
ivory towers they had struggled so hard to enter, they escaped from huge
numbers of studies, especially those carried out by psychologists, which re-
garded, as they still do, male and female as biologically given binary oppo-
sites. These studies are blind to feminists’ counterargument that gender is a
social construction built on biological organs and to poststructural gender
theory, instigated by Butler, which argues that biology itself is not fixed
and unchangeable but apprehended only within discourse. Indeed, Foucault
shows that how we understand genitalia is itself a construction.
116 On Being At Work
How does this relate to the well-established constructionist argument
that organizations mandate gender identities, requiring that staff constitute
gendered organizational selves in conformity with that requirement (Adler,
Laney and Packer, 1993; Benn and Gaus, 1983; Benschop and Doore-
waard, 1998; Cockburn, 1990; Duncan, 1996; Gherardi, 1995; Grant and
Porter, 1996; Mills, 1992; Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991; Pateman, 1983;
Trethewey, 1999)? Many jobs are gendered, with those more concerned
with care, such as nursing, elder care and nursery teaching regarded as
‘women’s’ and those requiring, say, heavy physical labour regarded as those
of ‘men’ (Adler, Laney and Packer, 1993; Duncan, 1996; Lam, 2004; Ga-
trell and Swan, 2008). Organizations ‘themselves’ are gendered—they are
masculine (Alvesson and du Billing, 1992; Calas and Smircich, 1991, 1992;
Hearn, 1992; Collinson and Hearn, 1996). That is, they are detached,
logical, unemotional places, banning any distractions beyond the work at
hand; they are stable, powerful and authoritative (Hearn and Parkin, 1986;
Hearn, 1992; Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991; Ross-Smith and Kornberger,
2004). As such, they are not caring, emotional, subjective places close to
nature. That is, they are not feminine, not masculinity’s inferior, pollut-
ing other (Gherardi, 1995; Da Cunha and e Cunha, 2002). The approach
of these studies is constructionist. They leave unanswered the question of
what gender may be, beyond the presumption that masculinity and femi-
ninity rely on each other for definition: I am female because I am not male,
and vice versa.
To understand being at work in the 21st century, we therefore need to
understand what gender ‘is’, how it is constituted, and how it shapes the
self as zombie-machine or human. In Butlerian terms, this requires explo-
ration of the performativity of gender in organizational public spaces that
were previously the domain of men but now are occupied by both women
and men. That is the aim of this chapter: an exploration of the performativ-
ity of gender so as to seek answers to the question of what ‘is’ workplace
gender in the early 21st century. In the context of this book, the questions
I am exploring include: what is gender in today’s organizations? Does the
distinction between labour and work hold good when discussing gender?
Is the zombie-machine gendered, or the human, and where is gender in my
aspirations for the me I desire to be(come) through/in work?
I interviewed two people for this part of the study, a woman and a man.
They are academics, chosen because academia, traditionally a masculine
profession and one dominated still by men, involves male and female staff
carrying out the same tasks regardless of gender, so I anticipated that it
would be a useful forum for exploring the performativity of gender: how
do female and male academics constitute gendered identities and gendered
bodies when undertaking similar tasks—what turns one into a man, and the
other into a woman? Do they escape from these binary oppositions? But I
also explore how cultural products are reflecting back to us changing gen-
dered cultures of workplaces by discussing the hit science fiction television
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 117
series Battlestar Galactica. The thesis I develop is that we lapse out of gen-
dered identities but are surprised back into them. I use a vignette from the
work of Patricia Yancy Martin to illustrate how this happens. But first, the
literature review.

DECONSTRUCTING ‘GENDER’? A POSTSTRUCTURAL

PERSPECTIVE

The questions I am pursuing in this chapter arise from poststructuralist gen-

der theory that challenges the stability, biological or constructed, of mascu-
linity and femininity. It shows that what can seem utterly immutable at a
particular point in time is subject to flux and change over a longer period.
Those seemingly fixed identities, sex and sexuality, are two categories that
have been shown by historians and cultural theorists to be fluid. The male
and female, the hetero- and the homosexual, indeed, even the body in mod-
ern Western cultures are conceptions of the industrialised era (Foucault,
1979, 1986, 1992; Lacqueur, 1990). Until the industrial revolution, gen-
der was on a continuum along which movement, regardless of embodied
identity, was possible (Fletcher, 1995; Harrison and Hood-Williams, 2002).
Bodies did not have necessarily determined sexual or gendered identities
(Lacqueur, 1990), and the body itself was subject to very different inter-
pretations of its materiality (Judovitz, 2001). It was in the last quarter of
the 18th century that what had been a single continuum of gender froze
into the binary structure which held sway until late in the 20th century
(Fletcher, 1995). Only in the 19th century did the binary divide between het-
ero- and homosexuality emerge (Sedgwick, 1991). Indeed, it was in this era
in the West that the interiorised ego evolved (Brennen, 1993; Taylor, 1992).
Presumptions about the fixity of sex/gender are betrayed by contemporary
scientific disciplines: research in embryology, endocrinology, urology, psy-
chology, genetics, neurology and other fields shows a ‘dizzying variety of
sexes available to any human being’ (Hester, 2004:218). Factors combine
in organic, not mechanistic ways, so that ‘variability, multiplicity and pluri-
formity are integral and necessary aspects of sexed morphologies, identities
and sex-object desire’ (ibid.), so that ‘it is no small exaggeration to suggest
that there are not two sexes, nor even five sexes . . . but literally hundreds
of possible sexes that humans can inhabit’ (219). These are compressed
into two cultural codes (Foucault, 1966) that are used when making sense
of gender in organizations (Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Kark and Waismel-
Manor, 2005; Barry, Berg and Chandler, 2006).
Butler’s early work in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter
(1993) on how gendered bodies are performatively constituted is vitally im-
portant here. I will next lay out the theoretical framework for this chapter,
which includes a summary of Butler’s account of the performativity of gen-
der alongside ideas from psychoanalytical theory. This not only illuminates
118 On Being At Work
further the ways in which bodies and gender are only arbitrarily related
but also explores how gender can be oppressive and constraining. That will
lead to the introduction of the people whose accounts will help develop the
main thesis of this chapter, which is that work provides an opportunity to
step outside the oppressions of gender until, that is, we are surprised back
into gendered identities. The thesis that concludes this chapter is that labour
requires that we conform to traditional gendered identities, while work al-
lows us to experiment and play with our gendered identities and sometimes
escape from their pains.

BUTLER AND THE PERFORMATIVITY OF GENDER

Butler (1990:8–9) states that there are discursive limits that both presuppose
and preempt possibilities of gender configurations save those predicated on
familiar binary structures: we have no language in which to imagine any-
thing beyond the male/female binary. This is an important observation for
this chapter, in which I will explore how an embodied gendered identity
may have little relationship to a subjective experience that is, to all intents
and purposes, outside gender. Although we will meet two people whom we
would identify, on first meeting, one as a man and the other as a woman, we
do this because of what we see before us: one is taller than the other, one has
a lighter voice and so on. Butler, however, in the opening pages of Gender
Trouble, unties sex and bodies:

it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given gender;

in other words, ‘woman’ need not be the cultural construction of the
female body, and ‘man’ need not interpret male bodies. This radical for-
mulation of the sex/gender distinction suggests that sexed bodies can be
the occasion for a number of different genders and further, that gender
itself need not be restricted to the usual two. . . . If gender is not tied to
sex, either causally or expressively, then gender is a kind of action that
can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the ap-
parent binary of sex. (1990:111–112)

External genitalia, traditionally assumed to be the ‘sure signs of sex’

(1990:110), are part of a cultural discourse which requires that a subject be
gendered if it is to be intelligible and have a livable life. The ‘inner truth of
gender is a fabrication’ (1990:136), because gender ‘is a fantasy instituted
and inscribed on the surface of bodies’ (ibid.).
The bodies that are discussed in this chapter are, in Butler’s terms, perfor-
matively constituted. That is, each micromovement of the body, each tiny,
repeated act, occurs within a set of meanings that allows us to constitute
it as masculine or feminine. These meanings preexist us: we are born into
them and learn how to move within them, to ‘constitute the illusion of an
abiding gendered self’ (1990:140). Thus:
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 119
Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an ef-
fect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables
that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will.
Thus there is no ‘I’ who stands behind discourse and executes its voli-
tion or will through discourse. On the contrary the ‘I’ only comes into
being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusse-
rian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’; it
is the transitive invocation of the ‘I’. Indeed, I can only say ‘I’ to the ex-
tent that I have first been addressed, and that address has mobilized my
place in speech; paradoxically, the discursive condition of social recog-
nition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject: recognition
is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. (1993:225–226)

One can ‘never be’ a gender because the normative assumptions of each
of the familiar genders are impossible to achieve and because the process of
becoming gendered never ends but is repeated moment after moment after
moment. That is, gender has ‘no ontological status apart from the very acts
which constitute its reality’ (1990:136). There is no female, male or other
gender identity that preexists the ‘expressions’ of gender; rather, the female
and the male are constituted through the acts that performatively achieve
gendered bodies. It is impossible to achieve fully the norms that state what a
woman or man ‘is’, but to be an ‘I’ requires that we strive to achieve them,
because the ‘I’ is ‘the historically revisable possibility of a name that pre-
cedes and exceeds me, but without which I cannot speak’ (ibid.).
Thus, as Butler summarises it (1993:2):

a) The appearance of substance is just that: an appearance;

b) Performativity ‘must be understood not as a singular or deliberate
“act”, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which
discourse produces the effects that it names’;
c) Sexual difference is materialised through this multitude of repeated
little acts that occur within regulatory norms of sex which materialize
the body’s sex;
d) Although the body is material (it is matter that matters), that material-
ity is an effect of power, so how the body is understood (why genitalia
are seen as the determinant of sex) is an effect of power;
e) So ‘sex’ is ‘not simply what one has, or a static description of what one
is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at
all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural
intelligibility’.

Her famous analogy with the drag artist does not imply that we are all
in drag: what it shows is that we are all imitating something, but what we
are imitating had no original that we can copy. Drag performs ‘the sign of
gender’, a sign that is, crucially ‘not the same as the body that it figures, but
that cannot be read without it’ (1993:237), because
120 On Being At Work
The critical potential of ‘drag’ centrally concerns a critique of a prevailing
truth-regime of ‘sex’, one that I take to be pervasively heterosexist: the
distinction between the ‘inside’ truth of femininity, considered as psychic
disposition or ego-core, and the ‘outside’ truth, considered as appear-
ance or presentation, produces a contradictory formation of gender in
which no fixed ‘truth’ can be established. Gender is neither a purely
psychic truth, conceived as ‘internal’ and ‘hidden’, nor is it reducible to
a surface appearance; on the contrary, its undecidability is to be traced
as the play between psyche and appearance (where the latter domain
includes what appears in words). (1993:233–234)

So bodies, in Butler’s formulation, are performatively constituted within

regulatory norms, with subjects not preexisting the acts but brought into
being through the reiterative power of discourse. ‘Sex’ is not a bodily given
on which gender is constructed, as social constructionism argues, but a cul-
tural norm which governs how bodies materialize. Bodies ‘assume’ a sex
that allows emergence of a speaking ‘I’, but within constraints that not only
limit the possibilities for what counts as ‘sex’ but also render abject those
who cannot conform with the norms. They do this through constant reitera-
tion of micromovements that constitute the body as male or female.
Gender, it can be seen, is a construction that conceals its genesis. We
collude tacitly within a ‘collective agreement to perform, produce, and sus-
tain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions . . . [whose] construc-
tion “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical
possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other
than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and
deflected under duress’ (1990:140).

DECONSTRUCTING GENDER: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL

APPROACH

In these early books, Butler is constructively critical of Lacan’s perpetuation

of the patriarchal, heterosexual matrix, and in more recent work she gains
insights from the feminist psychoanalytical theorist Jessica Benjamin. I find
Lacan’s Seminar XX conducive to understanding Butler’s account, so my
reading differs from hers on this point. Benjamin offers similar conclusions,
albeit via a different trajectory, to Lacan, and Copjec reads Lacan in depth
to define masculinity and femininity in the modern Western psyche. I will
briefly summarise these accounts as they not only influence the discussion
later in the chapter but also illuminate Butler’s observation, in the preface to
the second edition of Gender Trouble (1999:xxv), that ‘part of what is so op-
pressive about social forms of gender is the psychic difficulties they produce’.
Freud argued that the child is originally polymorphously perverse—
capable of becoming any or no gender or sexual identity. The child has to pass
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 121
through the Oedipal stage in order to emerge as coherently male or female
and thus, in Lacan’s terms in Seminar XX, line up before one of the doors
marked ‘male’ or ‘female’ (Lacan, 1982). Lacan’s thesis is that insertion into
a sexual identity is problematic and, even when achieved, is symbolic or
enjoined on the subject (Rose, 1982:41). It is essential to Lacan’s argument,
Rose writes (1982:41), that sexual difference be understood as a legisla-
tive divide which creates and reproduces its categories. Each speaking being
must line up on one or other side of the divide. Sexual difference is then
assigned according to whether individual subjects do or do not possess the
phallus, which refers not to the penis but to the master signifier. Anatomi-
cal difference is sexual difference, for the one is strictly deducible from the
other, but only because anatomical difference comes to figure sexual differ-
ence. Sexual difference for Lacan, Rose writes (1982:42), ‘covers over the
complexity of the child’s early sexual life with a crude opposition in which
that very complexity is refused or repressed. The phallus thus indicates the
reduction of difference to an instance of visible perception, a seeming value’.
Thus, Lacan talks about male and female speaking subjects rather than men
or women—a male speaking subject may be biologically female, and vice
versa (for a fuller analysis of Lacan’s Seminar XX, and in particular its
mixed reception by feminist theorists, see Fotaki and Harding, 2012).
The feminist psychoanalytical theorist Jessica Benjamin, (1988; 1995;
1998), although working in a different psychoanalytical tradition from
Lacan, argues somewhat similarly. In analysing the subjectivity of the other
(1998), she insists that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are descriptors which are
too easily and simply mapped onto bodies. They are positions that can be
occupied by subjects, and subjects can move between them, so ascriptions
of ‘masculinity’, for example, as competitive, instrumentalist and careerist
are discursive fallacies (Meriläinen et al., 2004). The mother may represent
the security of home and the father the excitement of the outside world, but
both ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are subject positions, representations, re-presen-
tations. It follows that individual subjects desire both the mother and the
father and their respective positions. Benjamin uses, as Butler often does,
the Foucauldian reversal of causation: it is not the female subject who, say,
provides care; it is the provision of care that constitutes the female subject.
But what are these positions, the masculine and feminine? To what are
we referring when we use the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’? Copjec’s answer
is that gender is painful, imprisoning and almost unbearable. In Imagine
There’s No Woman (2004), she uses Lacan’s body of theory to develop a
thesis of the form that masculinity and femininity take in their inscription
in the psyche. Each is located in relation to the gaze. Female speaking sub-
jects, Copjec argues, have to invent themselves as women, that is, as objects
different from themselves. It is impossible, she argues, to live as a woman;
rather, the person who is in the position of a female speaking subject is en-
gaged in a masquerade by which she pretends to be a woman. The female
body, that which says to the woman that she is woman, is a semblance—the
122 On Being At Work
body is female because the law requires that it be female. The woman can
approach and enjoy what appears to be her own body only through an
imaginary position from which she understands how it would be enjoyed
by another: the woman’s body is thus not hers. This body that tells her
who she is (not) is therefore not her body, and in her encounters with it she
constantly encounters her difference from herself. Further, the woman is
everywhere looked at, object of a gaze she must pretend she does not know
is directed at her. Think of the ubiquitous photos of the female body in
magazines: she lies there, two-dimensional, existing only to be looked at and
having no existence until she is looked at. The three-dimensional woman
gazes upon and absorbs thousands of such images of women on screen and
paper, and she is herself that image made flesh, walking about and working
on itself and always subject of a gaze. Copjec argues that the only retreat
from this excess of visibility is into hysteria.
The feminine therefore is a subject position where one constructs one’s
self as an object to be looked at and where one can grasp the self only as an
object that exists for the other’s gaze. To paraphrase a famous statement of
Lacan’s, where the female speaking subject is (an embodied presence), there
she is not—there is no such thing as the woman, only a fantasy that she
constructs for the gaze of others.
With regard to masculinity, Copjec (2004) argues that the superego is a
judgemental gaze that insists on constant self-monitoring. The masculine ego
is ‘too full of sacred places, too full of ancestral dead, to make living there
easy. Life is continuously sacrificed to the past and to the ancestral others by
whose dreams the living judge themselves, measure and validate themselves’
(176). The impossibility of living up to this judgemental gaze, a gaze that is
nomadic and looks at masculine subjects from all sides, making them visible
in the world, means that the masculine self is also the subject of a gaze, but
one that infuses him with shame. The response of the female speaking subject
is to pretend she does not know she is being looked at even though she desires
that look; the masculine response is an escape into perversion, into a desire
for domination and the ability to dictate what the law shall be. The masculine
ego therefore attempts to conquer the world and to occupy the position of the
big Other, from which position the actions of all others will be dictated (this
is what you must do) and assessed (this is how you will do it, how you will be
measured in your performance and punished for failure).
In summary, the interpretation of poststructural gender theory I offer
here argues that there is no necessary relationship between biological bodies
and male/female, masculinity/femininity; there is only a ‘contingent, illicit,
unsubstantiated’ link (Hook, 2009:166) that is grafted on to bodies that are
performatively constituted as gendered. Sex/gender emerges from neither
biology nor culture but from a compulsory sexuation which precedes cul-
ture (and thus organizations) and allows entrance into the symbolic realm.
There is nothing given about male and female, or masculine and feminine;
rather, there are fantasies that are inscribed in the psyche. These fantasies
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 123
govern what practices male and female speaking subjects must strive to
maintain. The female speaking subject’s agency arises from that work on
her self through which she will make herself visible to the desiring gaze she
desires; the male speaking subject’s arises from imposing its will on others.
Both positions are painful and debilitating.

THE PROBLEM

This period in the Euro-American part of the globe, as with that time
around the industrial revolution in Britain, is a time of gender flux. Changes
that take place in epochs such as this evolve slowly, over several genera-
tions, and are not immediately visible to participants, but poststructuralist
gender theory is articulating something of what many of us perhaps sense
is happening. In other words, I am suggesting that earlier studies of how
organizations actively participate in the gendering of employees (Adler,
Laney and Packer, 1993; Benn and Gaus, 1983; Benschop and Doorewaard,
1998; Cockburn, 1990; Duncan, 1996; Gherardi, 1995; Grant and Porter,
1996; Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991; Mills, 1992; Pateman, 1983; Trethewey,
1999) may need updating to take account of the woman as a speaking
managerial or professional subject. Rather than using the constructionist
approach of the studies just cited, which argues that behaviour follows bio-
logical sex, a poststructuralist thesis such as this argues that organizational
gender discourses constitute the masculine and feminine. The exploration in
this chapter explores current changes in organizational ‘modes of existence’
(Judovitz, 2001:1) occasioned by the influx of women into professional and
managerial positions in organizations. The thesis that organizations were
male public spaces, with women contained within the private space of the
home (Pateman, 1983) has broken down. This does not mean, of course,
that there is that elusive thing called equality between the sexes or that
many occupations do not remain strictly identified as ‘women’s’ or ‘men’s’
(Lam, 2004). What it means is that women or, rather, those who occupy
the speaking positions of women (Lacan, 1998) have become highly vis-
ible co-occupants of the public spaces in which professional and manage-
rial work is undertaken. If gender is performatively constituted within a
cultural, historical and psychic field where one seeks recognition, then one
must ask whether changing gender structures of management and the pro-
fessions offer different possibilities for constituting one’s gendered organi-
zational self. This leads to the questions, noted earlier, of what therefore ‘is’
gender in today’s organizations. Does the distinction between labour and
work hold good when discussing gender? Is the zombie-machine gendered,
or the human, and where is gender in my aspirations for the me I desire to
be(come) through/in work?
The empirical analysis ponders these questions. It has three sections. The
first is a study of a science fiction drama, in which we see enacted very
124 On Being At Work
clearly and visibly the breaking down of the relationship between gendered
attributes and biological bodies. The second is based on two interviews, in
which I explore the gendering of the working self and show how one moves
between gendered identities, even into non-gendered positions, but is always
surprised back into one’s culturally required gender. The third is a reinter-
pretation of data from a paper by Martin (2006) which I reread through
the thesis developed here. This leads to the conclusion that organizations
are places where, for some people at least, one constitutes the self as poly-
morphously perverse and where there is freedom from the pains of gender.
However, this relief is temporary: one is always surprised back into gender
and into its traumas. This has somewhat contradictory implications for the
thesis of this book.

ANALYSIS ONE: HOW THE MALE BECAME THE FEMALE WHO

WAS MASCULINE: REPRESENTATION OF GENDER FLUX IN
POPULAR CULTURE

I start with an analysis, influenced by Rhodes and Brown’s (2005) explora-

tion of how fiction and social scientific narratives overlap and flow into each
other, of the television series Battlestar Galactica to illustrate how represen-
tations of masculinity and femininity and thus possibilities for being male
and female have changed in the past 30 years.
Popular culture provides not only interpretative frameworks for nego-
tiating understanding of the social world but also both a lens for seeing
the social and performative texts that inform how we constitute our ‘re-
ality’ (Brewis, Hampton and Linsted, 1997; Hassard and Holliday, 1998;
Bowring, 2004; Fuery and Fuery, 2003). Battlestar Galactica captures some
of the ways in which gendering of organizational subjects has changed/is
changing in jobs where women now share what was previously male or-
ganizational space. Battlestar Galactica is a science fiction television series
that first aired in the late 1970s but ceased production after two series, to
be resurrected extremely successfully 25 years later. In its new format, it ran
for four series. In the 1970s, one of the leading characters, Starbuck, was
played by a man; today, Starbuck is female, although she is a hard-drinking,
tough and rebellious character, much more ‘masculine’ in many ways than
the original Starbuck. It would have been difficult to cast a woman as a
swashbuckling hero in the 1970s, so this change signifies shifts in sexed/
gendered identities in the current period. The Starbuck character is, I will
demonstrate, polymorphously perverse, that is, neither masculine nor femi-
nine but having the potential at any moment to be either or both or many or
none. As such, she symbolises changes in the gender regime currently taking
place. The series’ huge popularity, I suggest, arises in part from the ways in
which it allows viewers to identify with aspects of the (gendered) self they
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 125
sense but of which they are not consciously aware. However, when they see
it imagined on the screen, it speaks to that unthought knowledge, articulat-
ing for them what they sense but cannot put into words (Silverman, 1988).

Starbuck
The time may be in the past, the future or indeed the present. Humankind
lives on 12 linked planets and has invented robot-like creatures, cylons.
Forty years previously, war between cylons and humans led to the vanquish-
ing and exile of the cylons. The cylons have evolved and now can adopt an
appearance so like that of humans that they cannot be detected, allowing the
introduction into the story of a problematic often explored in science fiction,
the question of what it means to be human. Indeed, some cylons have been
placed as ‘sleepers’ in human society but do not know they are not human.
The story opens with the cylons attacking the 12 colonies, intent on destroy-
ing the human race. The remaining humans flee into space aboard any space
ship available. The only military spaceship not destroyed is the Battlestar Ga-
lactica. It is through the eyes of the people on board Battlestar Galactica that
much of the story is told. The battlestar has a crew of fighter, or viper, pilots,
one of the more senior of whom is a woman called Kara Thrace, whose call
sign is ‘Starbuck’. All pilots dress identically in boiler-suits.
Starbuck is a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking gambler. She is ‘an accom-
plished viper pilot’, who is ‘self-reliant—and a bit of a loner’. Described
on the official programme website as tough and rebellious, she has a ‘take-
charge’ attitude and is ‘always hungry for a good fight’. She is at the core
of the combat team because of ‘her guts, her brain, and a little luck’. (All
quotations are from http://www.gateworld.net/galactica/characters/thrace.
shtml, 2 accessed May 2007.) A gifted pilot, she is also a talented military
strategist. In various episodes, she is seen to use her body in ways that could
be regarded as masculine (Young, 1990). For example, in hand-to-hand
fighting or in the boxing ring, she punches overarm, like a man. Now it may
seem at this point that Starbuck represents here a woman who has to ‘pass’
as a man in order to be accepted in a masculine profession (Marshall, 1984;
Wajcman, 1998). This is not the case, however, for Starbuck is shown often
in a ‘feminine’ light, as weak, vulnerable and emotional.
Much of this description, except for the last sentence, is equally true of
the male character called Starbuck who featured in the original series of
Battlestar Galactica, which premiered in 1978 and ran for two series, end-
ing in 1980 (see http://www.scifistream.com/battlestar-galactica/ for more
information). Further funding was not available until 2003, after which the
‘reimagined’ story proved so successful that four series were commissioned.
The show won numerous prizes, positive critical comment (except for the
last episode) and larger audiences than any other series on the Sci-Fi chan-
nel, according to Wikipedia.
126 On Being At Work
The numerous websites which discuss Starbuck do so in adulatory tones.
Only a few references describe as controversial the decision to put a woman
into what had previously been a male role. One such is an intriguing question
asked by a journalist of actor Katee Sackhoff: ‘I am somewhat concerned
about Starbuck as a woman, since the “original” character was not just a
man, but a Ladies [sic] Man with a big old phallic cigar and all that. What
about now? Does Starbuck have something to replace the cigar?’ Sackhoff
replies: ‘She still has the cigar. God, I must have smoked about 30 of the
things’ (http://scifi.about.com/cs/a/aa11203.htm, accessed 22 May 2007).
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but the phallic imagery here resonates with
Butler’s proposal (1993) of a lesbian phallus; that is, contra Lacan, she ar-
gues that the phallus (the master-signifier) need not be represented by some-
thing alarmingly similar to a male organ. The phallus is central to much of
Lacan’s thinking. It is the master signifier, holding a privileged position over
all other signifiers, for it establishes the conditions for what can be signified.
The phallus therefore determines what can be knowable. Butler (1993), hav-
ing used Freud to show that bodily parts are imaginary, demonstrates that
the phallus can be attached to any body part, leading to the question of why
it should be attached to any body part. What would happen if the phallus
became a lesbian body part? Any body part or, indeed, none could thus be
the ‘master’ signifier. Following Butler’s argument, it is possible to see Star-
buck’s cigar as a female phallus that establishes the conditions for what can
be signified. As such, does it not suggest the possibility for signifying gender
as a disembodied ascription that can, to a certain extent, be refused? That
is, although my body is female, I may refuse some or many of the attributes
of its femininity, refusing to acquiesce in the requirement that morphology
becomes my destiny.
Battlestar Galactica was transmitted during a time of flux in which the
very possibilities for gender are changing. The 21st-century version of the
series, unlike its earlier incarnation, featured numerous strong female char-
acters, including the president, Laura Roslin; the cylon who destroyed the
12 colonies, Number Six; and numerous fighter pilots. Starbuck’s character
is different: these other female actors are playing strong, powerful charac-
ters, so they articulate changes in women’s lives that have occurred since
legislation promoting equal opportunity was enacted in much of the West-
ern world in the 1970s. Starbuck represents something more, because of
the polymorphous perversity of ‘her’ character (language insists we must
categorise the character as ‘he’ or ‘she’ and thus limits the possibilities for
speaking about polymorphous perversity). Writers and actor have made a
conscious attempt to replicate many of the mannerisms and characteristics
of the original male character, whilst at the same time Starbuck is shown
to be romantic, vulnerable and in other ways ‘feminine’. That such moves
are possible testifies to the major changes in the possible gender identities
that have become available in the quarter-century between the making of
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 127
the original and the ‘reimagined’ series. The success of the series suggests
a public quite comfortable with characters whose visual appearance sug-
gests their femininity whilst their behaviours suggest masculinity. Where
‘women’s films’ of earlier decades taught women how to desire men, thus
upholding the heterosexual matrix (Doane, 1988), such a popular television
series today seems to encourage its audience to desire and enact not a mas-
culine or a feminine but a polymorphously perverse subject position that
refuses gender categorisation.
This, importantly, is a subject position that may be desired alongside the
desire for an identity within a feminine or masculine subject position. By
this I mean that the two are not in opposition, not an either/or; rather, a per-
son can move fluidly between and, indeed, can refuse either or both of them.
This is illuminated specifically in one episode in the first of the ‘reimagined’
series, when Starbuck is portrayed off-duty and away from the spaceship.
She ‘dresses up’ as an alluring, sexually attractive woman, wearing a reveal-
ing red dress and makeup. Danger threatens, and she is a leading participant
in the ensuing fight scene. This is the most overt demonstration, in this
early episode, of how she can move easily between seemingly ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’ subject positions. Meanwhile, the character who represents
female sexual allure and the appearance of femininity, the character known
as Number Six, is a cylon who is intent, it seems, on annihilating the human
race. This character is Butlerian theory in action: the archetypal attractive,
blonde, alluring woman is shown in the very first episode to be a creature
that becomes a woman (rather than, say, a machine) only through the per-
formativity of the feminine.
Now, the objection may be raised that what I am observing in Battlestar
Galactica is, rather than a refusal of categorisation, an elision of difference
between men and women and thus a return to an older feminism which
encouraged or required women to become as masculine as men (Hekman,
1999). One of the major differences between this and earlier arguments is
that I am neither advocating that this is what women should do nor sug-
gesting some essentialised ‘woman’ beneath the portrayal of masculinity.
Rather, I am saying this is what is happening, that new possibilities for gen-
der have emerged and are informing the constitution of gendered identities
in organizations. A second objection therefore is that I am observing a form
of masculinity being practised by those with female anatomy and thus to
some extent following Halberstam’s (1998) analysis of female masculinity.
If so, then women are conforming to organizational requirements that they
practise their gender differently. This, I submit, is one part of the case, but
I want to keep in tension the practising of both masculinity and femininity
and polymorphously perverse organizational subjects. It is not a case of
either one or the other but of both/and and, indeed, neither/nor. I develop
this argument by turning to the two people who agreed to be interviewed for
this book, Kara and Saul.
128 On Being At Work
ANALYSIS TWO: EXPERIENCING GENDER

I interviewed Kara and Saul, two academics, and also observed them giving
lectures, trying to discern the ways in which the performatively achieved
body is constituted in its moment-to-moment repetitions of stylized ges-
tures. My aim was to better understand how the gendered body interacts
with the psyche to confirm one in what seems like a stable gender identity.
I also reflected back on myself as I watched them and tried to observe myself
auto-ethnographically in the process of giving a lecture: how is the embod-
ied academic self constituted through the doing of academic activities? The
observations initially confused me: there appeared to be few, if any, differ-
ences between how Kara and Saul used their bodies, save for the obvious
differences of physical appearance. I observed other colleagues and speak-
ers at conferences, keeping notes of how female and male lecturers moved,
trying to discern those movements that are supposed to be specific to each
gender (Young, 1990). I found I could not—both men and women keep
their arms close to their bodies or use their hands a lot; some men move
around and take up a lot of space, but so do some women. Some women
take up little space, moving their bodies only in small ways, but some men
do likewise. With a few exceptions (such as Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam), the
appearance of each speaker conformed to his or her biological sex: no man
wore a skirt or lipstick, and none of the women wore a tie. After a while, it
struck me that, beyond these superficial declarations of gendered identity,
the people I was watching while they were working were not performatively
constituting materially embodied gendered identities; there was a surface to
the body that symbolised masculinity or femininity, dress, hair and other
familiar codes, but, apart from the obvious distinguishing marks, there were
few discernible differences. Rather, I realised, I was imposing gendered iden-
tities on them. That is, my subjective body was imposing gender on what
are, to me, the objects that are their bodies (Leder, 1990).
The scene of recognition here was thus reversed: rather than their requir-
ing that I recognize them as appropriately gendered so that I could con-
firm them in their gender identity, I was imposing on them the requirement
that they appear to me as appropriately gendered. Butler alludes to this in
her work: recognition can be granted only on the condition that one ap-
proximates the norms that allow the self to be recognised; therefore there is
another party (including one’s own self looking in the mirror or reflecting
on [thinking about] its self) that judges whether one has reached the stan-
dards necessary for recognition. This implies that there is one who grants
recognition, an Other whose subjectivity we know little of. My experience
suggests something further: if I impose gender identity on an other, it means
I can place myself in relation to that person and know myself as appropri-
ately gendered and capable of recognition and therefore of being. In other
words, I require others to be appropriately gendered so that they hold up
a mirror in which I can know myself: in looking in that mirror I can see
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 129
myself as ‘like’ them (we share the same sex) or the opposite of them (we
do not share the same sex), and therefore I can know who I am. This must
also apply when the other is the reflection of my own body in the mirror, a
body that is outside of and separate to whatever it is I call ‘me’, but when
I see a body reflected back at me on which I can put the label ‘woman’ I
can know my gender. If I cannot place the other in an appropriate category,
then my own position is confused. This perhaps explains what happened to
Kara at the end of the semester, after her last tutorial, an incident (discussed
below) which suggests repair work is necessary for organizational partici-
pants when a person does not conform to that imposed gender identity and
is, in many ways, polymorphously perverse: we/they insist on regendering
that person, surprising them back into gender.
Kara was 31 and Saul 32 at the time of the study. They both work in busi-
ness schools in British universities. Saul was born and grew up in Britain,
while Kara, although educated in Europe, grew up elsewhere. In order to
maintain their confidentiality I will give no more than these few sketchy
details. Kara is short and slim and has her own, unique, clothes style. When
I watched her give a lecture, she moved about the stage little and used what
I would call ‘professional’ body language, in that her movements related
largely to the PowerPoint presentation and other visual aids, but her pres-
ence commanded attention as she spoke slowly and clearly in a voice that
could be described as in the range of an alto singer. Saul is tall and slim,
dresses conservatively in trousers and open-necked shirt and gives the ap-
pearance when lecturing of rigidly controlling his bodily movements.
Our discussion followed the timetable of a lecture: preparation, walking to
the lecture theatre, setting up, beginning to speak, delivering the lecture and
finishing. I will start with Kara’s account of walking to the lecture theatre.

Walking to the Lecture Theatre

Kara’s reply to a question about what she experiences as she walks to the
lecture theatre was really surprising. She had started the discussion by say-
ing that appearance is something that is a struggle, so she does not bother
much with it:

N: Um, what’s your philosophy with regard to looking after yourself?

K: Um, minimalist, seriously. Er, like the least pain possible. Um so
most of the time um I’m really lazy, I’m not very much bothered, I
make an effort to kind of dress up and brush my hair for lectures
and more or less appear in public, otherwise if I know that I’m go-
ing to go to work and sit in my office, even if I’m meeting students
actually, I just wear jeans and um I don’t know, . . . tennis shoes
[laughs] for footwear, and sweaters and um and so I do have aspi-
rations for dressing nicely and looking nice but most of the time it
sort of falls through.
130 On Being At Work
When I asked, ‘Walking to the lecture theatre and actually going into the
lecture theatre. What is going through your mind?’ her answer contradicted
her earlier account, and there was therefore a breakdown in the logic of her
arguments:

K: My primary thought is please please god do not let me fall off my

heels [joint laughter, occasioned on my part because I share this
dread]. Because I er, I’m very, I like wearing heels, but I don’t do it
too often because it’s quite painful for me, I don’t know why, I’m
just not very good on them . . . er stumbling is a very common affair
for me, exactly, and I’ve got these fantastic pair of platform shoes
which I absolutely love . . . and especially when I go down those
stairs at XXX Building, it’s like okay, just take it slowly, focus on
how you’re walking [laughs] and er ah, and if I go through a crowd
of students in in coming up to the lecture I know that I’m quite
short and most of them are taller than me, so just please notice me
and let me through, [laughs] so there is kind of like that feeling,
yeah and once I get to they more or less see me and once I get to to
to the desk [emphasis on desk] I can have something to hold onto
and, you know, while they all sit, and there’s no possibility of me
getting lost in the crowd I start to feel better [laughs] yeah, but this
transition is a dangerous thing. I have visions of myself like stum-
bling and crashing on the stairs and oh no [laughs].
N: When you start to talk, how do you actually start to talk? What does
it involve?
K: Um, I just, I start by giving out the attendance sheets, so it’s quite of-
ficious, and then say ‘right, welcome to the lecture’ so I start talking
in quite a loud voice just to kind of give a signal to everyone okay
that’s the time to put mobiles away and stop talking and you know
the lecture has officially started.

The extended discussion of high-heeled shoes was startling, but its in-
clusion, as well as the length of the reference, suggests that Kara herself
is here working with an as-yet unformulated theory of herself as lecturer.
She shows that these shoes not only inhibit freedom of movement but are
dangerous—if she falls her credibility as a lecturer is at stake because she
would be put in the position of the frail woman needing to be rescued. Fur-
thermore, as she discusses these shoes she talks about herself as invisible—it
is only when she gets to the lectern that she feels safe from falling and able
to silence the students with a few words spoken in a loud voice. What Kara
is articulating here is, I suggest, a transition between what I will call for the
moment the feminine and masculine speaking subject positions. The shoes
make her vulnerable and perhaps in need of rescue, but they also symbol-
ize, in their instability, the frailty of the gender she must sustain if she is to
be recognized as a woman. However, when she gets to the desk or lectern,
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 131
the signifier of the lecturer, she shifts rapidly from a vulnerable ‘feminine’
subject position to a dominant, ‘masculine’ one.
Copjec (2003), as outlined earlier, argues that woman constitutes herself
as an object for the desiring gaze of others; Kara, when talking about her-
self as an academic, seems to be saying that she fails at this. Using a female
signifier (high heels) makes her invisible (the students are all taller than she
is, even though she is wearing high heels). To me, what Kara is articulating
here is, first, the precarity of gender as symbolised by the feminine shoes: it
is something that may fail us and so undo us, unravelling all the work neces-
sitated in sustaining a sense of self. Second, she is espousing a theory about
the impossibility of being a female speaking subject in academia: we lose
our female gender identity (fall off the shoes) when we occupy the masculine
speaking position of ‘the academic’: that is, we must move out of the posi-
tion of female speaking subject and in some ways regender ourselves. To be
academics we must abandon the normative construction of the female self:
we fall off our heels and become logical, rational, non-emotional, power-
ful and in command; we do not exist to be looked at. We are ‘safe’ when
we reach the lectern, which acts similarly to Lacan’s famous toilet door in
allowing us to claim the appropriate gendered position: we line up behind
it and can assume the position of male speaking subjects. I have previously
argued that the manager’s suit is a form of control over male managers
(Harding, 2002) and have often been asked how that account applies to
women managers who dress very differently. Kara gives an answer to that
question: women working in what have traditionally been masculine profes-
sions are in drag, masculine minds in feminine attire perhaps, if we briefly
use a Cartesian binary. As such, female professionals are controlled in ways
very different from their male counterparts. Dominant representations of
women in European cultures are of embodied creatures: semi-naked female
bodies stare out at us from magazines, adverts and billboards. The woman
remains tied to its body (de Beauvoir, 1949/1997); she is always-already
naked, a nudity covered over by clothes. For men, the professional suit elim-
inates the body. If the woman who works in a professional career is in drag,
then she is controllable through the threat to tear off the dress to reveal her
as a woman, to make her conform to the archetypal female position.
Saul wears smart trousers and sharply ironed shirts to work. He does not
use the phallolinear mark that is the tie, but his clothes otherwise, in their
severity and lack of adornment, bespeak the rationality and non-emotionality
signified by the manager’s suit (Harding, 2002). For him, the walk to the
lecture theatre passes without hindrance:

N: Walking to the lecture theatre and going into the room—what goes
through your mind, what do you do in those moments?
S: Umm. It depends actually, not a lot actually, if I’m going in on my
own, I tend not to have anything in my mind. Partly because you’re
in that social environment and you might be seeing people you
132 On Being At Work
know and typically before I’ve gone to the class I know what I’m
going to talk about so it isn’t in the front of my mind.

Masculinity has often been described as the unmarked gender—men do

not think about what it is to be gendered. The absence of thought here sug-
gests that Saul is a ‘typical’ male speaking subject traversing the corridors
from office to lecture theatre, so confident in the identity accorded by mas-
culinity that he does not have to think about it (Seidler, 1994). However,
arrival at the lecture theatre is traumatic:

S: I do like to have ownership of the room, though. If I can be there

before the students, I like to be um or before the majority of the
students. . . . I don’t like it if for whatever reason they’re early or
I’m running a few minutes late, I don’t like to get in there when
everybody is there. [He needs to organize the technology and his
lecture notes.]
N: How does it feel standing there in that sort of minute?
S: I tend to use my notes then, just to flick through, I always come in
with a highlighter, because as I’m talking I might want to scribble
something down as I’m talking to them. . . . As much as anything as
if that act of highlighting commits it to memory rather than when
I’m actually in front of the lectern that I’m going to read it. Because
it’s a bit of a blur, anyway, when I’m live. Um . . . it means I don’t
have to stare looking at the students and them thinking ‘oh what’s
he looking at?’ and looking back, you know what I mean.

He had talked earlier of feeling so anxious about lecturing that his body
temperature rises. Here we see first a need to take control, to be in charge,
to prevent chaos ensuing if anything goes wrong. This is a masculine subject
position. But note also two statements: things become a bit of a blur when
he is ‘live’ and his references to being gazed at.
With regard to ‘when I’m live’, the metaphor of ‘live’ refers both to an
electrical charge flowing through a cable and to television or radio appear-
ances where, rather than being prerecorded, speakers are heard by listeners
as they talk and there is no opportunity to make corrections. Saul is speak-
ing here of a major transition, from a quiet, introspective and invisible per-
son who is about to become a lecturer to an active performer (lecturer) who
is able to carry out tasks without conscious thought (‘it’s a bit of a blur’).
When Saul goes ‘live’, when the electrical charge courses through him and
brings him to life (Frankenstein’s monster?), he stops refusing the students’
gaze (‘I don’t have to stare looking at the students’) and actively invites it:

N: When you start to talk what does that involve?

S: First of all, I’ll draw people’s attention to me, cos I’m in charge.
N: How do you do that?
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 133
S: Um I might just sort of say ‘okay’ or ‘okay good evening’, and then
I’ll wait for them to die down and say ‘okay, yeah, good’, and then
‘what we’re going to look at this topic’.

Now all eyes have to be on him, in this swift change of subject position.
In other words, he, like Kara, moves from being invisible to being visible, to
inviting the gaze of the other, a gaze that desires the other’s desire, which, as
Copjec argues, is the place of the feminine. However, we will see next that
how Kara and Saul respond to that desired gaze differs and positions them
in unpredictable ways: Saul, the male speaking subject, responds to the gaze
in what we may regard as a ‘female’ way, whereas Kara responds in what
is commonly regarded as a ‘masculine’ way. For now though, the conclu-
sion at this point is that the transition from office to lecture hall is one in
which Kara, a female speaking subject, experiences that speaking subject’s
self from a female position, while Saul, a male speaking subject, experiences
that speaking subject’s self from the unmarked male position. This changes
when they begin lecturing.

Giving a Lecture
To be the subject of a gaze has powerful resonance for academics who, by
definition, must be looked at, as can be seen in Saul’s return to a question
he could not answer until the issue of being looked at was raised. Early in
the discussion, in response to something Saul had said, I had asked him,
‘So who are you then?’ His reply had been very bland, if not evasive. When
asked what it is like to have ‘all those faces’ looking at him as he lectured, he
suddenly returned to that earlier question, signalling the turn in the discus-
sion with an emphatic ‘So’:

So. Going back to this idea of who am I, I suppose, there’s a degree

to which you project an image and it can be quite playful at times and
you can sort of do a little parody of yourself and everyone laughs, you
know, that the lecturer, you know, I don’t know, plays computer games
or whatever and doesn’t go down the pub every night, and they all go
ha ha ha isn’t that funny? And it’s fine, but it’s one that you’re willing
to give, you know, it’s like I’ll check out my vulnerability, and it’s not
manipulative, it’s just a way of moving the class along. But clearly that
degree of openness is measured and it’s appropriate, and it’s not ‘oh did
I tell you what happened last year, because it was a really tough time for
me’ cos you’re just thinking, well, you know, or whatever, you know,
there’s a degree to which you don’t bring that to work particularly with
the students because, yeah.

At this point, Saul articulates how he moves into a passive feminine

speaking position, one that desires to be desired by the other (making all the
134 On Being At Work
students laugh and identify with him as a person rather than a lecturer as he
performs a ‘little parody’). He is constructing an image of himself that is to
be looked at, in which he acknowledges that he is being open and ‘checking
out’ his ‘vulnerability’. Compare this to Copjec’s thesis of the masculine: the
gaze there is hugely judgemental, constituting in the male speaking subject
a psychic pain at its inadequacies having been found out. With ‘all those
faces looking at him’, Saul puts himself in the position of a female speaking
subject, constructing a self that is not him but that requires the gaze of the
other so as to approximate an identity.
Kara, on the other hand, when asked about how she felt as she starts giv-
ing a lecture, describes herself as a seducer.

At that moment. I feel quite sexy actually [laughs]. There’s there’s defi-
nitely, cos there’s always there’s always this part in lecturing—is it per-
formance, although I don’t. I mean. Prior to this interview I was kind
of thinking about that. Is it, you know, talking about the body of a
lecturer, is lecturing a performance or whatever? I mean, I, it definitely
is, right now, it’s definitely a performance . . . and I know I’m gonna
give give a give a good one, cos I know I’m good at it.

When Kara gives a lecture on a subject she likes, she talks about feeling
sexy, about giving a good performance—she will ‘give a good one’. Some-
times, it seems, the seduction fails, but this is on the occasions when she
does not feel sexy. This is the only time in the discussion that she men-
tions a philosopher’s name, a male philosopher who, it seems, takes over
the position of the seducer but who gets it wrong and insists on dry sex, sex
as duty, not sex as pleasure. Obviously, the man is not up to the job of se-
duction: it needs a powerful woman in a masculine speaking position—she
laughs in the place where the word ‘orgasm’ might have appeared, but then
changes her tone to show that she ‘does’ very few that are so unproductive
of excitement:

It’s definitely an oppressive feeling. . . . You know, it doesn’t feel as

pretty, as elegant, you know, it feels messy somehow, em, and that’s and
that’s what bothers me a bit. I don’t see the beauty in it so much, er,
the beauty of the performance and the beauty of the communication,
and and the vibe that is created, you know, I just, when I’m talking
about what is it, er, you know Adam Smith for example, there are some
good things to say about that, but overall when I explain the theory of
comparative advantage it’s very difficult to get the (she laughs), it’s not
a very sexy theory, it’s just [laughs] um so that that particular aspect,
that particular excitement is not quite there, and I do I do very few
you know [pause and a stumble] education and sex are very intimately
connected.
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 135
Sex is everywhere in organizations (Burrell, 1984; Hearn and Parkin,
1987). Sinclair (2009), for example, has explored how the sexual energy
of male students puts her in a vulnerable, female position. Such arguments
are located in a heterosexual matrix that presumes essentialist identities of
male and female (Butler, 1990; 1993). Halberstam (1998) has shown that
forms of desire are not attached to biological bodies; a biological female
may experience desire as if she were a penetrator rather than penetratee, a
speaking position that Kara seems to be taking up here, a position of ‘female
masculinity’: she is the masculine seducer who generates libidinal energy for
the transfer of knowledge. On the stage of the lecture theatre, she has kicked
off her high heels and looks at the students from a dominant, assertive male
position; in so doing, she demands that they look at her from their passive
female position.
However, perhaps these continuing references to male and female, mas-
culine and feminine, go too far—why is the male regarded as active and the
female passive, save for its metaphorical relationship to a particular position
adopted by two parties during the act of having sex? Indeed, through con-
tinuing to refer to them, am I not performatively constituting a relationship
where there should be none? Sjöholm (2010) has looked to The Antigone
and to Sappho for an alternative to Foucault’s history of Eros. Her argu-
ment is that we should distinguish between active and passive rather than
between male and female and speak of an erotics that goes beyond sex. Is
that what we are seeing here, that is, rather than moving between male and
female speaking subject positions, Kara and Saul are moving in and out of
passive and active positions? We are now getting ‘caught up in ontologi-
cal thickets and epistemological quandaries’ (Butler, 2004:16), but we must
fight our way through them.
So, one interpretation of the foregoing is that we have what we can call,
for simplicity’s sake, a biological male who makes a transition from male
to female speaking subject position in the course of carrying out his work
and a biological female who transits in the opposite direction, from female
to male speaking subject. This suggests something of that polymorphous
perversity identified by Freud and posited by Lacan’s statement in Semi-
nar XX about subjects being able to occupy speaking positions that do not
conform to their biological sex. We see here the condition of the infant
being re-experienced in adulthood, in places where female and male speak-
ing subjects now share public space and so the terms and conditions of
what we understand as ‘gender’ may have changed. Another interpretation
might be that we have two speaking subjects who move between active and
passive speaking positions. In this case, sex is not ascribed to bodies. Either
interpretation suggests that something revolutionary is taking place in the
ascriptions of sex and gender within the spaces and places of organizations.
It would seem that such changes are not occurring in non-work situations.
Neither Kara nor Saul could talk about being embodied at the workplace,
136 On Being At Work
but this did not apply to their talk about their off-duty selves. The body
is difficult to speak as a labouring body but is not so absent when one is
discussing non-work activities. I started each interview by asking about the
participant’s height, weight and philosophy of care of the body.
Each has a conscious relationship with their body in non-work situa-
tions. Saul’s relates to control of a machine that will allow him to function
well—he seeks a healthy body that will allow him to carry out his job. This
is a masculine body familiar to those who study the sociology of health: the
man takes his ill body to the doctor much as he would his car to the garage:
fix it please (Courtenay, 2000). Kara, on the other hand, enjoys having a
body and looking at her reflection as an embodied being: she admires in a
mirror the way she can make it move and how it looks when dressed up.

Table 5.1 Table Title

Saul Kara
I am 5’11, I am [pause] 13 stone 9 I am 31 and, er, I am about a 160, er,
normally, give or take a couple no, yes, 160 centimetres high and
of pounds, target weight is 13 weight about 60 kilos.
7 [laughs] and, in terms of my N. Why do you go belly dancing?
philosophy about looking after Er, just because it’s fantastic, the fun,
myself, I suppose physically I go to um, we have a nice troupe of people,
the gym at least three times a week, there’s my teacher and two other
not just for weight training which girls, we do dancing in my teacher’s
is something I do a lot less of now living room and all four of us go
that I am getting a bit older and absolutely crazy. We do things like
don’t see much point in having lots impersonating trolls [laughter]. And
of muscles to sit at a desk and do it’s just an enormously relaxing
a sedentary job. I might do some activity. We do the dancing, we just
cross-training or running or some socialise, we eat cake all the time, so
resistance training, circuit training, every session starts with cake and tea
and that’s what I do physically, [laughs], and we watch films, and we
I suppose, I play football once a do performances for charity and so
week. it’s just, I don’t know, I just like it. I
like it for the dancing, it puts you in
touch with your body really. I can
feel it, I enjoy my body, it’s really, it’s
a beautiful feeling when you can
make your body do interesting sort
of things and make it look good and
there’s a giant mirror, you know,
in the room where we can admire
ourselves, so it’s. Dress up in sequins
and skirts and scarves, so it’s like
whee it’s brilliant, yes.
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 137
Outside work, she is immanent to her body (de Beauvoir, 1949/1997), and
she enjoys that sensation of being embodied. This is in sharp contrast to
her relationship with it when at work, where it is something that has to be
covered up rather than enhanced.

Surprised into Gender?

Wondering why it might be so difficult to talk about one’s labouring body,
I observed myself while lecturing to try to come to grips with this issue in
the manner that Ronai (1999) does so well. She explored, during an auto-
ethnographic study in which she became a mud-wrestler, how the movements
of her body in interaction with the gaze of others evoked buried traumas:
mind, body and psyche were invoked together. However, even though try-
ing to consciously think about the body and its movements while lecturing,
I found myself forgetting to be aware of being embodied and reminded of it
only if a physical impediment (such as needing to avoid tripping over a step)
appeared in my way. The lecturing academic body becomes very much an
absent body, to use Drew Leder’s terms. That is, ‘one’s own body is rarely
the thematic object of experience’; rather, it is experienced as a ‘corporeal
absence’, a ‘ground of experience [that] tends to recede from direct experi-
ence’ (Leder, 1990:1). If the body is absent and gender is written on the
body, then is gender or our awareness of being gendered also often absent?
Now, following Butler, gender is constituted in part by means of a body
that performatively constitutes its sexed identity through moment-to-
moment reiterations of movements inscribed on the psyche. As I type this
account, I am using fingers whose nails are painted (today in a fashionable
coffee colour), and each movement of each finger as it hits the keyboard
follows a culturally mandated rule of how a woman’s fingers, rather than a
man’s fingers, should move. To balance my laptop on my lap, I have crossed
my legs in a way that is becoming of a woman (my mother told me when
I was ten years old that women do not sit with their legs apart), and, as I
stretch my neck to relieve the tension of staring at the monitor, I run my
hands through my (longish) hair as I do so, in a movement that, allied with
all the others, performatively achieves my female gendered identity. But,
most of the time, I perform these acts without being aware that I am doing
so: I am unaware of the female body that is moving, so deeply engrossed
am I for much of the time in this thing we call ‘the mind’. Any observer
who sees these acts of moment-to-moment constructions of the embodied
self can, however, locate themselves as a result of my act in an appropriate
place on the gender map: hair, nail varnish, physical stance, all these say,
to an onlooker, ‘woman’, even though I am absent to my embodied self
(Leder, 1990). The subject that I am is often unaware of its body, which is
then present as an object only to others. So, returning now to my observa-
tion that I was imposing gender on colleagues as they gave their lectures,
I suggest that for much of the time we are unaware of gender or of being
138 On Being At Work
gendered, even while the body performs the acts that constitute that gender.
Its constitution, all of Butler’s work tells us, requires confirmation from an-
other, recognition that the construction is ‘successful’ in some ways, that we
are coherently gendered. That is, gender is for much of the time subjectively
an absent-presence. It is only as object of another’s gaze (including my own
reflection in a mirror) that I know that I am gendered, that my body is iden-
tifiable (in my case) as that of a woman.
In other words, when carrying out the labour of lecturing and many
other such acts besides, the body that is constituted is one on which other
subjectivities will inscribe a gendered identity. As subject, however, I often
am not aware of the body or of gender. I become subjectively ungendered or
degendered or indefinably gendered or perhaps polymorphously perverse.
However, I have suggested that Kara and Saul moved between masculine
and feminine, active and passive, positions. To the audience that looked
down at them, such movement was invisible: Kara, to them, must be female
and Saul, male. Yet, that there is at some level some awareness in onlookers
of a subject’s refusal to conform to the onlookers’ desire that s/he constitute
the requisite gender identity was suggested by a later incident. Something
traumatic happened to Kara at the end of the last lecture of the semester
which suggests, firstly, that the person whose body is biologically female
but who takes up occupation of what appears to onlookers to be an active,
male speaking subject position, even while s/he may be subjectively some-
how outside of gender, tears the heteronormative organizational matrix.
Secondly, other actors who, I have suggested, require that s/he occupy the
appropriate gendered subject position if they are to be confirmed in their
own gender identity feel enjoined, whether they know it or not, to repair
those tears. She sent me an e-mail:

Hi Nancy,
I thought I’d add one more little vignette on bodily interactions with
the student body. It happened just now:
After the XXX tutorial that I conducted, I was left in a room with
three of my mail [sic] students. One of them (Student 1) was asking me
a coursework question, another (Student 2) was just hanging around
and the third (Student 3) one wanted to take a photo with me. After
Student 3 asked me for a photo and I said ok, Student 1 said he wanted
one too. I said all right. When the photo was taken he stood quite close
to me—not too close, but probably closer than I would have liked.
When the photo with Student 3 was taken, Student 3 (who is quite a
bit taller than I am) put his arm around my shoulder, but very lightly,
barely touching me. After this happened, Student 1 said he would really
love another photo, and in this 2nd photo put his arm around me too
(somewhat more firmly than Student 3).
I sense that something is going on here with all these arms. I think
Student 1, seeing that Student 3 got away with putting his arm around
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 139
me, also decided to give it a go. I did not awfully mind, but I was not
very comfortable and still (I am writing about 20 minutes after the in-
cident) do not feel very comfortable. I felt very small and fragile with
these big arms around me, and this is not how I see myself as a lecturer.
As a lecturer, I am big, strong and authoritative. If there are arms being
put around things, they are my arms, as opposed to other arms being
put around me. It also makes me quite uneasy knowing that while all
these students are very polite (I even got a bow from Student 1), some
of them are wanting to put their arms around me.
So here we go. Now I am thinking about how to avoid arms in the
future. (or should I? . . . is this an expression of my insecurity?)

Picture the scene. Kara has just finished giving a lecture in which she has
occupied an active, ‘male’ speaking position, one of authority, dominance
and control. The students who approached her and put their arms around
her returned her immediately to a passive, ‘female’ speaking position, one
in which she is inferior and where she exists to buttress the frail mascu-
line ego (Brennan, 1993). Kara is switched from being the superior to the
subordinate, from the powerful to the powerless, from the active to the
passive, and in that moment she becomes subject to the inferiority that is
the heritage of women in the West. From being unaware of her body, from
having an absent body, she is made aware again that her body is small,
weak and leaky (Shildrick, 1997). Kara is therefore surprised back into
gender.
I want to suggest that this is not an unusual event but one that happens
repeatedly. Sitting here typing this account, my body recedes from my con-
scious knowledge, as does my awareness of my gendered identity. A glance
at the nail varnish on my fingers reminds me swiftly and sometimes brutally
that I am a woman. Every time we catch sight of our reflection in a mirror
or are positioned as male or female in the eyes of another person, we see
the visible signifier of our gendered position so, having lapsed out of it, we
are always surprised back into it. There is a violence for women in being
surprised back into what we know consciously as an inferior, subordinate
identity and for men and women alike in what we know unconsciously is
a baleful, depressing position requiring much work in the maintenance of
something we really do not want to maintain. We thus continually taste the
freedom from gender and have it snatched away, taste it again and have it
snatched away again. To be forced back into gender is traumatic, at both
the conscious and the unconscious levels. Consciously, norms of how we
should behave as men or as women can be oppressive and overdemand-
ing, and we are always subject to failure. We may be judged on our gender
rather than on our achievements, categorised and forced into uncomfortable
boxes. Copjec’s analysis shows how gender in the psyche is a torment. This
becomes clearer through re-reading an incident reported in Martin’s (2006)
research.
140 On Being At Work
ANALYSIS 3: SURPRISED INTO GENDER

Paula was the only woman manager present at a meeting where an inci-
dent occurred that was so upsetting that it led her to leave the company
six months later. She recounted to Martin (2006) what had happened. At a
meeting, a new member of the managerial staff, Bob, had just been intro-
duced. He ‘pulled a pair of bikini undies [from his coat pocket] and tossed
them on the table and said, “I’m always ready”. Only one of the men pres-
ent did not burst into laughter, and this man, Jeff, walked out of the room
with Paula. Paula made numerous formal and informal complaints, but
Bob’s only punishment was the withdrawing of some promised perks. Paula
left and established her own ‘flourishing financial services firm’.
Martin (2006) uses this and other examples to argue that men in organi-
zations are insufficiently reflexive about how they practise their masculinity
and the effect this has on women’s continued subordination. I fully support
her in her conclusion but suggest the incident says something more about
organizational gendering.
Paula has been cursed by psychoanalytical theory’s buttressing of West-
ern culture, so she has no option but to construct herself as female and thus
subordinate. She evades those demands by constituting herself within an
active, managerial speaking position. Martin indeed argues that gender is
a tacit, liminal practice that may be largely subconscious. Paula thus may
‘forget’ she is a woman and join with the men in the meeting as an equal.
She, like them, may be ‘agendered’, or non-gendered, or have all sorts of
possible gendered identities potentially available as, in the company of the
men with whom she works, she forgets about culture’s requirement that
she be female. However, the throwing of the women’s underwear onto the
table surprises her back into gender, for if Bob had tossed onto the table,
say, a handkerchief, the incident would have been meaningless. Underwear,
in an office, is ‘matter out of place’ and thus has disruptive, performa-
tive power (Douglas, 1966). A garment that clothes the genital area, it has
sexual associations. Its sudden appearance, I suggest, reminds Paula that
she is a woman, with all the connotations of inferiority, subordination and
powerlessness that are the heritage of women in the West. She is surprised
back into gender.
Further, women’s underwear symbolises that supposed fear of castration
which Freud argues results in the male child aligning himself with the mas-
culine. So the ‘uproarious’ laughter of the men in the room may have been
less about humour and more the result of shock at their being surprised
back into gender as well. They are reliving that earlier trauma, that earlier
imagined threat of castration, through what Freud termed nachträglichkeist,
most commonly interpreted as “deferred action” or “retroaction”. By this
term is meant memory traces that are given new meaning as a result of being
‘relived’ in specific situations in the present. In other words, an episode that
occurred in infancy will return again and again, to be reconstructed and
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 141
reexperienced in the present (Barzilai, 1999). Lacan (1977) proposed that
human subjects live nachträglich perpetually, not extraordinarily, and, in so
living, they encompass three temporal stations: past, present and an antici-
patory dimension.
The sudden appearance of a symbol of symbolic castration therefore
would plunge all parties present back into the trauma of becoming gen-
dered. The men’s laughter is thus less laughter than a rictus response which
may have had little to do with humour and much to do with the return of
the repressed.
In this reading, Paula the manager, polymorphously perverse and confi-
dent in her non- or agendered identity, is reminded that she cannot evade
the powerless position of the woman. She is sentenced to entombment in a
symbolic cave, that of gender, the trouble and confusion of which is appar-
ent in Brewis’s (2005) painful exploration of the subjectified identity of the
female academic.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS WORKPLACE GENDER

IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY?

In this chapter I have explored the fluidity of gender identities in jobs that
women now share with men. Gender is in flux in these jobs: it is perhaps
more appropriate to talk about organizational speaking subjects, untied
from the descriptors ‘male’ and ‘female’, than about men and women. These
positions have no more than tentative connections with biological sexes,
and ‘male’ and ‘female’ are active and passive positions through which in-
dividuals move. The person whose genitalia are female may practise itself
as rational, logical, avoiding of intimacy, active, all those things regarded
as ‘masculine’. The person whose genitalia are male may practise itself as
caring, emotional, passive, all those things regarded as ‘feminine’. These
descriptive categories are arbitrary but normative. We are trapped by lan-
guage when trying to capture some of what is going on today, because we
are inevitably returned to ‘she’ and ‘he’ when we are surprised into gender.
It may be more appropriate to talk about, say, active and passive subject
positions, but even here we return to the grammar of ‘he’ and ‘she’, and we
cannot escape the centuries-long view of activity as masculine, and passivity
as its female other.
Furthermore, I have suggested that for much of the time we are, to our-
selves, ungendered or outside gender, but others impose gender upon us,
require that we be gendered so that they are confirmed in their own gender
identity. Repair work may be taken by those others if we do not conform to
their requirements of how we should be gendered, and indeed we may shock
ourselves when we see our reflections in mirrors—we return to embodied
movements that confirm us in our culturally mandated gendered identities.
We are therefore regularly surprised into gender, returned to the traumatic
142 On Being At Work
identity whose norms are unattainable and whose practices may render us
abject or put into painful and untenable positions. Then we lapse back out
of gender, only to be returned to it; then we lapse back into that comfortable
position in which the requirements of our gender are forgotten as more im-
mediate tasks and activities take precedence. But only for a while.
In attempting to move beyond the no-longer-tenable distinctions between
organizational masculinities and femininities, there is the possibility of sub-
jectivities that are about being. Rather than there being a ‘he’ and a ‘she’,
there will just be an ‘is’. Ending that sentence with a copula, not linking the
verb ‘to be’ to anything, signifies the meaning of that sentence. It is about
not being male, not being female, not being gendered, but just being a sub-
ject. Indeed, Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970) should have led us to
ask why traits have been organized into two lists of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Are
they not, as Foucault suggests, fundamental codes of a culture which allow
the ordering of things and disallow other possibilities? Does it not behoove
us therefore to challenge them rather than to continue listing them?
In terms of the argument of this book, organizations here have a poten-
tially emancipatory stance: they offer the possibility, perhaps to only some
of the people and only some of the time, of freeing the self from the dire con-
trols of gender. There is a cultural requirement to be identifiable according
to gender in order to be capable of recognition (Butler, 1990; 1993), but or-
ganizations may be illuminating ways in which it is possible to escape from
such a requirement. To be able to absorb one’s self in one’s task or to work
with others in a position of mutual respect about the self as a person, with
no judgements being made on the basis of whether one is fulfilling the norms
of masculinity or femininity—that is the possible future of organizational
(un)gender. Organizations currently show us a promised land, even though
we are currently allowed to enter for only sufficient time to know what it
must be like to become a citizen. The self that is outside gender is a self we
might hardly know we desire to be, because gender appears as natural and
as inescapable as the air that is breathed. However, having experienced the
freedom of being non-gendered, I may feel a visceral knowledge that the me
I wish to be would be freed from the constraints of gender.
I will therefore posit the notion that, when working on the self as an
organizational subject, we work on a self that will be outside gender,
freed from its constraints. But, when we labour, then, we labour as men
or women, with no freedom from gender’s constraints. The human is or
should be treated very differently. The terms of the question I posed earlier
about whether the distinction between labour and work holds when we are
discussing gender are turned on their head. The question should have been:
what can gender tell us about the distinction between labour and work? The
arguments in this chapter suggest that gender should be equated in some
ways with imprisonment and in other ways with freedom. There can be
pleasure in performatively constituting a gendered self, but also the terms of
gendering may be imposed in such a way that we become incarcerated in a
 Becoming and Not Becoming Gendered 143
traumatic prisonhouse of a body/identity. If this is the case, then labouring
as a gendered person, with the terms of that gender imposed by the organi-
zation, means that labour equates to fixed gender categories. On the other
hand, through work, we may (sometimes) escape from that prison and be-
come outside gender for a while. So work equates to constituting a self freed
from gender’s constraints.
The next question was: is the zombie-machine and/or the human gen-
dered? The answer would appear to be that the zombie-machine is clearly
marked as sexed and judged accordingly. It may be channelled into jobs
that are the domain of its requisite gender (such as nursing or caring jobs
for women, hard manual labour for men). The zombie-machine becomes
judged on how it upholds its ostensible (fixed) gender identity. The human,
on the other hand, may move in and out of gendered identities, choosing
how to constitute itself as female or male and refusing to be judged accord-
ing to the norms of either category.
These are tentative conclusions, but they point to a somewhat unexpected
observation in a critical text. This is that organizations may, in some ways,
offer some people some of the time a revolutionary potential for becoming
free of the constraints of gender.
6 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in
Drag: Organizations and the Murder
of the Me’s-I-Might-Have-Been

This book, located within a sociocultural philosophical framework that

incorporates Judith Butler’s work and that of several lay philosophers,
develops a theory of the damage caused to individuals because of the power
of organizations to impose their desires upon staff, thus ignoring, suppressing,
stunting, frustrating or killing the desires of people who, as Julie showed
in Chapter One, go to work to do more than labour. Organizations seek to
employ less than human zombie-machines, and individuals seek employment
in which the selves they aspire to be can be worked on. The tension here is
between the less-than-human and the human. Though staff twist and turn
to escape from the organization’s desires to reduce them to the less-than-
human, the organization imposes limits on the possible selves they can be.
Previous chapters have argued that the manager cannot even imagine any
existence other than as zombie-machine and so in many ways is the most
controlled. Through Shakeel, Alex, Kara and Saul, we have seen how employ-
ees’ intelligence may be refused expression and their enthusiasm and skills
ignored or turned against them and used to control them; the straitjacket of
the organization’s desires prevents their flourishing. We do the best we can
do in such circumstances to constitute a sense of self, seeking recognition
through friendships, escaping temporarily from the constraints of organiza-
tional norms, etc., but so many compromises must be made that the dreams
of who we could be(come) through our work are killed off. Even those of
us in relatively privileged jobs, such as that of the academic, are restricted in
what we can do and what we can be for much of our working days.
This book’s conclusion is therefore that organizations murder the-me’s-
that-might-have-been. This is in some ways what Butler (1997:149) calls
‘a hyperbolic theory, a theory in drag, as it were, which overstates the case
but overstates it for a reason’. The language used, of murder and death, is
hyperbolic but allows articulation of the damage that organizations do to
working people in an era where work on the self is fundamental to a sense
of being human.
The modus operandi of this chapter differs from that of the previous
chapters, in that it turns to popular culture for its ‘lay philosophy’ and
does not use Butler’s work for its theoretical framing. Again, the source of
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 145
its arguments arises from personal experience. I voraciously read or watch
detective stories, or ‘whodunits’, and so gobble up accounts of violent and
gruesome deaths. This contrasts markedly with my weak and stumbling
attempts at vegetarianism, Buddhism and pacifism and my horror of hor-
ror stories (they give me nightmares), but somehow I am drawn again and
again to the whodunit. I am not alone: Euro-American culture is saturated
with images of fictional violent death that cater for a seemingly insatiable
appetite for the whodunit. I therefore wondered if the whodunit could be ar-
ticulating something that is otherwise unsayable, as Parker (2011) argues of
the outlaw. An immersion in the literature about the whodunit, allied with
some previous reading of film theory, suggests this could be the case (pun
intended), while an excursion into philosophical and other explorations of
death allows elaboration of the theory.
This chapter therefore argues that the detective genre articulates on our
behalf an unspeakable knowledge, which is that the limitations imposed on
self-making in organizations is a form of death, the deaths of the me’s-who-
might-have-been, the me’s I dream of becoming; organizations are guilty of
the murder of these possible selves. This, of course, is not biological death,
death of the body, but neither is it social death (Glaser and Strauss, 1968),
that is, becoming a nonperson while biologically still alive, because social
death remains tied to the material ending of the body. ‘Organizational
death’, the death of the me-who-might-have-been had the organization not
killed my potential self/selves, is the murder not of the body but of selves-
in-the-making, so that what remains is a zombie stunted by the vile and
poisonous toad, work, that squats on our lives (Larkin, 2003).
My thesis concerning organizational death starts with imagining the feel-
ings Frank, Alex, Shakeel, Saul and Kara might have but for which there
is no easily available vocabulary. There is something that is experienced as
a sense of loss and dissatisfaction, of boredom with work and the wish to
escape, of frustration with the boss and dreams of starting anew. It is de-
scribed as a midlife crisis, a period when one realises that many of the things
one had planned to do have failed to materialise. Like physical pain, it is an
experience of which we are aware but for which words fail us (Scarry, 1988).
However, this knowledge that cannot be expressed makes itself known el-
liptically, through eruptions in other fields to which we are drawn. One field
of such eruption is the entertainments consumed in our leisure times, many
of which seem to focus almost obsessively on violent death. To relax, we
immerse ourselves in fictional death, and this, I suggest, is a symptom of
that which is felt but cannot be articulated while at work. Whodunits are
home to an understanding of death that ‘remain[s] unknown not because [it
is] occluded or unspoken, but because [it] circulate[s] constantly and visibly
as commonplaces’ (Dollimore, 2001:xii). The detective story or whodunit
deals in both death and organizations and so articulates for us our unsay-
able knowledge that the me’s-who-might-have-been are murdered by the
organization.
146 On Being At Work
The chapter begins with an overview of academic theories of death. It
then explores the whodunit and what it is articulating for us, its readers/
viewers, that we otherwise could not say. The discussion then returns to
Dollimore’s thesis on death, first discussed in the chapter’s review of litera-
ture on death, to weave Dollimore’s thesis on disessentializing with Marx’s
theory of alienation. This leads to a discussion of how work could allow
not only self-making but also opportunities for escape from dread anxieties
surrounding death.

WHAT IS DEATH? THEORIES WITHIN MANAGEMENT

AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES

There is as yet very little analysis of death by organization theorists. The

bulk of that which does exist takes a psychoanalytical stance (Smith 2006).
For example, Wolfram Cox (1997) points out the similarity between the
mourning that follows organizational change and the mourning that fol-
lows someone’s death. Ways in which the psyche, notably the unconscious
death drive, Thanatos, influences behaviours in organizations have been
explored (Fotaki, 2005; Menzies, 1960), allowing development of a thesis
of the merger of organization and self (Schwartz, 1987; Clark, 1993) such
that the individual’s ethics and code of conduct become overridden by those
of the organization, and staff carry out acts that they would otherwise find
unacceptable. Sievers (1994), for example, argues that organizations re-
quire that staff remain immature and thus oblivious to their own inevitable
deaths, so organizations inculcate a generalised feeling of immortality, while
Feldman (2004) sees this denial of death as freeing the professional person
to act without any morals other than those given within a professional herd
mentality. Feldman argues that denial of one’s own death estranges one
from life. Carr and Lapp (2005) similarly draw on Freud but argue almost
the contrary, that it is death which gives meaning to working life. They
argue that Eros and Thanatos, respectively the life and death drives, are
dialectically related, with life and death, pleasure and displeasure, always
imbricated each in the other.
One body of sociological theory, represented most passionately by Bauman
(1989), regards organizations as machineries of death. The argument here
is that those rational rules which generally enable organizations also fa-
cilitate genocide; they allow participants to distance themselves from their
actions (see also Burrell, 1997; Browder, 2003). In an intriguing argument,
Willmott (2000) looks to sociological theories of death to argue that orga-
nizations sharpen death’s sting because they provide the products, services
and sense of self that make life worth living. Fear of death is therefore a
form of grieving in advance for what we will ultimately lose. Willmott thus
turns on its head sociologists’ argument that institutions have developed to
help us cope with fear of our own deaths. His argument, in other words, is
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 147
that social institutions developed to stave off knowledge of our death actu-
ally constitute fear of death. Smith (2006), meanwhile, critiques a dominant
thesis within sociology, of the sequestration of death. This argues that mod-
ern Western societies shut the dying away, so that death has become private
and hidden. Smith starts with the proposition that although ways of dealing
with the material effects of death have been removed from day-to-day life,
death itself remains shatteringly omnipresent, so that the bereaved are, liter-
ally, devastated and have to rebuild themselves and their memories of those
they mourn. This rebuilding requires organization.
An important recent paper (Reedy and Learmonth, 2011) introduces
to organization studies philosophical thinking about death. Reedy and
Learmonth develop a Heideggerian organizational ethics in which they
argue the need to acknowledge mortality, an acknowledgement that should
lead to different ways of being and of being employed while at work.
Through turning the knowledge of one’s inevitable demise back on itself,
the self, they argue, can learn to live ethically, alive to every moment of its
existence; such a self demands an ethical organization aware of the need to
value every single one of those moments. Organizational responsibilities in
regard to its treatment of staff are therefore highlighted.
These disparate works cannot be woven together into a coherent argu-
ment or meaningful categories. Organizational death theory (organizational
thanatology?) is thus in its infancy, in contrast with its exploration in other
disciplines.

WHAT IS DEATH? ANSWERS FROM THE ARTS,

HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

The death of God in the increasingly secularised world of 19th-century

Europe was a ‘sociological fact’ (Young, 2003:3) by the time of Nietzsche’s
announcement of this death in The Gay Science (1882/2001). It is difficult,
enmeshed in a culture that has long been secularised (albeit not atheistic
[Chadwick, 1990]), to comprehend the hole left in people’s lives as religion
lost its place and the certainty of life after death faded. If God is dead, then
the meaning of life has disappeared, and if nothing takes its place then all
that remains is nihilism. In light of this gargantuan bereavement, how are
we to cope with life and death? Twentieth-century philosophers answered
that we cope with it by ignoring death even while we know of its omnipres-
ence; they warned against such neglect.
Simmel (1910/2007), for example, argued that death should not be seen
as a single act but rather must be recognised as being there, in every single
moment of our lives, for the human subject is an organism that knows it
must die. Death gives form to and colours life, but it does this through
an aversion to death. Therefore, ‘earning a living and enjoyment, work
and rest, and all other activities considered to be natural, are instinctively
148 On Being At Work
or consciously flights from death’ (ibid.:75). Similarly, but more influentially,
Heidegger (1926/1962) argued that the temporary and transitory reality of
being a biological creature is so horrendous that knowledge of our forth-
coming death is suppressed beneath compulsive activities which keep that
knowledge from us. To imagine not being, not existing, is so fearsome and
anxiety-provoking that we indulge in all sorts of pursuits that distract us
from our dreaded mortality. For Heidegger, the recognition that we are all
someday going to die should bring with it a strong ethical stance: we must
be authentic, acknowledge our finitude and thus choose the best way in
which to live. As noted earlier, Reedy and Learmonth (2011) argue that
Heidegger’s insights make it even more imperative that working lives not be
blighted by organizations.
Sociological theories of death echo philosophers’ arguments regarding
its absent presence, but with the focus turned towards understanding how
the precariousness of human existence conditions social action. The horror
of death cannot be avoided: ‘Death remains the great extrinsic factor of
human existence . . . [it is] the point zero: it is nothing more or less than the
moment at which human control over human existence finds an outer limit’
(Giddens, 1991:162). This ‘consuming dreadfulness’ of death and dying,
Small (2001, in Smith, 2006:226) suggests, ‘take[s] us as individuals, to a
place that exists at the brink of the crisis of modernity. We are not in con-
trol, we do not understand. Our sense of self, our relations with others, even
the way we experience time is challenged’. This explains why we cut death
out of conscious awareness, sequestering it, moving its ‘consuming dread-
fulness’ into institutions such as hospitals, care homes and hospices that
care for the dying and dispose of bodies (Giddens, 1991). Death is therefore
an ‘absent presence in social conduct’ (Willmott, 2000:654) which haunts
our understanding of our selves and our lives (Bauman, 1992), challenging
the possibility of ontological security (Giddens, 1991). Although we are not
overtly aware of its constant presence, it sends us to the gym and diet books
as we attempt to defer dying (Shilling, 1993).
There is thus a major body of theory which argues that death is ignored
or hidden away in Western cultures because it is too fearful to comprehend.
There are some suggestions that this perspective is now changing. For ex-
ample, the social historian Audrey Linkman (2011) argues that it applied
to the earlier part of the 20th century but that the taboo was challenged
in that century’s last two decades, when a 19th-century tradition of taking
photographs of the dead was resurrected.
A body of theory that is difficult to comprehend intuitively (until perhaps
in midlife, as one’s own meeting with the Grim Reaper starts to etch itself
into one’s diary) is that which, influenced by Freud, argues that the human
animal’s fear of death is matched by an equally powerful attraction towards
it. Freud (1914/2009; see also de Lauretis, 2008) argued that the subject has
two fundamental drives, those of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the drive to-
wards life, the creative life force, and Thanatos the drive that seeks a return
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 149
to the inorganic state from which life emerges. It is only in death that we can
escape from the burdens and fears of life. This uncomfortable thesis perme-
ates Western culture: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that influenced Freud’s
thinking, articulates it for us:
To die, to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream:—aye, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.
For, Hamlet continues, it is only the dread of something that awaits us after
death, ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns’,
which prevents our killing ourselves.
Where Freud explored an unconscious desire for death, Baudrillard
(1976/1993) dismisses psychoanalytical theory as a myth of our time, but
he argues similarly that death is omnipresent. Baudrillard traces modern
Western concepts of death to the 16th century and, by contrasting them
with those of other cultures, suggests reasons for Westerners’ deep anxiet-
ies about death. ‘Every other culture’, he writes (158–159), ‘says that death
begins before death, that life goes on after life, and that it is impossible to
distinguish life from death’. The dead do not disappear in other cultures as
they do in the West, but remain active participants in daily life. We must
therefore, he argues, grasp ‘the radical indeterminacy of life and death,
and the impossibility of their autonomy in the symbolic order’ (ibid.), be-
cause we in the West are not so different in many ways from those in other
cultures. Even during life, ‘whole parts of “ourselves” (of our bodies, our
language) fall from life to death’ (ibid.). Identity is also continually falling
apart, so that ‘only in the infinitesimal space of the individual conscious sub-
ject does death take on an irreversible meaning’ (160). Death is thus not an
event but a myth which is experienced as anticipation and which serves to
form identity by adding to the myth of origin another myth, that of ending.
When we mourn the death of others, we also mourn our own anticipated
death. Importantly for the arguments in this chapter, for Baudrillard, contra
Heidegger and Simmel, death is everywhere in life and its localisation on the
body as a single, traumatic event nothing but a Cartesian desire to blame
the body for ‘taking its revenge [for its subordinate status] by dying’ (160).
Mortal body and immortal soul are therefore both equally unreal.
Theories of death from other disciplines can thus be divided roughly into
two contradictory categories: death is hidden away and ignored; death is
omnipresent. A far more penetrating and intense study of Western European
ideas about death, which encompasses the theorists noted here and many,
150 On Being At Work
many more, is given in Dollimore’s (2001) monumental study Death, Desire
and Loss in Western Culture. Dollimore analyses discussions about death
in the scraps that remain of the writings of the earliest Greek philosophers
and their successors in Greece and Rome. He explores its importance to
understanding Christianity and Buddhism, its appearance in drama, novels
and poetry from the Renaissance to the late 20th century (Shakespeare, of
course, and the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, with Lawrence, Conrad
and Mann representing the 20th century), and theories of death embed-
ded in the works of philosophers and psychoanalytical theorists (Bataille,
Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Kojève, Lacan, Marcuse, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre
and Schopenhauer). His list of sources and the depth of his reading make my
‘literature review’ here pale into insignificance. In what follows, I summarise
the theory he develops but draw on it directly only towards the end of the
chapter, after I have set out the thesis that organizational death is the killing
of my hopes and dreams of the me’s-I-might-have-been.

DOLLIMORE ON DEATH

This is the thesis I disinter from Dollimore’s (2001) book. Death and desire
have been mutually informative throughout the entire history of Western
European cultures. Fear of death, of dissolution of the self, is so great that
the only release from it is death itself. Temporary, fleeting release can be
found in disessentializing the self through activities in which one loses one’s
subjectivity and the I, or the ego, dissolves. In such evanescent moments,
there is no ‘I’ that can fear its own demise. (Where Dollimore finds possibili-
ties for such momentary transcendence of the self in the anonymous sexual
encounter, I will later use Marx’s theory of alienation to posit another scene
in which the self may disappear.)
Dollimore traces (sexual) desire’s embedment in Western Europe’s con-
ceptualisation of death to the scraps remaining of the writings of the first
Greek philosophers and tracks the continuing marriage of death and desire
through millennia of Western European thought. Western Europeans are in-
dividuated, that is, ‘separate, differentiated, alone’ (xx); self-consciousness
of individuality is formed through a knowledge of the end of one’s life
and informed by a feeling that the only release is death (xxi), that is
‘oblivion, . . . the cessation of desire, the still point of the turning world’
(10). There is thus embedded in the European psyche a desire for death, one
that is intensified, thwarted, deflected and exploited by theology. Freud’s
theory of the death drive brilliantly reworks and challenges theology’s grip
on death (xx).
Death and desire are connected, Dollimore argues, because of ‘mutability—
the sense that all being is governed by a ceaseless process of change insepa-
rable from an inconsolable sense of loss somehow always in excess of the
loss of anything in particular’ (xiii, emphasis in original). Over millennia,
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 151
mutability becomes internalised as the inner dynamic of desire. ‘Fragmented,
unstable and death-ridden’ (83), the human subject is driven forward reluc-
tantly by that very ‘deeply regressive desire for oblivion’ (83): the desire
for death is what propels us towards a life in which the knowledge of our
own death foments ‘a restless, agonized energy’ towards the sustenance of
life. The Western European subject is therefore always ‘a subject in crisis’,
obsessed with control and expansion so as to deal with that crisis but insti-
gating forms of control that always exceed and break down the very order
that is restlessly quested (92–93).
Hegel, whose work informs the ideas of so many thinkers in the 20th and
21st centuries, understood this. Dollimore writes that Hegel, in analysing
how ‘we live stretched across a fierce dialectic in which identity is dependent
upon otherness or difference—dependent, that is, upon what it is not’ (154),
on an other that can never be kept other because part of what I am is that I
am not that, so that what I am not is not only alongside and independent of
what I am, but is also interior to what I am. However, for Hegel, being pre-
supposes not being, and vice versa. In order to be, everything must undergo
a dialectic sublation or negation by, in or as its opposite, so the negation of
death is not exterior but intrinsic to the subject. Thus, Kojève, interpreting
Hegel, could write that ‘the human being itself is no other thing than . . .
(a) death that lives a human life’; ‘Man [sic] is not only mortal, he is death
incarnate; he is his own death’; Man not only knows that he will die, ‘he is
the consciousness of his death’ (164).
Freud, Dollimore writes, evolved a new language, almost a new mythol-
ogy, to articulate the absolute interiority of death to life. Freud’s ‘ancient,
shocking vision’ was that death is not the termination of life (that ‘mystify-
ing banality by which we live’ [192]) but life’s animating and driving force.
Thanatos, or the death drive, arises from a desire for the complete calm of
the grave, free from the troubles of life. Life is merely ‘an enforced substitute
for death, a movement in the only direction available, which is forward and
one always undertaken against the more fundamental desire to regress, to
die (186–187).
In the 20th century, Dollimore argues, death was not so much repressed
as ‘resignified in new, complex and productive ways which then legitimate
a never-ending analysis of it’ (126). One of these is the marking upon ho-
mosexuality of death. Homosexuality becomes a ‘symbolic focus for cul-
tural preoccupations which far exceed it’. Homosexuality, defined by desire,
comes to figure death. (Another of these figures of death, I will argue
later, is the whodunit—by reading novels or watching films or television
programmes about murders and the search for the murderer, we immerse
ourselves in analysis of and fantasies about death. Thus we will return to
organizations.)
Now we come to what is most shockingly productive in Dollimore’s
thesis. The only freedom from knowledge of death that we have in that
time between cradle and grave is when we become ‘disessentialized’ (325),
152 On Being At Work
that is, when we so forget the ego or the I that we are lost to ourselves.
Postmodernism’s anti-essentialism, he writes, ‘as a merely theoretical state-
ment about identity is misleading to the point of being useless’ and ‘what
needs to be recovered is the experiential dimension of anti-essentialism’
(325). Dollimore finds this in homoerotic writing and in the anonymous
homosexual encounter, in which the self is ‘disidentified’ as ‘the divide
between reality and fantasy momentarily shifts and even dissolves, as do
other divisions too, including those between public and private, self and
other’ (327). In the momentary suspension of individuality, of the individu-
ated self, there is a temporary release from Thanatos, from the compulsion
towards death.
This would seem to take us a long way from much that goes on in organi-
zations, but there is a link to be made via Marx’s theory of alienation. I will
return to this argument in the conclusion to this chapter. For now, however,
I turn to the detective novel to explore how death informs working lives.
Just as the homosexual, in Dollimore’s thesis, is a symbolic focus for
Western Europeans’ fear of death, I suggest that the detective story offers a
cultural focus through which we put ourselves face to face with death. It has
been pointed out that there are strong similarities between the work of fic-
tional detectives and that of academics—each is concerned with discovery,
with finding out and with resolving dilemmas (Nicolson, 1946, Porter, 1981,
both in Hühn, 1987); further, fictional detectives are a useful proxy for sci-
entists and academics more generally (Czarniawska, 1999). Czarniawska
(1999) explores in depth the complementarity between detective fiction
and academic writing, while Salzer-Morling (1998) mimics the hard-boiled
detective novel to explore the relationship between academic papers and
organizational life, but there are no papers which analyse the detective
story’s performative relationship between reader, text and organizations.
That is, there is no exploration of how the detective story constitutes the
author/reader/viewer, who, we have seen, is long argued to be a creature
not only endowed with the fearful knowledge of its own finitude but in
many ways driven towards its own ending. I will use film and literary
theorists to show that our delight in observing, over and over, the fic-
tional portrayal of death arises from our attraction to a genre that says,
on our behalf, albeit elliptically and through symbols, metaphors and im-
ages, something which we cannot put into words. This is, we know we
are going to die, so we know how precious is the time available to us. In
that time, we wish to constitute selves that will have made our lives worth
living. Organizations, as the previous chapters and much research in la-
bour process theory and critical management studies have shown, severely
restrict the possibilities for constituting selves because they require that
we spend much of our time in work needlessly made boring and aimless.
That organizations thus limit our potential and stifle the selves we could
be is a form of murder—the murder of our dreams of who we could and
might have been.
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 153
THE DETECTIVE THRILLER AS ARTICULATION OF AN EPOCH’S
UNSPEAKABLE TRAUMA

The detective:

Wallander rushed down into the mud. He stumbled into the ditch and
scrambled up the other side. When he saw Hoglund [a fellow detective]
on her back in the mud he thought she was dead. . . . And it was all his
fault. For a split second he saw no way out but to shoot himself. Right
where he stood, a few metres from her. Then he saw her moving feebly.
He fell to his knees by her side. She was deathly pale and stared at him
with fear in her eyes. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said, ‘It will be all right’. . . .
Wallander could feel the tears running down his face. He called for an
ambulance. Later he would remember that while he waited, he had
steadily murmured a confused prayer to a god he didn’t really believe
in. In a haze he was aware that [two colleagues] Svedberg and Hamren
had arrived. Ann-Britt was carried away on a stretcher. Wallander
was sitting in the mud. They couldn’t get him to stand up. (Mankell,
2009:557)

In this section I outline the history of the detective story and its relevance
for understanding organizations. The detective story, with its focus predom-
inantly upon violent death, is hugely popular. To take one week at random,
beginning 25 April 2010, British television’s five terrestrial channels offered
each evening a minimum of two programmes (including films) that featured
violent crimes and their resolution. Satellite television channels offered nu-
merous offerings on the same theme. The terrestrial channels’ programmes
included reconstructions of actual crimes; a drama in which a police officer
has been transported back to the police force of the 1980s; ‘reality’ pro-
grammes in which police officers are accompanied by camera crews; a film
about a fictional 18th-century detective; a futuristic series in which the whole
of the human race is at risk; and numerous episodes of North American
crime dramas. The top ten paperback titles in terms of sales that week
included seven crime novels, two historical novels and one book combining
both genres through its exploration of an unexplained crime from the
15th century (the murder of the princes in the Tower of London). There was
little difference in the proportion of television programmes, films and books
devoted to crime and its detection in August 2010 and in March 2011. In the
US, six of the ten highest-selling books in 2008 (the latest year for which sta-
tistics were available at the time of writing) dealt with violent death and its
detection. 1Many of these books are translated into numerous languages, so
their stories are known internationally. For example, two Swedish authors
whose books are read worldwide are Stieg Larsson, whose Millenium Trilogy
has sold more than 40 million copies, and Henning Mankell, whose Wal-
lander series, featuring the eponymous detective, has sold 25 million copies.
154 On Being At Work
The BBC television films of the Wallander novels were watched by more
than 20 percent of the viewing audience on their first airing in the UK, that
is, by between 5.2 and 6.3 million people, 10 percent of the entire popula-
tion2. Many more will have watched the programmes via other formats.
Television programmes based on Ian Rankin’s Rebus detective novels have
achieved viewing figures of up to 8.4 million people.3 Crime dramas, nota-
bly those concerning murder and attempts to discover the murderers, are
therefore the entertainment of choice of many millions of people. When
six million people sit down to watch Wallander, they sit down to watch a
portrayal of murder.
Detective fiction appeared in the mid-19th century alongside an emergent
scientific interest in deductive logic and, indeed, manufactories. A newly liter-
ate reading public which was experiencing the cultural upheavals of industri-
alisation, the move from rural to city living, mass literacy and secularisation,
found in detective fiction some sort of ontological security (van Dover, 2005).
Edgar Allan Poe’s two short stories The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
and The Purloined Letter (1844) established the ‘twin fountainheads’ (Rz-
epka, 2005:74) of detective fiction: ‘whodunit?’ and ‘how is the criminal to be
discovered and captured?’ As the scientific method developed, so also did the
focus in the crime novel on deduction through a careful accumulation of facts:
the amazingly insightful detective could emerge. It was Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books that institutionalised the format, which was
to continue for a century and more: the somewhat troubled but brilliant and
astute loner, dependent on a good friend, who has powers of observation far
beyond those of the average person (Rzepka, 2005; van Dover, 2005). The
detectives featured in the classic detective novels (and, later, the films and
television programmes) offer, in the scientific age, the assurance that someone
knows infallibly what has happened to us and knows the mysteries that sur-
round the beginning and the ending of our lives (van Dover, 2005). There is
nothing in this first incarnation of the detective genre to relate it to organiza-
tions: the detective operated independently, demonstrating a sparkling intel-
ligence far in advance of that of the police officers, whose role was that of the
inferior other to this superior form of being.
Classic detective fiction revolves around two stories: the story of the crime
and the story of its solving, often recounted by a companion to the hero-
detective. Its successor, American hard-boiled detective fiction, emerged
in the first half of the 20th century: now the companion disappears and
the detective becomes the narrator. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, who
appeared in The Maltese Falcon in 1930, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe, who featured in a series of novels beginning with The Big Sleep
(1939), typify the hard-boiled detective. Whereas previously there were
two overlapping stories—the committing of a crime and its solving—now
the two stories merge, and through the very process of searching for the
criminal the detective causes the criminal to commit more crimes. Often the
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 155
hard-boiled detective has to battle against not only the devious criminal but
also the corrupt organizations that employ them. The heroic detective of
the classical novel is replaced in the hard-boiled novels by a detective who
is damaged, disillusioned, and ‘in a paralyzed state of profound weariness
and melancholy’ (Hühn, 1987:461) but who can, like the heroic detective,
‘reintegrat[e] the aberrant event, [and so] the narrative reconstruction re-
stores the disrupted social order and reaffirms the validity of the system
of norms’ (425). It can be seen that, as with the classic detective story, the
hard-boiled detective story does something far more than entertain, because
it addresses the traumas of an age. However, there is again little about orga-
nizations in this period: the detective is a solo operator, and any organiza-
tions encountered are shadowy, criminal and dangerous, symbolic perhaps
of the world wars of the 20th century and the West’s fear of Soviet commu-
nism but not of workplaces.
Classic and hard-boiled detectives have been challenged by the post-
modern detective story. Whereas literary theorists have argued that this
generation of whodunits is one, typically, in which each person’s story of
the crime is just another version of what happened, with little possibility
of discovering ‘the truth’, I suggest that the distinction between the post-
modern detective story and its predecessors is the importance of organiza-
tions to the analysis, because today’s detective works for an organization,
usually a police force, and often deals with murderers who work for other
organizations. Like that of the hard-boiled detective, this detective’s read-
ing of the story changes the story itself, and the detective, battered and
bruised, is left to suffer the consequences of a damaged ego. However,
this detective is not so much disillusioned as traumatised at being unable
to control everything going on around him/her (Czarniawska, 1999), and
much of what goes on around the detective is organizational life. Although
one story—the teleological journey towards discovery of perpetrators of
the crime—continues, alongside this runs another story in which teleol-
ogy is defeated and all around is chaos and uncertainty. This is signified
in material (organizational) objects such as the furniture in the detectives’
offices. Where the aesthete Holmes has a comfortable study and his body
remains barely touched by his encounters with criminals, Philip Marlowe
is the possessor of a modest office consisting of two rooms (one for his
secretary, one for himself) that is sometimes ransacked. Marlowe himself
is often beaten up, captured, threatened or bruised, and his body aches as
he pursues the perpetrators. The postmodern detective shares a cramped
office with other officers, in an organization upon which s/he depends for
his/her livelihood and is often engaged in finding murderers who work in
other organizations or who commit crimes on behalf of those organiza-
tions. As the level of privacy and comfort in the detectives’ offices diminish
and the detectives’ engagement with organizations increases, the detective
becomes more vulnerable.
156 On Being At Work
Today’s detectives are flawed, fallible people, just like their readers.
Where Marlowe suffered no more than a hangover from drinking his fa-
vourite bourbon, his successors now suffer the problems of alcohol abuse;
their bodies ache from lack of exercise and poor diets. Mankell’s Wallander
worries about his weight and has to take a day off work when he has flu,
he is too cold if he has not worn the right jumper, is often aware that he
needs a shower, has trouble finding the time to do his washing, shopping or
cleaning, and is eventually diagnosed with diabetes and, later, Alzheimer’s
disease. Rankin’s insomniac Inspector Rebus is increasingly unfit and can-
not keep up when chasing criminals, while Billingham’s Detective Inspector
Thorne stares in his mirror at his bloodshot eyes and, like Rebus, is racked
with guilt and haunted by past cases, and, unlike Rebus but like Wallander,
has a nervous breakdown. Larsson’s Blomqvist, the journalist who acts as
detective in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, is put into the position
of the female (he almost dies at the hands of a mass murderer of women)
and, emasculated, is rescued by a woman. Jo Nesbo’s Finnish detective
Harry Hole is an emaciated alcoholic. These detectives often are seeking
love but unable to find it. Again it is organizations that are responsible for
this failure in the detectives’ lives—they are unlovable because of the jobs
they do. Those detectives with friends and families find their relationships
damaged, and often organizations, work and family intrude into one an-
other’s sphere in ways that endanger not only family life but the life and
health of family members. Rebus’s daughter is disabled as a direct result of
his job; Wallander’s daughter is, in several of the novels, held at knifepoint
by deranged murderers, and D.I. Thorne’s only friend, a pathologist (it is
notable that pathologists often have a major role in these stories), is targeted
by a murderer because of their friendship. Everything around these detec-
tives that relates to organizations appears unreliable or dysfunctional. They
drive cars that seem always on the point of breaking down. Wallander’s
office contains a rickety chair which is perpetually in danger of collapse, a
chair that seems symbolic of both the organization in which he works and
of Wallander himself. Rebus and D.I. Thorne loathe the buildings in which
they work, and Thorne constantly hurts himself on the corner of his desk.
All are worn down by their jobs and the organizations against which they
struggle.
Not only do organizations feature prominently in the postmodern who-
dunit, but also their integrity is often challenged. Blomqvist is editor of a
magazine that is put under severe threat, a scenario which instigates his
exploration of another organization which perpetrates utterly vile acts.
Harry Hole works with totally corrupt police officers; while Donna Leon’s
Venetian Commissario Brunetti is, unusually, happily married but oppressed
by corrupt governmental and private organizations. Brunetti’s private hap-
piness contrasts with public despair: the crime is solved, but the criminal
often goes unpunished because of influence from ‘higher-ups’. Postmodern
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 157
detectives have no respect for those more senior than they in the organiza-
tional hierarchy, and indeed it is almost a hallmark of these detectives that
they despise their managers.
Where the brain of the classical detective solved crimes and brain com-
bines with brawn in the hard-boiled detective novels, the postmodern detec-
tive relies on the stolid work of the team, on the brilliance and intuition of
the bruised and battered detective and also on luck. These detectives are in-
escapably embroiled in organizations: those they work for (and rail against)
and those they battle, pursue and attempt to bring to justice.
This history is important because detective fiction reflects dominant so-
cietal discourses in any epoch and also explores the unsayable at any par-
ticular time (Rzepka, 2005). The classic detective novel, written during the
certainties of imperialism and the uncertainties of industrialisation, could
articulate the fears of a collapse of social order and could promise its resto-
ration. Readers of the hard-boiled detective story lived through two world
wars and were threatened with nuclear armageddon: the hard-boiled detec-
tive signalled, through his isolation and his vulnerability, the loss of cer-
tainty and the fear that social order would always be tentative (Rzepka,
2005). The postmodern detective is a flawed, suffering and fallible human
being who works for one organization while often battling the crimes com-
mitted by other organizations or criminal employees. What does this detec-
tive articulate about the current epoch that is otherwise unsayable?
I suggest that in an era when the self is a project to be worked on, an
achievement that is always ongoing, always in process and offered to the
self for its own consumption (Foucault, 1979; 1986; 1992), the who-
dunit articulates issues around the project of the self. Technologies of the
self ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of
others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves’ (Fou-
cault, 1997b:225). The liberatory potential articulated here by Foucault
is quashed by organizations: work, for many, remains a place where the
self cannot be transformed. The body of literature on identity in MOS
is too big to summarise here (see Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas, 2008,
for a statement on the state of the field), but the detective story, given the
size of the reading and viewing audience, must constitute one of the dis-
courses or technologies of the self that makes available ways of being and
identity within postmodern Western organizations. It articulates attitudes
and feelings that have a performative potential, informing work on the self
through the circulation of interpretations that are invested in the becoming
of the self. I next explore how the taken-for-granted presence of organiza-
tions in today’s detective stories alerts us to the unsayable that these stories
articulate for us, albeit through a glass darkly, and which become part of
the ongoing working self. The unspeakable secret is that organizations are
imbricated with death.
158 On Being At Work
IMMERSION WITHIN (POPULAR) CULTURES OF DEATH

The victim:

With a tremendous effort, he had managed to wrench his bound hands

up to his mouth so he could gnaw on the rope. At first he ripped and
tore at it like a beast of prey gorging on a kill. Almost at once he broke
a tooth on the lower left side of his mouth. The pain was intense at first,
but quickly subsided. When he began chewing on the rope again—he
thought of himself as an animal in a trap who had to gnaw off its own
leg to escape—he did it slowly. . . . Twice each day or night he was given
water and food. Twice he was also dragged along the floor by his feet
until he came to a hole in the floor. . . . [There was nothing except] a
pair of hands with gloves on. Hands that dragged him to the hole in the
floor. . . . The hands had no body no ears, no mouth. . . . He foresaw
his own end. The only thing that kept him going was his chewing.
(Mankell, 2009:50–51)

I turn now to outlining how and why all this watching of fictional death,
portrayals of something that is so awful it is supposedly sequestered, denied
or repressed, is not a passive occupation but one in which the watcher/
reader is actively engaged in becoming through this immersion in the who-
dunit. This attraction towards portrayals of death, notably portrayals that
are imbricated within and through representations of organizations, does
something far more than entertain us: it articulates a relationship between
the self, death and organizations.
The thesis that fear of death is suppressed or repressed seems to me to
ignore technological developments which, over the course of the second half
of the 20th century, turned Western cultures into image-saturated cultures
(Jameson, 1991), where the self is constituted through and within omnipres-
ent visual images, both static and moving. In the arts, media and culture,
‘high’ and ‘low’, death is prodded at, poked, interrogated, analysed, pon-
dered, laughed at, analysed and inserted into plot lines, newsreels, poetry,
plays, films, novels, short stories, photographs, paintings and sculpture, so
that images and representations of death, real or imaginary, are inserted
willy-nilly into our lives whenever we turn on the television, read a newspa-
per or glance at a billboard. We are immersed in a mediatised and visualised
culture that is saturated with images of death.
Literary and film theory shows that all this watching and reading is far
from being passive and is, rather, performative of the self (Bal, 2000). In
Western ‘looking cultures’ (Denzin, 1991), subjects possess a visual literacy
which, Denzin argues, has displaced literacy based on orality and print. It
is through looking that we construct our ‘postmodern selves’, which have
become signs of themselves, where media representations and everyday life
interact in ‘a double dramaturgical reflection’: our understanding of films
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 159
and other visual images thus bleeds into our ‘everyday lives’. Literary the-
ory, brushing aside Denzin’s observation regarding the displacement of the
written text, explores how interactions between reader and text involve a
reader who writes the text as she reads and how she too is ‘written’ through
engagement with the story (Lodge, 2000; Iser, 2000). Denzin’s thesis sug-
gests that readers interpret written texts in a manner informed by their en-
gagement with the visual media, and so readers and lookers constitute a
sense of self through engagement with both types of texts. Similarly, Mieke
Bal (2000) suggests that narrative modes which combine visual images with
the thought processes of the viewer instigate a subjective recall of things
suppressed and one’s own life narrative, so that there is within ‘the mind’
no distinction between imagery and the spoken—they so intertwine and in-
terweave that an appreciation of a work of art may be felt viscerally and ar-
ticulated to the self-as-viewer through the media of both words and images.
Film theory draws from Lacan (1977) the perspective that we want the
gaze of the text to see us so that we know of our own presence. Thus, the
relationship with the text involves a two-way flow, and our subjectivity be-
comes ‘a text for the text’, where readers and texts are caught up in each
other and where, through suture, readers enter into or project themselves
into the text whilst simultaneously operating from the place of the gaze
(Silverman, 1988; 1996).4 It goes further: it examines how we do not sit pas-
sively in the cinema seat or on the living-room settee but project ourselves
into the screen, locating ourselves on the camera’s lens and entering our-
selves into the characters portrayed on the screen. When we watch or read
a whodunit, we can therefore identify with detective, murderer and corpse.
Our engagement with film and novel is performative: through interaction
with images and words, we construct a sense of self and learn how to be in
the world (Doane, 1988).
Living in image-saturated cultures (Jameson, 1991) in which we actively
invite dramatisations of mortality into our leisure hours, read avidly about
them and view images that bring them to life, we are therefore ourselves
produced as subjects who are cognisant of and interact with death. For
example, in the opening shots of the filmed version of Mankell’s Faceless
Killers, we see two elderly people, husband and wife, eating their supper,
laughing and talking. We firstly observe them through a window, from the
vantage point of their murderers; the camera then locates our vision within
the noose the murderer is carrying, and we see Mrs. Lovgren’s terrified face
as she sees the intruder. From our vantage point, we too are intruders. We
know what is to happen, and our bodies react viscerally (Marks, 2000).
The scene changes—we are taken into a restaurant where the detective,
Wallander, is having dinner with his daughter, and we relax with him but
struggle as he tries not to damage his family relationships. The next time we
see Mrs. Lovgren is as she dies in Wallander’s arms. We are both Wallander
holding her and Mrs. Lovgren as she dies. We breathe a breath that mimics
her last breath and feel the despair of the detective.
160 On Being At Work
However, the deaths we consume while sitting on our settees or cinema
seats or in bed before going to sleep are fictionalised deaths. In filmed ver-
sions of the novels, we see bodies lying on the floor, soon to be outlined
in chalk marks by crime officers (we have become schooled in such police
procedures), but these are the bodies, we know, of actors who picked them-
selves up, wiped off the fake blood and got on with the rest of their lives
after the camera stopped rolling. They are people, just like us, doing a job
of work. We can watch dramatisations of the murder of hundreds, if not
thousands, of fictional people and know that each body we see laid out will
get up and resume daily life. In reading the novels, we enter into the selves
of the victims, but we turn the page and are resuscitated back to life after
the imaginary death we have momentarily experienced. What the detective
genre therefore does is educate us into an experience of death followed by
life followed by death followed by life, over and over, until we finally stop
reading or viewing.
So, in absorbing the stories of violent deaths, we experience being the vic-
tim, the murderer and the detective, and we experience being the observer—
the eye of the camera observing everything except the vital clues that have
been deliberately withheld from us. This experiencing is not intellectual but
is comprehended and felt ‘with our entire bodily being, informed by the full
history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium’ (Sobchack,
2004:63). We move among the positions of the terrified victim, the calculat-
ing murderer and the confused but ultimately successful, albeit damaged,
detective. So, as viewer or reader of detective stories, we experience the
possibility of our own deaths. The untimeliness of a violent death portrayed
in detective stories, Sobchak (2004:240) writes, can thus be appreciated as
potentially mine. But, in knowing that we have survived the murderer’s at-
tack—indeed, in knowing that the actor who played the victim got up, took
off the ‘blood’ and had dinner—we know that death is put off until another
day. Some of our understanding of death is therefore Lazarus-like: we can
be killed and we can rise up again, immediately, to be killed again the next
time we open the novel or turn on the television.
In such ways, through processes of projection and introjection of the sto-
ries in which we immerse ourselves, we experience death and put it behind
us until, that is, the next programme or the next chapter of the novel. At the
same time that we have experienced the situation of the corpse, we have pro-
jected ourselves into the position of the detective searching for the murderer
and often, especially in novels, into the place (mind) of the murderer. In
the quotation that opened this section, we find ourselves inside the terrified
mind of someone who is about to be murdered, and in the quotation that
follows below we are taken into the mind of the murderer. Very shortly after
this account, Mankell takes us into the mind of the detective, and with that
we are plummeted back into the world of organization and work. Through
the power of the image or the written word, we imagine that we know
something of what it is to take life and to be dead and the frustrations of the
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 161
work that results from those twinned acts. Always, in the postmodern de-
tective story, we are located within organizations—they are an omnipresent
although hardly noticed aspect of the stories. Their taken-for-grantedness
is perhaps what makes the import of the whodunit so powerful: the images
work on our conscious minds while we remain hardly aware that they are
doing so. When we watch the detective film or read the book, we are not
escaping from the daily grind of the workplace but are taken back into it,
albeit while hardly noticing because we are more concerned with whodunit.
In that workplace, then, we experience our own murder, then rise back up
from it, to experience it again. It is through culture and its articulation in
the imagination that organization and death become imbricated. I turn now
to film and literary theory to develop the thesis that this experience articu-
lates that which is otherwise unspeakable: that organizations murder the
me-who-might-have-been.

ANALYSING THE TEXT: THE DETECTIVE WALLANDER

The murderer:

In an hour her guests would arrive. Before then she would have to give
the man in the oven his food. He had been there for five days. Soon he
would be so weak that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. . . .
She had not yet decided how she was going to kill him. There were
several possibilities, but she still had plenty of time. She would think
about what he had done and then resolve how he was supposed to die.
(Mankell, 2009:54–55)

Although the relevance of novels for understanding organizations has

been demonstrated by Knights and Willmott (1999), there is perhaps more
interest in films as a vehicle for interrogating organizations and working
lives. Edited texts (Hassard and Holliday, 1998) and monographs (Bell,
2008; Rhodes, 2007), alongside special editions of journals (Organization,
2008, 15:4), suggest a potential for developing intellectually subtle theories
that complement those found in the work of the better film theorists. Within
management and organization studies, the stories contained in films, novels
and television programmes have been analysed as historico-cultural texts
that provide insights into organizations and working lives. For example, an
analysis of Star Trek provides an account of the changing status of women
in the late 20th century (Bowring, 2004), and one of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert (Brewis, Hampton and Linstead, 1997) facilitates an understanding
of the fluidity of gender identity, while a close reading of the film Jarhead
(Godfrey, Lilley and Brewis, 2012) allows analysis of the masculine military
body. British television comedy series of the 1970s contain a cultural his-
tory of organizations that might otherwise be unavailable (Hancock, 2008).
162 On Being At Work
A constructivist account of culture and organizations, meanwhile, explores
how ‘reel life’ and ‘real life’ are closely connected (Parker, 2008); that is, the
performative dialectic through which depictions of organizations on screen
inform the ‘reality’ of organizations (leading to changes in the depictions of
organizations on screen, and so on) is interrogated.
Film philosophy, however, encourages an analysis of the cultural text
not only for an understanding of the ostensible subject matter of the text
but also for an understanding of issues circulating within wider culture
that, although remaining on the periphery of consciousness, gnaw away
at viewers/readers (Conard, 2007; Wartenberg, 2007). In relation to orga-
nizations, for example, Parker (2009) has shown how representations of
pirates allow dreams of utopias that contrast with ‘our lives of constrained
labour’ and, furthermore, how they articulate the porosity of the boundary
between ‘legitimate’ (dominating, constraining, rule-bound) and ‘illegiti-
mate’ (anarchistic, carnivalesque, egalitarian) organizations. Parker (2008)
has explored the lessons for organization theorists to be learned from rep-
resentations of the Mafia in books, films and television series, especially
depictions of eating that feature in all explorations of the Mafia. Here again,
boundaries between domains become the focus of attention, but this time
the lesson is the importance of maintaining boundaries, of not letting orga-
nizations confuse the firm with the family. The following analysis builds on
the thesis of boundaries between domains: here the question becomes one of
exploring what is and what is not regarded as a crime, which emerges from
the chapter’s thesis that death should not be limited, in our understanding,
to biological death but should incorporate an understanding of what we
could call the death of our dreams, that is, the death of the desired, imag-
ined, anticipated selves that we could become.
Although the faces of people who have died in ‘real life’ are rarely shown
in close-up in news programmes, those who have suffered a fictional death
in the whodunit are pored over by the camera. We are invited to gaze on the
twisted body at the place where the murderer left it and then as it lies on the
pathologist’s slab. Indeed, a stock scene in the detective story is that of the new
recruit who vomits at the first sight of the body that is being cut open by
the pathologist.
When we look at these dramatised images of fictional deaths, what do
we see? In her magisterial, existential phenomenology of film-watching,
Sobchack (2004) argues that death is signified by two states of bodies: the lived
body and the corpse, ‘a thing of flesh unintended, inanimate, static’ (236).
The corpse horrifies because it is an object denied subjectivity. It ‘engages
our sympathy as an indexical object existentially connected to a subject who
was once an intentional and responsive “being”, and it generates our horror
as a symbolic object bereft of subjectivity and responsiveness that stands for
a condition we cannot existentially know and yet to which we must suc-
cumb’ (236). It is this distinction between subject and object that is relevant
to the present discussion. If Sobchack is correct and corpses are able to
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 163
occasion ‘visual and metaphysical reflection on being and not-being’ (237),
on the difference between being a subject and an object, then the corpse will
also allow reflection on subjectivity: what it means to be quick rather than
dead. The horror of the zombie, of a fictional body that lives but has no
subjectivity, suggests that it is not only death of the body that horrifies but
death of whatever it is that animates and was animated by that body, what
we may call ‘the self’ (Bollas, 1993; 1995). The corpse therefore symbolises
the loss of all that would have been had the person continued living: of the
me-who-might-have-been.
So, when we engage in the pornography of death that is detective fiction,
when we look at the bodies laid out on the fictional pathologist’s slab, we
are plummeted unawares into a meditation on the me who animates and is
animated by the body. We may be reminded of the horror of the eventual
but inevitable mortification of our own flesh as we look at that of the fic-
tional corpse, but the capacity of the subject for imagination and the ability
to project one’s self into the future involves knowledge not only of the flesh
but of one’s subjectivity. In other words, the possibility of no longer being
a me appals us just as much as the possibility of becoming putrefying flesh.
Film theory suggests that when we glance at the supposedly dead bodies in
whodunits, we know what it is like to be a corpse, for the corpse has invited
us to share its end. We thus know something of what it is like to cease being
a being, all hopes, plans, adventures and joys ended. It is not just the future
of the body that ceases but the future selves that could have animated that
body if death had not been visited upon the self. In Mankell’s The Man Who
Smiled, for example, the murdered solicitor will never enjoy his retirement;
the ex-policeman seeking to rejoin the police force will never again be a po-
lice officer; the aid worker blown up in an explosion will never become all
those future selves she might have been. These victims are identified by their
job titles and by the organizations they work for. In The Man Who Smiled,
as in so many postmodern detective stories, organizations are implicated in
all these murders. As we project ourselves into the corpses in this story and
back out from those dread positions, our future selves are there in this ek-
static dance: the me’s-who-might-have-been had they not been bludgeoned,
strangled, or bombed by the organization. All that potential, all wiped out.
But where are the detectives when we need them? The detective is charged
with finding the murderer before s/he can commit any further crimes but
time and time again fails to do so before more people die terrifying deaths.
In The Man Who Smiled, Wallander fails to save the lives of at least three
people: we see graphically that it is the very organization which has charged
the detective with this task that impedes him in his duties of saving them.
In the BBC’s filmed version, the organization does not want Wallander to
return to work after his nervous breakdown, even though that breakdown
has been caused by the organization’s very desires for what that person must
do. In the novel, colleagues welcome Wallander back warmly, and it is he
himself who feels alienated, an outsider, a stranger who does not know his
164 On Being At Work
way around. He is in the organization but not, at this point, of the organi-
zation. His identity, that of police officer, is tentative, uncertain, capable of
being changed in a moment from that of detective to that of ex-detective. It
is the detective who should save me, the viewer, from the murders that may
be visited upon me, but the detective is frail, vulnerable and in need of rescu-
ing himself. It is the job and the organization that have ground him down.
And thus it has ground me down.
I want to suggest next that it is the organization, through all this, which
is the murderer. This is signalled in various ways: organizations employ to-
day’s detectives and demand that they commit acts and live lives that de-
stroy them. Wallander, Hole, Stone and numerous others often contemplate
leaving the police force but are trapped: they are unemployable elsewhere.
There is no way out: their potential to be something else has been slain.
Indeed, the BBC dramas Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes are set in a limbo
world where police officers, on the point of death, refuse to die but battle
on perpetually against organization and criminals: for them, there is no way
out whatsoever; their choice is either the organization or the grave. Even
though we may not know the denouements of these series, they articulate
for us at some level the despair occasioned by working lives that allow no
exit and impose major impediments to joy, pleasure and work on the self.
The detective speaks for us about being in an organization and trapped
by that organization. Murderers work for organizations that have charged
them with the task of murder. In our reading/viewing, organization and
criminal merge, each inseparable in its identity from the other. The orga-
nization with which we are presented as we turn the pages of the book or
watch the television is therefore one that both imprisons and murders. We
are trapped within that organization, which symbolises for us the company
for which we work.
This, then, is my argument. I live in an epoch and a culture when, in
order to be a me, I must work on the self as if it were a work of art. Working
on the self as a work of art requires work that is congenial to the identity I
would be, but the organization limits what I am allowed to be. It compresses
me within narrow boundaries, labouring at tasks that prevent me from
working on the other possible selves I would be if only there were the oppor-
tunities. I go home at night, tired and disenchanted, and turn on the televi-
sion or sit reading a novel. If I have chosen a whodunit, as many people will
have done, then I enter into a scene where I experience being a murderer,
a victim and a detective charged with finding the murderer. Again, I plum-
met into an organizational world—there is no escape. As I engage with the
text and experience these imaginary subject positions, I know the despair
of having no future (the corpse), with all the me’s-that-I-might-have-been
having been murdered. I also experience the position of the murderer and so
feel culpable. I am the person who has murdered all the me’s-that-I-might-
have-been. But the detective saves me from that knowledge, because, as I
experience the mind of the detective, I am told, over and over, that it is the
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 165
organization that hired the killer and wished the victim dead. I, like many
others, may feel frustrated and dissatisfied by my work but can articulate
those feelings only in terms of things that may appear relatively trivial. But
there is a deeper sense of frustration, one that is there at the edge of my con-
sciousness and for which I have no language. I am thus drawn irresistibly to
cultural artefacts that articulate it for me. Through watching the detective
I am reaching towards an understanding: it is not so much that my work is
tedious, boring, controlling, frustrating, albeit shot through with moments
of pleasure or achievement; my work may indeed be all those things. More
fundamentally, the current organization of work, in hierarchical organiza-
tions that try to control my movements, thoughts and feelings, murders the
me-I-might-have-been, all those dreamed of, aspired to ‘I’s’ that could have
existed were work organized differently.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A THEORY AND ETHICS OF

ORGANIZATIONAL DEATH

This chapter has used the whodunit to explore our fascination with fictional
portrayals of death. I have argued that the location in organizations of the
postmodern detective illuminates the whodunit’s articulation of thoughts
and ideas that can be expressed only tangentially, through artefacts or prod-
ucts that symbolise what it is we cannot put into words. The thesis of this
chapter has been that the organization in demanding that we labour as zom-
bie-machines so limits opportunities for working on the project of the self
that it murders the selves who might have been. A regretful looking back at
one’s teens, with all their promises, hopes, aspirations and dreams, perhaps
comes closest to saying this unsayable thing, because we speak about death
only in terms of the biological ending of the body. However, there is so
much individuals could do, so many people they could be, if they were not
required, every working day, to constrain themselves within the straitjacket
of the particular function, task or identity required by the organization,
so there must be another form of death, one which is not biological but is
organizational. Organizational death is that murdering of the me’s-who-
might-have-been, selves perhaps with greater capacity for joy, wonder and
achievement, and of the production of things of beauty and of the mainte-
nance of family and community than can be expressed in bureaucratised,
clock-watching, rule-bound, profit-oriented production processes.
Now it might be objected that the form of the self I am outlining here lim-
its the possibilities of the self to those available within post- or late modern
capitalism. Work on the self is therefore limited to that which fulfils capital-
ism’s needs (Bauman, 2007). There is that possibility, of course, although
Foucault’s perspective is very different. He advocates a politics of pleasure,
one in which work on the self (as a work of art) is an end in itself. I will
return to his arguments, along with Butler’s more recent theorising about
166 On Being At Work
recognition, in the concluding chapter. For now, I will preface that discus-
sion by returning to Dollimore’s (2001) analysis of how death and desire
have been interwoven into the Western European psyche and to his argu-
ments concerning the disessentializing of the self as the only means by which
the dread fear of death can be put aside, if only for a short while. I will
suggest here that his advocacy of means of dissolving the ego can illuminate
further the distinction between zombie-machine and human.

DISESSENTIALIZING THE WORKING SELF

There is in Dollimore’s thesis a moral imperative towards finding ways of

experiencing freedom from individuation and thus its spectral DNA, the
dread anxiety of death. This goes beyond the possibility of the fantasised I
who I would be if work facilitated the constitution of such an I. This is an
I that we can grasp only with difficulty, because it is an I that ceases to be
an I, that lets go of its ego and becomes disessentialized, to use Dollimore’s
term. I am now going to use this possibility as a thought experiment, so to
speak, to explore its potential for a new politics of organization studies,
one that fights on behalf of the me’s-I-might-become. Barthes has suggested
that disessentializing occurs when one is immersed in literature. I suggest
the contrary: the self does not disappear while we read a novel or a film; we
might be taken outside ourselves, but we become another I, another ego,
and that is not what disessentializing means. I will start this discussion on
disessentializing with a short vignette from my own experience, in which
the ego dissolved while the body was immersed in its work. I will relate
that to Marx’s theory of alienation and then turn Marx’s theory on its head
to suggest ways in which disessentializing of the self would be an aspect of
work as it should be experienced. In this regard, work (not labour) concerns
not only working on the identity of the self but also constituting selves that
are (fleetingly, temporarily) freed from the traumatic knowledge of our own
mortality.

A Vignette: An Oppressive Disessentializing of the Working Self

Many years ago, in what now seems like another life, I was trying to find
a job in the Welsh Valleys during one of the regular depressions of the
20th century’s economic cycles. There was little employment available for
a 17-year-old with a handful of ‘O’ levels save for work on the production
lines in a factory that made components for electrical products. I worked
on a machine making capacitors that became parts of transistor radios
(which shows how long ago this was). The work was piecework; that is, we
were paid only for the number of pieces we made each week. We started at
8 a.m., finished at 5 p.m., had two 15-minute tea breaks and a 30-minute
dinner break. The high windows of the capacitor room were covered in
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 167
newspaper to keep out the sunlight, on the odd days that the sun shone,
making unbearably hot the huge, high-ceilinged space. Music blared from a
record player, and later Radio One’s pop music station, as a way of keeping
the boredom of the work at bay. Each of the women and girls working in
this section of the factory sat at a machine that had a footboard; rollers on
which two large skeins of ribbon, one metal and one plastic, were located;
two cups, one to left and one to right, that held strips of wire; and a peg
across which stretched a short strip of metal that glowed red-hot and was
used for sealing the components. The process, so far as I can remember it,
was as follows:

• With the left hand, place the ends of the plastic and metal ribbons
around the end of a spinner, and then press a button on the footboard
with the left foot to spin the ribbons around the spinner until they
catch;
• With the right hand, lift a piece of wire, place it on the metal ribbon
(which is much narrower than the plastic ribbon which will eventually
encase it), lower an arm of the machine, and double-click with right
foot so that an electrical current seals the wire to the plastic ribbon;
• Repeat with a piece of wire to the left;
• Click left-foot button to roll further ribbon around the spool, holding
it with the left hand to ensure that it takes shape properly;
• Almost immediately, lift the red-hot sealer with the right hand, taking
care to move the left hand just in time to avoid burning your thumb
instead of sealing the wires;
• With the right arm, move another arm of the machine across to free the
new capacitor so that it slides down into an awaiting tray, and at the
same time click a counter with the left hand;
• Repeat 2,400 times a day for five days so as to earn £12 for the week’s
wages.

With practice, you could establish a rhythm: move right arm, move right
foot, move left arm, move right foot, and so on and so on. One of the fas-
cinating things was that, despite the noise and the always-present danger
of burning one’s thumb (the smell was very similar to roasting pork), we
could somehow, sometimes become absent from our bodies, and time would
pass without our having any awareness of it. The evidence for this was the
counter: we watched them anxiously to check we were keeping up sufficient
speed to earn a living wage, and sometimes a few hundred suddenly seemed
to have been added to the count. The clock would show that 20, 30 or more
minutes had passed without our having any conscious awareness of having
been there, as an embodied person making those components.
This is one aspect of what I think Dollimore is referring to when he
uses the term ‘disessentializing’. One is alive but is absent to one’s self; the
ego disappears, and in its place there is the calm of the grave, all fear of
168 On Being At Work
death forgotten because the ego that experienced that fear has ceased, for a
short time, to exist. However, that this absence from the self was instigated
through becoming the ultimate zombie-machine, where the dexterity of the
human animal melded with the machine so that maximum efficiency was
obtained, suggests that Dollimore’s thesis will help flesh out the distinc-
tion between zombie-machine and human. Marx’s thesis on alienation, read
through the lens Dollimore offers, will assist in this exploration.
I was introduced to Marx’s theory of alienation as an undergraduate
a few years after working in this factory, and it seemed to me to capture
that experience of making capacitors, where forgetting the self for a short
while was a bonus because it meant not having been consciously aware of
the passing of the 20, 30 or 40 minutes of tedium in the noise and dirt of
the factory. This is a thesis outlined by the young Karl Marx (1988) who,
in his 26th year, wrote the scraps that remain of the 1844 Manuscripts.
He outlined a theory of a subject alienated by, from and within work, one
whose mirror image is the self that could and should emerge through work.
Work should be productive of a radiant self constituted through crafting of
objects within an aesthetically pleasing physical location and a strong social
network. In 1911 the then-55-year-old Frederic Winslow Taylor published
The Principles of Scientific Management, which put what seems to have
been the final nail in the coffin of the implicit dream in the 1844 Manu-
scripts. Marx’s thesis on alienation haunts the text you are reading now. It
is time to acknowledge it openly.
Marx wrote that the human is alienated from the product s/he makes, from
him/herself, from his/her ‘species being’ and from his/her fellow (wo)men.
I will start with Marx’s exploration of alienation from ‘species being’,
which is in many ways the most difficult part of his discussion but which
is easier to understand if one thinks of a cow chewing the cud or grazing
in the field all day. The cow exists only to exist; it labours only to con-
tinue being alive. It has no consciousness (so far as we are aware) over and
above the need to continue chewing and grazing. It has no ‘conscious life-
activity’ (Marx, 1988:76). The human, in contrast, is a species being that
is conscious of its own existence: a human can ponder itself as if it were an
object and so is a ‘Conscious Being’ (76). (Wo)Man does not exist in isola-
tion from other people but is an active participant in the species that is the
human animal (77) and so contributes to the sustenance of humankind as
a whole (77). S/he goes beyond his/her own immediate physical needs so as
to contribute to the greater good, producing ‘the whole of nature’ (77). S/he
‘forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty’ (77). However, under
capitalism, (wo)man’s life activity is reduced to a means to staying alive and
no more—s/he becomes like the cow, working only to sustain physical exis-
tence. S/he moves but does not think or create. S/he exists only to exist and
so, rather than contributing to mankind or community, focuses only on the
means for his/her own immediate sustenance. S/he is thus estranged from
his/her species being.
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 169
Further, under capitalist conditions, workers are alienated both from the
products they produce and from themselves as producers of that product.
The products they make are whipped away from them to be sold elsewhere.
The worker also ‘must sell himself and his human identity’ (1988:25) in
order to survive. Workers thus ‘sink . . . to the level of a commodity’ (69), a
commodity that they themselves produce through their labour and which
is itself sold. This commoditised self, like any other commodity produced
through labour, is ‘the objectification of labor’ (71); that is, the object in which
work is ‘congealed’ or in which immaterial practices become material—real,
physical objects. In the factory, blindly producing capacitors, we were not
allowed to talk to each other and had to have permission to go to the toilet.
We were thus infantilised but, more than this as Marx explains, we existed
only as extensions of machines that made meaningless products. We moved
our hands, arms and feet, but our minds were disengaged, and the capacitors
that rolled down into the collecting trays were taken away—alien objects
that belonged to the employer. Our ‘inner worlds’ were impoverished, as
the work required no thought, skill or imagination, and yet we were so
busily occupied in such very mundane activity that we could not produce
anything that seemed meaningful or that would contribute to the good of
the community. Yet we could not stop producing the capacitors, one after
the other, 2,400 each day, 12,000 each week. The machine governed all our
movements, with those damned capacitors dictating how we sat, thought
and behaved. They ‘exist[ed] outside [me], independently, as something alien
to [me]’ and became ‘a power on its own confronting [me]’ (72). Each of
us had ‘become . . . a slave of his object’ (72). This could occur because the
only means of earning a living, of maintaining ourselves as physical subjects,
was through paid employment of this kind, but it was only through being
physical subjects that we could be workers: to be a subject, I must labour; to
be a labourer I must be a subject who can labour (73).
Further, in the act of doing the work itself, workers estrange themselves
from themselves. First, because the worker is him/herself one of the products
that s/he makes and all products s/he makes are owned by someone else, s/he
is estranged from herself. Second, because labour is external to the worker, a
form of activity that is imposed upon him/her and which makes him/her feel
‘outside himself’, the I becomes an object just doing the mundane activities
it has been told to do. ‘The worker therefore only feels himself outside his
work, and in his work feels outside himself’ (74). The body sitting at the
machine making capacitors had no separate existence from the machine:
it was a labouring body sans mind, sans motivation, sans a sense of being
human. There was no me but a body to which I ‘returned’ at the end of the
day. However, what or who was this me to which I returned? In Marx’s
words (1988:74), ‘man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely
active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or
at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc; and in his human functions
he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal
170 On Being At Work
becomes human and what is human becomes animal’ (74). That is, eat-
ing, drinking and procreating become the acts of animals because they are
undertaken only to sustain the self as a labourer. This is self-estrangement,
because capitalism takes over the life-world of the worker.
Finally, it follows that (wo)man is estranged from (wo)man. The people
with whom one works become no more than fellow cogs in the machine.
As people are reduced to working only so as to sustain the physical body,
Marx argued that work becomes something to be shunned ‘like the plague’
(74) when we do not have to do it. Sitting at the machine, churning out
capacitors, we counted out the hours and minutes before we were free to
leave for the day. Those odd moments when we were absent to ourselves,
when ego had ceased to exist and the body performed the required duties
as an extension of the machine, were times of blessed relief. In the terms of
the arguments in this book, we were pure zombie-machines, with no invest-
ment in the products we were making, no opportunity to work on the self
as anything other than an extension of the machine; no interaction with
others save for supervisors who treated us like schoolchildren; and no sense
of making a contribution to the good of humankind. We worked solely to
earn money to pay the rent, buy food and clothing, pay for heating, raise
our children and, if there was anything left over, go out one or two evenings
a week in search of entertainment. There were no dreams of the me’s we
might become: the future stretched out in front of us, as attachments to
machines who laboured to contribute to the household budget.
However, the zombie-machine is not disessentialized, in Dollimore’s
terms, because, although it escapes temporarily from its mundane existence
as it forgets its own existence, it is a self whose humanity has been stripped
away.
There is an alternative possibility for disessentializing the self through
one’s work, but this requires that work be undertaken differently (that is, as
work rather than labour). Marx regarded work as ‘satisfaction of a need’
(74), a need which goes far beyond the mere sustenance of the physical
body. This need is that of expressing one’s self through one’s work, of con-
tributing to the community and living as a social being. This is alienated
work turned on its head; it is a model of what our jobs should be like. It in-
volves work in which we can invest ourselves with pride: the objects that we
make attest to who we are, and we invest ourselves in them. When I look at
this book, for example, whatever others may say about it, I will be proud to
have written a book—I will have invested myself in it, and I am happy to see
that self looking back at me. We therefore can constitute ourselves as human
in the making of products and services that allow us to use our talents and
skills in the best possible way, in a social environment in which the human
can flourish. Engagement with our colleagues, friends, customers, clients
and managers, recognition from them of our skills in making bread, grow-
ing crops, devising art works, caring for children, cleaning toilets, not under
the watchful eye of managers but in a shared endeavour in which each gives
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 171
what s/he can—that is the sort of utopian work space Marx seemed to envis-
age. Through such labour, we would contribute to culture, society and the
welfare of all. Conscious of ourselves as humans, we would also be aware of
and recognize all the frailties that accompany membership in such a species.
Another form of disessentializing of the self would be possible here. It
is one that people sometimes talk of when they discuss their hobbies or lei-
sure pursuits, that is, the things they want to do and in which they develop
skills different from those they must use in their paid jobs. They talk of, say,
painting and ‘not noticing the time go by’ or ‘forgetting about everything
because I got so absorbed’. This form of forgetting is another way in which
one becomes disessentialized, if only for a fleeting time. If it were to occur
in the (utopian) workplace because of the pleasure in making the object or
delivering the service, then the disappearance of the ego would not be of
the sort that reduces one to a zombie-machine, allowing one to forget not
only the immanence of one’s mortality but also the dire circumstances of life
itself. It would be one in which the dread knowledge of one’s own mortality
ceased for a while as the ego dissolved, and the product or service in which
one was absorbed could be all the better for that forgetting, because one’s
talents would be set free. As Pirsig argued, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance (1999), rather than a rider driving a motor bike on which he
had painstakingly worked, rider and machine become one—motor bike in
motion.
It does not seem likely that many people would say that they dream of
jobs in which they become so absorbed in their work that they forget them-
selves; we articulate our desires in other ways, perhaps because this sort
of language is not easily available to us. So, we can say that we dream of
being an astronaut or a chef or a cake baker, and with those aspirations we
dream of the people we would be while working in those jobs. We cannot
say, ‘I want a job where I can forget myself for hours at a time’. However, I
suggest that this form of forgetting the self is an aspect of being human, of
being freed to work on the self through a job that allows one’s expression
of one’s skills and talents. When the zombie-machine forgets itself while,
say, making capacitors, it escapes not only from the awful knowledge of its
own inevitable demise but also from a working life that presses down on the
self. On the other hand, when the human forgets itself through its work, it
escapes only from the awfulness of the ego; its return to its ‘self’, to being
essentialized, is to a place where pleasure accompanies the self who works.
To conclude: this chapter has focused on death and has used the who-
dunit to argue that our fascination with death articulates a knowledge that
we cannot otherwise put into words: that organizations murder our dreams,
all the me’s-I-might-have-been. Jonathon Dollimore’s thesis on death al-
lowed me to bring in the young Marx’s theory of alienation, which haunts
this book. I have argued that the zombie-machine can sometimes become
disessentialized and escape from the terrible knowledge of its own mortality
but that dissolution of the ego reduces it to a machine that must return to a
172 On Being At Work
consciousness of itself as a zombie-machine. The human, however, would be
working in a job that not only allowed work on the self, on the constitution
of a desired identity, but also would allow the self to become unaware of
itself and so forget its inevitable demise because of the sheer pleasure taken
in its tasks. That is, work should be enjoyable and should give a sense of
achievement. The ‘work of art’ that Foucault spoke of, that which we are
ideally forever constituting, could thus be one that is achieved through one’s
work.
There are some (to my mind) crass arguments in contemporary leadership
studies which recommend that leaders become ‘servant leaders’, devoted
to ensuring that staff can contribute their best efforts to the organization.
There are perhaps elements of what I am arguing for in this chapter in that
body of work. However, the difference is the context. Servant leaders work
in organizations whose aims are those of maximising return for sharehold-
ers or, in public-sector organizations, the government or community. Ser-
vant leadership, in such a context, remains exploitative, another attempt at
securing more wholehearted commitment (and thus hard work) from staff.
What I am imagining is a very different organizational context, in which
other objectives are subordinate to the major priority of the flourishing of
staff.

POSTSCRIPT: HYPERBOLIC THEORY IN DRAG

Can death be used as a metaphor for what is not biological death? Patrick
Reedy and Mark Learmonth’s (2011) Heideggerian reading of death and or-
ganizations suggest it should not be: I may take away its full horror and let
organizations off the hook of their ethical responsibilities, while at the same
time so exaggerating my arguments that they lose their force. To answer
this question, I return to Butler’s (1997) reference to the need sometimes for
‘hyperbolic theory’, one that overstates its case for a reason. Organizations
have certainly been complicit in atrocities which caused death and suffering
for millions of human beings (Bauman, 1989), and the sort of suffering I am
exploring in this book is nowhere akin to the depths of barbarity of which
organizations are capable. However, the identity politics of the past 40 years
has shown that forms of suffering exist that were not recognised until a
language emerged that allowed labels to be put to them and thus an activist
politics to develop. I am attempting in this book to identify another form
of suffering for which we currently lack labels. Feminism, queer theory,
postcolonial and crip theories are all testament to the power of language
to inform politics, change the symbolic order and thus have real, positive
impacts on people’s lives. An earlier politics based on class and grounded
in Marxist theory focused on working lives but eventually came to little
in the West, perhaps because, as Lacan (2007) observed, it would have
done no more than replace one master with another. Feminism challenged
 A Hyperbolic Theory, a Theory in Drag 173
patriarchy, queer theory heteronormativity, and postcolonial theory empire,
and it seems to me that we need a new language, beyond that of control and
resistance, that allows us to challenge what organizations do to the people
who work in/for them, including those of the relatively privileged people
of ‘the West’. I have used the terms ‘murder’ and ‘death’ because of their
power to arrest attention. I have used the detective because s/he combines
in the same symbol both organization (the employer) and death (detectives’
job is to deal with death and find murderers), and so the whodunit provides
a bridge that links death and organizations. Furthermore, this bridge is a
person who is ground down by unnecessary organizational limitations that
add to the burdens of the messiness of everyday life. I am not arguing for
the possibilities of a Utopia where all suffering disappears, only for a means
of reducing the strains upon lives that will always be in many ways less than
perfect.
This page intentionally left blank
Conclusion: From Poverty of
Aspiration to a Politicised, Ethical
Me-I-Might-Become?

The thesis of this book is that in late capitalist or postmodern cultures where
the self has become a project to be worked on, we look to our jobs as a
means of constituting the selves we aspire to be. Organizations, however,
so limit the possibilities for being that the most many of us can achieve is a
shade of the selves that might have been, a ghost of a life that has never been
lived. Organizations therefore murder the selves that might have been. This
is a hyperbolic theory, a thesis in drag, as Butler would have it, which uses
the language of violent death as a political manoeuvre.
I have used a sociocultural philosophical approach that analyses the
working-life stories of individuals through the lens of Judith Butler’s theo-
retical perspective, treating the life stories as if they were lay philosophies of
work (Introduction). The argument can be summarised as follows. Organi-
zations desire staff who are zombie-machines, that is, intelligent machines
totally focused on achieving organizational aims and objectives and thus
lacking any agency beyond that required in contributing to organizational
goals (Introduction). Such staff would be somewhat less than human and,
it follows, would be and are devoid of certain rights that attach to being
human. Julie showed us in Chapter One that individuals, unsurprisingly,
approach work with aims and desires different from those of their employ-
ers. Among the outcomes we desire from our work is the constitution of
a desired self or selves, selves we could become through our jobs. Inher-
ent in aspirations for opportunities to work on the self is a theory of the
self as human. Julie’s ideas, illustrated further by Alex’s working life story
(Chapter Four), suggest that labour and work should be distinguished from
each other. Labour involves doing the tasks required by management but,
as it excludes anything that serves in the constitution of the self, labour is
what is undertaken by zombie-machines. Work involves those activities,
often over and above the tasks required of the zombie-machine, that facili-
tate constitution of selves that are fully human. Alex illuminated how the
friends and colleagues with whom we work, rather than management or the
organization, contribute that recognition which is vital in the constitution
of selves.
176 Conclusion
Frank, the boss, demonstrated (in Chapter Two) the difficulty for man-
agers of granting recognition to employees as anything other than zom-
bie-machines, because his thesis is of a selfhood that is so intertwined
with the organization that the self is no more than a constantly labour-
ing, managerial zombie-machine. Just as the lord, in Hegel’s dialectic,
does not seek recognition from the bondsman, so Frank does not look
to staff for recognition, although he requires that staff labour as zombie-
machines in order that he can demonstrate to himself and others that he
is a manager. At the same time, if his staff are perfect zombie-machines
then Frank’s psyche is challenged. The manager is on the horns of an
impossible psychic dilemma. Shakeel (Chapter Three) blurs the bound-
ary between managers and staff, because he shows how staff speak in the
idiom of management, have firm ideas of how work should be carried
out and are frustrated by managers who are seen as inefficient intruders
into working space. Staff therefore cannot grant recognition to managers
because they do not recognise managers as anything but imposters who
disrupt the efficient flow of work. Although staff of necessity give the
impression that they are working like zombie-machines (and thus, in their
own perception, inefficiently), the impression is superficial, unstable and
abandoned whenever possible. Managerial and staff ‘realities’ are so dif-
ferent that they cannot be said to occupy the same space. An implication
of Shakeel’s account is that he, like Alex, turns to colleagues and friends
for recognition of the self as human. Such a recognition is impossible
outside the terms of gender; gender is compulsory but also debilitating.
Kara and Saul (Chapter Five) showed how fluid are gendered identities
and how the self that is lost in the doing of its work escapes from the
prisonhouse of gendered identity. Reparative organizational work is then
undertaken, in this case not by management but by students (‘customers’),
to line up gendered subjects with biological bodies. This causes shock and
trauma to organizational subjects freed, for a time, from the constraints
of gender, but time and again they are surprised back into them. I sug-
gested that the labouring zombie-machine has to conform to traditional
gender categories, whereas work on the self incorporates opportunities for
freedom from the trauma of gender. These explorations of the limitations
imposed on constituting aspired-to working selves were brought together
in Chapter Six, where theories of death, the detective novel, and Marx’s
theory of alienation were used to argue that organizations murder the
me’s-that-might-have-been.
In summary, in late or postmodern capitalism, we look to our work for
a means of constituting an ideal(ised), aspired-to self, but organizations ne-
gate that aspiration. Staff find ways of escaping from organizations’ most
dire demand that they be reduced to less than human zombie-machines and
thus discover ways of constituting a sense of a workplace self that is human,
albeit one whose potential for being is so constrained that it is only a
shadow of the dreamed-of, aspired-to self. Organizations therefore murder
the me’s-that-might-have-been.
 Conclusion 177
What I have not yet explored is who that desired, dreamed-of self might be.
Julie (Chapter One) suggested that her aspiration is to be freed through work:
work would give her a face to show to the world, and she would then be able
to go out and explore that world. Frank waits for a retirement from work that
will give him the time to do those things he has put aside so as to devote him-
self totally to his managerial labours. Shakeel has aspirations to be a writer
and become politically active, but labour gobbles up so much of his time that
those aspirations are left to wither on the vine of his dreams. Alex comes
closest to constituting the desired self of the glamorous, exciting professional
archaeologist, but the conditions of employment (short-term, temporary as-
signments without many employment rights) means she has to live much of
her life exasperated by administrative jobs that she loathes. As to Kara and
Saul, as academics they work in a profession whose members love their work
but are constantly frustrated by creeping managerialism, increasing admin-
istration and the impossibility of working on the aspired-to academic self
(Harding, Ford and Gough, 2010; Clarke, Knights and Jarvis, 2012).
But there is something narcissistic in our dreamed-of selves, and indeed
late or postmodern culture would appear to provide the terms in which our
dreams are focused on the ‘me’. Bauman (2007), as we saw in the Preface,
is perturbed that work on the self is devoted to constituting nothing but a
commodity to be sold to the highest bidder (see also Sennett, 2006). The
self that is constituted is also a product for one’s own consumption (in front
of the mirror, I ask myself do I look gorgeous/good enough?) and that of
others (have I constituted a self that my peers will value and which they can
use in positioning themselves—am I academic enough for students, manage-
rial enough for workers?) (Falk, 1994). This commodity that is the self is a
work-in-progress which staves off death—if I work hard enough to make my
body immune to illness and dying, I may live for a thousand years (Shilling,
1993). Although self-absorbed, this is a self that is positioned within nor-
mative requirements of how one should be, and so failure to constitute a
desired self can reduce one to a position of abjection. There is little of that
ecstatic, ek-static self that Marx dreamed of, whose self is caught up in giv-
ing to its society and taking from it only what it needs.
This is perhaps therefore another form of the murder-of-the-me’s that
might have been: that is, in late or postmodern capitalism, we have impover-
ished, deracinated aspirations of who we can be or what we might become.
Can we aspire to be something more? Foucault’s late work and Butler’s
recent work points to alternative possible selves.

WHAT IS THE WORKPLACE ‘ME’ I COULD BECOME?

Can we constitute workplace selves that are ethically alive and alert to a pol-
itics of microrevolutionary change that, while it would not challenge capi-
talism per se, could change the norms that govern workplace identities and
thus contribute to the flourishing of working selves? Marx (1988) hinted at
178 Conclusion
this self, as discussed in Chapter Six. For Marx, the communist workplace
should be a welcoming place that would facilitate workers’ contribution
to the greater good while they made aesthetically pleasing products. Those
objects would reflect an investment of a self that flourished through its la-
bours. Foucault’s question concerning why we should not turn ourselves
into works of art is redolent in some ways of Marx’s conception of a non-
alienated worker, although it is a question framed for the conditions of late
or postmodern capitalism rather than of Marx’s industrial capitalism. Both
theorists help us understand that one of the objects produced through work
is the self.
Where Marx conceived of persons with what we would now define as
homogeneous identities, Foucault distinguished between the subject and the
self, observing different forms of the subject emerging in different places:
‘The subject is not a substance but a form’, one that is

not primarily or always identical to itself. You do not have the same
type of relationship to yourself when you constitute yourself as a politi-
cal subject who goes to vote or speaks at a meeting and when you are
seeking to fulfil your desires in a sexual relationship. . . . In each case
one plays, one establishes a different type of relationship to oneself. And
it is precisely the historical constitution of these various forms of the
subject in relation to the games of truth which interests me. (Foucault,
1997a:290–291)

Marx could not conceive of a self that was not, within capitalism, itself
a commodity, but we have seen in this book how workplace subjects can
have a number of different relationships to themselves, in Foucault’s terms,
in that they can be at one time a less-than-human zombie-machine and at
another time lay claim to their humanity. Workplace selves (with the excep-
tion, it would seem, of the manager) can thus move between (more or less)
alienated and (more or less) non-alienated subject positions, or what I have
called the zombie-machine and the human. The question thus becomes one
of exploring how to expand the space of the latter. There has been limited
but promising work in management and organization studies drawing on
Foucault’s later work on aesthetics of existence, which offers ‘a movement
of hope, giving fresh meaning to political ideals that occupy a vital position
in contemporary political discourse and a way out from the confinements
of the new knowledge based enterprise’ (Barratt, 2008:525). Butler’s recent
work on ethics adds insights to Foucault’s thesis on constituting one’s self as
an ethical subject. Both thinkers work within the constraints of a capitalism
that is unlikely to be overturned by direct, revolutionary challenges. Their
work on ethics, when combined, can suggest how each one of us could
become a microrevolutionary (Gibson-Graham, 1996), doing what we can
within the conditions of possibility of capitalist workplaces to change those
conditions of possibility.
 Conclusion 179
FOUCAULT AND AN AESTHETICS OF THE SELF

Foucault (1997a:262), informed by intense studies of the Greco-Roman

world, arrived at ‘the idea that the self is not given to us, [and so] I think
that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves
as a work of art’. This involves far more than working on one’s appear-
ance: beauty and virtue are conflated; the person who works on the self so
that it becomes a virtuous self is thence a thing of beauty (O’Leary, 2002).
The practice incorporates a politics and an ethics arising from the ascetic
practice of ‘an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to
develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being’
(Foucault, 1994:282). There are four major aspects of the relation to one-
self (Foucault, 1997b:238) (i) the aspect of myself or my behaviour which
is concerned with moral conduct; (ii) the mode of subjection, or the way
in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations;
(iii) the means by which we change ourselves to become ethical subjects;
(iv) the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way.
These are all aspects of the relationship to oneself, and the distinction be-
tween morals and ethics is important because moral codes are no more
than rules or precepts, whereas ethics is the relation of the self to the self.
What Foucault is articulating here is a need to identify how discourses
of morality, although performative of the subject, prevent one from act-
ing ethically. We could say that Frank, in striving to maintain a profitable
business, is acting morally (he keeps staff employed, provides a service val-
ued by customers, and contributes to returns to shareholders). This book’s
thesis suggests that he is, however, acting unethically in that he operates
within managerialist discourses within and through which he requires that
staff become zombie-machines. For Foucault, through working on one’s
relationship with oneself, one can reach out to others more ethically and
develop new relationships with them: the ethical act does not precede the
ethical actor.
What is sought is a practice of freedom, where ‘Freedom is the onto-
logical condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom
takes when it is informed by reflection’ (Foucault, 1997a:284). The free-
dom that is sought is freedom from a disciplinary practice that ‘categorizes
the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his
own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and
which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes
individuals subjects’ (Foucault, 1982:212). There is evil at play here, but
evil is to be understood not as the law-breaking actions of immoral agents
but ‘as arbitrary cruelty installed in regular institutional arrangements
taken to embody the Law, the Good or the Normal’ whereby ‘systemic
cruelty flows regularly from the thoughtlessness of aggressive convention-
ality, the transcendentalization of contingent identities, and the treatment
of good/evil as a duality wired into the intrinsic order of things’ (Connolly
180 Conclusion
1998:109). In this light, the suffering produced by organizations in requir-
ing that staff become zombie-machines should be understood as an evil.
One’s duty becomes development of a form of subjectivity that could be
the source of effective resistance to such organizational power (Bernauer
and Mahon, 1994:147). This ‘remove[s] ethics from the quest for univer-
sal standards of behaviour that legislate conformity and normalization’
(ibid.); it encourages escape from ‘those prisons of thought and action that
shape our politics, our ethics, our relations to ourselves’ (ibid:152) and
thus facilitates engagement in a struggle for freedom within the confines of
one’s historical situation, against forces that work to subordinate human
existence.
The work on the self advocated by Foucault, in this reading, becomes a
micropolitics of localised struggles in which each individual works on its self
to produce an aesthetic self that reaches out ethically to others. The point of
this, as summarized by Connolly (1998:115), is ‘to ward off the violence of
transcendental narcissism: to modify sensibilities of the self through delicate
techniques. . . . The goal is to modify an already contingent self—working
within the narrow terms of craftsmanship available to an adult—so that you
are better able to ward off the demand to confirm transcendentally what
you are contingently’, that is, to resist the discourses that position one as
zombie-machine or anything less than human and within which one posi-
tions others similarly.
That is, one must struggle to identify the discourses that position one as
a subject and then work to free oneself from those discourses, questioning
all the time how they position one in response to others. How can we do
this? There are few guidelines in Foucault’s work, and indeed there cannot
be because it must be left to the individual to find his/her own way to con-
stituting the self as a work of art. However, in the Preface to Deleuze and
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault called for the need to struggle against
‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and our everyday behaviour, the fascism
that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and
exploits us’ (Bernauer and Mahon, 1994:154–155). This emphasises that
we should start to observe how we conform within norms that are injuri-
ous to others and how the discourses that speak through us are harmful
to those others. It would seem that one must own up to and change one’s
racism, homophobia and tendency to judge others by arbitrary rules of
beauty; we must give up our wish to dominate, our habits of being judge-
mental about others’ behaviour and so forth. One must, in short, continu-
ally question the taken-for-granted modes of being of/within 21st-century
organizations.
Butler’s recent development of a left-wing politics in Frames of War
(2009), which I examined in some depth in Chapter One, helps expand
upon this. Foucault and Butler alike unsettle us in that they urge us to recog-
nise our ‘dark side’; for Foucault, it is our affinity with fascism, and for
Butler it is our urge to destroy the other.
 Conclusion 181
BUTLER, ETHICS AND POLITICS

To reiterate, in Frames of War, Butler critiques the violence perpetrated by

the US and its allies in retribution for the 9/11 attack on US territory and its
citizens. She asks why the loss of American lives is something to be grieved
and avenged, while those anonymous people killed in the subsequent wars
in Iran and Afghanistan are not subjects of Western mourning. She argues
that framing, that is, how dominant interpretations organize our thinking,
comes to position us so that we regard some people as human and worthy
of grief and others as less than human. My arguments in this book have
explored how a form of violence very different from that analysed by Butler
is perpetrated every day in the organizations in which we work. This is
a violence that is in no way akin to the sheer dreadfulness of war, but to
be required to become a zombie-machine and to have one’s possibilities
for selfhood greatly impoverished should not be regarded as normal, even
normative, but should be framed as a form of violence. Butler works with
photographs of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to develop
her arguments. She writes (2009:64):

Whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we for-

mulate moral criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depends
upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been estab-
lished. This field of perceptible reality is one in which the notion of the
recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what
cannot be named or regarded as the human—a figure of the non-human
that negatively determines and potentially unsettles the recognizably
human.

Those in power frame our understanding such that war becomes regarded
as justifiable on the grounds of national protection and the citizens of those
countries against which war is waged become understood as nonhuman.
Capitalism has so long framed our expectations of how organizations func-
tion that the capillary form of violence I have analysed in this book, the
murder of the me’s-that-might-have-been, is regarded as an everyday neces-
sity rather than the violence that it is.
Where Butler can work, in Frames of War, with visual images that proj-
ect very directly and without qualification the inhumanity of which she is
speaking, organization theorists have to work with words spoken from
within a discourse that has no language for the form of oppression I am
exploring in this book. If ‘framing presupposes decisions or practices that
leave substantial losses outside the frame’ (Butler, 2009:75), then we must
explore what is or cannot be said. The ways in which labour and work are
currently conceived do not allow everyday articulation of the possibilities
for a being at work that is positioned ‘outside the frame’. In other words,
I am extrapolating from Butler’s thesis to argue in favour of contesting the
182 Conclusion
‘ontological given’ of what being at work means and thus, like many authors
working in what we loosely call ‘critical management studies’, challenging
the normative framework in which governance of 21st-century organiza-
tions is located. It follows that the argument also involves a desire for a
language that allows articulation of the currently inarticulable. Hence the
hyperbolic choice of the terms ‘death’ and ‘murder’.
Unsurprisingly, given the influence of Foucault on Butler’s work, we see
here similarities in his arguments and hers: we need firstly to identify how
our thinking and talking are constrained to what is available within domi-
nant discourses, so as, secondly, to break free of the chains in which they
have bound our thoughts and speech.
Where Butler differs markedly from Foucault is in the final chapter of
Frames of War, when she explores the challenge of nonviolence. Butler’s
argument throughout that book follows a neo-Buddhist path: we are all ek-
statically constituted in relation with others and so are inextricably bound
up with others; we cannot exist and cannot have an identity without oth-
ers, so that the harm I do to another is harm done to myself. We inhabit
‘animated fields of differences’ wherein the social ontology of the subject is
one that affects and is affected by another, such that ‘ “the subject” ’ is less a
discrete substance than an active and transitive set of interrelations’ (147).
Our ontological interrelation with others is prior to any calculation of how
that interrelation should work.
From this flows an ethical stance towards the other.
However, Butler cautions against any easy presumption of a moral self
that can be turned towards the other. We are, each of us, ‘mired in violence’,
that is, in the violence that formed us and a violence that inhabits us. First,
we are all at least partially formed through violence, because against our
will we must conform to norms that confer intelligibility or recognisability
(167). Although we are born within a matrix of power, the repetition inher-
ent within performativity means that we do not have to repeat the violence
of our formation, even though we continue to be assaulted by relations we
never chose and that ‘are impingements that are injurious, acting forcibly
on the body in ways that provoke rage’ (171). Indeed, we must ‘assume
responsibility for living a life that contests the determining power of that
production’ (170) because we are ‘mired in violence’. Just as Foucault ar-
gues that we must recognise our fascist desires, Butler, drawing on Levinas
and Melanie Klein, advises the need to recognise that to be a subject is to
acknowledge that one is ‘injured, rageful, disposed to violent retribution
and nevertheless struggles against that action’ (171). We must acknowledge
that we are, even those of us who are ostensibly peaceable, pervaded by ag-
gression. We must recognise the injuries that we ourselves cause others and
engage in an active struggle against our own aggression, because

To say that we have ‘needs’ is thus to say that who we ‘are’ involves an
invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation, and
 Conclusion 183
does not merely designate a stage of childhood to be surmounted. It is
not just ‘one’s own’ struggle or the apparent struggle of ‘another’ but
precisely the dehiscence at the basis of the ‘we’, the condition under
which we are passionately bound together: ragefully, desirously, mur-
derously, lovingly. (183)

Moral responsibility thus includes protection of the other from one’s own
aggression. This involves the fallible practice of trying to attend to the pre-
cariousness of life (177) and being wary of moral sadism, which is a form of
persecution that passes itself off as virtue (177).
Although Butler is here referring to a political stance that preaches the
necessity of war in order to secure peace, I suggest that ‘moral sadism’ can
be applied to understanding organizations. Where Butler is concerned with
living and dying, I am concerned with how we define ‘life’ in organizations
and how that life is denied when subjects are reduced to zombie-machines.
The attempt to understand ‘the boss’ in Chapter Two shows how manag-
ers are so caught up in dominant organizational discourses of the need to
devote oneself singularly and wholeheartedly to the organization that they
cannot separate themselves from ‘the organization’. I have argued previ-
ously (Harding, 2003) that management textbooks and thus management
degrees are complicit in constituting such a managerial subject position. In
the language that Butler now provides us with, one must charge business
schools, management textbooks and the discourses of managerialism that
circulate more broadly as a form of moral sadism. That is, they preach the
virtue of profits and duty to shareholders and subordinate all other claims
beneath those overarching impositions, arguing that we will all benefit if we
serve the needs of profit making.
If so, then we work within conditions of moral sadism. How does one
care for one’s self and others in such a context? The art of caring for the
self, in Foucault’s terms, would involve, in Butler’s terms, ‘an understand-
ing of the possibility of one’s own violent actions in relation to those lives
to which one is bound, including those whom one never chose and never
knew’ (179). As with Foucault, this involves being alive to understanding
the ways in which we have been educated to see the world, that is, how our
understanding of it has been framed. This requires the hugely difficult task
of challenging the very terms through which we have learned to think and to
act. We must educate ourselves so that we can challenge the frames through
which representations are given to us.

CONCILIATION

Foucault and Butler combined lead us to ethical practices in which we (i) identify
how we are subjected and subjectified by dominant moral discourses and
how our responses are framed so that the breadth of our thinking and
184 Conclusion
understanding is constrained within narrow limits; (ii) find ways of moving
beyond those discourses into more ethical positions; (iii) work on the self
to identify and acknowledge the meanness and nastiness within the self and
to find ways of limiting its effect on others but abjuring any claim to have
rid the self of its dark side; (iv) work on the self to change the terms within
which one works and acts and so to reach out to others ethically.
These are ethical practices of the individual who is always given over to
others. To practice such techniques of the self would be to constitute selves
that perhaps surpass those of which we had previously dreamed. It is a
political action because such a self refuses the terms within which organiza-
tions seek to subjectify us and insists on the right to constitute selves that are
nourished and can flourish through our work.
This is where I struggle. In this chapter, I have singled out Frank, the
boss, to illuminate the absence of ethics in management. If the overall aim
is to develop an ethics of organizations in which each person can flour-
ish, constituting selves that perhaps surpass those of which they/we had
dreamed, then the most obvious target for change would be managers, and
perhaps we could reach them through our teaching and our writing. But
how would a Shakeel, a Julie, an Alex, a Kara and a Saul respond to these
ideas, and how could or would they work on themselves? Would they be
able, given the presumptions of hierarchy and the pressures on them to be
zombie-machines, to educate their managers? I must include myself in this
list: how do I challenge those discourses of the moral codes to which I cling
and move towards more ethical practices of the self? How could I sustain
them when I feel tired and grumpy and want to escape from the world and
back into my books?
For now, perhaps our focus should be on the first two of the steps out-
lined here, that is, identifying and changing or moving beyond the orga-
nizational discourses that inhibit our flourishing. That is what this book
has aimed to do: to develop a hyperbolic theory that uses the language of
murder and death to introduce different ways of articulating the harm that
organizations do when they inhibit the flourishing of their staff.
Appendix

SOPHOCLES’S TRAGEDY, THE ANTIGONE: A PRÉCIS

Many versions of the stories of Oedipus and his family would have circu-
lated in Athens, passed on by word of mouth and woven into presentations
for the theatre. The version with which we are most familiar is that given by
Sophocles,1 who presents the story in three plays written many years apart.
Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes. Follow-
ing a prophecy that the boy will kill his father, the parents charge a shepherd
with the killing of their infant son. The shepherd cannot go through with the
deed and passes the child to another shepherd, who takes him to Corinth,
where the childless king and queen adopt him. Told by the Oracle at Delphi
that he, Oedipus, now a grown man, will kill his father and marry his
mother, Oedipus decides he will avoid the curse that is on him by never re-
turning to Corinth. At a narrow pass on a mountain range, there is a violent
dispute over who has right of passage, and Oedipus kills the man who has
obstructed him. He later encounters the Sphinx. This monster is oppressing
the citizens of Thebes and will stop its tyranny only when someone answers
its riddle correctly. She asks Oedipus, as she has asked many others: what
is it that goes on four feet, three feet and two feet and is most feeble when
it walks on four? Oedipus’s answer is ‘man’: on all fours as a baby, on two
feet when grown, and on three (with the aid of a walking stick) in old age.2
The Sphinx throws herself to her death, and Oedipus’s reward is marriage to
Jocasta, the widowed queen. She and Oedipus rule happily for many years,
producing a family of two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and two sons,
Eteocles and Polyneices. Eventually the fate that has been awaiting him all
along intercedes, and Oedipus discovers that the man he slew at the moun-
tain pass was his father and that he is married to his own mother. Jocasta
hangs herself, and Oedipus takes the long pins from her robe, puts out his
eyes and goes into exile with his daughters. Jocasta’s brother, Creon, as-
sumes the throne until his two nephews come of age, at which time there is
an agreement that the brothers, now under a curse from Oedipus, will share
the throne. Eteocles, taking his turn first, refuses to give up the throne to
his brother at the due time, and Polyneices summons an army from another
186 Appendix
city-state and sets out to attack Thebes. Oedipus’s curse is fulfilled because
in the ensuing battle the brothers kill each other.
It is at this point that The Antigone begins. Creon, returning to the throne,
dictates that Polyneices’s body shall not be buried. Antigone refuses to obey
this edict and twice sets out to scatter earth over the carcass. Discovered, ar-
rested and taken to Creon, she refuses to obey his law, and he condemns her
to the slow death of entombment in a cave. Creon’s son, Haemon, betrothed
to Antigone and heartbroken, begs for her freedom, and eventually Creon
cedes to his son’s wishes. He has delayed too long, for when they get to the
cave they find the body of Antigone swinging from the cloth she has used
to hang herself. Haemon, the wretched lover, kills himself, and, hearing the
news, so does his mother, Creon’s wife. Creon is himself soon to die.
Notes

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ‘WORK’?

1. I distinguish between management (the function) and managers (the people

who do management tasks).
2. Whenever possible, our mother used to dress all five of us sisters alike.
3. At that time, median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees in the
UK were £489, that is, £531 for men and £426 for women: Statistical Bulle-
tin: 2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earning (London: Office for National
Statistics).
4. George A. Romero, director of this film, has developed a cult following for his
films since this one, made in 1968.
5. A scene of recognition of the academic self: I read Butler’s chapter at a pave-
ment café in Avignon, so my response is partly caught up in my construction
of my self as a sophisticated traveller (I omit all reference to the wrinkles and
the middle-aged spread—it countermands the image of the self I wish to pres-
ent to myself. Indeed, they are ‘the’ rather than ‘my’ wrinkles and middle-aged
spread) who can sit at a pavement café, ignoring the cigarette smoke that is
now absent from British cafés (but, then, so is the sun), reading a philosopher
discussing the work of another philosopher and thinking, ‘Wow, I think I can
understand this’. I interrupted my reading every so often to demand that my
friend listen to a choice phrase or two. He did similarly with the book he was
reading. As we read, sipped and chatted, did we not project ourselves for-
ward to a time of telling others about sitting at a pavement café in Avignon’s
morning sunshine, eating croissants, drinking strong coffee, breathing in the
smoke of Gitanes, images of generations of French philosophers having done
likewise informing our images of ourselves, making our images of our selves
visible to self and other? This is an observation that we, of course, discussed,
in that scene of recognition, in which we became, moment to moment to mo-
ment, academics.
6. People from South Wales typically insert a ‘by’ before ‘here’ or ‘there’, and
indeed the whole phrase (‘by here’ or ‘down by there’) is perhaps a heritage of
the Welsh language that informs the English spoken there, ‘Wenglish’. It took
me a long time to learn not to do this when I took up my first lecturing post,
and I still often forget. On the other hand, my grandsons tell me off for not
talking proper Wenglish when we are together.
7. In the succeeding chapters, I will argue that there is a workplace realm, away
from management, in which people can work as well as labour and, in so
doing, construct themselves as human.
188 Notes
CHAPTER 5: BECOMING AND NOT BECOMING GENDERED

1. Women now work in large numbers in professional and managerial roles

that once were the sole domain of men. Where, in the UK, women occupied
10 percent of professional jobs in the 1970s, in 2005 they occupied 42 percent
of managerial positions (although only 17 percent of directorships and chief
executive posts). In 2005, 37 percent of the medical profession and 58 percent
of medical students are female, 32 percent of financial managers and 47 percent
of the legal profession are women, and women occupy 30 percent of manage-
ment consultants and related roles, 41 percent of academic positions in higher
education and 43 percent of financial institution management roles (Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2006).
2. That web address is no longer available. Details about Battlestar Galactica
can now be found at http://www.scifistream.com/battlestar-galactica/.

CHAPTER 6: A HYPERBOLIC THEORY

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_
novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_2000s#2008.5B4.5D (accessed 10 August
2010).
2. See http://www.yellowbird.se/index.php?option=com_seyret&task=videodire
ctlink&id=219&Itemid=4 (accessed 10 August 2010)
3. See http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2007/06/03/rebus-
rebuff-78057-19237980/. (accessed 10 August 2010).
4. ‘Suture’ refers to procedures whereby cultural texts confer subjectivity upon
their viewers or readers (Silverman, 1988:195).

APPENDIX

1. I have used the version introduced by Knox and translated by Fagles (1982).
2. I cannot resist quoting from Muriel Rukeyser, ‘Myth’ (in Cavarero, 2005:49):
Long after, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a fa-
miliar smell. It was the Sphinx.
Oedipus said, ‘I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my
mother?’
‘You gave the wrong answer,’ said the Sphinx.
‘But that was what made everything possible’, said Oedipus.
‘No’, she said, ‘When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two
at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say
anything about woman’.
‘When you say Man’, said Oedipus, ‘you include women too. Everyone
knows that’.
She said, ‘That’s what you think’.
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Index

A friendship: in MOS 104 – 8; as

academics: as controlled labourers 10; recognition at the workplace
and gender(ing) 128 – 37 111 – 13; sociological and
Althusser 56 anthropological studies of
Antigone, The 64, 69 – 70, 73 – 4, 78 – 9, 108 – 11
185 – 6
Antigone’s cave 79 G
gender 117; gender performativity
B 118 – 20; and psychoanalysis
Battlestar Galactica 124 – 8 120 – 3
Bauman, Zygmun 2 Greek tragedy 65 – 8
body 36
Bollas, Christoper 8 H
Butler, Judith: abjection 4; Antigone’s Hegel: and The Antigone 65; master/
Claim 64; Frames of War 15, 16; slave dialectic 38, 41, 43
and the human 23 – 5; master/ human, the: definition of 21 – 3; and
slave dialectic 26, 30, 61; Psychic gender 141 – 3
Life of Power 38, 41
L
C Labour process theory 1
control/resistance binary 1 Labour/work: distinction between 35
critical management studies 1, 4, 5, 16 Lacan 31, 120 – 1
Lefebvre 2
D less-than-human: definition of 5
death 80 – 3; theories of 146;
organizational 165 M
detective stories 145 management and organization studies
Dollimore, Jonathan 13, 146, 150 – 2, (MOS): as art/humanities 11;
166 as social-cultural philosophy
11 – 12; as a social science 10
E Martin, Patricia Yancy 140 – 1
ethics of the self 175 – 8 Marx, Karl 1, 82; and alienation 2,
166, 168 – 71
F master/manager/slave dialectic
facelessness 32 43, 46
Foucault, Michel: categorization master/slave dialectic 38, 43 – 5, 72
9 – 10, 24; on Greek tragedy 68; methodology: anti-methodology 7;
repressive hypothesis 45; work interviews and problems with
on the self 4, 178 – 80 7–9
204 Index
O social constructionism: definition of 5
organization: contradictory meanings Sophocles see Antigone, The; Greek
of the word 75, 77; and death tragedy
theory/thanatology 147
T
P Taylor, F. W. 35
postcolonialism 4
Z
S zombie-machine: constitution of the
science: critique of 10 human 21 – 2; definition of 5;
science fiction: and the human distinction from the human 16;
22 – 3 gender 141 – 3