Table Of ContentJudith Butler and
Organization Theory
The year 2020 marks thirty years since the first publication of Judith
Butler’s ground-breaking book Gender Trouble. Here, and in subsequent
work, Butler argues that gender and other forms of identity can best
be understood as performative acts. These acts are what bring our
subjectivities into existence, enabling us to be recognized as viable,
employable social beings, worthy of rights, responsibilities and respect.
The three decades since the publication of Gender Trouble have witnessed
Butler become one of the most widely cited and controversial figures in
contemporary feminist thinking. While it is only in her most recent
work that Butler has engaged directly with themes such as work and
organization, her writing has profound implications for thinking, and
acting, on the relationship between power, recognition and organization.
Whilst her ideas have made important inroads into work, organization
and gender studies that are discussed here, there is considerable scope to
explore further avenues that her concepts and theories open up. These
inroads and avenues are the focus of this book.
Judith Butler and Organization Theory makes a substantial
contribution to the analysis of gender, work and organization. It not
only covers central issues in Butler’s work but also offers a close reading
of the complexities and nuances in her thought. It does so by ‘reading’
Butler as a theorist of organization, whose work resonates with scholars,
practitioners and activists concerned to understand and engage with
organizational life, organization and organizing. Drawing from a range
of illustrative examples, the book examines key texts or ‘moments’ in
the development of Butler’s writing to date, positing her as a thinker
concerned to understand and address the ways in which our most basic
desire for recognition comes to be organized within the context of
contemporary labour markets and workplaces. It examines insights from
Butler’s work, and the philosophical ideas she draws on, considering the
impact of these on work, organization and management studies thus
far; it also explores some of the many ways in which her thinking might
be mobilized in future, considering what scope there is for a non-violent
ethics of organization, and for a (re)assembling of the relationship between
vulnerability and resistance within and through organizational politics.
Melissa Tyler is a professor of work and organization studies at Essex
Business School, The University of Essex, UK.
Routledge Studies in Gender and Organizations
Series Editor:
Elisabeth K. Kelan
Although still a fairly young field, the study of gender and organizations is
increasingly popular and relevant. There are few areas of academic research
that are as vibrant and dynamic as the study of gender and organizations.
While much earlier research has focused on documenting the imbalances
of women and men in organizations, more recently, research on gender
and organizations has departed from counting men and women. Instead
research in this area sees gender as a process: something that is done rather
than something that people are. This perspective is important and mean-
ingful as it takes researchers away from essentialist notions of gender and
opens the possibility of analysing the process of how individuals become
women and men. This is called ‘gendering’, ‘practising gender’, ‘doing
gender’ or ‘performing gender’ and draws on rich philosophical traditions.
Whilst Routledge Studies in Gender and Organizations has a broad remit,
it will be thematically and theoretically committed to exploring gender and
organizations from a constructivist perspective. Rather than focusing on
specific areas of organizations, the series is to be kept deliberately broad
to showcase the most innovative research in this field. It is anticipated that
the books in this series will make a theoretical contribution to the field of
gender and organization based on rigorous empirical explorations.
Gender and the Professions
International and Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Kaye Broadbent, Glenda Strachan, and Geraldine Healy
Postfeminism and Organization
Edited by Patricia Lewis, Yvonne Benschop, and Ruth Simpson
Women and Careers
Transnational Studies in Public Policy and Employment Equity
Marilee Reimer
Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions
Edited by Marta Choroszewicz and Tracey L. Adams
Judith Butler and Organization Theory
Melissa Tyler
Judith Butler and
Organization Theory
Melissa Tyler
First published 2020
by Routledge
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Melissa Tyler to be identified as author of this
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For Ellis—with love, and the hope that you will continue to
always be audacious
Contents
ContentsContents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 Making Trouble: Organizational Performativity
and Parody 29
2 The Organizational ‘Matter’ of Bodies at Work 60
3 Un/Doing Organization—Coherence at the Cost
of Complexity 85
4 Accounting for/in Organization: Giving and
Working an Account of One’s Self 109
5 Organized Dispossession: The Organizational
Politics of Precarity 140
6 Organizational (re)Assemblage: Towards a Plural
Performativity 165
Postscript 197
References 206
Index 215
Preface
PrefacePreface
The year 2020 marks thirty years since the first publication of Judith
Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. The three decades since have witnessed
Butler becoming one of the most widely cited yet controversial figures in
contemporary feminist thinking. Her performative ontology of gender
has led many to worship at the altar of ‘St Jude’ with a fanzine in the
1990s and now various social media groups devoted to her. In Buenos
Aires in 2019, queues formed outside the hall where Butler was speaking
more than seven hours ahead of the scheduled start time such was her
popularity, while in Brazil in 2017, she was burned in effigy by Far Right
protestors who had interpreted her work as ‘anti-family’.
Butler has been hailed as ‘a genius for insubordination’ (Fraser, 1995a:
65), celebrated as a public intellectual whose work reaches well beyond
the confines of academia (Fischer, 2016), yet she is also the notorious
winner of a ‘bad writer’ award (see Butler, 1999) and has been derided as
a ‘professor of parody’ who is capable of little more than setting the femi-
nist movement back through her ‘hip defeatism’ (Nussbaum, 1999: 37).
Responses to Butler’s work from within work and organization studies
have tended to sit somewhere between these extremes. A growing number
of scholars, practitioners and activists have drawn on her ideas and have
applied and developed her insights, often re-framing her thinking through
an organizational lens where her writing, particularly her earliest work,
tended to lack this substantive focus. As Butler’s own thinking about
organizational lives and contexts continues to evolve so too do the pos-
sibilities, as well as the challenges and limitations, of drawing her work
into a dialogue with organizational scholarship, activism and practice.
Butler’s performative theory of gender in particular has made a sig-
nificant contribution to work and organization studies in the years since
the first publication of Gender Trouble. As Lloyd (2007) notes, it is this
aspect of her thinking for which Butler continues to be best known, and
it is her performative ontology of gender, in particular, that has been the
most influential aspect of her writing for organizational scholars. Kenny’s
(2019: 33) book on whistleblowers is a notable exception, drawing
together insights and ideas from across the full breadth of Butler’s work
