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Do we need to study popular culture within organization studies, and exactly what is it we do if we choose to do so? Is it nothing more than organizational scholars co-opting yet another discipline, or is there an independent contribution to be made? I will in this text argue that in order to develop, organization studies must fi nd its own identity in relation to cultural studies, and that the search for this must by necessity include the study of hybrid cultural forms. Such forms, which are neither highbrow nor properly lowbrow, challenge common assumptions about what 'popular' in fact means in the fi eld, and points towards the need for a more complex theory of how images of management and organization are consumed, disseminated and re-created from the world of popular culture into the world of the contemporary organization and back again.Even though there have been repeated calls for developing the fi eld of management and organization studies in a way that would better encompass the ways in which purportedly managerial phenomena leak into the wider social context (Hancock and Tyler, 2004;Parker, 2006aParker, , 2006b, the nature of these

Through an investigation of the organizing potential of productive dualisms and ontological hierarchies that move toward epistemic and ontological closures, this essay theorizes the bounded potential of fluidity, and points to the possibility of waste, excess and sacrifice within a general economy of gender. We emphasize the apparently paradoxical role that dualisms -especially dualisms understood semiotically -have played in the foundational work to which many theorists look for clues about how to proceed in confounding limits and boundaries. Moreover, closures around the interrelated subordination of femininity and blackness emerge as a crucial reminder of the interlocking projects of gender and race theory. Drawing upon gender and critical race theory, philosophical phenomenology, and the work of Georges Bataille, we suggest that a general economy of gender can be explored by perceiving the closures, and other limits, enacted by dualism in organizational settings.

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