International audienceOrganizations are frequently subject to changes that promote new and/or (supposedly) trendy identities for their members. Various studies have sought to understand how such identity regulation processes are achieved through discourse, a fact that has led researchers to call for a more material understanding of this phenomenon. Through an in-depth ethnography of a transformation programme aimed at constructing a new social identity among project managers – that of internal consultant – we find that identity regulation is exercised through a sociomaterial process affording the performativity of the promoted identity, mainly through the consultants’ bodily performances. This is important because it shows how identity regulation is achieved through both (and intertwined) discourse and materiality

Posthumanist research has recently been undertaken to rectify the longstanding anthropocentric invisibilization of animals in organizing processes. The stake is both epistemological and political, with the growing awareness that the current ecological crisis is a crisis in our relationship with animals. Organizations studies have worked on organizations’ ontologies and methodologies to make way for animals but have tended to avoid the daunting task of exploring animal ontologies, making themselves liable to reconduct the humanist normative categories humanity/animality and leaving animals non-researchable subjectivities. This chapter draws on the long, central, and living tradition of phenomenological thinking about animals, from Von Uexküll to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Burgat, Despret, and Morizot. Fully endorsing the view that the ontological is political, I make the case for exploring the specific historical construction of the hierarchical dualism humanity/animality—connected to but not equivalent to other dualisms such as person/object—to propose richer animal ontologies, such as animals’ and species’ life-worlds and ways of being, to build new relational ontologies.

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