Body Breakdowns as Politics: Identity regulation in a high-commitment activist organization

Abstract

Recent studies on identity regulation emphasize the significance of the body in mediating individuals’ responses to cultural control within organizations. However, little is known about how such responses are concretely enacted by individuals through their bodies. Based on an ethnography of an activist organization, this study discusses the culture of self-sacrifice through which activists’ identity is regulated. It reveals the everyday tensions between passionate commitment and vulnerable bodies, exploring how body breakdowns lead activists to separate their passion for a cause from the organizational culture and ultimately make their exit. We thus aim to contribute to research on identity regulation by highlighting the precariousness of this process and demonstrating the political potential of bodies to resist controlling regimes. We interpret breakdowns as political events emerging at the interface between the docile enactment of a bodily norm and its concrete physical violence.

Politicizing the Body in the Anti-Mining Protest in Greece

“…Organization studies scholarship has begun to theorize spatial forms of resistance to neoliberal capitalism (Courpasson, Dany, & Delbridge, 2017;Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017;Fernández, Martí, & Farchi, 2017;Mumby, Thomas, Martí, & Seidl, 2017;Reedy, King, & Coupland, 2016). However, there are few accounts of women's contributions to these movements (Tyler, 2019;Vachhani & Pullen, 2019), and these rarely, if at all, address embodied opposition (or struggle) in the organization of resistance (Elidrissi & Courpasson, 2019). As a result, resistance spaces possessing 'structure and orientation by virtue of the presence of the human body' (Tuan, 1979, p. 389; see also Butler, 2015) remain largely unconceptualized in management and organization studies.…”

Extinction Rebellion: Green activism and the fantasy of leaderlessness in a decentralized movement

“…While XR’s website does not refer to leaders as such, the movement’s founders are clearly seen as occupying this position by both the membership and the media. This leads to a conundrum about how one becomes a leader in a leaderless organization, how such authority is brought about, for example, by becoming a founding and committed member (see Rahmouni Elidrissi, 2019), and what are the accountability structures, as explored next.…”

“…This article contributes primarily to psychoanalytic approaches to leadership (Costas and Taheri, 2012; Driver, 2013; Gabriel, 1999; Western, 2014) by deploying the Lacanian concept of fantasy to elucidate avoidance of leadership in a leaderless social movement. We adopt a psychoanalytic perspective to show how the fantasy of being a ‘leaderless organization’ enables activists to avoid debate over the nature of leadership in decentralized social movements (Kwok and Chan, 2017; Nepstad and Bob, 2006; Rahmouni Elidrissi and Courpasson, 2019; Western, 2014), and potentially makes democratic politics and social change impossible. We thus argue that such movements’ failure to explicitly articulate these issues and fully implement democratic procedures may lead to evasive behaviour, confusion and abdication of responsibility, which may undermine their political and organizational goals.…”

“Environmental defenders”

“…The martyrdom effects of singling certain people out as heroic "environmental defenders", as well as the effects on the outcomes of resistance, depend on a range of factors. These include: the political cultures at play, the intensity and duration of grievances, the prior profile of the defenders and their cause, the nature and strength of their solidarity network, effects on bodies and minds, and the processes of mobilization that follow (Conde & Le Billon 2017;Elidrissi & Courpasson 2019Nixon 2016. In strong police states, extensive surveillance and systematic repression can methodically undermine socio-environmental movements.…”