Heroism and/as injurious speech: Recognition, precarity, and inequality in health and social care work

Abstract

This paper draws on Judith Butler's (2009Butler's ( , 1997 writing on precarity and the interpellatory power of naming, read through her recent writing on the dynamics of recognition, vulnerability, and resistance, to develop a critique of the discourse of heroism used to position health and social care professionals, and other key workers, during the COVID pandemic. It does so in order to reflect on the insights into workplace inequalities that this example provides, in particular into what, to borrow from Butler, we might think of as the conditions necessary for a "workable life". It argues that, although it might seem paradoxical, the heroic discourses and symbolism used to recognize health and social care workers throughout the pandemic can be understood as a form of "injurious speech" in Butler's terms, one that served to other key workers by subjecting them to a reified, rhetorical form of recognition. The analysis argues that this had the effect of accentuating health and care workers' precarity and of undermining their capacity to challenge and resist this positioning.

Organizing vulnerability exploring Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability to study organizations

“…Triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic, scholars have explicitly discussed vulnerability as an epistemological praxis, that is the role of vulnerability in the research process (Abdellatif & Gatto, 2020; Henriksen et al., 2022; Plester et al., 2022), and how vulnerabilities become visible when infrastructures break down (Clavijo, 2020; Ryan et al., 2021). Hales and Tyler (2022), for example, critique the heroism discourse surrounding healthcare and social workers using a Butlerian lens. Inspired by Butler's work on vulnerability and resistance (Butler, 2016), scholars have recently studied how individuals and groups use vulnerability for resistance (Cutcher et al., 2022; Gao & Sai, 2021; Reiss et al., 2021).…”

“…Resonating the COVID‐19 pandemic, critical and feminist MOS researchers have started to use vulnerability as a praxis of knowing (cf. Abdellatif & Gatto, 2020; Clavijo, 2020; Hales & Tyler, 2022; Henriksen et al., 2022; Plester et al., 2022; Ryan et al., 2021). As invulnerability is an impossibility, Fineman (2010) calls for a government to be a “responsive state”.…”

“…While Judith Butler's ideas, especially those discussing gender, have been widely discussed in critical and feminist MOS (Borgerson, 2005;Riach et al, 2016;Tyler, 2019), her conceptualization of vulnerability has only just recently entered the field. Inspired by COVID-19, feminist MOS scholars have debated the vulnerabilities made visible by the pandemic (Clavijo, 2020;Hales & Tyler, 2022;Ryan et al, 2021) and those inherent in academic researching and writing (Henriksen et al, 2022;Meriläinen et al, 2022;Plester et al, 2022). This paper proposes to use Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability for studying management and organizations (Borgerson, 2005).…”

“It hits me in the weirdest moments”: How future female workers experience loss in times of planetary crisis

“…This makes vulnerability not simply a curse but possibly also a ground for new modes of solidarity (Butler et al., 2016, p. x). Organization scholars have explored vulnerability as resistance to workplace inequalities (Hales & Tyler, 2022), to patriarchal power structures and gendered dynamics in research processes (Plester et al., 2022), to worsened job and domestic conditions in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic (Reiss et al., 2021), and to the discrimination against aging subjects in organizational recognition schemes (Cutcher et al., 2022). Thus, these studies have shown that, as an experience of exposure to power, vulnerability can simultaneously constitute an embodied enactment of resistance (Butler, 2016b; Cutcher et al., 2022; Meriläinen et al., 2022).…”