Un/doing Chrononormativity: Negotiating Ageing, Gender and Sexuality in Organizational Life

Abstract

This paper is based on a series of 'anti-narrative' interviews with self-identifiedLGBT people designed to explore the ways in which lived experiences of age, gender and sexuality are negotiated and narrated within organizations in later life. It draws on Judith Butler's performative ontology of gender, particularly her account of the ways in which the desire for recognition is shaped by heteronormativity, considering its implications for how we study ageing and organizations. In doing so, the paper develops a critique of the impact of heteronormative life course expectations on the negotiation of viable subjectivity within organizational settings. Focusing on the ways in which 'chrononormativity' shapes the lived experiences of ageing within organizations, at the same time as constituting an organizing process in itself, the paper draws on Butler's concept of 'un/doing' in its analysis of the simultaneously affirming and negating organizational experiences of older LGBT people. The paper concludes by emphasizing the theoretical potential of a performative ontology of ageing, gender and sexuality for organization studies, as well as the methodological insights to be derived from an 'anti-narrative' approach to organizational research.

Mental Heath as a Weapon: Whistleblower Retaliation and Normative Violence

“…We drew on other scholars inspired by poststructuralist psychoanalysis (Harding et al 2014;Riach et al 2014Riach et al , 2016 and began with a close reading of data, followed by open coding. We were interested in the ways in which 'identities are constituted within circulating discourses,' such that discourses '"speak through" subjects' self-reflections.…”

“…We remained attentive to how the 'I' drew on dominant discourses that appeared to offer validation (Parker 2005, p. 173). Such an approach facilitates an opening-up of aspects of organizational life that are typically taken for granted, and can help analyze the kinds of 'organizational undoing' that subjected selves undergo as they engage with the organizations for which they work (Riach et al 2014). Dominant sub-themes emerged in relation to mental health and people's accounts, and these were noted alongside the identified contradictions.…”

“…Recently scholars have proposed that Lacanian, 'poststructuralist' psychoanalysis offers a useful contribution, shedding light on Foucauldian subjectification by accounting for the contribution of psychic dynamics in this process (Pavon-Cuellar 2010; Stavrakakis 2008). Butler's Psychic Life of Power has been particularly influential in introducing such ideas to organization studies (Riach et al 2014;Harding et al 2014). She describes subjects' psychic desires for recognition within the symbolic order as fueling an ongoing quest for new and more promising affective identifications (Butler 1997a, b).…”

“…She shows how such practices are effective because capitalist forms of organization elicit from us the kinds of passionate attachments to dominant social norms, values and rules, which are re-affirmed and re-embedded through circulating discourses in ways that ultimately represent normative violence, suggesting that power is both an intra (psychic)-and intersubjective (social) process rather than a property or attribute that one can obtain at the expense of the other. While Butler does not expand on this in the context of work organizations, others have recently illustrated how her 'recognition-based critique of the conditions governing viable subjectivity' (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679 can shed light on dynamics of normative power in organizations (Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2013Harding et al , 2014Riach et al 2016), not least in relation to sexuality and gender (Tyler and Cohen 2008) but also the consumption of management textbooks (Harding 2003), ethical workplaces (Kenny 2010) and organizational violence (Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016). This theory has recently been applied to understand the experiences of whistleblowers in the aftermath of their disclosures (Kenny 2017) and their exclusions from recruitment practices and friendship circles because of having engaged in 'impossible speech.'…”

“…Specifically, there is no attention paid to how the wrongdoing organizations deploy various discourses including that of mental health, to undermine the claims of whistleblowers who often internalize and enact these. In this article, we contribute to research on this important issue by drawing on Judith Butler's 'recognition-based critique' of subjectivity and power, a growing area of interest in organization studies (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679; see also Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2014;Kenny 2010Kenny , 2017Riach et al 2016;Tyler and Cohen 2008). This view builds on the resource-based approach because it sees power as inherent to the very formation of the subject, as she constructs a sense of self through identification with discourse, rather than simply an entity that is either possessed or not.…”