Whither Critical Management and Organization Studies? For a Performative Critique of Capitalist Flows in the Wake of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

Over the last few months, COVID-19 has entered our own consciousness as a moment of profound disruption, leading in too many cases to misery and death, but also, forcing us more mundanely to reorganize our lives, work and social relations. This unexpected dis-organization of life has revealed our mutual dependency to exist, as one people, literally: pandemic. At the same time, it has shown how these social relations constitute us as many, different and unequally vulnerable. How does the pandemic interrogate our understandings of power, subjection, oppression and inequality? What can we, as critical Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholars, bring to the table of renewed theorisations of (dis)organizing during and post the pandemic? This disruption invites us to engage more often and more thoroughly with capitalism as constituted through capitalist flows of people, goods, capital, ideas and affect-and, one could add, viruses. As David Harvey has argued, these flows organize the economy and society by increasingly 'compressing' space and time to ensure capital valorization, fundamentally shaping the relations that constitute us in work and society more broadly. They render us dependent on each other in specific ways, governing through 'the modulation of divisions and of differences' (Lazzarato, 2006, p. 119), 'frictions' that generate value for capital (Tsing, 2005) and render us unequally vulnerable. The COVID-19 pandemic thus calls critical MOS to address capitalist flows. Let me illustrate.

Making Diversity Research Matter for Social Change: New Conversations Beyond the Firm

“…Rather, it points to how subjects' difference (in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, and also geographical location) is key to their integration into capitalism on profoundly unequal terms and is enforced through dispossession, misrecognition and severe forms of exploitation. Taking a broader political economy perspective, as opposed to one solely focused on what happens within the firm as a bounded entity, this research attends to the multiple forces determining working and living conditions and the experiences of the global, diverse workforce on whose undervalued work contemporary global commodity flows rest (Ozkazanc-Pan & Calás, 2015;Zanoni, 2020b).…”

COVID‐19 and the Future of Management Studies. Insights from Leading Scholars

“…We may become more aware of differences between organizations in terms of their healthcare benefits, wellbeing policies and willingness to give their employees a voice in decision making processes. This may also prompt a process of occupational re‐rating as we confer more value and regard to those key workers, such as doctors and nurses but also teachers and transport, care and delivery workers who have been in the front line in the fight against COVID‐19 (Ashforth, 2020; Zannoni, 2021). Finally, at a more societal level, the pandemic and its management might make us more aware of institutional differences between countries and how countries with stronger cooperative and collectivist orientations may have outperformed more individualist ones in reducing both its healthcare and economic costs (Avery, 2020; Eaton and Hecksher, 2021).…”

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“…Yet the ideal worker is not only the one thought to be most suited to do the work (Acker, 2006;Ashcraft, 2013), but also, crucially, the one who is available to do so under the least favorable conditions possible or, in other words, the one most easily exploitable (MacKenzie & Forde, 2009;Romani et al, 2019;Zanoni, 2011Zanoni, , 2019. Labor markets are continuously fragmented, both symbolically and institutionally, to integrate workers into capitalism on unequal terms (Harvey, 1990;Lazzarato, 2006;Zanoni, 2020aZanoni, , 2020b. Capitalism does not simply register preexisting differences between workers.…”

“…It is in this disjuncture between life and capitalism, in the interstice, the "cracks" and the "excess" that practices experimenting and prefiguring a noncapitalistic future can emerge (Bonefeld, 2014), politically nurtured by alternative libidinal investments such as hope (Dinerstein, 2015). Clearly, "classing struggles for social justice" is not a return to an "essential" subject preceding capitalism, but a re-imagining of diverse subjectivities and social relations (Zanoni, 2020a(Zanoni, , 2020b.…”

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