Abstract
This article explores the methodological possibilities that Butler’s theory of performativity opens up, attempting to ‘translate’ her theoretical ideas into research practice. Specifically, it considers how research on organizational subjectivity premised upon a performative ontology might be undertaken. It asks: What form might a Butler-inspired methodology take? What methodological opportunities might it afford for developing self-reflexive research? What political and ethical problems might it pose for organizational researchers, particularly in relation to the challenges associated with power asymmetries, and the risks attached to ‘fixing’ subjects within the research process? The article outlines and evaluates a method described as anti-narrative interviewing, arguing that it constitutes a potentially valuable methodological resource for researchers interested in understanding how and why idealized organizational subjectivities are formed and sustained. It further advances the in-roads that Butler’s writing has made into organization studies, thinking through the methodological and ethical implications of her work for understanding the performative constitution of organizational subjectivities. The aim of the article is to advocate a research practice premised upon a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. It concludes by emphasizing the potential benefits and wider implications of a methodologically reflexive undoing of organizational performativity.
Keywords
Introduction
This article considers how organizational scholars might apply Judith Butler’s (1988, 1990, 1993, 2000, 2004, 2005) theory of performativity in order to develop a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. Specifically, it outlines and evaluates a methodological approach designed to ‘undo’ the constraints imposed by the compulsion to perform seemingly coherent narratives of self within organizational settings. It argues that research designed to bring about a reflexive undoing of such narratives, exploring how (and why) they are constituted, and finding ways of changing them, is an important route through which organizational research might benefit those who contribute to it and become more politically engaged (Cabantous et al., 2015; Ford et al., 2010; Spicer et al., 2009; Wickert and Schaefer, 2014) and self-reflexive (Borgerson, 2015; Dick, 2013; Gilmore and Kenny, 2015; Wray-Bliss, 2003).
In his discussion of the ethics and politics of critical management research, Wray-Bliss (2003: 310) challenges us to think more critically and reflexively about the constitution of subject positions within the research process, noting how accounts of methodology tend to be limited to ‘minimal, technical descriptions’. In order to move beyond this, he argues, we ought to begin to work more carefully through the ‘painful puzzle’ (Wray-Bliss, 2003: 321) of how academic research with anti-oppressive commitments and emancipatory aspirations continues to textually reproduce what it purports to critique. In a similar critical vein, Penny Dick highlights the interactional power asymmetries between the researcher and the research subject as a particular challenge for critical researchers, one that foregrounds how ‘particular versions of reality achieve authority as a consequence of the power relationship that characterizes the interaction’ (Dick, 2013: 646). Of particular relevance here is Dick’s emphasis on the extent to which researchers’ understandings of the social phenomena they study are ‘as much constituted by their own discursive practices of researching, writing and theorizing as . . . by the discursive practices of their research participants’ (2013: 648). In practice this may lead researchers to make unreflexive assumptions about the types of subjectivities constituted through the research process, including their own, thereby replicating precisely the kind of categorical thinking that a performative theory of subjectivity is intended to critique.
Borgerson (2015) picks up on these concerns in her discussion of humility and the challenge to decolonize the ‘critical’ in critical management studies (CMS). Acknowledging how CMS can exercise a colonizing impulse in unreflexively assuming a position of epistemic privilege in categorizing and positioning the subjectivities of Others, CMS researchers risk, she argues, perpetuating an intellectual hegemony in how subjectivities are understood in research that claims to be critically emancipatory. In response, Borgerson (2015) advocates that a Butlerian inspired notion of performativity be sutured into critical management research so that CMS researchers might nurture an ‘openness to the Other’. Borgerson’s (2015) contribution is an insightful development of Spicer et al.’s (2009: 545) earlier call for a re-thinking of how we ‘do’ critical management research, in order to ‘take seriously the life-worlds and struggles of those who are engaged with it’, emphasizing the need for researchers to mobilize performativity in order to open up more reflexive spaces for critical management research. Spicer et al. (2009: 549) argue that fostering a critical performativity constitutes an important way in which researchers might cultivate ‘openness and curiosity about the social world’. Their approach, in particular, emphasizes the importance of a micro-emancipatory ‘critical performativity’ (Spicer et al., 2009) or a ‘progressive performativity’, as outlined by Wickert and Schaefer (2014). A more radical theory of performativity, one that has parallels with Butler’s recent concerns to articulate a performative theory of precarity and dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), urges us to ask ‘uncomfortable questions about our own positions’ (Ford et al., 2010: 71) as researchers. It is to this more politically engaged theory of performativity within organization studies that we seek to contribute, emphasizing the need to ‘understand the terms within and through which subjects are performatively constituted’ in organizational settings (Cabantous et al., 2015: 8). Cabantous et al. (2015: 8) argue that two fundamental questions follow from engaging a Butlerian ontology of performativity within organization studies: ‘Who are you? What are the conditions of the possibility of your becoming?’.
Taking up these questions, we outline below a possible response to these challenges, developing a self-reflexive methodological approach to researching organizational subjectivity drawing on Butler’s theory on performativity. We illustrate this with reference to data generated from interviews exploring the work and organizational experiences of self-identified older lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans- (LGBT) adults in the UK, undertaken by the authors between 2012 and 2014. 1 We argue that Butler’s concept of ‘undoing’ constitutes a particularly useful resource through which valuable methodological opportunities are opened up. These opportunities potentially allow us to critically and reflexively understand more about the labour involved in performing and maintaining the semblances of subjective coherence upon which organizations depend. In particular, they enable us to appreciate, as Driver (2015) avers, the importance of analysing the stories that people tell about the identity work they undertake within organizations in order to comprehend the complexities, contradictions and especially the struggles in their accounts. In our discussion of the ethical implications of ‘undoing’ as a methodological approach, of unravelling these struggles, we distinguish what we call an organizational undoing through which, in Butler’s terms, ‘the subject produces its coherence at the cost of its own complexity’ (1993: 115), from a more analytical, reflexive undoing. While the former requires that constraining and conflating the complexity of lived experience is a condition upon which viable organizational subjectivity depends, the latter is designed to bring this complexity to the fore, revealing rather than concealing the labour required to produce and maintain semblances of subjective coherence in and through organizations. We use the term ‘organizational undoing’ here to refer to what Dale and Latham (2015: 168), emphasis added describe as ‘organizational processes which fix and stabilize differences and categories, and apply rules and procedures to maintain these’, arguing that subjective viability and organizational recognition depends upon the capacity to maintain a performatively credible conformity to these processes, rules and procedures. In contrast, we argue that a ‘reflexive undoing’, one designed to reveal the organizational processes through which subjects are ‘undone’ and to emphasize the sheer effort involved in staking a claim to recognition, allows us to examine not only the conditions of organizational recognition, but also the consequences of mis-recognition for those who don’t fit.
Considering the methodological possibilities opened up by a reflexive undoing, as well as evaluating its ethical implications, the article has two specific aims. First, we consider the methodological potential of Butler’s writing for the study of organizational subjectivity, specifically the latter’s normative constitution and conditioning within organizational settings and through organizational processes. Second, we outline and evaluate the practical application of this potential through our consideration of anti-narrative research as a method of data generation and analysis. We use the term ‘data generation’ rather than ‘data collection’ to emphasize that research data is generated through the research process rather than pre-exists it, awaiting ‘capture’. It is also designed to discourage us from citing interview data as a self-evident reflection of an external reality that is somehow separate from the accounts given in research interviews but rather, to highlight the interview process itself as a performative one, part of the constitution of the subject, including that of the researcher, albeit one that we have endeavoured to make as reflexive as possible. We examine how a Butler-inspired methodology might be pursued through a reflexive undoing and an anti-narrative interview method premised upon a reflexive ethic of openness throughout the research process.
In particular, we ask the following questions. First, how might a methodology underpinned by a performative ontology reflexively ‘undo’ organizational subjectivities, revealing the normative conditions, and identity work, on which they depend? We use the term ‘performative ontology’ here to refer to Butler’s emphasis on subjective existence as the outcome, rather than the basis, of a process of social recognition (Hancock and Tyler, 2001). Second, how do we develop methodologies and methods that do not simply ‘fix’ the subjects of inquiry (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012; Dick, 2013), reproducing patterns of narrative coherence and processes of organizational undoing? Third, what are the methodological possibilities for data generation and analysis if we adopt an anti-narrative approach to organizational research? Finally, what are the practical and ethical considerations associated with a methodological, reflexive undoing and with anti-narrative research practice?
In thinking through these questions, as well as the literature cited above, we are particularly inspired by Gilmore and Kenny’s (2015) recent discussion of self-reflexivity in organizational research, in which they advocate a move from self- to collective-reflexivity as the basis for a method of data collection and analysis they describe as ‘pair interviewing’. The latter involves a co-construction of knowledge that allows themes traditionally downplayed (e.g. emotion, inter-subjectivity and power dynamics) to be foregrounded. In particular, Gilmore and Kenny (2015: 60) ask: what methods might usefully assist researchers ‘who are committed to self-reflexivity that is meaningful rather than token?’, recommending a range of research practices. These include adopting a collective approach to reflexivity (see also Brannan, 2011); conducting interviews in which the interviewers avoid making ethical or epistemic judgements about participants’ accounts; facilitating a co-construction of research accounts as the research progresses, and developing a collective reflexivity ‘as an ongoing practice, rather than as an afterthought’ (Gilmore and Kenny, 2015: 73). However, Gilmore and Kenny (2015) note that the theoretical resources available to us in attempting to move toward a methodology premised upon inter-subjectivity and relationality remain relatively limited.
With this in mind, and in addressing the questions outlined above, we seek to draw on and develop the inroads that Butler’s writing (1988, 1990, 1993, 2004, 2005) has begun to make into work and organization studies over the last decade or so (Borgerson, 2005; Cabantous et al., 2015; Ford and Harding, 2011; Harding et al., 2011, 2013, 2014; Hodgson, 2005; Kenny, 2009, 2010; Parker, 2002; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2014; Wickert and Schaefer, 2014). While empirically focussed and theoretically rich, what remains relatively under-developed within this literature is an integration of insights from Butler into methodological debates about how we might, in practical ways, develop our understanding of organization subjectivity. Hence, what it might mean to develop a Butlerian performative methodology, designed to ‘undo’ organizational/organizing processes in research design, has yet to be explored. Taking up the challenges referred to above, our aim in this article is to address this gap. In this respect, we seek to counter some of the criticisms levelled at Butler’s theory of performativity and undoing as overly abstract and difficult to apply empirically (Fraser, 1997; Morison and Macleod, 2013). We also aim, in this sense, to address the very practical question of how we might actually ‘do’ organizational research inspired by theoretical insights from Butler’s writing. We do so by mapping and evaluating a practice-based methodological application of Butler’s theoretical analysis of the dynamic relationship between organizational subjectivity and the norms by which it is both compelled and constrained.
The article is structured as follows. We begin by considering Butler’s writing on performativity and undoing, briefly retracing her steps thus far within organization studies. We then consider the as yet unexplored methodological implications of her work for the study of organizational life, mapping out three characteristics of a Butler-inspired methodology: (i) anti-narrative interviewing as a method of data generation and analysis; (ii) a methodological ‘undoing’ based on a performative ontology; and (iii) a commitment to a recognition-based, reflexive undoing based on an ethics of openness. In conclusion, we consider, in particular, the underlying question of whether the methodological, reflexive undoing we outline here is ethically defensible, ending with notes of both optimism and caution.
Butler, organizational performativity and ‘undoing’
Butler’s writing on performativity and undoing is developed across a number of her ‘core’ texts (1988, 1990, 1993, 2000, 2004, 2005), in particular Gender Trouble (1990) and its anniversary edition (2000), in which she explains her conceptual understanding of performativity. This can be seen most clearly in her oft-cited conviction that gender is ‘a corporeal style, an act as it were, that is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’ (Butler, 2000: 177). Arguing that ‘this repetition is not performed by a subject’, but rather ‘is what enables a subject’ (Butler, 1993: 95), Butler emphasizes that subject positions are continually evoked through stylized acts of repetition, through mundane acts of gesture and inflection that, if performed in accordance with the social norms governing the conferral of recognition, result in the attribution of viable subjectivity. In one sense, therefore, Butler conceptualizes subjectivity as an act of ‘doing’ but, crucially, ‘not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (1990: 33). In other words, Butler argues against a notion of the subject as the originator of action, in favour of understanding how the doer (or ‘subject’) is the outcome of a process of recognition rather than the basis of it, so that ‘the doing itself is everything’ (1990: 25). This bifurcation of agency and subjectivity has led Butler to be accused of reducing the subject to a discursive effect, disavowing the capacity of the subject to exist beyond discourse (see Butler, 1993). However, this bifurcation is crucial to understanding how, for Butler, subjectivity is effectively the outcome of a process of social organization through which certain performative acts come to be recognized as viable subject positions, while others are disavowed.
This line of thinking has been developed in a wide range of contemporary social and organization theory too broad to do justice to here, engaging with writers such as Derrida, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Nietzsche and Hegel. Harding (2007: 1761) reasons that what connects these various writers is an understanding of subjectivity as ‘always in a process of becoming’. Drawing on this processual ontology, organization theorists influenced by post-structuralist thought take as their starting point an understanding of subjectivity as a verb rather than a noun (an approach that parallels Butler’s performative ontology of gender). Within this line of thought, subjectivities come into effect only through re-iterative performance; ‘compelled by the regulatory practices’ of social and we would argue organizational, coherence (Butler, 1990: 24).
Although, as Borgerson (2005: 64) points out, Butler has little to say about organizations as places of work per se, concepts such as performativity and undoing have ‘profound implications for organization theory’. At the same time, the wider implications of Butler’s writing for the theoretical analysis of the relationship between organization and subjectivity beyond a thematic, analytical concern with gender and/or sexuality have yet to be fully explored. There are notable exceptions (Ford and Harding, 2011; Harding et al., 2011, 2014; Hodgson, 2005; Parker, 2002), with Kenny (2009, 2010) in particular drawing on Butler’s writing on performativity and parody in her discussion of the ‘ek-static self’. Elsewhere, Kelan (2009: 35) has explored the implications of this performative ontology for understanding how ‘gender performances and gender identities are not something fixed but something that needs to be done at work’. However, as Kelan (2009: 50 and 51, emphasis added) also notes, ‘Butler’s theories are largely elaborated at a very abstract level, which leads to problems concerning how the process of gender as a doing can be studied empirically’ so that for her, ‘the main problem with Butler’s work is . . . that it remains unclear how people negotiate subject positions in everyday situations’. Drawing on Butler (2004), Kelan locates gender performance within processes of biographic narration, arguing that narration, as a social practice, is a form of ‘doing gender’ in Butler’s terms, or ‘a way of rendering the individual readable as a human being’ (Kelan, 2009: 107).
Kelan’s (2009) study of ICT professionals sets out to show how different subject positions are evoked when narrating organizational biographies. However, her focus is not on ‘undoing’ these narratives in a Butlerian sense, or on trying to understand what happens to lived experiences in the construction of these narratives, but rather on revealing how narratives are performed at work. Picking up from this point, the approach outlined below is concerned less with how particular organizational narratives are evoked, but rather why, and with what consequences; in other words to what ends, and at what ‘cost’, in Butler’s terms, does the subject attempt to produce and maintain a coherent narrative of self?
This approach is particularly influenced by what is arguably the most radical proposition in Butler’s writing (see Butler, 2004, 2005), namely her insistence that if subjective becoming is a process of doing, then it is always also a process of undoing. Here, undoing is linked to the desire for recognition of oneself as a viable, culturally intelligible subject. For Butler (2005), all subjectivities are precarious insofar as our need for mutual recognition renders us vulnerable; however, some subjectivities are more precarious than others, such as those coded as transgender and transvestite, which are curtailed within a gender binary (Schilt and Connell, 2007; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2014). Yet subjectivity can be ‘undone’, in Butler’s terms, at least in part, by revealing its constructed and performative qualities (Butler, 1990). In other words, in the very performativity of subjectivity lies our capacity to reflexively undo its constraining effects, opening up the possibility of reinstating alternative performances that potentially challenge subjective normativity, or at least open to question the terms of recognition upon which it depends, and through which it comes to be organized. Lived experiences of this ‘organizational undoing’ reveal the ways in which attributing recognition to certain forms of subjectivity while disavowing others constitutes a significant, but often overlooked, process of organization, as well as a series of practices enacted within organizational settings.
Developing a methodology that allows us to reflexively undo these ‘organizational undoings’, as well as crafting a corresponding method that enables us to appreciate the narratives on which the conferral or denial of subjective recognition depends, is therefore a crucial endeavour. It is one that stands to benefit researchers with an interest in the complexity of organizational subjectivities, and in developing critical, reflexive analyses of their performance and management (see Borgerson, 2015; Fournier and Grey, 2000; Spicer et al., 2009; Wickert and Schaefer, 2014), particularly in understanding the work that goes into maintaining narrative coherence (Driver, 2015) and understanding the conditions of organizational becoming (Cabantous et al., 2015). This methodology needs to facilitate, in Butler’s terms, a reflexive ‘undoing’, not of organizational subjects, but rather of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. Hence, this reflexive rather than organizational undoing has, methodologically, to reveal the processes and governmental norms by which workplace subjectivities are shaped, as well as their consequences for lived experiences within organizations, enabling us to understand more about the identity work that goes into presenting oneself as a viable, organizational subject. As such, a reflexive undoing must contrast with a more performative, organizational undoing in revealing lived experiences of being subject to the ‘rules and norms’ we are required to conform to ‘if we are to exist’ not simply in a physical sense, but as viable, social subjects, within and through organizational settings (Ford and Harding, 2011). Below, we consider how, as organizational researchers, we might go about ‘doing’ a methodological undoing; how we might engage, in and through our research practice, in a self-reflexive undoing. The latter is specifically designed to reveal, rather than conceal, the complexities of lived experience that are constrained in the performance of viable, coherent organizational subjectivities, using Butler’s work as a theoretical resource.
Mobilizing Butler methodologically
Taking the aims introduced above as our starting point, as well as our shared theoretical interests and experiences of organizational settings, we wanted to find out how other organizational subjects are engaged in negotiating a sense of self as coherent and viable. Developing a methodological undoing to support this endeavour, we outline below three characteristics of such an approach: (i) an anti-narrative method of data generation and analysis; (ii) a reflexive ‘undoing’ premised upon a performative ontology; and (iii) a reflexive, recognition-based ethics of openness to the Other. To illustrate the points discussed below, we draw on our own experiences of undertaking an anti-narrative interview-based study focusing on older LGBT people within organizational settings, considering each of these themes in turn.
Anti-narrative interviewing as a research method
Butler’s understanding of narrative, developed most fully in her book, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), provides a performative lens through which to understand how narratives operate in the process of becoming a subject. In particular, Butler’s largely phenomenological understanding locates narrative, as an attempt to cohere and convey a liveable life, within the context of the desire for recognition of oneself as a viable subject; as she puts it: ‘I come into being as a reflexive subject only in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself’ (2005: 15). Framed in this way, narrative is not simply ‘telling a story about oneself’, but rather the response we are compelled to provide when being ‘held to account’ for oneself (Butler, 2005: 12). This applies particularly to one’s difference, within social (organizational) power relations:
Giving an account thus takes a narrative form, which not only depends upon the ability to relay a set of sequential events with plausible transitions but also draws upon narrative voice and authority, being directed toward an audience with the aim of persuasion. (Butler, 2005: 12, emphasis added)
Here, narrative is framed as a process of organization through which the desire for recognition of oneself as a viable, coherent self is both compelled and constrained. This recognition-based understanding of narrative and its connection to subjective performativity is quite distinct from the theoretical and methodological approaches to narrative within organization studies discussed below. In these approaches, narrative is arguably secondary or subsequent to the constitution of the self as a moral person; that is, to presenting ourselves as capable of living an ethical life. Our performative approach influenced by Butler emphasizes, however, that it is through narrating ourselves in a way that conforms to the normative conditions governing viable subjectivity that we are able to stake a credible claim to recognition. Within organizational settings, and through organizational processes, the ability to provide a coherent narrative, and the capacity to give an account of one’s ethical capability, arguably becomes conflated in the constitution of the self as a performative narration. It is this conflation, and its associated costs that, drawing on Butler (2004, 2005), we conceive as an organizational undoing, and that we seek to methodologically, reflexively, ‘undo’ through anti-narrative research.
Narrative analysis and storytelling research has made significant inroads into management and organization studies in recent years (see Boje, 2001, 2008; Czarniawska, 1998; Driver, 2015; Gabriel, 1991, 1995; Rhodes and Brown, 2005), particularly as a method of understanding what Weick (1995) calls ‘organizational sense-making’. Yet the analytical emphasis within this literature has tended to be on understanding how knowledge is produced ‘as individuals participate in the narration process’ (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012: 1696), with researchers attempting to develop ways of assembling coherence out of otherwise apparently fragmented accounts. In her discussion of narrative research, Czarniawska (1998: 19) reasons how, in this respect, organizational research often replicates organizational processes, as narrative modes of sense-making that tend to integrate a series of events into a coherent, linear ‘plot’ are reproduced rather than subject to reflexive critique.
The more performative approach to anti-narrative analysis we advocate here draws on Butler’s account, discussed above, in emphasizing how narrative is not simply an epistemic device, but rather an ontological premise. In other words, coherent narratives are not simply what we do as organizational subjects, but rather are what we are. As such, the capacity to provide and sustain apparent narrative coherence is not just a sense-making process undertaken by organizational subjects, it is what constitutes the latter as we seek recognition of ourselves within and through organizations, as viable subjects able to ‘give an account’ of ourselves. What this means methodologically is that rather than regarding narrative as a mechanism through which to produce apparently coherent ways of knowing or speaking about organizations and the subjectivities on which they depend, they are regarded as semblances of coherence that are performatively narrated.
Based on Butler’s performative ontology, and on the commitment to ‘undoing’ as a methodological imperative outlined above, what we advocate here as anti-narrative research is designed to do precisely the opposite to this narrative performativity. Specifically, it focuses on ‘the aim of persuasion’ (Butler, 2005: 12), the methodological intention being to ‘undo’ apparent semblances of coherence in order to encourage critical reflection on the conditions of organizational recognition upon which they depend. Here, it is important to reiterate that a reflexive undoing is designed to undo organizational subjectivities, and the normative conditions upon which they depend, and not organizational subjects. This means that as a research method, anti-narrative interviewing puts into practice a reflexive methodology that seeks to undo the conditions of subjective recognition within organizational processes and settings. This raises significant ethical and political questions to which we return below.
For clarification, we use the term ‘anti-narrative’ to describe a methodological approach to research as a critical, reflexive process of undoing (Butler, 2004). Anti-narrative research seeks to unravel seemingly coherent narratives, including chronological ones, in order to reveal the labour that goes into producing and maintaining them. In addition, it encourages critical reflection on the consequences for those involved, of being unable or unwilling to conform to the conditions compelling the performativity required to sustain coherence. Put simply, our approach encourages critical, reflexive evaluation of the conditions and consequences of narrative construction within organizational settings. This Butler-inspired method differs from Boje’s (2001, 2008) methodological concept of ‘ante-narrative’, which emphasizes that in order to understand the full complexity of organizational storytelling it is important to examine the small, fragmented discourses that are told ‘live’, as events unfold, and to consider how these fragments result in stories that are complex and multiple. These fragmented, incoherent pieces of story are referred to as ‘ante-narratives’ (emphasis added) in Boje’s account, and are viewed as stories told before narrative closure is achieved. Following Butler, and emphasizing that because the (organizational) self requires constant narration as the struggle for recognition remains an ongoing process, our methodological premise precludes the possibility of narrative closure but instead, seeks to ‘undo’ the conditions compelling its pursuit. In practice, this opens up a methodological space within which participants can reflect on the tensions, conflicts and compromises involved in becoming and maintaining viability at work through the narration of seemingly coherent, recognizable selves.
As an illustrative example of how this anti-narrative approach might be integrated into research practice, we encouraged participants in our study to reflect on their experiences by adapting a drawing-based method that we had previously encountered in Wallman’s (2011) anthropological study of local network effects, and in Longhurst’s (2001) use of ‘symbolic maps’ in her study of women’s negotiation of their pregnant bodies in public places. We began by conducting a visually led interaction, asking participants to draw and then talk through an adaptation of Venn diagrams traditionally used to illustrate connective sets in mathematics. Inspired by Fournier’s (2002) account of how the participants in her research eluded discrete categorization of their identities (see also Beech, 2010), our inclusion of the Venn diagrams was designed to encourage participants to reflect on how aspects of themselves that they felt were particularly important were interrelated or disconnected, with some aspects of their lived experiences being brought to the fore, while others were retired. The approach was also intended to encourage critical reflection on the complexities characterizing lived experience, teasing out contradictions and overlaps. In practice, we offered participants an illustration of how the Venn diagram might be used (drawn from an earlier pilot study we conducted), emphasizing that this was merely for illustrative purposes. Then, using a whiteboard to allow for flexibility, we invited participants to draw their own versions of the diagram. During the interviews several participants altered the form or added material around their circles to convey more detail or emphasis. For example, one of our participants encircled her entire diagram with a larger circle that she labelled ‘lesbian’ to emphasize that she felt this particular aspect of her identity was the most all-encompassing (see Figure 1).
Example of an adapted Venn diagram.
Methodologically, these Venn diagrams were not intended to contribute to our data as such, but rather to provide a reflexive way of accessing the tacit and elusive connectivities that are often naturalized in everyday experience, ‘written out’ of organizational identities, or categorized as fixed and discrete in more traditional research designs (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012; Dick, 2013; Fournier, 2002).
Rather than seeking clarity and categorization, we encouraged participants to reflect on how various aspects of their identities ‘get tangled up and mixed together’ as one of our participants, Debbie, put it. In practice, this meant that we encouraged participants to articulate disruptions, tensions and negotiations within their narratives, considering the work involved in maintaining apparent coherence and in conforming to the norms they described as governing acceptability within their respective workplace settings. We framed this emphasis through quite simple questions such as, ‘Tell me about yourself and what you do’, or ‘Tell me about your experiences at work’. But rather than leading participants through the interview as a narrative in itself, producing what Boje (2001) calls ‘modernist stories’, we encouraged participants to constantly move back and forth across times and places in their respective accounts, often using their Venn diagrams to refer back to (see also Carlsen et al., 2014). This created narratives that had no discernible linearity and that were allowed to disrupt the apparent coherence that linearity implies. Throughout the interviews we encouraged participants to focus on sections and intersections in their diagrams, considering not only what was included, but also what they consciously chose to leave out as well as reflecting on what might not have occurred to them to bring into the discussion. When asked, or when invited to do so by participants, the researchers also drew their own Venn diagrams to open up discussion about shared experiences and perceptions as well as differences and disruptions. In effect, this served to invert, or at least unsettle, the assumed ‘unquestionable right to question’ that often characterizes the relationship between researchers and participants (Wray-Bliss, 2003: 314). The interviews were therefore designed to provide a methodological opportunity to ‘undo’ rather than replicate the compulsion to present and perform organizational subjectivity through semblances of narrative coherence.
Once these interviews had been transcribed and subject to a first level thematic analysis (although not synthesizing or categorizing these themes) discussed among the three researchers, we presented the transcripts along with our initial interpretations of emergent findings from each interview back to each of the respective participants. This sought to develop a dialogic methodology designed to be collective (Brannan, 2011), interdependent (Wray-Bliss, 2003) and inter-subjective (Cunliffe, 2003), within which data generation and analysis formed part of a reflexive, dialogical process (Stephenson, 2005). Underpinning this was a commitment to developing the research process as a reflexive undoing, a theme to which we now turn.
A reflexive ‘undoing’
Following Butler, a reflexive ‘undoing’ attempts to establish a methodological space in which to bring to the fore the otherwise occluded effort involved in maintaining a coherent, viable organizational self. If we recognize that organizations can effectively undo us through the compulsion to perform and maintain subjective coherence in ways that often require that the complexities and contradictions underpinning them are concealed, a reflexive methodological undoing is designed to do precisely the reverse. In practice, this involves reflexively retracing the process and labour involved in producing semblances of coherence. In our own experiences, on the basis of the interviews outlined above, this is most insightful when the starting point for analysis is a shared understanding of the work we undertake, as organizational subjects, attempting to maintain a performative sense of self that is coherent and viable. This goes beyond a ‘willingness and openness . . . to be challenged and have [our] views radically called into question by those . . . [we] are studying’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 548) and moves us into a reflexive interrogation of our own narrative performativities as researchers. In practical terms, this might involve discussion of shared interests and motivations underpinning participation amongst all those involved in the research process. As Cabantous et al. (2015: 14) emphasize in this respect, an approach to organizational research premised upon a critical performativity ideally proceeds from a shared recognition of ‘the conditions of possibility for being and becoming organizational subjects’ including, in a very practical sense, a mutual understanding of the various pressures engendered by those conditions.
To illustrate the methodological implications of this, in our own study, one of our gay male participants questioned one of the researchers about his motivation for interviewing older LGBT people, asking in particular why he had travelled such a long distance to meet with this particular interviewee during the evening, on a weekend. This opened up a mutually reflexive space for a discussion about the performativities associated with being a researcher, such as carrying out research that is original and publishable, in order to sustain a performative sense of self as a viable academic. Although the work environment discussed was different to that of the interviewee’s, the latter was able to relate to the experiences described by the researcher, opening up a dialogue about the interviewee’s own experiences of maintaining a coherent and viable sense of self at work including, but not exclusively, in terms of negotiating his identity as an older gay man, a theme that was also discussed in relation to the researcher’s experience.
In another instance, one of the other researchers found herself somewhat disoriented, if not slightly ‘exposed’, at the beginning of an interview in which the interviewee, Emma, asked, ‘So, you want to interview me because I’m a lesbian, do you?’. Struggling for a constructive and polite answer, the researcher had to admit to both herself and Emma that this was indeed the case. In this instance, both became aware of the researcher’s ‘fixing’ (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012; Dick, 2013) of Emma to a ‘lesbian’ identity category. This ‘sticky moment’ (Riach, 2009) in the interview then provided a more reflexive space for Emma to discuss the performative work she undertakes in negotiating a lesbian identity in different work contexts. For the researcher involved, it prompted a reflexive discussion with Emma about her own heteronormative assumptions and their impact on the research process. In particular, this involved reflecting on her situated positioning of Emma primarily as a lesbian subject, reproducing not only a heteronormative construction of Emma’s lesbian identity as organizationally ‘abnormal’, but also one of value to the researcher, effectively as capital. This positioning, which both Emma and the researcher were retrospectively uncomfortable about, might otherwise have been overlooked had Emma not raised the initial question about how the researcher had unreflexively ‘fixed’ Emma within the research process. In both examples, these shared moments of recognition, of reflexive undoings, facilitated a discussion of the work involved in maintaining semblances of coherence and credibility within organizational life, emphasizing how the latter involves a process of continual compromise and negotiation, a containment of contradictions (Driver, 2015) or a conflation of complexity in Butler’s terms that organizational undoing serves to occlude, and that a more reflexive undoing in anti-narrative research aims to reveal. In particular, this latter approach seeks to open up a discursive space in which the consequences of being unwilling or unable to sustain this performative containment can be articulated and therefore recognized.
As an illustrative example, one of our participants, Chris, discussed this through his references to what he described as the ‘busyness’ involved in negotiating recognition within organizational settings. At the time of the research in 2013, Chris worked as a training consultant for a number of large organizations based in the UK, one of which has a reputation for particularly conservative attitudes towards LGBT people. He explained, in a very practical sense, the identity work involved in managing what he perceived to be his subjective positioning as an ‘outcast’ because of his identity as an openly gay man within this environment:
If some part of you already realizes you’re an outcast . . . you’re always busy negotiating a line . . . You’re always busy. You want to belong, you want to be yourself . . . and of course you want affection and intimacy.
Chris relates the busyness he describes her specifically to the work involved in negotiating his need for belonging, for affection and intimacy, through the maintenance of a coherent, viable sense of self; in other words, one that is not, in his terms, cast out or rendered abject. It is in (i) attempting to reveal the labour involved in continually striving for subjective coherence; (ii) understanding how the ways in which the complexities of lived experience are conflated through this labour constitute an organizational ‘undoing’; and (iii) creating a research space in which participants can reflect on the negating effects of being unable or unwilling to maintain subjective coherence, or on the sheer effort required to do so, that a Butlerian methodology is particularly insightful. This is precisely because Butler’s performative ontology opens up the possibility for a research design that facilitates a critical, reflexive rather than an organizational ‘undoing’, one that seeks to reclaim the otherwise occluded processes and experiences such as the sense of perpetual ‘busyness’ Chris describes. Hence, the aim of a reflexive ‘undoing’ is to reveal the complexities of lived experience that come to be conflated in the performance of viable, intelligible organizational subjectivities that Chris evokes. We now turn to a consideration of the ethics of openness underpinning anti-narrative research as a method of undertaking this reflexive undoing.
Reflexivity and an ethics of openness
Taking its theoretical cue from Butler (2003, 2004), a methodological undoing is underpinned by a collaborative, embodied and inter-subjective understanding of reflexivity. This demands both an interrogation of our own frameworks of knowing; a process which, as indicated above, requires us to continually and inter-subjectively evaluate our own assumptions and their implications for the research. A reflexive undoing involves, in Butler’s terms, a constant need to ‘give an account of oneself’ (Butler, 2005), premised upon an understanding of reflexivity as situated and enacted by all parties involved in the research process. Reflexivity in this respect is framed as a methodological pre-condition resulting from our inter-subjective, mutual interdependence and recognition of our shared vulnerability. In practice, as discussed above, this requires us to be continually mindful of the risks attached to our own potential complicity in normalizing knowledge production and in subjective categorization or ‘fixing’ (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012; Dick, 2013) in such a way that might inadvertently reproduce categorical thinking and narrative linearity, replicating precisely the normative compulsions that anti-narrative research is designed to undo. Yet, reflexivity within anti-narrative research also requires us, as researchers, to be continually conscious of the potential ethical challenges opened up by a methodology designed to ‘undo’ the subject positions that research participants work hard to maintain, particularly those who occupy more precarious positions than others (Wray-Bliss, 2003). Our sense here is that this is a risk attached to all qualitative studies, namely, the risk of unravelling those who participate in social and organizational research, embedded as it as within ‘power asymmetries’ (Dick, 2013). What anti-narrative research does is bring this risk to the fore, requiring continual considerations throughout the research process of the ethical issues this raises. In comparison, more conventional interview-based methods may either deliberately or inadvertently occlude these issues, or un-reflexively replicate the compulsion to maintain narrative coherence, so that through interview questions, for instance, the research process reproduces rather than ‘undoes’ organizational undoings.
In considering the ethical issues at stake in anti-narrative research, insights from Butler’s (2004, 2005) integrated ethico-politics provides a useful starting point. As Butler herself puts it, emphasizing the mutual vulnerability engendered by our need for recognition in exposing ourselves to the Other, through our fundamentally embodied relationality, we constantly stake a claim to recognition yet simultaneously run the risk of misrecognition. Yet without taking this risk we cannot live a bearable life. As she puts it, ‘we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’ (Butler, 2004: 23). By opening ourselves up to the Other, Butler reminds us, we both reaffirm our existence at the same time as rendering ourselves vulnerable to its disavowal. In this sense, she invites us to engage with the challenges for ethics, reflexivity and narrative posed by a theoretical recognition of our mutual inter-dependency and the need for us to develop an ethical openness to understanding the constraints governing the conferral of recognition, as well as the consequences of its denial. 2 Recognition of this mutual inter-dependency has significant methodological implications and potential for organizational researchers committed to a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and their normative conditioning. In practice, this involves framing organizational research and ourselves as researchers within relations of reciprocation and recognition.
In this respect, again as an illustrative example, our research with older LGBT people aimed to provide a reflexive space within which participants could discuss their lived experiences of struggling to conform to the normative expectations they perceived to condition viable organizational subjectivity. Our anti-narrative approach was designed specifically to provide a space within which all research participants, including the researchers, could reflect on the effort involved in continually trying to negotiate the disjuncture between the apparently coherent organizational narratives they felt they were compelled to perform and the complexities of their lived experience. Reflecting on his initial interview with us, Chris explained what this had meant to him:
It was a pleasure to share those thoughts. To be honest, although being gay is such an important part of my life, talking about it is rare. Not many people ask questions. It’s taken for granted almost, but never investigated by others. Accepting it is one thing, talking about it is still a bit of a taboo.
To this end, premised upon a recognition-based ethics of openness (Butler, 2004), our approach to data generation was self-consciously anti-hierarchical and reciprocal, in a way that had to be continually reflexive, as our own performativities as researchers were often undone within the research process. As another example of how this worked in practice, the research design meant that the researchers got to know each of the participants relatively well before, during and between the interviews. This meant that an interview dynamic emerged in which participants were often able to destabilize our deliberate (and on reflection, naïve) efforts to flatten the assumed epistemic hierarchy within academic research, or at least to appear to be making an effort to do so. More than this, we were able to reflect on this process with the participants during the interview settings, thereby questioning the effects of our own research practice on the subject positions being played out (Wray-Bliss, 2003). Attempting to nurture a situation in which participants’ lived experiences rather than academic knowledge was framed as the basis on which claims to knowing subjectivity could be made and valued, we assumed we had set up the interviews in such a way that participants could, we thought, be able to take on the role of knowing subjects. But ‘set up’ is an important phrase here, and participants sometimes unsettled these attempts, constituting what on reflection, we have understood as instances of reflexive undoing (Butler, 2004), through which our own subject positions as academic researchers were unravelled and the apparent coherence of our respective performances within the research process was thrown into relief.
To illustrate, one of the researchers arrived at the agreed interview time to be met by a participant who wanted to begin by discussing her (the researcher’s) academic publications that she (the participant) had looked up and read prior to the interview taking place. Initially, this unsettled the interviewer who felt that her attempt to frame the encounter so as to cultivate a subject position of knowing expert for the research participant had been somehow exposed (and the ‘framing’ of both parties, and the interview itself, therefore revealed), as the interviewer had been repositioned by the participant within a presumed epistemic hierarchy. The interviewer encouraged a discussion that provided a space within which both women could discuss the experience and how they felt about it in relation to their respective roles and positions within the research. Brought into view, and played out in this encounter, was a recognition of mutual vulnerability premised, in part, on a shared understanding of the relative sense of powerlessness experienced by researchers in unfamiliar research settings or encounters, as well as the relative ‘strangeness’ and sense of exposure experienced by the participants, both themes that are often overlooked in methodological accounts of organizational research (Gilmore and Kenny, 2015). Rather than understood as ‘difficulties’ that a reflexive methodological undoing needs to overcome, our research design was specifically intended to cultivate these moments of disruption and destabilization, revealing the performativities at stake within the research process (and the labour underpinning them), with the aim being to privilege and so understand more about, the performative capacity of the research participants in assuming positions as knowing subjects within the research.
However, what this undoing also implied was a more troubling unravelling of participants’ carefully crafted selves. As we discuss in more depth below, this raises significant ethical considerations regarding the relative vulnerability of research participants. For example, in the same study, one of the participants, Debbie, reflected on the disjuncture between the opportunity to ‘open up’ in the interview and the denial of recognition she experienced in her home life. As she expressed it, ‘what I get are these nice comments when I can sit and talk . . . in a rational way, and then I’ll go home and I’ll get “God, you look stupid. Why are you dressed like that?”. You’ve got no idea’. On the one hand, Debbie described the experience of taking part in the research as very affirming: ‘I get these nice comments’. But at the same time, she reflects on our limited understanding of her life outside of the interview setting: ‘You’ve got no idea’. In this latter comment, Debbie suggests that not only is our research design not enabling us (and her) to articulate the disjuncture between different aspects of her lived experience, she also implicitly questions the ethics of our approach and of our methodological conduct in ‘taking apart’ the various subject positions she struggles to occupy as a trans woman, and the coherent narrative she works to maintain, her latter comment potentially implying both an epistemic and ethical failure on our part.
These kinds of interventions are particularly important in anti-narrative research because they require us to be continually reflexive about the research project as a reciprocal undoing, opening up a space for the interview as an anti-narrative endeavour, one that explicitly seeks to avoid ‘unravelling’ participants, but which perpetually runs the risk of doing so. At one extreme therefore, anti-narrative research involves a continual risk of ‘fixing’ research participants, replicating the kind of categorical subject positioning it aims to critique. At the other extreme, it constantly threatens, because of its commitment to a reflexive undoing, to unravel the carefully crafted semblances of coherence that participants work hard to maintain, particularly those whose subject positions are precarious and vulnerable, and who are at a more extreme risk of organizational misrecognition. As Butler highlights, however, particularly in her recent work on dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), a political theory of performativity emphasizes an ethics of mutual vulnerability for, in Butler’s (Hegelian) terms, as one cannot exist without the Other, one is responsible for the Other. Our concern here has been to explore what methodological opportunities this might open up, drawing specifically on Butler’s ethico-political commitment to a reflexive undoing and the performative ontology of subjectivity on which it is based.
Conclusion
This article has explored the methodological possibilities that Judith Butler’s theory of performativity opens up for researching organizational settings and relations, drawing particularly on insights from Butler’s critique of subjective recognition as a process through which the complexity of lived experience is conflated in the performance of seemingly coherent, recognizable subjectivities. Specifically, we have considered what it means to undertake research premised upon a performative ontology grounded in a critique of the normative conditions governing organizational recognition, a commitment to a reflexive ‘undoing’ and an ethics of openness to the Other. Specifically, we have asked, what form might a Butler-inspired methodology take? What opportunities might it open up, and what difficulties might it pose, for organizational researchers? In response to these questions, we have proposed and evaluated a method described here as anti-narrative interviewing, arguing that this method constitutes a valuable methodological resource for organization studies researchers with an interest in understanding how and why idealized organizational subjectivities are formed and sustained. Our aim in doing so has been to make a methodological contribution to the development of a critical, reflexive performativity within management and organization studies (Borgerson, 2015; Cabantous et al., 2015; Spicer et al., 2009; Wray-Bliss, 2003), one that seeks to critically interrogate our own positioning (Dick, 2013; Ford et al., 2010). Gilmore and Kenny (2015: 74) conclude their discussion of reflexivity and power dynamics in organizational research by emphasizing that, if researchers ‘wish to remain committed to the production of rich accounts in which the embeddedness of researchers within organizational research contexts is given space to emerge, the development of new approaches is needed’. We have sought to develop this idea, particularly in addressing their concern to build the theoretical resources from which organizational researchers might draw in the future. Cabantous et al. (2015) have argued for the development of a critical approach to organizational research premised upon a political theory of organizational performativity, one that seeks to change the conditions of becoming within and through organizations. They have undertaken some of the theoretical work this involves, acknowledging that this is only a partial contribution and that further preparatory work is necessary. In this article, we have sought to undertake some of this work by emphasizing the methodological potential of an ethically and politically engaged theory of organizational performativity, one that explicitly seeks to reflexively undo what Borgerson (2015: 119) has described as the unreflexive colonizing impulse of purportedly critical, emancipatory research.
In sum, we have explored the methodological potential for organizational researchers opened up by Butler’s theoretical work on performativity (Butler, 1988, 1990, 1993) and undoing (Butler, 2000, 2004), and particularly by her recognition-based ethico-politics of openness (Butler, 2004, 2005). We have argued that, taken together, this body of writing provides interesting ways of understanding and of studying the role played by organizations in compelling particular narrative performances. If, as Butler (2004: 23) puts it, ‘I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations’, what does this tell us about how and why our subjectivities are compelled and organized? Why is it that the relations we live require us to ‘tell a story’? How, and why, must our organizational settings result in us being ‘undone by these very relations’?
Our discussion above suggests that organizations play an important role in undoing the very narratives that they compel us to cohere on their behalf. As organization studies researchers, we must interrogate this process and its consequences by providing critical, reflexive spaces within our research for participants to articulate how and why they are ‘gripped’ by their narratives, and to consider what this means in terms of their respective lived experiences of organizational settings and relations. Within organization studies, we are only beginning to explore these ideas and the range of possible responses and strategies we might mobilize (Borgerson, 2015; Cabantous et al., 2015; Dick, 2013; Ford et al., 2010; Gilmore and Kenny, 2015; Spicer et al., 2009; Wray-Bliss, 2003). Our own contribution to this process has been to consider some of the possibilities occasioned by a reflexive, methodological undoing within organizational research, one premised upon a recognition of the ethical risks attached to, but also the political importance of, undoing organizational undoings.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the men and women who shared their time, thoughts and experiences throughout the research project on which this article is based. The insights and contributions of the three anonymous reviewers and of associate editor, Dennis Mumby are also gratefully acknowledged.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.