Abstract
Organizing Ambiguity
Why are organization scholars drawn to Judith Butler? What does she offer that others do not? Each reader of her work will have a different answer of course, but a certain something seems to be shared. Faces light up when she is mentioned during the chats around a coffee urn at some organization studies conference or other. ‘Have you read. . . [the latest book]??’, ‘Have you heard. . . [the latest speech]??’ The books, the speeches, appear to spark something precious, something resonant. A glimmer of something new about the organizations we study; a crack of light – always partial, often elliptical: a new perspective.
Butler’s work has morphed and shifted over the years. She is prolific. She is complex. Her writing builds upon the ideas of many thinkers well-known and loved within organization studies. She sets herself tricky tasks. Rereading subjectivity via psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and feminism takes more than one book. She engages with the materiality of the body while foregrounding the discursive. She thinks the ethical and the political together and what this means when protestors take to the streets. She refuses easy answers. It is this last aspect – the refusal of easy answers – that requires some detailed writing. Answers – especially when it comes to social life – are elusive and never simple. But the process of circling around them, of asking why the question was posed in the first place, can be illuminating. Exploring boundaries that shape what people accept as answers, and the closures that result, can tell us a lot about the underlying structures of power. And this is where Butler’s work shines. She problematizes and unpacks. The status quo, and its underlying norms, exclude as much as they include. The intentions we attribute to ourselves and others, as subjects, are not what they seem. It takes careful work to unpack, to think these things through. At its best this is what Butler’s writing can be: an invitation to the reader to join the adventure. She honours the heritage of each line of thought as she proceeds (more so in her later work, it must be said), enables glimpses and glimmers to emerge along the way, while painting a joyful picture of where the journey might lead us.
In Judith Butler and Organization Theory, Melissa Tyler honours the complexity, the joy and the potential of Butler’s work. The book maps out the various ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with her thinking over the past twenty years. She explains Butler’s big ideas in clear and compelling detail, describes and discusses the major criticisms of her work, and outlines the potential for future scholarship to engage with this exciting set of theories. The value of this book cannot be overstated. To date, there has been no such attempt to connect, synthesize and explore this small but growing body of scholarship.
Tyler’s is a timely book. For years, Butler’s work has inspired scholars interested in how organizations offer both a source of recognition but also exclusion for those who encounter them, focusing on topics from gender and sexuality to ageing and violence. New ways of understanding have emerged. But lately Butler’s focus has shifted more explicitly to the role of institutions, organizations, work and infrastructures in exacerbating inequality and exclusion, alongside their critical role in enabling resistance. As Tyler points out, there is significant potential for organization scholars to both engage with and speak back to these debates.
Judith Butler and Organization Theory takes us on a more-or-less chronological excursion through Butler’s writing since Gender Trouble was first published in 1990. The journey is well-organized; each chapter is dedicated to a particular phase of Butler’s theorizing. Tyler takes time to describe the intellectual heritage of these concepts, illustrating with examples from extant organizational scholarship. In each chapter she offers a generous exposition of the various ways in which Butler’s ideas have inspired research on organizations, collating a diverse and eclectic set of studies, and placing them in conversation with the nuances of Butler’s own writing. The result is a rich and unique topography of this growing field.
The reader unfamiliar with this work will learn about the significant impact to date – and potential going forward – of Butler’s work for critical management scholars, and sociologists of work. This potential clearly extends well beyond the topics of gender and sexuality with which she has been traditionally associated. Butler’s focus for example on how social norms come to be ‘organized’, and in turn ‘organize’ individuals, represents a significant development in how we conceptualize the relationship between power, recognition and identification.
Butler is arguably at her strongest when she is questioning and pulling apart accepted aspects of social life, while proposing new perspectives. She thus carries on the work of Foucault in her commitment to continuous problematization: asking difficult questions about ‘normal’ parts of life. Butler spends a lot of time denaturalizing social categories, but never with the aim of reinstating a singular and monolithic alternative. Instead, her typical approach is to open up a new lens, hold contradictory aspects of a problematic together, evaluate each and – importantly – allow the disjuncture to exist without striving for a resolution. As one example among many, when she describes how and why subject creation is founded on exclusions of others alongside our desires to persist as valid beings, she shows how just as we desire the recognition that offers us a stable sense of self, we shore up our own defences against being excluded. We do both of those things. They are good and bad. Her ability to handle and even embrace ambiguity without the need for a solution or closure is a valuable legacy of her psychoanalytic heritage drawing on Freud, Klein and Lacan. Continually showcasing Butler’s skill in enabling ambiguity to simply sit with us – to just be – is one of the strengths of Tyler’s book. As she notes, ‘we are vulnerable because, on the one hand, organizations exclude us or, on the other, exploit our need for inclusion. [Y]et at the same time, they are the very mechanisms through which we seek – and need – to address that vulnerability’ (p. 184).
One example of how Butler’s work extends thinking in organizational scholarship involves the practice of ‘doing’ empirical research. Her work on how people account for themselves shows us that there is more to narrative than meets the eye – both the narratives we tell ourselves as researchers and also the narratives we elicit from other people when we ‘do research’. We are, as Butler describes in Undoing Gender, ‘undone’ by certain norms and discourses that have significance in our lives. This is because we are often compelled to identify with these norms, even as they injure us. Narratives are attempts at coherence, by speaking subjects, that circle around these experiences. A narrative of self is a potential insight into the identification, the compulsion and the injury, suggesting the power of norms to both produce but also foreclose the attainment of a ‘liveable life’ as a viable subject. This prompts profound examination of what we think we are doing when we interview our ‘subjects’. Tyler’s in-depth discussion of this aspect is one example of many in which Butler’s concepts are juxtaposed with critical issues in organizational scholarship (see also Fotaki & Harding, 2018; Harding, 2013; Kenny, 2019; Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2016).
Alongside a valuable mapping of work to date, the book presents some propositions – or challenges – to the reader. The first is to show how there are many areas of organizational scholarship in which Butler’s ideas have potential to shed new light, potential that is as yet unrealized. Tyler offers assistance to the interested reader, drawing out the possibilities. We are in a time of profound global change and organizations are central to this shift. Organizational scholars are increasingly turning their focus to larger-scale questions of inequality, domination and exclusion. New framings and theories are needed to accompany this turn. The work in which Butler is currently engaged offers much here – from her detailed exploration of forms of violence against groups of people marginalized and excluded from structures of recognition that would confer safety – to the potential for shared bodily experiences of assembly to resist these changes. Of particular relevance is her interest in how neoliberal currents in state policies have dispossessed workers worldwide, leaving millions in precarious and vulnerable positions (Butler, 2016; Butler & Athanasiou, 2013).
What might be done in response to such dispossessions and exclusions? For Butler it is our coexistence as precarious subjects that connects us. Regardless of background or means, we each inhabit bodies that are born, live and die; this means we need others, despite the popularity of philosophical and political doctrines emphasizing independence and self-reliance (Butler, 2016). At each stage of life, we cannot exist without the material and symbolic support of others: we share vulnerability to an early demise. This compels us to acknowledge mutual dependency and to strive for new, more appropriate, political formations. As Tyler notes, citing Butler, ‘it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice’ (p. 168).
Tyler describes Butler’s explorations of the potential for radical and affective types of solidarity to emerge in opposition to today’s oppressive political and economic forces. Here, as Tyler usefully notes, Butler ‘is sketchy at best on the substantive details of what this might entail, and what form it might take’ (p. 179). Regarding how we might find ways to make such changes, to enable such bonds and enact such politics, ‘Butler remains frustratingly non-committal over what this might involve and how it might be undertaken’ (p. 179). Since Gender Trouble, this apparent inability to ‘commit’ to concrete plans of action has been a feature of Butler’s writing. It has engendered criticism. But perhaps we should not look to Butler for these things – for plans and actions. Perhaps we look to Butler for the problematizations, glimmers and glimpses that enable others to see things differently and take them forward. And this is where Tyler sees a valuable and exciting future for intersections between Butler’s work and organizational scholarship. Where Butler may be short on empirical detail, organization scholars engage, in-depth, with the lived experiences of institutions, infrastructures and workers therein: topics about which Butler is increasingly interested. Particularly in her closing chapter, ‘Organizational (re)Assemblage’ Tyler discusses the potential for fruitful conversations to emerge.
Locating Butler’s concepts and ideas in the wider terrain of philosophical and political thought, and proposing ways in which they might be mobilized in the study of organizations, this text provides an ideal springboard from which to begin such work. The result is to argue, convincingly, that while Judith Butler is not an organization theorist per se, her work has deep significance. Overall, offering a deep engagement with Butler’s ideas, a generous exposition of others’ work and exciting suggestions for moving forward, Judith Butler and Organization Theory represents an invaluable addition to our field.