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This paper seeks to explore the notion of desire in relation to subjectivity at work by drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan. It aims particularly to consider the possible ways in which desire is evoked and channeled in managerial practices that are aimed at managing the self.

The paper provides an illustration of this by a reading of how developmental HRM practices attempt to elicit and channel subjects' desire.

Particular images promulgated by these practices appeal to the subject in such a way, that it becomes caught in a relationship of fascination with them. These practices thereby attempt to create identification with a fantasmatic image of the self, and in so doing, to shape subjectivity in line with managerial objectives. It is also argued that a different modality of relating to desire can provide a way of avoiding the most detrimental effects associated with these practices, and I indicate possible ways in which this different modality or “traversal” may take shape.

The paper analyzes the use of desire in management practices.

Purpose – Role-taking refusal was a foundational problem in Mead's work but was ignored by subsequent interactionists who focused on the benefits of role-taking – empathy and solidarity – but failed to examine how they are destroyed or crippled from emerging as inclusionary aspects of social consciousness. Role-taking refusal constitutes both the microfoundation of dehumanization in the case of the oppressor and, in the case of the oppressed, the microfoundation of resistance. Role-taking refusal is linked to Giddens's notion of the reflective project of the self, Omi and Winant's racial formation theory, Feagin's theory of systemic racism, and the perspective of Critical Race Theory.

Methodology – I shall portray role-taking refusal by using historical, theoretical, and empirical works, especially ethnographic studies.

Social implications – The oppressed know the image their oppressors have of them. Refusing to internalize this image is the first step – the microfoundation – of resistance. Role-taking refusal in the oppressed fosters critical consciousness, which, if solidarity with others is formed, can lead to collective action and, possibly, permanent institutional change.

Originality – “The superiority delusion” is the paradigmatic ideology of all oppressors, deployed to justify their power, privilege, and prestige. This delusion is maintained by the microfoundation of dehumanization, which is a systematic refusal to role-take from those over whom oppressors oppress. All other ideologies that justify oppression are derived from some form of “the superiority delusion,” identifying for the first time role-taking refusal as paradoxically both the original sin of social relations and the foundation of social resistance.

Telling the story of the author’s attempts acquiring the Danish language over the past three and a half years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how identity work is narratively accomplished within organisational contexts. It aims at developing an in-depth understanding of the process of identity work.

The autoethnographic study illuminates narratives of subjectivity that inform notions of identity during the author’s journey of learning Danish and how this enterprise is embedded in the workplace surroundings.

The autoethnography carves out seven distinct, yet, inter-related narratives of subjectivity constituting the notion of who I am and what I should do within the process of learning Danish as a foreign language.

Instead of only describing different self-notions within identity work, the process view adopted in this research enables understanding of the various tensions, struggles and contradictions inherent in identity work. Examining the process of identity work sheds light on the multiplicity of self-notions emerging and re-emerging over time, co-existing, replacing each other, intertwining, struggling for dominance, and through this constituting the precarious and ongoing sense of identity.

The purpose of this paper is to advance understandings of the subjectivities that influence auxiliary‐level female employees' work and learning experiences in general legal practice. Moreover, the aim is to maximise the opportunities for these workers.

A broader critical ethnographic study investigated socio‐cultural perspectives of women, work, and learning. This paper represents part of the study exploring the empirical relationships of female workers and the subjectivities that impact on their work and learning. This approach was based on critical epistemologies and examines sources of workplace barriers. Data were triangulated through interview transcripts, observations, and reflective diaries. The collection of data involved gathering information from nine female workers and an analysis of the data were activated at the research settings and organised into categories through comparison and inductive coding.

Findings suggest that negotiating subjectivities at work is complex and inhibiting for auxiliary workers. Yet, despite low levels of support, auxiliary workers are determined and they find ways to survive through participatory practices and agentic actions. These findings are imperative to enhance auxiliary women's workplace learning experiences.

The research challenges management to acknowledge and expand understandings of subjectivities and to take advantage of these understandings as a springboard to augment auxiliary women's work and learning experiences. Value is in transforming social practice within legal workplaces to better consider the potential of all workers. Also, strategically this may well enhance the productivity and viability of these kinds of practices.

This paper seeks to examine the identities and subjectivities of independent knowledge workers who contract their services to organizations. Two questions are addressed: who are these enterprising knowledge workers, in terms of how they understand and position themselves relative to organizational structures, practices and social relations in their work as “inside outsiders”? How do they recognize their own constitution, and what spaces for agency are possible?

The discussion draws upon a qualitative study of 18 self‐employed consultants in organizational change, analysing their articulations as ongoing constitutions within prescribed discourses and cultural technologies. Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were analysed inductively to determine themes and silences among the narratives.

The argument shows how these subjectivities emerge from in‐between spaces, both inside and outside organizations. As they negotiate these spaces, they exercise agency by resisting control while building connections. These articulations are described as “network identities”.

The paper concludes with implications for organizations employing or contracting with such individuals. Suggestions for managers involve enabling more project structures, negotiating boundaries and purposes more clearly, providing more flexible conditions and facilitating more integration of these knowledge workers with other employees before, during and following innovative project activity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the monstrous in organizational diversity by introducing the concept of cultural anthropophagy to the diversity literature. Using Kristeva's notion of abjection to better understand cultural anthropophagy, the paper argues that cultural anthropophages cross boundaries, and build identity through desire for and aggression toward valued others.

The paper uses a conceptual discussion of abjection, along with a historical survey of anthropophagic approaches from Brazilian art and cultural studies.

Anthropophagic approaches highlight unique features of organizational identity, framing identity formation as a fluid process of expulsion and re-integration of the other. While abjection approaches focus on the exclusion of material aspects of the self and the formation of self-other boundaries, anthropophagy focusses on the re-integration of the other into the self, in a symbolic gesture of re-integration, desire, and reverence for the other.

The idea of anthropophagy is a recent entrant into the organizational literature, and the close relation between anthropophagy and abjection is illuminated in the current paper. Original insights regarding the search for positive identity, the ambivalence of self and other, and the relation of the particular and the universal, are offered with regards to the diversity literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of gender, sexuality and occupation and to analyse how male cabin crew utilize space in managing gender identity.

The paper draws on a project where interviews were conducted with 17 male cabin crew, all aged < 35 years, from 5 different airlines in airports in the South East of England. The crew worked in a mixture of short-haul, low-cost and long-haul global carriers.

The paper shows how men in a feminized service role negotiate masculine subjectivities within and through space and how gendered meanings attached to space can impress on and both challenge and be challenged by the performances and subjectivities of individuals within them.

The findings on which the paper is based surface the diverse challenges facing men in non-traditional roles – an area that would profit from further research in different contexts. Further, the findings have implications for work-based practices and employee relations within a paraprofessional service role.

The paper adds to the understanding of how gender and identity intersect as well as to how space, seen as both gendered and gendering, is implicated in the processes involved.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the authors’ multiple subjectivities, in research and in practice which are ever shifting in context with each other. The authors present richness of understanding which can be revealed when researchers eschew consensus, certainty and easy solutions. The authors aim to show that plurality of ontological and epistemological approaches combined with diversity in understanding and subjective experience is necessary in qualitative research in organisations.

The authors take a playful and incomplete narrative approach in their critical reflection on the subjectivities being silenced or ignored in organisations and in academia. The authors present an unsettling and ambiguous read but the aim is to question the formulaic, linear, simplistic solutions and structures evident in organisations and academia that silence uncertainty, emotions, voice and creativity through standardisation and the rhetoric of collaboration for performance enhancement. This process the authors have termed philosophical violence.

The authors identify philosophical violence as a dominant theme in qualitative research, in organisational practice and within academia. In contrast, the authors’ embodied subjectivities preclude the reaching agreement or consensus too quickly, or indeed, at all. The authors’ embodied struggles add to the understanding of ambiguity, difference, critical reflexivity and understanding, providing richness and accommodating diversity and paradox in the inquiries in the organisations.

The authors show the struggles as hopeful and the non-collaborative collaboration as a resource from which the authors can individually and jointly develop new understandings of working and thus survive the philosophical violence found in organisations and in research. Honouring subjectivities is essential for rich qualitative research in organisations.

In an era of global economic expansion, the harsh underside of capitalism clearly affects human subjectivities and consciousness.¹ Emotions, which both express and structure subjectivity and consciousness, reflect and manifest the social reality of human life in its various globalized dimensions. My argument in this chapter thus concerns the ways in which the contradictions as the harsh underside of capitalism affect the subjectivities of racial minorities. For this reason, the relationship between emotions and commodity capitalism is an especially pressing concern for the formation and expression of racial identity in the United States today. To understand the social reality of race in the U.S. capitalist system is to take seriously the affects that express and constitute the critical social thought of racial minorities. As African Americanist scholars such as Cornel West (1994, p. 42) have argued, the ideology of unregulated capital in corporate consumerism creates market moralities and market mentalities that “erode civil society.” The critical thought of black Americans, West (1992, p. 42) avers, suffers irreparable damage by images that relentlessly commercialize the so-called good life:These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others – and thereby edge out nonmarket values – love, care, service to others – handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America.Corporations thus capitalize on civil rights gains while commodifying the activist politics of communities and governmental organizations. In effect, the “status quo” of government that promotes economic justice and civil rights protections is fragmented and replaced by corporate domination and the rule of the free market. Instead of turning to non-commercial avenues of civil society to change oppressive relations of power, Americans opt for consuming social change in a laissez-faire economy that equates individualism and free choice with purchasing merchandise. In her powerful critique of class privilege and consumption-based individualism, Bell Hooks (2000, p. 81) explains how the media's use of race to promote a “shared culture of consumerism” vitiates community values and deflects attention from class antagonism. Such consumerism, Hooks maintains, promotes ambitions for lifestyles of conspicuous consumption and celebrity that renders incoherent and undesirable a democratic sensibility that made civil rights gains for women and minorities possible in the first place (Bell Hooks, 2000, p. 77).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological implications of queering organizational research. The author examines three related questions: what does queering organizational research entail?; how have organizational scholars queered research to date?; and how does queering organizational research and methodologies advance our understandings of organizing processes?

The paper begins with an overview of queer theory, which is followed by a review of the ways in which organizational research and methodologies have been and can be queered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of queering organizational research and methodologies and offers research questions that can guide future research that draws from queer theory.

The author claims that methodologies are queered through a researcher’s commitment to enacting the philosophical assumptions of queer theory in a research project. Much of the value of queering methodologies lies in its disruption and critique of conventional research practices, while enabling us to explore new ways of understanding organizational life.

Queer theory is still nascent but growing in organizational research. To date, there has been little consideration of the methodological implications of queering organizational research. This paper discusses these implications and can thus guide future research that is informed by queer theory.