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Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2014

Mary Phillips

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current…

Abstract

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current scholarship. In organizational practice, leadership is a masculine activity ideally carried out by male bodies, such that women’s leadership is still perceived as problematic. This suggests that the field is fearful of allowing sexual bodies to pollute what should be a functional, cognitive and instrumental activity. This chapter therefore draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explain how and why the sexual body is positioned as the unspoken other of leadership. To do this, I explore the representation of two very contrasting leaders, Jean Luc Picard and the Borg Queen, in the popular film Star Trek: First Contact. The film illuminates how leadership ideally resides in a virile, mastered and distant male body. The sexual female body is represented as disgusting, dangerous, and a source of contamination and so must be cast out and destroyed. Finally, I ask whether the representation of the Borg Queen is useful as a transgressive means to undermine the abjection of the female leader’s body. However, I conclude that to counter abjection, scholars of leadership need instead to build discursive and material practices that revalue the feminine and respect the alterity of self and others.

Details

The Physicality of Leadership: Gesture, Entanglement, Taboo, Possibilities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-289-0

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Book part
Publication date: 1 November 2017

A number of incidents and community movements in the post-economic growth era have come to shape understandings of the Republic of Ireland’s marginalized groupings. These groups…

Abstract

A number of incidents and community movements in the post-economic growth era have come to shape understandings of the Republic of Ireland’s marginalized groupings. These groups exist in both urban streetscapes and rural communities; all have come to represent a new culture of transgressive resistance in a state that has never completely dealt with issues of political legitimacy or extensive poverty, creating a deviant form of ‘liquid modernity’ which provides the space for such groupings to exist. This chapter demonstrates that the prevailing ideology in contemporary, post-downturn Ireland have created the conditions for incidents of ‘cultural criminology’ that at times erupt into episodes of counter-hegemonic street level governmentality.

The chapter further argues that these groups which have emerged may represent the type of transgressive Foucaultian governmentality envisaged by Kevin Stenson, while they are indicative of subcultures of discontent and nascent racism, which belie the contented findings of various affluence and contentment surveys conducted during the years of rapid growth. The chapter develops this theme of counter-hegemonic ‘governmentality’, or the regional attempts to challenge authorities by local groups of transgressors. The chapter finally argues that, in many ways, the emergence of a culture of criminality in the Irish case, and media depictions of the same can be said to stem from the corruption of that country’s elites as much as from any agenda for resistance from its beleaguered subcultures.

Book part
Publication date: 5 December 2018

Thomas Raymen

This chapter brings the book to a close by summarising the overall argument and looking to the future of commodified lifestyle sports and post-industrial cities under an ailing…

Abstract

This chapter brings the book to a close by summarising the overall argument and looking to the future of commodified lifestyle sports and post-industrial cities under an ailing capitalist economy. Most importantly, it calls upon academics to abandon concepts of resistance and social scientific approaches rooted in symbolic interactionism and discursive meanings in order to return to a critical analysis of the real generative mechanisms of political economy. This chapter closes with a brief epilogue that returns to the traceurs and the parkour community in this study one year after the ethnographic fieldwork ended.

Details

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-812-5

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Book part
Publication date: 5 December 2018

Thomas Raymen

This chapter outlines the book’s rationale and approach in addition to its general argument. It introduces the reader to what the author has described as a ‘paradox’ of parkour…

Abstract

This chapter outlines the book’s rationale and approach in addition to its general argument. It introduces the reader to what the author has described as a ‘paradox’ of parkour, whereby parkour and freerunning is hyper-conformist to the values of consumer capitalism whilst its free practice is excluded and marginalised from urban space. Before offering methodological commentary on the book’s ethnographic approach and outlining the structure of the book, it looks how this paradox is a product of late-capitalism’s own making – making reference to processes of deindustrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of consumer capitalism.

Details

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-812-5

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Book part
Publication date: 21 December 2010

Liam Leonard and Paula Kenny

Writing in his seminal work Crime Control as Industry, Nils Christie (1993) outlines his vision of how western societies were facing increased unrest due to unequal wealth…

Abstract

Writing in his seminal work Crime Control as Industry, Nils Christie (1993) outlines his vision of how western societies were facing increased unrest due to unequal wealth distribution and lack of access to properly paid work. After a sustained period of neo-liberalism and rationalisation throughout the western world, Christie's prediction of rising crime rates in relatively wealthy states has come to pass. However, the responses to this increase in crime have been varied from nation to nation. In Christie's case, the rise of the ‘crime control industry’ is a response that combines social control with a growth industry based on processing members of certain sections of society through a course of action that includes arrest, remand, trial and imprisonment at a time when the emphasis on rehabilitation appears to have diminished.

Details

Sustainable Justice and the Community
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-301-0

Abstract

Details

Writing Differently
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-337-6

Book part
Publication date: 16 December 2003

Lauren Langman and Katie Cangemi

Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been…

Abstract

Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been created, but that wealth has been unequally distributed. Such inequality has meant that large numbers of young people have not been able to find the kinds of jobs and careers that provide the “goods” life extolled in a consumer society. Nor do the dominant values of rationality, neo-liberalism or secularism hold much appeal. These conditions have encouraged the emergence of a number of subcultures of transgression, identity-granting communities of meaning which provide members with a sense of community with recognition and empowerment. As many such subcultures repudiate dominant norms, we note how they resemble the medieval carnival, which Bakhtin showed was a time and place of inversion, transgression, and celebration of the grotesque. It allowed the common people encapsulate realms of agency to articulate disdain and resistance. Yet this served to reproduce the dominant system.

In much the same way, insofar as globalization is intimately tied to cities, we have seen the growing importance of cities as nodal points for global commerce as well as sites for entertainment and tourism. These factors, together with the longstanding anonymity and toleration of the city, have become focal points for the emergence of a number of oppositional subcultures. They include those who embrace extreme body modification, numerous forms of body adornment through piercings (rings, posts, studs), tattoos, and surgical modifications such as implanted horns, furrows, or split tongues. Following Simmel, adornment can be seen as a means of inclusion within a group and differentiation from others. The practitioners of extreme body modification label themselves “urban primitives,” who see themselves rejecting global modernity, the occupation-based status hierarchies of the dominant occupational system and its shallow, materialistic culture. They see themselves as a moment of the “transvaluation of values” in which Dionysian passion triumphs over Apollonian control and restraint. This is especially evident in various genital decorations in which what heretofore has been private and exposure was a matter of shame. There has been a “cultural transformation of the pubic sphere.” While such groups find community, identity and recognition, they must also be understood as a key ingredient of the city in a global age in which diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the offbeat constitute essential moments of urban ambience.

Details

The City as an Entertainment Machine
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-060-9

Book part
Publication date: 15 October 2018

Abigail Gardner

In early 2017 I was watching YouTube, and being bounced around by its algorithmic recommendations. One suggestion appearing down the side bar column of jpegs was MARROW, from…

Abstract

In early 2017 I was watching YouTube, and being bounced around by its algorithmic recommendations. One suggestion appearing down the side bar column of jpegs was MARROW, from Anohni’s 2016 album Hopelessness. It figures a black background and foregrounds an ageing, smiling, bejewelled woman lip-syncing to the song. She is the American artist Lorraine O’Grady. Watching it felt odd, as if something was `out of place’.

Anohni speaks through her, using ventriloquist tactics to displace her own body and O’Grady’s voice. This interested me. It was the first time I had been presented with the body of an ageing woman without knowing what she looked like in youth (unlike Madonna or Aretha Franklin for example). And it was the first time I had seen lip syncing done in such an eerie fashion. The tactic is used on other music videos for tracks taken from the album where ageing women and women of colour are centre stage.

Using the idea of a place that it is ‘out of time’, in that the music videos are set in a blank space and the lip- syncing upsets the idea of a single sutured speaking author, the chapter explores the idea of `queer temporality’ by using Judith Halberstam’s 2005 work. It suggests that the music videos are potentially transgressive in their presentation of a non-normative and fractured bodies. It uses work from ageing studies (Baars, 2012) and trans-ageing (Moglen, 2008) to suggest the transgressive potential of Anonhi’s music videos in how they position transgendered voices and ageing bodies.

Details

Subcultures, Bodies and Spaces: Essays on Alternativity and Marginalization
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-512-8

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 5 December 2018

Thomas Raymen

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is rooted in ultra-realist criminology theory and transcendental materialism’s…

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is rooted in ultra-realist criminology theory and transcendental materialism’s innovative conceptualisation of subjectivity. The chapter outlines both of these perspectives and how they differ from existing criminological theory in order to explore both how and why individuals in contemporary society are so committed to the values, symbols and identities of consumer capitalism. The chapter then employs this theoretical framework to problematise and deconstruct the dominant conceptualisation of parkour as a mode of performative resistance, by drawing upon theoretical ideas such as precorporation, the reversal of ideology and interpassivity.

Details

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-812-5

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 September 2023

Melissa Yoong and Nourhan Mohamed

While past research has explored how opting-out enables mothers to break free from masculinist organizational cultures, less attention has been given to how they resist…

Abstract

Purpose

While past research has explored how opting-out enables mothers to break free from masculinist organizational cultures, less attention has been given to how they resist disciplinary power that constitutes and governs their subjectivities. This paper aims to add to the discussion of opting-out as a site of power and resistance by proposing the concept of “constructive resistance” as a productive vantage point for investigating opted-out mothers' subversive practices of self-making.

Design/methodology/approach

This Malaysian case study brings together the notion of constructive resistance, critical narrative analysis and APPRAISAL theory to examine the reflective stories of eighteen mothers who exited formal employment. These accounts were collected through an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured email interviews.

Findings

The mothers in the sample tend to construct themselves in two main ways, as (1) valuable mothers (capable, tireless, caring mothers who are key figures in their children's lives) and (2) competent professionals. These subjectivities are parasitic on gendered and neoliberal ideals but allow the mothers to undermine neoliberal capitalist work arrangements that were incongruent with their personal values and adversely impacted their well-being, as well as refuse organizational narratives that positioned them as “failed” workers.

Originality/value

Whereas power is primarily seen in previous opting-out scholarship as centralized and constraining, this case study illustrates how the lens of constructive resistance can be beneficial for examining opted-out mothers' struggles against a less direct form of power that governs through the production of truths and subjectivities.

Details

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2040-7149

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