Event Details

This OWT research seminar is given by Prof Nancy Harding (University of Bath), Dr Sarah Gilmore (Cardiff University) and Prof Jackie Ford (Durham University). For further information or enquiries, please contact Dr Mo Cheded – m.cheded@lancaster.ac.uk.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83753091285

(Meeting ID: 837 5309 1285 )

Abstract

The post-Cartesian ‘material turn’ in management and organization studies understands that bodies are far more than vehicles that enable work to be undertaken, but are agentive actors in the constitution of work and working selves. This leads to the need for more empirically-derived understanding of the agency of flesh in the performative corporealization of working, embodied selves. We met this challenge through adapting feminist, posthuman research methods for a study of the materialities and materialization of working bodies. The study takes forward Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity by reading them through each other, and introducing flesh as an agentive actor in each moment-to-moment move. In paying close attention to the speech of supposedly ‘dumb flesh’ we show how flesh resists its negation and itself imposes control on the worker. We coin the term ‘body/flesh’ and illuminate how bodies are active and agentive, constituting corporeal/izing working selves in somewhat unexpected ways.

Author Biographies

Nancy Harding is Professor of Human Resource Management at the School of Management, University of Bath. Her research interests include working lives, gender, critical management studies and ways of researching and writing ‘differently’. Her articles have appeared in journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Organization, Journal of Management Studies and Gender, Work & Organization. Her two sole-authored books explore the construction of management and the manager, and ways of being at work. Her joint-authored books are on bringing feminism into 21st-century management studies (with Marianna Fotaki), a critical perspective on leadership (with Jackie Ford and Mark Learmonth), and the social construction of dementia (with Colin Palfrey).

Sarah Gilmore is a Reader in Organization Studies at Cardiff University Business School. Her research interests are wide-ranging but her empirical work focuses on elite sport and reviews aspects of working lives through a range of lenses such as precarious work, emotion/emotional labour. She has a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis and has used this to explore reflexive accounts within ethnographic work; the positionality of the manager within football as well as her current work concerning socialisation. Her research has been published in Organization Studies, Human Relations as well as a range of sport science and sports medicine journals.

Jackie Ford is Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Durham University Business School and has held various professorial posts since 2008 at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford. Jackie’s research includes the study of working lives, notably in exploring critical approaches to leadership; gender, diversity and inclusion; and ethics, management and organization studies. She has co-authored a monograph entitled Leadership as Identity: Constructions and Deconstructions (Ford, Harding and Learmonth, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); co-edited Making Public Services Management Critical (Currie, Ford, Harding and Learmonth, Routledge, 2010); co-edited the text- book Leadership: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Carroll, Ford and Taylor, Sage, 2019, 2nd edition); and has published in a range of journals including British Journal of Management, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Leadership, Management Learning, Organization, Organization Studies, Sociology, and Work, Employment and Society.