Their inclusion of queer folk is a capitalist ruse that entrenches cultural labor inequities.

Introduction ‘LGBT-friendly organizations’ are understood as ‘work settings [that] do not simply tolerate. . . but accept and welcome’ (Williams, Giuffre, & Dellinger, 2009, p. 29) LGBT people: places in which LGBT employees can be ‘authentically themselves’. These have emerged as part of the contemporary re- or dis-organization of capitalism and work towards greater flexibility and inclusiveness, whereby gender and sexuality ‘no longer correspond so easily to organizational hierarchies’ (Hearn, 2014, p. 407). While some celebrate their emergence as a progressive step away from historical realities of ‘the closet’ and homophobia, others question the financial motivations driving inclusion and the promise of liberation which accompanies it (e.g. Rumens, 2018), arguing that the discourse of LGBT-friendliness is little more than a capitalist ruse designed to make us ‘feel good’ (Fleming, 2007; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009, 2011; Irving, 2008). From this perspective inclusion is the latest permutation of organizational control: a managerial mechanism designed to buttress the semblance of ‘freedom’ while maintaining the ‘fungibility of labour’ (Hearn, 2014) and keeping employees ‘happy’ and (self-)managed for the sake of organizational productivity. But between celebrating and denouncing inclusion, much goes unexamined. As a critical scholar motivated by matters of social justice, I share the political impetus driving the latter perspective which problematizes the increasingly central role played by the ‘[t]emples of global capitalism’ (Rao, 2015, p. 38) in the creation of supposedly more ‘inclusive’, ‘welcoming’ and ‘friendlier’ gender/sexual ‘scenarios’ (Hearn, 2014). At the same time, as a lesbian and thus an imagined target of LGBT-friendly promises of inclusion, I am deeply troubled by the ease with which this critique privileges matters of economic redistribution over questions of cultural recognition (Butler, 1997). While it may certainly be true that capitalist organizations are exploiting our need for recognition to further entrench labour and global inequalities, conceiving questions of gender/sexuality1 as ‘merely cultural’ (Butler, 1997) matters risks diminishing the lived experiences of gender/sexuality and missing the complex ways by which these are controlled, managed and regulated in contemporary ‘inclusive’ organizational formations.