Marxism within the academy understands gender as a performative practice

CMS is a network of management and business school academics, who publish mostly Marxist and some feminist and limited post-colonial perspectives on the contemporary organisation of capitalist work. This literature intends to place the dominantly pro-capitalist OMS literature in a critical perspective. These attempts to influence discourse by writing follows the interpretation of performativity as language creating realities. Critical performativity is therefore the attempt to influence organisational reality by writing from the academy. The term critical performativity then leads to roughly two sections, a larger theoretical section on meta-theory discussing what CMS should be about and what kind of critical knowledges should it support, and a smaller practical section creating critically performative knowledge in interaction with a situated organisational practises usually in the form of academics working with non-for-profit or anticapitalist organisations. The critical performativity literature developed out of discussions on the performativity of capitalist organising pushing for efficiency. One fundamental reading was the article by Fournier and Grey (2000) “At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies” in which they argued that OMS was creating knowledge under the paradigm of increasing efficiency and growth. To counter this, they called for non-performative academic research that does not participate in the growth narrative and even counters it critically. They wrote: “the aim [of OMS research] is to contribute to the effectiveness of managerial practise, or to build a better model or understanding thereof. Management is taken as a given, and a desirable given at that, and is not interrogated except in so far as this will contribute to its improved effectiveness. Critical work is not performative in this meaning, even though it may well have some intention to achieve (e.g. to achieve a better world or to end exploitation, etc.). […] One way in which the demarcation between the non-performative and the performative, the critical and the non-critical is mediated and may be recognized lies in the lexicon of concepts which are deployed within the different styles of work. For example, the invocation of notions such as power, control and inequality typically betoken some form of critical approach whilst efficiency, effectiveness and profitability do not.” (Fournier & Grey, 2000, p.180) Fournier and Grey’s call for non- or anti-performative research has led to the development of the term critical performativity in CMS (Cabantous et al., 2016). Despite the 20 years that have passed since this first call, critical performativity can be considered as still within development, maybe because organisation scholars are not always clear what they mean by the term performativity (Gond et al., 2015). Each philosophical meaning provides a different perspective on how social reality could be influenced by research. In addition, there is an even wider spectrum of ideas on what a better world, that Fournier and Grey mention in brackets, could look like and how it could be achieved. In response Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009) argued that CMS as a whole should be a performative project to intervene in discussion on management and thereby affect organisational practise to stop CMS from withdrawing into safe intellectual cynicism. They proposed a framework for critically performative research. Research as critique should be affirmative to the organisation under study for example by affirming the complexity and ambiguity present in their practises. Research as critique should base on ethics of care to the people one is studying by taking them seriously but also being critically friendly in discussing their practises with them. It should be pragmatic by rejecting the metaphor of the corporation as indefeasible evil but instead finding pragmatic “incremental incisions into particular processes” (ibid., p. 550). Doing so critique should be potential focused and find utopias in the existing working life. Finally, a critically performative research practise should be normative, therefore base criticism on an articulated set of normative ideas on what a good organisation would be like. This proposal of critical performativity clearly breaks, as the authors stated, with Fournier and Grey’s (2000) call to be non-performative, therefore, not to participate in the production of knowledge for the sake of capital. It advocates to reform the corporation, instead of abandoning it, through “[m]icroemancipations [that] involve specific and focused attempts to create spaces of autonomy among institutionalized relations of power.” The paper shares some references on performativity theory with this thesis but was based on a surface interpretation of the performativity of gender. The proposal to alter management practise from the point of academic writing was based on an interpretation of performativity following Austin and Butler. They have argued that speech acts and embodied performances create social realities. Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009) heavily borrowed from an interpretation of Butler’s work, queer theory, which they do not explicitly reference. Instead, they summarise performativity theory as “[t]hrough being made performative, discourses create spaces where we are able to rework them” (ibid., p.544) based on the understanding that queer theory has made gender performative. However, with a closer reading of Butler (2004), the argument of queer theory is not, that discourses have been made performative through academic theory, but that academic theory has provided the perspective to understand gender as performative social practise that does not mirror a biological reality. While theory can help to become conscious of taken-for-granted knowledges, in this case gender norms, and try to challenge them through queer practises, this does not make one less or more performative. A critical performativity based on queer theory would be a conscious, intended performance instead of normed performances that reproduce what is already set in dominant discourses. I mention queer theory here to make the lived experiences visible on which the academic theory was later developed. Queer theory and Butler’s (ibid.) work on gender as performance is based on the experiences of people, who faced and face violence for daring to queer gender norms. When Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2016) later reject criticism for incorrectly applying Butler’s theory, they defend themselves against “intellectual authoritarianism” (p. 231). More problematic than misunderstanding a philosophical framework for the sake of academic rigour are the ethical questions about appropriating queer situated knowledges, taking them out of context and then applying them to create minor reforms in capitalist organising. By today queer theory has branched out from the study of gender to a political epistemology (Sedgwick, 2003; Halberstam, 2011). De Souza, Brewis and Rumens (2016) have offered a first conceptualisation of queer methodologies for the study of organisations. My argument here is not, that queer theory should not be applied outside its original use, but that any application of it should make the effort to understand the context of its development. Doing so will also help to understand the limits of power that queer theory has been pointing out. The ignorance of the limits that power places to the alteration of discourses was later also pointed out by Fleming and Banerjee (2016). Fleming and Banerjee (2016) critiqued Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2009) conceptualisation of critical performativity as both overemphasising the effect of language and the role of CMS in OMS scholarship as a whole. Seeing little perspective in engaging with managers and trying to change capitalism from within the corporation, they argued that even if individual managers would like to change practises, the institutional conditions would prevent them from doing so. They pointed out that attempts of a critical subversion of discourse need to take into account the conditions of speech. In his conceptualisation of how language created reality Austin (1975) included the perlocutionary speech act, a speech act that calls out a reality but has the potential to fail if, simply put, the audience denies to listen and enact it. Translated to the case of critical performativity in CMS, this would mean that writing about potentially less exploitative managerial practises would not necessarily bring about change if nobody decides to listen to them because they do not fit with the dominant pro-capitalist discourse.