From Stonewall to Academia: Towards Queer(er) Modes of Organising in Business and Management Schools

Posted on: 11 June 2024 by Ebru Calin in Research

On Pride Month, PhD student Ebru Calin reflects on the role of academia in moving towards queer(er) modes of organising in business and management schools.

Whatever power we have that we don’t use will become an instrument against us, the question of differences is a perfect example. If we do not learn to use our differences constructively they will continue to be used against as causes for war. We must turn this around, not by eliminating difference or pretending it doesn’t exist, but examining how it may be used and recognized.
Audre Lorde, Queer Civil Rights Activist

Time and time again, I find myself returning to the writings of queer civil rights activist Audre Lorde, discovering something new with each reading. Lorde challenges us to see difference as a possibility, an opening to mobilise change.

Reflecting on her ideas, I see how, in research, business schools, and everyday life, we often witness, are subject to, or even find ourselves complicit in attempts at making our differences ‘manageable’ or ‘governable’, which prompts questions: What difference does difference make? What is equality for some at the expense of others but another form of oppression?

These questions are particularly vital as we—individuals, academics, universities, organisations—celebrate Pride Month in honour of the resistance and resilience of the LGBTQ+¹ community.

While as researchers, we are hopeful to enhance and improve policy with the aim of improving the quality of work lives², we still find ourselves confined; subjugated to fit a certain box, reproducing the same dichotomies we aim to dismantle.

For instance, diversity management programs often reduce our identities to something that is ‘fathomable’ and ‘documentable’ for the sake of organisational control, efficiency and measurable outcomes.

An example of this is how LGBTQ+ employees might be required to conform to heteronormative standards underpinning the ‘white, straight line’ to gain recognition and acceptance within an organisation.

Similarly, binary-trans, non-binary and gender-questioning employees might find it challenging to navigate workplace policies that only acknowledge binary gender identities³ or an LGBTQAI+ couple may face obstacles in attaining (shared) parental leave policies that are primarily designed for heterosexual couples.

Such injustices inevitably draw our attention to deeper issues of economic precarity and systemic inequality.

Although I feel it is my duty as a doctoral researcher to find answers to my questions, I have come to recognise the importance of silences; the missing lines on HR documents and the blank spaces in our minds.

These silences tell their own story, communicating a message that occupies an ontological position that deserves meticulous attention.

Therefore, I am not asking the above questions to prompt answers, as there is no straightforward, definitive answer.

Yet the questions themselves merit existence, lying at the heart of understanding the complex, queer nature of equity, equality, inclusion and diverse representation, especially within business schools and management education.

Therefore, as (early career) researchers, we not only have a responsibility to reimagine difference but also possess the privilege of a voice - a response-ability to address questions we might not yet have answers for.

Understanding Pride Month

Pride Month is more than just a celebration; it is a commemoration rooted in the resistance and resilience of the LGBTQ+ community which traces back to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, a pivotal event sparked by a police raid at the ‘Stonewall Inn’ in New York City.

This sanctuary for queer individuals became a battleground when patrons, led by figures like Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender activist and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina transgender activist, fought back against persistent harassment embodying a different response to oppression and violence.

Their defiance ignited a three-day riot that gave birth to the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

This uprising paved the way for the first Pride march in 1970, and today, Pride Month honours this legacy of defiance and difference and the ongoing struggle for equity and equality.

But how do the themes of difference and resistance that underpin Pride Month relate to business and management schools?

What difference does difference make?

In the context of business and management schools, academia has long been recognised as a ‘gendered institution’⁴ operating as a site for the reproduction of gendered and raced cis-heteronormative patterns of difference and domination.

These patterns are perpetuated through decisions and procedures, images, symbols and ideologies, interactions and individual dynamics of gender performance.

Organisations themselves as well as organisational spaces are always already structured for cis and male, white heterosexual bodies.

Thus, sexuality and sexual difference, like gender and race, are integral to many societal processes and institutionalised forms of injustice.

More than a celebration, Pride should be a reminder. Pride should remind us of the importance of interrogating how norms and categories of difference are brought to the fore in particular settings, structures, processes and interactions in academia.

This interrogation holds the promise of recognising how power shifts shape the experiences of individuals and groups, revealing the simultaneity of privilege and disadvantage.

Rather than fixed or separate entities, they are part of a dialectic invocation process whereby privilege is then a ‘dynamic, relational and unstable phenomenon’⁵ that is intrinsically linked to disadvantage and centred on power relations that are fluid, interactive and uneven.

While Pride celebrations symbolise liberation, visibility and emancipation in numerous organisations and universities, countless LGBTQ+ individuals, academics and students still face systemic injustices, violence and persecution, especially in areas where being queer is criminalised and declared illegal.

Even within Europe, many injustices persist, with rights being denied even as progress is made in achieving legal protections for queer individuals (eg Employment Equality Regulations Act 2003 and Equality Act 2010).

For example, in the UK it is not possible for two women to both be registered as mothers on a birth certificate; the one giving birth is registered as the mother while the other person is registered as the parent.

Thus, progress is occurring simultaneously with the persistence of restrictive laws, highlighting the performativity of ‘equal rights’ and social justice drawing our attention to the simultaneity of privilege and disadvantage.

While LGBTQ+ rights in the European Union and the UK are theoretically protected under law, in practice, discrimination in employment⁶ and family practices (eg flexible working, shared parental leave, surrogacy, adoption, etc) still occurs⁷.

Accordingly, the Equality Challenge Unit report highlights these issues on a broader scale by examining the experiences of 720 LGBTQ+ staff across 134 UK higher education institutions.

The report showed evidence of "systematic institutional discrimination and implicit discrimination in relation to promotions, discretionary pay rises, and redundancies," with LGBTQ+ staff routinely facing "negative treatment’ from ‘colleagues (33.8%), students (18.9%), and those in other areas of their HEIs (25.3%)".

The reality of this is reflected in over a decade later, with research reports presented by Advance HE finding that LGBTQ+ staff still perceive their sexual orientation as a barrier to career progression.

These issues also begin to be addressed by podcasts (eg Bending Boundaries, If These Ovaries Could Talk) and through research-based and practical management guides produced by experienced academics to enhance practical support for diverse employees engaging in non-traditional work and family arrangements (eg Future Families Work).

So, how can Business and Management Schools embrace Queer Pride without diluting its meaning or universalising experiences, particularly for Queer people occupying multiple minority statuses?

Organising queer(ly)

Queerness is not here yet but it approaches like a crushing wave of potentiality
José Esteban Muñoz, Queer Theory Researcher

Over two decades ago, researchers envisioned an ‘academy of queers’ where business schools not only include LGBTQ+ academics and their allies but also ‘queer the idea of the academy’ by reimagining how discursive spaces might be re-created in more productive ways⁸.

Current research on queering management schools⁹ continues to deconstruct entrenched categories of knowledge and identities that have long been considered natural and beyond contestation.

Queering, as theorised by scholars like Heather Love, involves a semantic flexibility that challenges ‘normal’ behaviour such as linear publication track records and career progression paths.

In more recent examples, Queer Theory has been introduced as a way to interrogate more broadly the norms of organising¹⁰ and was even presented in Management and Organisation Studies to invite readers to reflect on “the normalizing effects of discourse on capitalist hegemony”.

These uses recognise that Queer Theory has applications outside the analysis of queer (or LGBT+) subjects and can be extended to the critical exploration of other normative practices beyond sexual and gender identity.

As human beings, especially as researchers, we have an innate desire to categorise and name (every)thing/everyone, finding a sense of tranquillity in organising our understanding of reality; some might say it is our raison d’être.

However, queer is an elusive term occupying a unique position.

The concept “has had from the start an explicit stake in its own indefinability, its refusal to specify its project intrinsically connected to the sense that its political efficacy depends on its ability to remain open to its own potentiality, to its unknowable manifold futures”¹¹.

Even attempting to define what queer theory is could be seen as an anti-queer endeavor¹².

This begs the question, what would it look like if we moved towards queer(er) modes of organizing in business and management schools and organized queer(ly)?

Again, as I pose this question I am sharing my appreciation for its inherent value and right to simply be, rather than claiming a singular or definitive answer.

Reflecting on Sedgwick, perhaps we should encourage ourselves as scholars in business schools to welcome unconfined meanings allowing us to explore modes of organising that present a “mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”.

However, you might ask, what does that have to do with me?

Well, LGBTQ+ commonality resides less in a shared identity and more in a shared alterity¹³.

Therefore, queer experiences of living and doing are not just limited to LGBTQAI+ communities, nor are they monolithic.

They problematise heteronormativity, a moral system that shapes the way we approach people and work according to heterosexual principles.

Heteronormativity becomes the hegemonic standard for social and sexual relationships and ways of doing which is always historically, contextually, and socio-politically situated.

**What is equality for some at the expense of others but another form of oppression?**

The idea to move towards queer(er) modes of organising draws our attention to structures of power and privilege that can render some forms of equality devoid of meaning, or even oppressive.

This is particularly evident in our discipline, especially in how we write as academics¹⁴.

Sarah Ahmed stressed in business school, it is crucial to pay attention to whose voices are heard and whose are marginalized, whose scholarship is cited and whose remains in the shadows¹⁵.

In other words, the everyday practices we engage in to attain academic citizenship and the policies we reproduce through our actions, might inadvertently uphold systems of privilege that benefit some while disadvantaging and silencing others.

This failure to ensure equitable access to opportunities, resources, and academic recognition highlights the importance of moving towards queer(er) modes of organising which holds potential allowing us to critically examine and challenge these power structures.

Queer as an inconclusive political tool

Queer theory is an inconclusive tool, perfect for playful creativity that welcomes ‘free-falling, wild thinking and imaginative reinvention’
Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies

Building on the ideas presented in the queer manifesto what I am suggesting is that queer(ing) transcends its discursive and theoretical constraints which often inadvertently reproduce the same dualism(s) it seeks to challenge.

Going beyond the notion of identity, as Judith Butler points out, “queer... was never an identity... it was always a critique of identity”¹⁶, therefore organising queer(ly) is a position in flux, an attitude, a way of be-ing, a way of do-ing, a mode of collective organizing, political activism, collective parenting, practising religion and so much more.

This highlights the importance for business school to create space for queer perspectives within the framework of business and management education, including policy statements, curricula, reading lists and research activities.

However, we have a response-ability to do so mindfully being aware of the risks of reducing queer(ing) into an empty signifier, stripping it of its political power.

Rather than prescribing specific guidelines, it is essential to focus on exploring the implications of queerer modes of organising, and queer theory for management and business studies, identifying future research directions and promising avenues of inquiry.

Applying a queer lens to disciplines such as Management and Organisation necessitates a critical reexamination of the epistemological foundations of the field¹⁷.

This involves starting with an analysis of heteronormativity and heterosexuality, and deconstructing the inequalities perpetuated by normative classifications, particularly for individuals and practices that diverge from societal scripts and expectations¹⁸.

While the journey towards embracing queer(er) modes of organising in business schools will not happen overnight and will most likely be a challenging, unsettling, journey “one with no clear referent and a wide variety of lineages and expressions… it is both a claim to difference and to community, to radical alterity and to political tactics, at one and the same time” ¹⁹.

I see so much untapped potential in moving towards queer(er) modes of organising and organising queer(ly) in business schools, reshaping not only our research methodologies but also how we write, challenging entrenched notions of sexed, gendered and raced dichotomies.

While there is no singular approach to mobilising the radical possibilities inherent in this shift, there is hope in collectively embracing “the possibility of changing directions and finding other paths”²⁰.

1 LGBTQ+ is an abbreviation for LGBTQIA+, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual and more.

2 See for example: Well-balanced families?: A gendered analysis of work-life balance policies and work family practices; Providing, Performing and Protecting: The Importance of Work Identities in Negotiating Conflicting Work–Family Ideals as a Single Mother; and American Pragmatism and Organization: Issues and Controversies.

3 See "I guess the trans identity goes with other minority identities": An intersectional exploration of the experiences of trans and non-binary parents living in the UK and Binary-trans, non-binary and gender-questioning adolescents’ experiences in UK schools.

4 See Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations and From sex roles to gender structure.

5 See Women Elite Leaders Doing Respectable Business Femininity: How Privilege is Conferred, Contested and Defended through the Body, page 380.

6 See Gender typicality and sexual minority labour market differentials.

7 See The dynamics of online learning at the workplace: Peer-facilitated social learning and the application in practice, Childhood Social Gender Transition and Psychosocial Well-Being: A Comparison to Cisgender Gender-Variant Children, Surrogacy and "Procreative Tourism". What Does the Future Hold from the Ethical and Legal Perspectives? and Where’s dad? Exploring the low take-up of inclusive parenting policies in the UK.

8 See Queering Management and Organization, page 162.

9 See Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies: Notes toward queering heterosexuality, Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization, Age, sexuality and hegemonic masculinity: Exploring older gay men’s masculinity practices at work and LGBTQ Research in Management and Institutions: Broadening the Lens.

10 See Queering Management and Organization and Queering Queer.

11 See Feminism's Queer Theory, page 159.

12 See A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, page 8.