In this paper we argue that violence is curiously both absent and present within organization studies. By violence we mean actual or potential physical harm and, building on an insight from Norbert Elias, we suggest that such violence is both ‘totally familiar yet hardly perceived’ in organizations. We examine how in two major traditions of organization studies, one deriving from Weber and the other from Foucault, violence figures as, respectively, an ‘absent-presence’ and a ‘present-absence’. We then propose that a sensibility towards violence enables the recognition of ‘the blood and bruises’ of organizational life: something present close to home as well as faraway; here and now rather than long ago; and featuring in ‘normal’ organizations as well as in abnormal or exceptional circumstances.
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