Sexuality and organizational analysis—30 years on: Editorial introduction

Sexuality is nothing if not complicated—but that is no excuse for ignoring it. (Burrell, 1984: 113)

Gibson Burrell’s ‘Sex and organizational analysis’, published in Organization Studies in 1984, represented an extremely important contribution to the development of critical management and organization studies. It was based on the application of insights from various disciplinary fields such as sociology, philosophy and social history to the study of sexuality in work organizations. Thirty years on, while sexuality remains a relatively marginal topic in mainstream organization studies, a substantial body of ideas has emerged in more critical quarters representing a flourishing dialogue that, in the spirit of Burrell’s earlier contribution, has stretched across disciplinary boundaries. In recent years, this sub-field has been inspired and influenced particularly by the impact of feminist theory and post-structuralism, as well as insights from queer theory and post-colonialism.

Alongside these important theoretical developments, lived experiences of sexuality within organizations have changed considerably during the last three decades. As consumers and workers our lives are shaped by the ubiquity of organizations and by the centrality of sexuality to our lives; ‘we live, in short, in a sexualized world’ (Hawkes, 2002: 1). With the economies of most contemporary market societies being supported by thriving sex industries and sexualized modes of commercial exchange, sexuality has arguably never been so controlled, commodified and commercialized. An ever-expanding range of goods and services are provided and consumed through the invocation of sexual imagery within what Rachel Cohen and colleagues (2013: 3) have described as ‘the body/sex/work nexus’—the labour processes, workplace relations and struggles over regulation and resistance that together constitute intimate, embodied and sexualized forms of labour. Within this nexus, sexual harassment, violence and sexually based forms of discrimination and abuse continue to shape many people’s lives within organizations. The co-existence of exploitative and oppressive views on what is normal and natural in relation to sexuality, and the impact of these on how sexuality is organized and experienced within organizational settings, suggest the persistence of fears and anxieties about, as well as a hierarchical ordering of, expressions of sexual desire. At the same time, however, protective legislation combined with changing social attitudes, a strengthening of political capacities and important developments in communication and information technologies that have facilitated community building and social networking mean that, in some contexts and for some groups, organizations have become more sexually diverse, open places than a generation or so ago. In both respects, and reflecting a ‘historical convergence of empirical, policy, political, theoretical, technological, spatial and indeed personal concerns’ (Hearn, 2011: 299), sexuality has arguably, for better or for worse, never been so organized.

The apparent naturalness of sex may suggest that its meaning is fixed and stable, shared and unproblematic but, as the various contributions to this issue indicate, this is far from the case when we begin to consider both the organization of sexuality—its categorization, classification and hierarchical ordering—and the sexuality of organization—the lived experience and management of sexuality within and through organizational settings. What the various contributions to this special issue remind us of is the importance of connecting these two dimensions, an analytical relationship opened up within organization studies by Burrell (1984) and colleagues’ (Hearn et al., 1989; also Hearn and Parkin, 1987/1995) dialectical understanding of sexuality as a site of control and resistance. Indeed, the dialectical emphasis on sexuality as a ‘frontier’ advocated in ‘Sex and organizational analysis’ has been reflected in many subsequent attempts to make sense of the relationship between sexuality and organization over the past 30 years or so. These have sought to emphasize the centrality of sexuality to organizational power relations in all their many forms. As Fleming (2007: 239) has noted in this respect, ‘following Burrell’s landmark analysis of sexuality and organization, a good deal of the discussion has been couched in terms of power, control and resistance’. It is this complex mélange of power, control and resistance, exclusion and over-inclusion that continues both to fascinate and to elude organizational scholars, and which means that sexuality remains a central if relatively neglected aspect of organizational lives and processes.

Inter-disciplinary and iconoclastic in its orientation, Organization has played a crucial role in expanding the field of organization studies, providing an often ground-breaking context within which to explore themes and ideas that have traditionally been unheeded or negated by mainstream research in the field, including a concern with the relationship between sexuality and organization. Continuing this tradition, this special issue provides a timely opportunity to reflect on developments in the study and lived experience of sexuality within organizations over the past three decades. It also provides a provocative forum within which to anticipate possible future developments in organizational forms, policies and practices, as well as to map out potential conceptual, methodological and theoretical directions in the study of sexuality and organizations. In what follows we introduce Gibson Burrell’s preface to the issue, which discusses the genesis of his 1984 article and its development and reception, insists on the continuing ‘centrality of sex to the organization and not just to its individual membership’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313) and makes a number of connections to the articles in the issue. We then briefly outline the contributions that each of these articles makes, before anticipating possible future directions for sexuality and organization studies.

Gibson’s ‘A book at bedtime’ begins with him noticing a book called Love Locked Out about life in medieval monasteries whilst browsing in a public library in Lancaster in the early 1980s. As he recounts, he drove back to the library later that same day being unable to get the book out of his mind because, as he says, it was ‘about a form of organizational life of which I knew nothing’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313). He borrowed it, began to read more widely around the subject and this eventually led to an article being presented at a Sociology seminar at Lancaster University—one attended only by men. Gibson also alerts us along the way to the very different political culture of university life in the early 1980s—one in which the publish or perish culture had yet to take hold and where ‘one worked on papers out of excitement—not a sense of careerist duty’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313). He comments that the process of getting the article published in Organization Studies was fairly straightforward but that a ‘naming and shaming’ process commenced shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, these accusations of ‘something akin to priapism’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313) on his part have done nothing to deter Gibson from continuing to write, discuss and teach on the sexuality of organization over the last 30 years. He remarks, though, on his simultaneous efforts to disavow his own sexual agency in this regard in the lecture hall in particular. Gibson concludes by emphasizing the importance of ‘the fusion of the personal and the political’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313) in the organization of sexuality and the sexuality of organization, and finally suggests that his own initial contribution was but ‘a single piece of provocation, written in 1984, at the indefatigable behest of a lonely book, sat in a small library, miles from a university’ (Burrell, 2014: 312–313). Naturally we three beg to differ, as what we have said so far about the significance of ‘Sex and organizational analysis’ hopefully exemplifies!

Turning now to the six articles ‘proper’, our first piece, ‘Sexual fetishism in organizations: The case of journal list fetishism’, is by Robert Cluley. As well as being extremely timely in the UK context in particular, since our publication date marks five months into the assessment of all Research Excellence Framework 2014 submissions, Robert’s article turns on the claim that analyses of fetishism in organization studies privilege Marxist commodity fetishism over Freudian sexual fetishism in their argumentation. For him, our academic fetishization of journal ranking lists—such as the one produced by the Association of Business Schools in the UK—provides a useful exemplar of the utility of the Freudian approach. Freud understands fetishism as a process which renders the apparently non-sexual sexual and therefore ‘helps us to explain why people continue to fetishize certain objects even after they have been made aware of the ways those objects are produced and overvalued in particular organizational contexts’ (Cluley, 2014: 314–328). If we favour the Marxist lens on fetishism instead, Robert suggests that we may neglect ‘the active role of fetishists in organizations … [and] the pleasures that fetishists get from their fetish objects’ (Cluley, 2014: 314–328). His close reading of recent scholarly accounts of the fetishization of journal ranking lists argues that such attachments afford a form of auto-erotic pleasure, where we get significant kicks from meeting the demands of the ranking journals during the writing and review process. Nonetheless, at the same time this experience is hung about with ‘self-loathing and guilt’ (Mingers and Willmott, cited in Cluley, 2014: 314–328). Robert’s finely woven and provocative article therefore adds a very intriguing fillip to discussions of our relationships with journal ranking lists.

The second article is ‘Bodyspace at the pub: Sexual “orientations” and organizational space’, by Kathleen Riach and Fiona Wilson. It focuses on the negotiations and contestations of sexuality, space, bodies and service work in a UK pub chain. Kathleen and Fiona observe, first, that the sexuality of organization literature has paid insufficient attention to space and, second, that research on the sexualization of service work tends to downplay how ‘dynamics surrounding sexuality and sexual identity work are constituted by employees in a way that actively shapes space’ (Riach and Wilson, 2014: 329–345). Bodyspace allows us, they suggest, to better understand how sexuality and organization play into and against each other as well as recognizing that the body is ‘both a site and a constitutive element of organizing space’ (Riach and Wilson, 2014: 329–345). Space can thus be approached as something that we do, not purely something that is. Kathleen and Fiona analyse data from qualitative interviews with employees and managers at the chain and from Kathleen’s four month long participant observation in one outlet. Their thematics are drawn from Sara Ahmed’s concept of orientation and include: 1) background, where particular histories and memories conjoin in the contemporary work environment of the pub so that specific kinds of bodily relations became possible; 2) body dwelling, where the alignment of spaces and bodies is influenced by the bodies in situ and 3) lines of directionality, which refers to how bodies are interpellated in particular ways in particular contexts and thus how we become these ‘hailed’ bodies. Their concluding discussion makes a number of important points about how the use of bodyspace and Ahmed’s orientation opens up new vantage points on the sexuality of organization, in particular ones that do not ‘underestimate spaces of activity and negotiation’ (Riach and Wilson, 2014: 329–345).

Next is Katie Sullivan’s ‘With(out) pleasure: Desexualization, gender and sexuality at work’. Like Kathleen and Fiona’s article, this is grounded in ethnographic data and focuses on a service occupation; massage therapy. Katie’s central thesis is that pressures towards organizational desexualization serve to maintain heteronormativity, sexual harassment and discrimination. At the same time, she contends that Burrell’s (1992) re-eroticization thesis—a more recent intervention into the area than ‘Sex and organizational analysis’—needs to be tempered with the recognition that our interpretations of sexuality at work as pleasurable, risky, coercive or instrumental depend on the kind of work that we do and how we think our bodies are evaluated at work. Massage therapy is of course an excellent empirical site in this regard because it is predicated on touch and its settings and props are easily ‘coded’ as sexual (dim lights, candles, clients being both undressed and prone). Katie interviewed male and female therapists and also took part in practical bodywork and ‘professionalization’ classes for therapists. Her analysis reveals the highly contingent nature of desexualization in therapeutic practice and how it turns around gendered bodies. Katie demonstrates that male and female therapists alike reconstruct client sexual displays as evidence of prior sexual abuse (women clients) or as an inappropriate plea for closeness and bodily intimacy not otherwise readily available (men clients). As such the therapists engage in active desexualization—they ‘strip’ their clients of any ‘untainted sexual agency’ (Sullivan, 2014: 346–364, her emphasis). Katie ends with a contrasting account from a female practitioner who acknowledges male desire explicitly in her sessions. In instances where a man requests that she masturbate him to ejaculation, say, this therapist gently declines on the basis that she chooses not to, and as a result ‘broadens the discursive repertoire of professionalism … by allowing for sexuality (her own sexual agency included) to be part of the session’ (Sullivan, 2014: 346–364). As Katie argues, this tactic allows us to shift attention away from how sexuality is professionalized (i.e. disavowed on the part of both clients and practitioners) and towards questions about how professionals might relate to others and themselves as sexual beings.

Our fourth contribution, ‘Gay men in the performing arts: Performing sexualities within “gay-friendly” work contexts’, is by Nick Rumens and John Broomfield. This article asks ‘if and how work contexts understood as “gay-friendly” can be characterized as exhibiting a serious breakdown in heteronormativity’ (Rumens and Broomfield, 2014: 365–382). Whilst acknowledging that ‘it is currently possible to identify gay-friendly places of work in specific ways that were impossible or improbable decades earlier’ (Rumens and Broomfield, 2014: 365–382), Nick and John seek to open up the concept of ‘gay-friendly’ via the lens of queer theory to ask how environments such as the performing arts are experienced by—in this instance—gay men. Moreover, they enquire as to whether organizational sexualities in this sector continue to turn around a fixed and homogenizing heterosexual/homosexual binary, and arrive in the main at a conclusion which indicates just how resilient heteronormativity is, even in contexts such as these. Nick and John are interested in how the social dynamics of the performing arts reinforce, subvert or undermine a hegemony which positions ‘normal’/‘acceptable’ homosexuality as in essence ‘just like’ heterosexuality. This is so as to offer a ‘corrective’, in their words, to the assumption that ‘gay-friendly’ refers to genuinely progressive, not to say radically diverse workplaces. Their interview-based study also offers insights into the performing arts per se for organization studies scholars, as a site which has not merited much attention from our discipline. Nick and John’s qualitative interviews with gay male performers and female casting agents focus on drama school, castings and backstage interactions. Their study, whilst absolutely not suggesting that gay male performers are somehow passive in all of these interactions and dynamics, does ‘foreground the struggles, decisions and actions taken … as they make a living as a professional performer amid the competing demands they are subject to in terms of how they must manage the performance of sexuality in specific work contexts’ (Rumens and Broomfield, 2014: 365–382). Moreover, it lays the groundwork for further research into specific sexualities in a range of ‘gay-friendly’ work environments, to ascertain the persistence of heteronormativity in this regard.

Steven Courtney’s ‘Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders’ is the fifth article in the issue. It sits neatly alongside Nick and John’s article as its empirical, interview-based focus is on individuals who self-define as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and it makes extensive use of queer theory. Steven’s analysis also offers a fascinating complement to Nick and John’s argument because it revolves around the ways in which five English school leaders, all of whom identify in more or less ‘essentialist’ ways as gay, lesbian or bisexual, may ‘nonetheless succeed in disrupting heternormativity despite claiming identity labels which may reify and reproduce the constructed binaries underpinning it’ (Courtney, 2014: 383–399). As Steven also suggests, however, the project he presents here is a profoundly challenging one given that queer theory might be seen to question the very existence of groups such as gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people, and when important political gains have been made on the basis of the recognition of sexually minoritarian, stable identities. He works through this issue for his own empirics by clarifying his own position, whereby he treats queer not as a category but rather as ‘moments of transgression, non-normative aspects of identity of practices which subvert heteronormativity in some way without denying the personal validity and usefulness of my participants’ identity categories’ (Courtney, 2014: 383–399, his emphasis). As such Steven identifies the possibility of the inadvertently queer school leader, where leadership produces queer outcomes. His carefully crafted argument concludes with a series of claims around where the analysis might take us next, including the suggestion that ‘Not only the leaders, nor even leadership, but its dialectic counterpart followership is inadvertently queered’ (Courtney, 2014: 383–399) in his study.

‘Sexualities, organizations and organization sexualities: Future scenarios and the impact of socio-technologies (a transnational perspective from the Global “North”)’, by Jeff Hearn, rounds out the issue. Jeff’s tour de force is, we feel, most appropriately placed at the end of the issue because of its substantive analysis of what might be yet to come. He opens by reviewing studies of sexuality within organizational settings since the 1970s, arguing that these studies have contributed to important empirical, theoretical and conceptual developments in our understanding of what constitutes organization sexuality. Based on these insights, Jeff maps out four possible future scenarios for the ways in which intersections between gender and sexuality are both understood and experienced: a hyper-patriarchy scenario in which men and women become more divergent, with greater inequality as the consequence; a late capitalist scenario, in which genders become more convergent, with greater inequality; a bi-polar scenario, in which genders become more divergent, with greater equality and finally a postgender scenario, in which genders become more convergent, with greater equality. Somewhat similar possibilities are mapped out for intersections between gender, sexuality and organization sexualities, with another four possible scenarios being discussed by Jeff. These are characterized, respectively, as heteropatriarchies, late capitalist sexual, sexual differentiation and sexual blurring scenarios. The article also maps these possible future scenarios onto the combined impacts of globalization, transnationalizations and ICTs and other socio-technologies, considering the consequences of these developments for organizational sexual politics, including the problematization of our very understanding of ‘what sexuality is’ (Hearn, 2014: 400–420, his emphasis). And here Jeff opens the way, 30 years after Burrell’s (1984) article, for us to take our understanding and lived experience of sexuality and organization in new directions.

Of course Burrell’s original article was not only notable for its focus on sexuality and organizational analysis: it also signalled a shift towards the poststructural turn in management and organizational analysis in the UK and the eventual founding of Organization itself (Mills and Helms Mills, 2013). Without wishing to privilege poststructuralist analysis as the lens on sexuality and organization, it can nevertheless be argued that it has served to open up questions of sexuality that had hitherto been under-theorized—buried as ‘it’ was in various realist accounts that essentialized and in the process ignored sexuality. Gender, let alone sexuality, was neglected across different paradigms of management thinking (cf Hearn and Parkin, 1983, 1987/1995) and it was arguably the growing interest in poststructuralism, providing new ways of viewing gendered and sexual relations, that marked out Burrell’s work and indeed that of Kathy Ferguson (1984), published the same year. That said, traces of poststructuralist thought are evident throughout our six contributions, but not exclusively so. The passage of time has allowed for what Ferguson (1984) called a ‘strategic borrowing’ of poststructuralist concepts that are drawn upon in varying degrees in our articles. In short, these are theoretically more diverse than perhaps we as guest editors expected and consequently serve to further open up debate across the various critical traditions within management and organization studies. In the process the contributions take us into the field of the still under-studied: ‘sex’ work, sexual orientation and identity work, the role of globalization and context, but also less obvious fields of psychoanalytical notions of fetishism.

Inevitably, there are also a number of areas of debate left untouched; in large part this is to do with the limits of space and research opportunities but also perhaps because of the images and practices that continue to be evoked by the idea of sexuality. Five years after the publication of ‘Sex and organizational analysis’ Gibson Burrell and Jeff Hearn (1989: 1) were noting that, regardless of increasing attention to gender at work, there ‘still is a silence on sexuality’. We sincerely hope that this special issue does not serve to create a false sense that sexuality has now been ‘done’ and can be put in a box for another 30 years. As all our contributors have ably demonstrated, sexuality remains a profoundly powerful and dynamic in organizational life.

In closing we would like to extend sincere thanks to Martin Parker, Craig Prichard and Robyn Thomas, the former and current co-editors of Organization, for their ongoing support in, first, accepting our proposal for the issue and, second, during the process of its compilation. Jill Meadows, Organization’s editorial assistant, has likewise been invaluable in advising us along the way, and gently reminding us of deadlines and so on—thank you, Jill! We are also very grateful to the many anonymous reviewers who turned round their reports within the especially demanding parameters of a special issue timetable, and always provided constructive and helpful feedback for our authors and for us in the process. Finally, very many thanks to our eight authors, not only for their excellent articles but also for bearing with us through the 20 months or so between our original submission date and the issue being published—clichéd it may be, but we quite literally could not have done it without you!