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Abstract

This ‘Speaking Out’ essay contributes to debates over Brexit and populism by suggesting how we, as management and organisation studies scholars, might approach ‘org-studying’ Brexit. First, as UK-based European Union citizens working in UK business schools, we clarify our own position(s) in relation to Brexit. Second, we position ourselves more specifically as management and organisation studies academics by considering how we might begin to analyse the organisational consequences of Brexit through seeing it as part of a continuing global crisis – or series of crises – including and going beyond those affecting American and European societies and economies, as well as their political and other social fields and organisations. We highlight the salience of emotions with regard to Brexit, and in particular ressentiment in relation to populism as a political methodology. We also note the importance of identity and how political and personal identities are being reconstituted in the United Kingdom in light of the Brexit vote. We put forward suggestions for how management and organisation studies scholars might integrate these insights into an overarching approach to researching the organisational consequences of Brexit based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Gisèle Sapiro on the transposition of crisis. Our final remarks address the way that Brexit crisis continues to challenge our own established identities.

Keywords

Academic identities Bourdieu Brexit crisis emotional landscape emotional zeitgeist emotions in organisations identities in organisations

All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing … All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing … All across the country, things got nasty. All across the country, nobody spoke about it. All across the country, nobody spoke about anything else. All across the country, racist bile was general. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the have and have nots stayed the same. (Ali Smith, Autumn, 2016)

Introduction

The past 5 years in the United Kingdom have been a period marked by a number of referendums and elections, including the ‘Brexit’ vote (June 2016), the Article 50 notification (March 2017) and the ‘snap’ 2017 UK General Election that resulted in a hung parliament. In this article, we take the opportunity to reflect on the relevance to management and organisation studies (MOS) of the decision – taken through a majority vote of 51.89% – that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. The reflections we present are informed by our professional identification as well as our personal views, observations and experiences. We are MOS academics but more importantly, we are citizens and employees. We work and live in Britain and are worried about what has been happening in this country – not least because of our strong commitment to the project of a United Europe and to our political position as ‘remainers’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given our own scholarly interests and political beliefs, ever since the pre-Brexit referendum campaign, we have been preoccupied by following the unfolding Brexit process, paying particular attention to its potential effects on organisations based in the United Kingdom. Consequently, we have been trying to familiarise ourselves with as much information, as many opinions and speculations as possible to understand better what is going on, and how Brexit has been influencing and is going to continue to influence organisations and those working in them. This ‘Speaking Out’ article constitutes an attempt on our part to put forward suggestions for MOS researchers – including ourselves – for studying the organisational consequences of ‘Brexit’.

Already, the Brexit process is producing a broad range of effects on organisations and individuals: workers, volunteers, activists, students – in other words, all citizens – and the economy. These impacts are widening, deepening and diversifying (e.g. BBC, 2018; CIPD, 2018; Institute for Employment Studies, 2018; KPMG, 2017; Major, 2018; Musaddique, 2017; The Economist, 2017). Such changes present MOS scholars with a duty to study Brexit, while simultaneously posing an important challenge: how do we start to research, conceptualise and shape this wide, complex phenomenon in the making, and the subsequent crises which may ensue?

The Brexit debate

We have followed journalistic and academic blogs (e.g. Chris Grey, David Allen Green, Steve Peers, Frances Coppola and Adam Tooze) and twitter feeds (e.g. Ian Dunt, Stephen Bush, ‘Simeon Stylites’ and Prof. Tanja Bueltmann), as well as the emerging academic literature on the topic. Two basic perspectives can be found in the academic papers and books published to date. These are summed up by Blyth and Matthijs (2017) as first, a macro, structural perspective and second, a cultural identity perspective. The first of these argues that phenomena such as the Brexit referendum result, the election of Donald Trump as US president and similar ‘populist’ political movements are symptomatic of what Mark Blyth calls ‘global Trumpism’. These populist movements can be seen as socio-political reactions to the post-2008 crisis of neoliberalism that both revealed and exacerbated the unsolved contradictions inherent in the economics of globalisation. As a populist movement, then, Brexit can be understood as a response to the structural causes of insecurity, including debt and wage suppression, and the growth of inequality and precarity within capitalist economies (Piketty, 2014; Tooze, 2018).

From the perspective of cultural identity, reactionary populism (Fraser, 2017) is considered the political expression and mobilisation of ressentiment (Weber, 1996 [1922], drawing on Nietzsche, 1994 [1887]). Ressentiment as a concept designates a feeling of powerlessness that permeates certain social groups (Bourdieu, 2016; Brown, 1993), be it the underprivileged – in which case the group members will have a sense that their increasingly precarious economic status is threatened by invasive ‘outsiders’ – or be it the relatively privileged, who feel that they are being unjustly denied their rightful position of socio-cultural dominance due to a perceived dual cultural threat from alien ‘others’ and the machinations of unaccountable ‘elites’. As a social process, then, ressentiment is directed against two discursively constructed categories of people: the liberal, metropolitan, transnational ‘elites’, and ‘immigrants’.

Therefore, in terms of Brexit, we can argue that ressentiment, understood as a powerful festering shared emotion, was used by the Leave movement’s strategists to mobilise the votes of two different fractions of society: (1) members of the traditional working class who feel themselves economically deprived and ‘left behind’ (see, for example, Pettifor, 2017) by de-industrialisation and financialisation (ascribed to globalisation as promoted by economic elites) and (2) the relatively economically privileged who feel that (what they perceive as) their ‘native, white’ social and cultural dominance (Demir, 2017; Golec de Zavala et al., 2017) has been threatened by ‘multiculturalism’ in the form of an influx of people speaking different languages, eating different foods and following different religions. According to the cultural identity perspective then, the negative feelings associated with ressentiment emerge as racist and xenophobic attitudes among members of these predominantly White English groups which, in turn, have been translated into tangible actions with tangible consequences.

Both mainstream media and academic sources report on and analyse such actions in the context of Brexit. For example, while racism and xenophobia have always been present in British society (see, for example, Nairn, 1970 on the career of right-wing politician Enoch Powell), Brexit seems to have re-legitimised and amplified the expression of such feelings and behaviours associated with them, leading to a significant increase in different forms of abuse and attacks on foreign-looking and foreign-language speaking UK residents in all walks of public life including workplaces (e.g. BBC, 2017; Khalili, 2017; Sime, 2018; Virdee and McGeever, 2018).

On the other hand, there is also evidence of strong feelings against racism and xenophobia post the Brexit referendum and mobilisation of efforts to counter such forces by a large number of British residents. This is exemplified by campaigns and movements such as the 3 Million, In Limbo and the work of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. To us, this points to the need to find an analytical framework that brings together the structural and cultural perspectives and that we can use to highlight the importance of emotions and identities in the context of Brexit – a theme we return to below, as we put forward proposals regarding the possible directions for ‘org-studying’ Brexit.

The importance of ‘org-studying’ Brexit

Brexit, a complex and multi-faceted social and political phenomenon, will have more long-term effects on workplaces, the people within them and on the nature of management and organisations within the United Kingdom than any other single event in recent history. As MOS scholars – regardless of whether we self-identify as ‘leavers’ or ‘remainers’ – we need to engage in the important task of studying these issues. We must build a deep and rich understanding of how Brexit and reactions to it have and will influence management and organisations, and strive through our research to make a positive impact on the nature of – and on managing and organising within – the (post-)Brexit workplace. In this regard, our task involves, for example, the exploration of how employees, managers, entrepreneurs, professional groups and organisations make sense of and respond to Brexit-related changes, and manoeuvre effectively within the emerging environment. Such studies also need to include how workers, volunteers, activists and students – in particular in the case of higher education – as well as wider community members are affected by the actions of organisations and organising processes in the context of Brexit.

Our challenge as scholars is also to examine the interconnections within and between the different levels at which Brexit manifests itself – for example, through examining the link between the decline of civic engagement in the United Kingdom, the feelings of ressentiment and powerlessness that have contributed to the conjuncture of Brexit and the ways in which these phenomena influence organisational cultures and interpersonal relationships in all types of workplaces and organisations. It is, in addition, necessary for MOS researchers to consider possible future scenarios in relation to Brexit and its impact on management and organisations, and to develop ways of addressing the multi-faceted organisational and societal consequences of Brexit as they unfold.

Below, we put forward recommendations for how we might approach the study of Brexit and suggest exploring its complexities through applying approaches which have been gaining currency among MOS scholars as offering rich and nuanced insights into organisations, individuals and groups within them, and the broader society. In particular, we call for developing ways for studying Brexit by seeking inspiration from Bourdieu’s thinking on crisis, enriched by insights from research into emotions and identities in organisations, to develop an understanding of the interconnected impacts of Brexit on society, organisations and people within them.

Org-studying the emotions of Brexit

As the Brexit referendum approached in June 2016, the Leave and Remain campaigns strove to mobilise votes using a rhetoric constructed to appeal to the electorate as a whole, or targeted at key sub-groups, identified by opinion surveys and focus groups as particularly open to influence. While both campaigns drew on a mixture of ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ arguments, the rhetoric of the Leave campaign framed reasons to vote against the continuation of Britain’s membership in the EU to a large extent through an emotive rhetoric that resonated with the ‘gut feelings’ of many who were inclined to vote ‘leave’. It articulated ideas about the allegedly negative impact of migration on the economy and society, expressing feelings of ressentiment towards foreign ‘others’, and framing the British workers as victims of the EU expansion. This was exemplified by the stereotype of European migrants taking jobs away from the British people, calls for ‘taking back control’ and regaining ‘autonomy’ and the notion that EU membership is a drain on the National Health Service (NHS) and the main reason behind wage stagnation (e.g. Lee, 2016; Reynolds, 2016; Vote Leave, 2016).

By contrast, the Remain campaign’s rhetoric was not built around an appeal to voters’ positive emotions about the EU and a wish for the United Kingdom to remain part of it¹ (Korski, 2016), but rather on inciting fear of the economic consequences of leaving. For example, pro-‘remain’ messages did not try to evoke in the British people a sense of relief, joy and appreciation that thanks to the EU the country has not experienced a war on its territory since the end of World War II, that democracy has advanced throughout Europe and that thanks to EU legislation worker protection rights have been gained by workers in Britain (e.g. Behr, 2016; Cave, 2016; Jackson et al., 2016). Rather, the Remain campaign deployed mainly an appeal to ‘factual’ and ‘rational economic’ arguments that demonstrated the potentially negative consequences of Britain’s leaving the EU, especially in terms of its economic impacts (e.g. Cabinet Office, 2016; Cassidy, 2016; The Economist, 2016).

The approach adopted in the Leave campaign’s rhetoric, that is, an attempt to directly connect with how ‘ordinary people’ feel, without much concern about ensuring that the arguments used would come across as ‘rational’ and ‘evidence-based’, was a typical example of a populist argumentation (Krämer, 2017). Populism, after all, is often openly anti-intellectual in its claims (Bourdieu, 2016; White, 1962). Therefore, in the case of the Brexit referendum, adopting a predominantly emotions-laden rhetoric was a skilful strategy that resonated with sections of a public whose factual knowledge about the EU and Britain’s status within it was in any case very low (e.g. Elgot, 2016; Hix, 2015; Peck, 2016). As such, British voters were more likely to respond to an argumentation that focused primarily on how they felt – and that promised that they would feel better as a consequence of casting their vote in a particular way – rather than on building on what they knew as far as ‘facts’ were concerned.

If we accept that the decision to leave was, to a large extent, a response to a rhetoric that drew on people’s emotions, then what follows is a need to consider Brexit as an emotional phenomenon that has affected the British electorate, regardless of whether they voted to ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ – and one that, by extension, will continue to exert a strong emotional impact on people and their identities, both in the broader society and in organisations. We, therefore, suggest including ideas about emotions and identities in organisations, stemming from a body of literature that has its roots in the recognition that emotions infuse all aspects of social life (Fineman, 2003; McCarthy, 1994; Solomon, 1993), in our proposed framework for researching the organisational consequences of Brexit.

Org-studying the Brexit crisis

As we have argued above, Brexit has been exerting a significant emotional impact on people, be it ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ voters, as well as those who – like those Europeans living in the United Kingdom who do not hold British citizenship – were unable to vote and yet have been personally affected by the referendum result. In this sense, Brexit can be seen as a crisis and a source of emotional shock for individuals. Indeed, in the context of Brexit, references to crisis and shock are also appropriate in relation to aspects other than emotions. According to Tooze (2018), the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was the initial spark that set off a decade-long series of economic, social and political shocks of which Brexit is but one. If that is the case, then it might be argued that the original abdication of responsibility by MOS scholars in general and critical management studies (CMS) scholars in particular was a failure to adequately address the causes and effects of the GFC in relation to leaders, managers and organisations (a point made with some force by Tourish, 2015).

This failure might suggest that CMS scholars now have an even greater responsibility to engage critically with Brexit and other forms of contemporary Euro-American populism, both as to how such movements are organised politically and as to their effects within organisations – alongside whatever political engagement each individual thinks appropriate. Such an understanding requires us to draw on interdisciplinary resources in developing an overall theoretical approach that situates the conflicting emotions roiling around Brexit within organisations and in relation to both economic and cultural forces. To do this, we propose a relational and structured model that draws more widely on the social sciences. One way forward here would be to work with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) approach to crisis analysis as developed by Gisèle Sapiro (2013, 2014) and to combine it with relevant work on emotions and identities in organisations.

Calls to extend Bourdieusian approaches in critical management and organisation studies have led to a growing literature on topics such as organisations and crisis (e.g. Kerr and Robinson, 2012), the accounting profession (e.g. Spence and Carter, 2014), elites (e.g. Maclean et al., 2014), management education (e.g. Vaara and Faÿ, 2012), management control (e.g. Kamoche et al., 2014), gender and leadership (Elliott and Stead, 2018), language (Śliwa and Johansson, 2015) and architecture, symbolic power and space (Kerr and Robinson, 2016). Such studies have employed the full range of Bourdieusian concepts: field, forms of capital, habitus, symbolic violence and so on. In light of this growing body of work, we suggest that Bourdieu’s conceptual framework provides a way of beginning to make sense of the historical moment of Brexit that we are living through.

Likewise, there is by now a rich body of literature addressing emotions and identities from an MOS perspective. For example, of relevance to our analysis of Brexit is existing work that considers how processes of identity construction are influenced by emotions (e.g. Brown, 2015; Jenkins, 2008; Sturdy et al., 2006) and that draws attention to the way in which challenging situations present a threat to an individual’s socially constructed identity, giving rise to a range of negative emotions including anger, anxiety and worry (e.g. Ibarra and Petriglieri, 2007; Thomas and Linstead, 2002). Also, importantly for our analysis, MOS scholars have studied the emotional impact of actual and expected shifts to careers and roles, such as uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, irritability, shock and a sense of vulnerability (e.g. Ibarra and Petriglieri, 2007; LaPointe, 2013; Muhr, 2012; Pullen, 2006; Raghuram, 2013) as well as, by contrast, excitement and enjoyment (Empson, 2013).

The proposed approach to researching Brexit and populism has a number of benefits. For example, Bourdieu’s (2012) analytical concept the field of power allows us to distance ourselves from the strategic uses of ‘elite’ in populist discourse and makes possible a more differentiated analysis of socio-economic power and where it lies in the nexus of media ownership, politics and money in the United Kingdom. In addition, Bourdieu’s concept of the political field enables us to analyse how political positions, dispositions and manoeuvrings have been driven by wider socio-economic crises in the wake of the GFC. This in turn allows us to question the utility of ‘populism’ as an analytical concept, given its widespread use as a political and cultural weapon, and to suggest instead that populism is better understood as a political methodology operationalised by demagogues to mobilise forms of ressentiment.

In developing Bourdieu’s approach to crisis analysis, we draw in particular on Sapiro (2013, 2014). In her studies of the historical-empirical case of France in the 1940s, Sapiro shows how the external shock of French military defeat and German occupation in 1940 constituted a crisis of national identity that transposed into a crisis in the political field that allowed the formation of the right-wing Vichy regime. This crisis then transposed into the literary field with the ascent of Vichy-supporting authors and their associated infrastructure of publishers and journals.

Applied to Brexit, Sapiro’s approach to crisis enables us, as MOS scholars, to research Brexit and its consequences systematically as, first, economic and social crisis (macro level); then as transposed into the field level (meso level) as a crisis of organised politics; and finally, as transposed and experienced at the individual and interpersonal level, as a crisis of individual identities and interpersonal relationships (micro level). This approach allows us to develop an understanding of the crisis as dynamic and unfolding and specifically requires an understanding of the interrelations between levels of analysis. In this way, we can track how the initial external economic shock of the GFC has been and continues to be transposed across society and the social fields of which it is comprised (such as politics, banking and finance, health care and higher education; for some implications of Brexit for CMS, see Grey, 2018 in this journal).

Following this model, then, at macro level, Brexit was a conjuncture that brought together various structural forces – demographic changes, economic crisis and globalisation – that, as we noted above, contributed to the spread of economic and cultural insecurity (Tooze, 2018). However, public understanding of these macroprocesses and structures depends, in part, on how these processes are interpreted and classified by ‘producers of the discursive representation of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 2016: 1074). These experts include academics and policy entrepreneurs whose ‘neutral’, euphemised classifications, such as ‘somewheres and anywheres’ (Goodhart, 2017), or ‘the left behind’, are translated into the public sphere as values- and emotions-laden group and individual identities (‘citizens of nowhere’ or ‘immigrants’).

Furthermore, the idea of the ‘left-behind’ has been racialised as ‘the white working class’, a categorisation that redefines class as a racial category and in so doing disregards the 75% of voters of colour – most of whom might be considered working class – who voted to ‘remain’ (Emejulu, 2016; see also the critique of the ‘white working class’ concept by Bhambra, 2017). Such discursive constructions which euphemise powerful social forces (Bourdieu, 1996) can be used by politicians, their strategists and their media allies in the field of power to mobilise populations by appealing to their emotions. The fact that membership of the EU guarantees freedom of movement for all EU citizens meant that EU citizens in the United Kingdom could not be categorised and controlled as ‘immigrants’, and the presence of EU citizens was used to capitalise on ressentiment, to market emotions and to construct threats to nativist social identities.

The macro social and economic crisis was then transposed into sets of field-specific crises. In the political field, to counter the right-wing threat from United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the Conservative government promised to reduce immigration into the United Kingdom to fewer than 100,000 per year (Grierson, 2018). This policy, operationalised as the so-called ‘hostile environment’,² was introduced in 2012 and overseen by Theresa May as Home Secretary. It involved sending vans with ‘go home or face arrest’ on the side into sensitive areas, and enrolling landlords, employers and others to limit immigrants’ access to work, housing, health care, bank accounts and so on.³ Agents in these fields were forced to be the equivalent of border guards.

This provides evidence of how agents in the political field both contribute to the perpetuation of a structural xenophobia, a sort of emotional Zeitgeist compounded of fear, ressentiment and insecurity, and to its transposition into social fields and into wider society. Fields are also emotional landscapes, and mobilisation of the emotional Zeitgeist was central to the political decision to call a referendum, to the Brexit campaign (in the course of which Labour MP Jo Cox was assassinated), and, post-Brexit, has continued to metastasise in the form of political and press campaigns against ‘citizens of nowhere’, the ‘elite’, ‘cosmopolitans’ and so on. The derogatory connotations of these categorisations and the feelings of contempt and resentment towards those to whom these labels are applied draw our attention to the importance of classification struggles and the imposition of identity as a form of symbolic violence.

We can also see how emotion operates, first, at the macro level in the form of a general emotional Zeitgeist, and then at a meso level as collective feelings mobilised and directed against those identified as minority groups. This is where we can next extend the Bourdieu/Sapiro analysis of Brexit into the study of the everyday life of organisations by bringing in the consideration of emotions in relation to individuals and relationships. In doing so, we contribute to a theoretical enrichment and empirical applicability of Bourdieu’s work, which has previously been criticised for under-theorising emotions and eliding the more nuanced effects of emotions and identities at individual and group level (see, for example, Reay, 2015).

By incorporating emotions and identities into an overall Bourdieusian approach we should, as organisation scholars, be able to explore how Brexit is transposed from macro to meso level and experienced at micro level. Here, we can use emotions and extend the role of identities in applying the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 2016), understood as the learned social dispositions that allow us to operate as embodied individuals in the familiar and shared everyday world and in the various fields in which we are professionally invested (Bourdieu calls this investment illusio). Research at this level can also show how our social trajectory – our history – is embodied in habitus as bodily hexis (Bourdieu, 1980; Kerr and Robinson, 2009): that is, in our physical being, the durable ways we present ourselves physically and interact with others, including everyday gestures, ways of standing, speaking and walking. Habitus also incorporates ways of thinking (oedos) and valuing (ethos) (Bourdieu, 1984 ); however, it does not – or not explicitly – deal with emotions, understood as ways of feeling and relating to the world. Focusing on emotions and identities at micro level would add depth and insight to complement the macro and meso level analyses, contributing a fine-grained understanding of how Brexit is experienced by individuals in their everyday lives, how Brexit is affecting their official identity and personal sense of identity (professional, personal and political) and what their planned and imagined futures may be.

The related concept of hysteresis (Bourdieu, 1980; Kerr and Robinson, 2009) helps explain the consequences of meso level shock (i.e. field level) at the micro level (i.e. the habitus, which links the meso and micro levels). In this context, the hysteresis effect relates to a crisis of individual and collective identity – evoking a sense of disconnection between the individual and the no-longer familiar everyday social world, in situations when social identities are changed by powerful external forces (to, for example, ‘immigrant’), resulting in feelings of disorientation, loss, grief and rage that can result at the organisational level in accommodation, resistance, withdrawal or exit.

Crisis disrupts familiar interpretations of the world and established social identities. It affects how individuals feel and act, both in their private and working lives. It makes the political (painfully) personal: in the context of Brexit and in relation to you as an EU citizen in the United Kingdom, it may make you modify your bodily hexis and your day-to-day behaviour. For example, you may decide not to draw attention to yourself as ‘foreign’, be it at work, in the street or, if you are a student, in the educational institution you attend. You may do this through opting to self-censor your speech by not speaking in your first language in public (see, for example, Forrest, 2018). This is because, on the streets and in other public places, EU citizens risk being subjected to individual acts of aggression on the grounds of their ‘foreignness’. The Brexit campaign and the referendum result have licensed the extension of racism and xenophobia to include more citizens as alien ‘others’. This, in turn, has affected all types of organisations, including workplaces. Colleagues might have become less open and more suspicious towards each other; some might have decided – or will decide – to leave UK-based organisations, in order to live and work in the EU.

This example of Bourdieusian analysis shows how social and economic changes at the macro level can be interpreted and imposed as a ‘vision of the world’ at meso level, disrupting social fields and how this transposition has further effects at the micro level. For how to do this, we might look at the example of La misère du monde (Bourdieu, 1993), in which Bourdieu and his associates present a research project that, through interviews and social analyses, demonstrates the ramifying effects of neoliberal economic policies on the everyday lives of individuals.

Of course, we recognise the complexities involved in conducting research at macro, meso and micro levels. However, we argue that the approach outlined in this article provides us with a theoretical orientation, an initial guide to an understanding of the social world, one that will allow organisational scholars to ground investigations into these ongoing multi-level crises. Org-studying Brexit, then, could build a theoretical space that brings together the recently popular among MOS scholars Bourdieusian approaches with the growing literature on emotions and identities in organisations. This might also allow MOS scholars to track the mobilisation of ressentiment (what we have called the emotional Zeitgeist) in the rise of populism as a political methodology and its effects in and on organisations in contemporary Europe and the United States. Specifically in the United Kingdom, we might look at the reconfiguration of politics around, and the emotional investment in, new emerging identity formations, that may in turn contribute to a reorientation of the political field by social and political movements campaigning for the cancellation of Brexit or, failing that, campaigning to rejoin the EU.

Final remarks

A scholar’s duty is not only to conduct research that is relevant and meaningful to society. It is also to speak out from a position that recognises that academia is part of this society, and that neither the academic field nor the identities of academics are insulated from broader social phenomena, shocks and crises. Brexit, as no other recent event in the United Kingdom, proves this point. The referendum result has caused a shock and crisis within the entire academic field and has led to politicisation of individual academics’ identities along the ‘leaver’/‘remainer’ divide (for example, our clearly stated position as ‘remainers’), which is part of how Brexit is being transposed into the academic field. It has also given rise to complex and often intense emotions that, as with members of other organisations in the United Kingdom, impact academics as university employees and managers. These newly politicised academic identities and intensified emotions also influence how MOS researchers perceive society as the subject of their study, including their own contributions to the classification struggles outlined above.

In this article, we have suggested how UK-based MOS academics might – as scholars – begin to engage with Brexit as a process that they are forced to undergo: an understanding of how Brexit, while a highly emotional phenomenon, might be situated as one crisis in an ongoing series of economic, social, political and personal crises from the GFC onward and how we might begin to track these circuits of emotions and identities that contribute to forming and reforming field and habitus – showing how identities are constructed, coercively imposed and emotionally resisted.

We are calling for ‘org-studying’ Brexit not because we see it as an ‘academic’ issue, in the colloquial sense of the term, but because it is the most impactful, worrying and painful event we have encountered in Europe in our lifetimes; one that will continue to influence us all: as engaged citizens, members of organisations, scholars and – above all – human beings. Truly ‘taking back control’ – as the Leave campaign slogan would urge us to – would necessitate taking seriously the democratic deficit, not just in formal politics, but in our everyday lives. Let’s study Brexit then, and in so doing try to minimise – and perhaps even reverse – the damage done by Brexit to us, our organisations and society.

Footnotes

Notes

ORCID iD

Martyna Śliwa

Author biographies

Ron Kerr is senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Business School. His research focuses on the applications of Pierre’ Bourdieu’s ideas in the context of leadership and organisations.

Martyna Śliwa is professor at the University of Essex. Her research addresses different aspects of the interconnections between macro-level socioeconomic phenomena and everyday experiences of members of organisations.

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When the political becomes (painfully) personal: Org-studying the consequences of Brexit

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The Brexit debate

The importance of ‘org-studying’ Brexit

Org-studying the emotions of Brexit

Org-studying the Brexit crisis

Final remarks

Footnotes

Notes

ORCID iD

Author biographies

References