The value of voices: Crip challenges in speech impairment and organizational accountability

Abstract

This article examines how organizational accountability creates disabling conditions for speech-impaired workers. While accountability is often assumed to be a neutral principle of recognition and responsibility, we show how it privileges fluency and phononormativity, marginalizing those who communicate differently. Using a combination of sensory ethnography, interviews and analysis of technological devices, we explore how speech-impaired workers navigate accountability through assistive technologies, artificial voices, and human-nonhuman coalitions. Drawing on crip theory and its understanding of the cyborg, we identify three crip challenges to accountability: speech crip time (non-normative temporalities of communication), crip organizational selves (hybrid, interdependent subjectivities), and crip phononormativity (the tension between standardized and customized voice technologies). These challenges expose the ableist assumptions embedded in accountability regimes and open up alternative ways of communicating and being recognized in organizations. We propose three crip-informed tactics to counteract disabling conditions in organizational accountability: challenging speech chrononormativity, listening across identitarian boundaries, and denaturalizing social norms of communication. Our findings contribute to critical accounting and organization studies by rethinking accountability beyond ableist paradigms, embracing opacity, interdependence, and non-conformity as organizational values.