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Abstract

Building on the work of Rancière, this paper theorizes otherness in organization. Extant research primarily understands the Other as a subject silenced by the voices of the One. The underlying assumption is that albeit silent, the Other is still perceived as a subject able to articulate him-/herself in intelligible ways to the One. But what happens when the Other is not even perceived as a subject part of the community of human speech? We introduce the concept of noise to understand such otherness that has remained theoretically neglected and empirically understudied so far. We develop how affect plays a significant role for how the position of Other as noise is produced and overcome – something that we term miscounting and recounting. The paper extends the theoretical repertoire of organizational scholarship by developing the notion of the Other as noise, the role of affect in struggles over otherness and the significance of in/equality enacted in practice.

Keywords

affect body inequality otherness politics

Introduction

It is 6 June 1993 and New Yorkers are awakened to the news that a shipwreck has been sighted not far off Rockaway beach. A group of desperate men and women are seen swimming ashore. Within minutes the police, the coastguard, the immigration services, the media with pundits and the public have gathered at the scene. […] Remember it was the ‘voices’ of the screaming Chinese in the moonlight that is meant to have alerted New Yorkers to the shipwreck. Yet, these voices are lost as soon as they are washed ashore. Like Odysseus, the Chinese refugees, hungry, cold and covered in brine, emerge from the hostile sea as the Other, the needy, the displaced, the incomprehensible. [. . .] Our organizations are not interested in listening to the Other. They are interested in labelling, classifying and managing them, in short in incorporating them into their own narratives.

(Gabriel, 2003, pp. 629–630)

Organizations constitute central ‘sites for the creation and maintenance of inequality’ (Amis et al., 2018, p. 1135) both within themselves and society at large (Hinings & Greenwood, 2002). Inequality is not only a matter of economic disparities but also of social ‘structures of exclusion and disadvantage’ (Amis et al., 2020, p. 195). In order to understand and capture such unequal structures, research has focused on otherness, othering and the Other (Williams & Mavin, 2012, p. 160; see also Hearn, 1996). Otherness refers to the relation between the One – associated with hegemonial norms and values – and the Other – the marginalized, the excluded, the illegitimate (e.g. de Beauvoir, 1972; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). Studies of discourse and identity, post-colonial relations and polyphony have explored otherness in organizations (e.g. Alcadipani et al., 2015; Belova et al., 2008; Clegg et al., 2006; De Cock & Jeanes, 2006; Larsen, 2017; Mik-Meyer, 2016; Srinivas, 2013; Williams & Mavin, 2012). Focusing on a variety of issues, such as gender, sexuality, age/ism, dis/ability or ethnicity, the literature approaches organizations as realms of inequality in which the One has voice, whereas the Other is silenced or silent (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Alvinius & Holmberg, 2019; Christensen et al., 2022; Dar, 2019; Riach, 2007; Ward & Winstanley, 2003). Importantly, the working assumption of the literature is that the Other, although silenced/silent, is, in principle, perceived as intelligible to the One.

Our paper extends the existing theorization of otherness by shifting attention to what happens when the Other is not even perceived as an intelligible speaking being. Whereas existing research assumes a homogeneity of otherness, we draw attention to how otherness can vary. We take an interest in a theoretically neglected and empirically understudied otherness where the Other, as in Gabriel’s (2003, pp. 629–630) opening quote, can be heard yet remains ‘incomprehensible’ to the One: the Chinese refugees are perceived as screaming, cold, hungry bodies rather than as a silent/silenced Other. We capture such incomprehensibility through Rancière’s (1998) notion of noise, which denotes those who are cast into the realm of ‘the animal noise [. . .] expressing pleasure or pain’; they are perceived as unintelligible, as ‘speaking being[s] [. . .] without qualification and political capacity’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 22). As the Other as noise remains outside ‘frames of intelligibility’ (Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009, p. 783) provided by discourse, the relation between the One and Other is largely shaped through affect or in Rancièrian terms the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 7). Otherness is then a matter not primarily of words, talk and meaning – discursive interactions – but of sense perceptions, the corporeal, the physical – affective relations.

This analytical shift from discourse to affect, from the Other as silenced/silent to the Other as noise is significant for two reasons: first, affect plays a central role in how the social order is maintained or transformed (Fotaki et al., 2017). The concept of the Other as noise serves to draw attention to the role of the body and affective relations both in constructing otherness as well as resisting it (Fotaki & Daskalaki, 2021). For the Other as noise, struggles against inequality cannot involve speech interventions and political participation (Kalonaityte, 2010). To illustrate the latter, what drives the Black Lives Matter movement is ‘soul blindness’ (Cavell cited in Havercroft & Owen, 2016, p. 2), namely ‘the failure to see “others or ourselves as human” [. . .] in the sense of humanity as an ethical kind’ (Havercroft & Owen, 2016, p. 2). This ‘failure’, we propose, refers to how black people are cast as noise and thus not even as subjects of speech that can discursively fight for equality. As a result, their struggles therefore revolve around transforming the affective order.

Second, the Other as noise brings into focus groups of marginalized and excluded people that research may fail to account for when focusing on the Other as silenced/silent. Importantly, we are not suggesting a hierarchization between different kinds of otherness. Notwithstanding this, the assumed homogeneity of otherness may risk not paying sufficient empirical and theoretical attention to some of the most under-privileged groups (Kalonaityte, 2010) and their particular struggles against inequality (see also Van Lear & Janssens, 2016). Here otherness needs to be approached through a lens that foregrounds embodied, lived and sensual experiences rather than mainly discourse (Gherardi, 2019; Pullen et al., 2017).

The paper is structured as follows: first, we review extant research on otherness, pointing out the need for organization theory to move beyond the current focus of the Other as silent/silenced. Second, we present Rancière’s philosophy to theorize otherness where the Other is cast as noise. Third, we introduce the concepts of miscounting and recounting to capture how such otherness is produced and can be overcome. Fourth, we discuss studies that have empirically explored phenomena that, we suggest, are cases of the Other as noise to elaborate how miscounting and recounting takes place in organizational contexts. Lastly, the concluding discussion draws out implications of our Rancièrian perspective for studying otherness, affect as well as inequality, and it develops directions for future research.

Otherness in organization theory

The Other, othering and otherness have been central concepts in social and organizational theory to understand different kinds of inequality. Following the works of de Beauvoir (1972), Said (1978) and Spivak (1988), otherness is relational: who is counted as the Other, e.g. women, the Orient or the subaltern, inherently implies who counts as the One, e.g. men, the Occident, the West. The construction of otherness is therefore a power-laden process in which the Other is also a constitutive part of the One. As de Beauvoir (1972, p. 17) notes in The Second Sex: ‘the Other is posed as such by the One defining himself as the One’.

In organization theory, otherness is also understood through the taxonomy between ‘those associated with established norms [that] are thought of as “One” and those marginalized as “Other”’ (Williams & Mavin, 2012, p. 160; see also Hearn, 1996). We identify three overarching streams of literature on otherness: discourse and identity, post-colonial and polyphony literatures. The next section develops how research in our field predominantly takes a discursive approach to otherness, whereby the Other is perceived as silenced/silent. This approach fails to account for otherness where the Other is heard but remains unintelligible to the One – a neglect that results from extant research’s underlying assumption of universal intelligibility: there is one universal way of understanding, seeing and communicating about the world that everyone, including the Other, shares so that the One and the Other can comprehend each other. In problematizing this assumption on the basis that it limits our understanding of otherness, we highlight the need to draw attention to otherness arising not primarily within discursive interactions but affective relations.

Otherness and the nexus of discourse and identity

For research focusing on discourse and identity, otherness refers to the Other being silenced/silent within discursive interactions. This is a central way to understand a range of phenomena, such as gender relations (Larsen, 2017; Pullen & Simpson, 2009; Ward & Winstansley, 2003), ableism and disability (Williams & Mavin, 2012) or ageism (Riach, 2007). Building on a Foucauldian inspired lens of power (e.g. Christensen et al., 2022; Pullen & Simpson, 2009; Ward & Winstansley, 2003), this literature maintains that otherness is constituted through the very power relations embedded in discourse (Foucault, 1977, 1978).

While the Other can, in principle, participate in discursive power struggles, research suggests that s/he is silenced by the One: ‘subjects are organized by majority voices that speak of/for “the Other”’ (Christensen et al., 2022, p. 997; see also Dar, 2019). Discursive interactions limit what can be articulated or not (Brown & Coupland, 2005; du Plessis, 2020; Hardy & Phillips, 1997; Ward & Winstanley, 2003),¹ thereby silencing certain voices. This silencing is normalized, thus without the need for legitimization (Fernando & Prasad, 2019; Simpson & Lewis, 2005). While the Other can resist being silenced and raise their voice, this can reinforce their very position as Other (Alvinius & Holmberg, 2019), as Lewis and Simpson (2012) illustrate with respect to tokenism in a rereading of Kanter’s (1977) classic work Men and Women of the Corporation: successful female managers are often categorized into dominant gendered stereotypes exactly because they are visibly successful. The exceptionality of their position is rationalized in ways that reaffirm their position as the female Other, such as being reduced to sexualized objects or representing a motherly ‘ethic of care’ (Lewis & Simpson, 2012, p. 146).

Even discourses of equality, integration and empowerment can smother minority voices (Mik-Meyer, 2016; for similar dynamics, see also Riach, 2007; Tomlinson & Egan, 2002). For example, rhetorical strategies of antidiscrimination empowerment may offer opportunities for the Other to speak, yet work with a limited range of discursive expectations for the Other to ‘speak into – and speak from’ (Christensen et al., 2022, p. 1011), thus reaffirming ‘the organization of racialized subjects’ (Christensen et al., 2022, p. 1005). The Other may therefore choose to ‘seek invisibility’ and ‘disappear’ (Lewis & Simpson, 2012, p. 151) through strict norm-adherence or remain silent (Ward & Winstanley, 2003) as a form of self-protection.

Taken together, research on discourse and identity highlights how otherness is constructed within power-laden discursive interactions, whereby the Other is silent/silenced by the voices of the One. By focusing on the silencing of the Other within discursive interactions, studies assume that the Other can, in principle, speak on their own terms and be heard and understood by the One – an assumption of universal intelligibility that, however, does not allow theorizing otherness beyond discursive interactions.

Otherness and polyphony

Otherness also constitutes a focus in studies drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of polyphony. The polyphony literature, like the discourse and identity one, approaches organizations as ‘discursive spaces’ (Belova et al., 2008, p. 495), made up of words and talk (Hazen, 1993), but places more emphasis on the ‘multiplicity of voices, dominant and peripheral, which together make up a contested and ever-changing arena of human action’ (Belova et al., 2008, p. 495). The focus lies on exploring avenues of empowerment for those otherwise silenced (Clegg et al., 2006; De Cock & Jeanes, 2006; Oswick et al., 2000; Shotter, 2008). Polyphony is not

just a metaphor for the diversity of voices that exist in organizations nor a reminder that such diversity ought to be accommodated; rather it is a reminder of the problematic and difficult process of working out different organizational themes as they relate to stakeholders, identities and relationships. (Sullivan & McCarthy, 2008, p. 530)

Polyphony research does not assume the domination of the One over the Other (Clegg et al. (2006). Even asymmetrical power relations do ‘in no way preclude dialogue between living acting interlocutors’, as De Cock and Jeanes (2006, p. 27) argue. By drawing attention to the inherent polyphony in organizations, this line of research provides an optimistic reading of how the Other can assume voice. However, notions of ‘language games’ (Clegg et al., 2006, p. 19), ‘dialogue’ and ‘voices’, similarly, assume that the Other produces utterances comprehensible to the One. While referring to the need for ‘translations’ and thus the existence ‘not . . . [of] one language but . . . differences between languages’ (Clegg et al., 2006, p. 20), the overarching idea is that dialogue and ‘mediating between different language games’ (Clegg et al., 2006, pp. 20–21) is always possible. This exemplifies the same theoretically limiting assumption of universal intelligibility identified and problematized above: the One and the Other can engage with each other in meaningful dialogues (Letiche, 2010), as the Other can produce a language worth translating.

Otherness through the post-colonial lens

Post-colonial research focuses on the epistemological dimensions of otherness in relation to the global North–South divide and post-colonial power relations (Ibarra-Colado, 2008; Islam, 2012; Mir & Mir, 2009, 2013; Srinivas, 2013). Studies stress ‘epistemic coloniality’ (Ibarra-Colado, 2006, p. 464) in academic knowledge production (Abrieu-Pederzini & Suárez-Barraza, 2020; Alcadipani, 2017; Ibarra-Colado, 2008) or coercive knowledge transfer from South to North (Mir & Mir, 2009): the devalued colonial Other is faced with the difficulty to articulate him-/herself through hegemonic knowledge and categories of the western One. In order to resist and overcome this Western hegemony, there is a need of ‘giving voice to [southern] scholars’ (Alcadipani et al., 2012, p. 133; see also Alcadipani, 2017) and of ‘raising a multiplicity of voices’ (Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006, p. 872; see also Dar et al., 2021; Mir & Mir, 2013) – something that can, however, further reinforce the silencing of the Other (Ibarra-Colado, 2008).

From post-colonial studies we learn how dominant Western norms, values, knowledge and general ways of seeing the world produce the non-western Other. Similar to aforementioned research, post-colonial studies reviewed so far suggest that the Other is silent/silenced by the One and can attempt to overcome this silence through raising his/her voice. Thus, the literature also works with the assumption of universal intelligibility, limiting its theorization of otherness to the discursive realm.

Indeed, Islam (2012, p. 170) has pointed out how post-colonial writing navigates between the poles of

either questioning the colonized subject’s ability to ‘speak’ at all in his/her terms (e.g. Spivak, 1993), finding liberation only in the flight toward unintelligibility (e.g. Butler, 2000) or, conversely, insisting on the revolutionary reappropriation of consciousness from colonial domination (e.g. Fanon, 1967).

This highlights how the Other’s very position as a speaking being, his/her ability to articulate him-/herself in comprehensible ways to the One, may be negated. As Spivak (1988), whom Islam also cites, famously put it: Can the subaltern speak? – the title of her seminal work. For understanding such otherness, the idea of ‘universal reason’ that ‘any rational person will see and understand the same things – that is, can make and will accept and understand the same translations’ (Letiche, 2010, p. 271) – needs to be questioned. While, from a post-colonial stance, Letiche (2010) poses his critique vis-a-vis polyphony research, our literature review demonstrates how this problematic assumption can be found within otherness research at large.

The Other beyond silence and voice

The problematization of the assumption concerning universal intelligibility is the starting point of our paper. We seek to broaden the extant research focus to include an understanding of otherness outside discursive ‘frames of intelligibility’ (Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009, p. 783). The ‘critical question’ concerning otherness should not be limited to whether the Other is ‘heard amid the polyphony’ (Clegg et al., 2006, p. 16), becomes a partner in dialogue or a voice within discursive interactions. It is rather what happens when the Other is heard (thus not simply silenced/silent) but perceived as incomprehensible and unintelligible – thus noise. For theorizing such otherness, it is necessary to draw attention to the role of affect rather than primarily of discourse. As the Other is perceived as unable to engage in meaningful speech acts, the relation between the One and the Other is not primarily shaped by and through discourse but by what Rancière (2004, p. 7) terms the ‘distribution of the sensible’. This refers to the ‘boundaries and divisions that relate to sense perception’ (Bargetz, 2015, p. 588) – that is affect. Affect can be understood as

those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1)

The distribution of the sensible allows making visible how the Other is affectively related to as noise, as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966) that can engender fears, disgust and a sense of danger. Others are thus cast as what Goffman (1956, p. 147) has termed ‘non-persons’, people whose ‘basic personhood – their existence – is denied’ (Costas, 2022, p. 111).

The Other as noise studied through the lens of affect is important for bringing into focus otherwise understudied actors as well as their particular struggles against inequality. Van Lear and Janssens (2016) have critically remarked that research tends to focus on rather privileged individuals. They argue that ‘it might be interesting for future research to also study the struggles of ethnic minorities in less privileged socio-economic positions, such as refugees or blue-collar workers, and explore whether they experience struggles differently’ (Van Lear and Janssens, 2016, p. 214). Kalonaityte (2010, p. 37) also reasons that ‘the most disadvantaged groups are likely to lack political resources and access to direct speech’. Following this, we should not uncritically assume that everyone is recognized as an intelligible, speaking subject by the One, and can, in principle, engage in discursive power struggles. As we develop based on Rancière’s (1998) political theory next, otherness constitutes an antagonistic struggle and constant (re)negotiation around hegemonic forms of recognition (Mouffe, 2000) – who is understood as a member of the community of human, intelligible speech and who is not.

Towards a Rancièrian understanding of the Other

Rancière’s ideas have been picked up in eclectic ways in organization theory, namely in relation to aesthetics, the sensible and their management (Beyes, 2017; Korica & Bazin, 2019), the novel in organization studies (Beyes et al., 2019), radical equality (Skoglund & Böhm, 2019), aesthetic knowledge and organization (Linstead, 2017; Schreven, 2018), and art performances and design (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2017; Beyes & Steyaert, 2013). Rancière’s theorization of noise that we focus on has, however, received limited attention within our field so far (with the exception of Huault et al., 2012).

Politics, for Rancière, is the struggle over the distribution of the sensible:

Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt. (Rancière, 1998, pp. 22–23, emphasis in original)

Reformulated through the lens of otherness, Rancière asks the question of who is part of the community of human speech and who is not. Such othering comes about through

an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (Rancière, 1998, p. 29; emphasis added)

The Other is subtracted from the realm of logos, and thus from discourse, and cast into the realm of phône, the sphere of animalistic expressions of pleasure and pain – noise rather than voice. Those Others are thus not simply silenced but, more fundamentally, perceived as unintelligible: ‘those whose voice merely mimics the articulate voice to express pleasure and pain’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 22). It is through the realm of affect, the perceptions through the senses, rather than discourse, that the Other is related to by the One.

With Rancière we arrive at an understanding of otherness that is fundamentally different from how it has been predominantly conceptualized in extant research (see Table 1). Rancière’s theorization draws attention to the affective quality of otherness that the notion of silence – the focus of existing research – does not capture. Silence implies that one could make an utterance intelligible to others yet refrains or is hindered from doing so due to power dynamics. Noise, by contrast, means that people produce sounds that can be heard yet carry no meaning for the One. This Other is therefore subtracted from the community of human speech – a subtraction that the existing preoccupation with discourse, dialogue and speech in otherness research cannot make visible. In order to capture what happens when the relation between the One and Other is no longer primarily one of discursive interactions, otherness research needs to shift the focus from the realm of discourse to the realm of affect. It is only in this way that research can shed light on the Other perceived as noise by the One. The etymology of the ancient Greek notion of βάρβαρος – barbarian – exemplifies the Other as noise: the onomatopoetic designation of barbarian marked foreigners whose utterances sounded like an unintelligible ‘bar bar bar’ (Kramer, 1998). Greeks did not recognize their language as speech but only as noise. The Other as noise, as incapable of even producing discourse and thus as uncivilized, primitive and animalistic, is at the heart of the notion of the barbarian.

Table 1.

Conceptualizations of Otherness in Organization Theory.

	Discourse and identity literature	Polyphony literature	Post-colonial literature	The politics of the Other
Key assumptions	- Otherness produced through discursive power-relations	- Otherness produced through discursive power-relations	- Otherness produced by both epistemic and discursive power-relations	- Otherness produced through affective relations
Key mechanisms	- The One speaks for/of the Other	- Both the One and Other have voice - Dialogue and translation through language games	- Otherness embedded in Western hegemonial knowledge - Discursive voice(-giving) as mode of resistance	- Dialectic struggle over intelligibility - Miscounting and recounting as embodied forms of re/ordering
Position of the Other	- The Other as intelligible subject, yet silent/silenced	- The Other as intelligible subject between voice and silence	- The Other as intelligible subject between epistemic silence/silencing and voice	- The Other as unintelligible noise - Otherness as struggle over political subjectivity

Otherness: Miscounting and recounting

How is the Other perceived as noise? And how might the Other assume voice? Building on Rancière’s theorization, we introduce the concept of miscounting to explain how the Other is cast as noise, and the concept of recounting to capture how the Other can manage to assume voice. These concepts show how the social order is not fixed but contingent (see also Mouffe, 2000); miscounting and recounting dialectically relate to each other.

Miscounting attempts to create a boundary between who is part of the community of human speech and who is not, and therefore establishing a ‘miscount’, as Rancière (1998, p. 39) puts it himself. Miscounting takes place through a specific ordering, the assignment of speech, bodies and things to a particular place and/or time. This involves ‘a set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 39). To give an example, miscounting occurs when women are assigned to the realm of the oikos (the household, the private sphere), whereas the realm of the logos (the public, the politics and reason) is exclusively reserved for men. As a result, women’s inequality relates to how the affective order denies their personhood; they are not perceived as intelligible speaking beings able to articulate themselves in politically meaningful ways (see also Fotaki & Daskalaki, 2021).

Recounting refers to the idea of counting something anew. For the purposes of our paper, this is not about simply counting again but changing the very way in which counting takes place. In using the notion of recounting, we capture the attempts of the Other to move from being miscounted to becoming perceived as intelligible, thus overcoming the status as Other.

It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. (Rancière, 1998, p. 41)

Recounting takes place as bodies, things or speech are removed from their assigned places and/or times, thereby challenging the existing social order. It is about creating an equality that does not yet exist and that comes into being through its very enactment. Recount-ing is thus performative; it ‘simultaneously produce[s] both the argument and the situation in which it is to be understood’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 57).

This is illustrated in Rancière’s reading of the well-known Aventine Hill tale from Titus Livius. The tale is about the Roman plebeian’s secession, during which the plebeians leave Rome to protest their lack of political participation, bringing the economic life in Rome to a halt. To the patricians, political participation of the plebeians is out of the question ‘for the simple reason that plebs do not speak. They do not speak because they are beings without a name, deprived of logos-meaning, of symbolic enrollment in the city’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 23). The plebeians gather on Aventine Hill where, by forming their own institutions such as choosing political representatives from among themselves or consulting their own oracles, they express themselves as intelligible beings: ‘They write, Ballanche tells us, “a name in the sky”: a place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings, in a community that does not yet have any effective power in the city of Rome’ (Rancière, 1998, pp. 24–25). When the patricians send Menenius Agrippa to convince the plebeians to return to Rome, he is forced into negotiations. By the very act of negotiating with them, Agrippa recognizes them as intelligible subjects, which outrages the patricians upon his return to Rome:

They have speech like us, they dared tell Menenius! Was it a god that shut Menenius’s mouth, that dazzled his eyes, that made his ears ring? Did some holy daze take hold of him? . . . He was somehow unable to respond that they had only transitory speech, a speech that is a fugitive sound, a sort of lowing, a sign of want and not an expression of intelligence. (Rancière, 1998, p. 24)

Rancière’s discussion of the Aventine Hill tale shows how the Other cast as noise can challenge and overcome this position. This indicates how recounting can take place: the plebeians stage their secession by removing their bodies from their assigned place in Roman society. They practise equality with the patricians by establishing their own institutions, e.g. ‘consulting their own oracles’ and ‘choosing representatives’. Here equality is not assumed through discursive struggles, strikes or collective bargaining but through altering the distribution of the sensible so that the Other is no longer perceived as noise. In the next section, we develop how miscounting and recounting takes place in organizational contexts.

The Other as noise: Miscounting and recounting in organization

In developing how miscounting and recounting play out in organization and relate to each other dialectically, we explore the ‘processes of organizing’ and ‘the social conditions and institutional contexts’ (Gündoğdu, 2017, p. 191) that create and potentially disturb a certain order. We do so on the basis of exemplary studies that have empirically explored phenomena that, we suggest, constitute cases of the Other as noise.

Organization and miscounting the Other

Returning to Gabriel (2003), the Rancièrian theorization allows us to introduce an analytic vocabulary to capture the struggle over otherness in his study. Gabriel (2003) describes the shipwrecked Chinese refugees near New York as ‘screaming’ and ‘hungry, cold and covered in brine’ (p. 630) as they land on Rockaway beach. Their ‘”voices” [. . .] are lost as soon as they are washed ashore’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 630). Rather than addressing them as individual subjects in need, an organizational machinery is set in motion tasked with upholding the border regime. The stories of the refugees ‘are not relevant, they are not required and they are not part of the narratives which will engulf and swallow them faster than the angry sea’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 630).

Following our Rancièrian lens, Gabriel studies how these refugees are approached as noise rather than subjects with an intelligible voice – indeed, he uses quotation marks around the notion of voice. This status, we suggest, explains why ‘organizations are not interested in listening to the Other’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 630). Gabriel (2003, p. 629) cites media headlines that describe the Chinese refugees as a ‘tidal wave of human flotsam’. The media refers to a sinking ship which ‘disgorges’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 629) them near Rockaway beach. This implies an affect of disgust, associating the refugees with ‘dirt and danger’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 51, see also Douglas, 1966). They are marked as a ‘sea of voices, all yelling’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 629). The notion of the ‘sea’ and the fact that their ‘voices’ are only heard as ‘yelling’ demonstrates how the refugees are nothing but ‘nameless beings’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 24), producing noise in the eyes of the One. They are heard but not listened to; they are ‘beings deprived of logos’, of ‘speech’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 24). Gabriel (2003, p. 630) states how the immigration services, the coast guard and the police are only ‘interested in labelling, classifying and managing’ the refugees.

Such ordering exemplifies what we term miscounting, the practices through which the status of the Chinese refugees as Other is both produced and made manifest: ‘Within a matter of hours, their Otherness has been appropriated, classified and organized into our discourse of Otherness – they have been normalized, they have become “illegal aliens”, prisoners’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 630). The refugees are placed in the order of US society as ‘illegal aliens’; their bodies are assigned to a specific place – the prison. As Gabriel (2003, p. 630) suggests, they can only emerge as speaking beings years later, ‘when prison has taught them to speak the language which gets results in Clinton’s America [. . .] [-] we are unable to listen to the Other, until the Other has adopted our voice’.

On the basis of Stevens’ (2017) study of homelessness in London, we can further see how miscounting through spatially organizing the Other can occur. As Thanem (2011) has shown in an earlier study, urban design and planning in major Western cities is configured to foster mobility and motion rather than dwelling. Stevens (2017) provides various examples of this: slanted seats at bus stations that allow only for brief periods of sitting and discourage sleeping, ‘benches [that] have been designed [. . .] to prevent laying down, brown wooden planks or metal poles cleanly placed at exact intervals’ (Stevens, 2017, p. 674), spiked shop windows and public toilets that need to be paid for.

Read through our Rancièrian lens, this spatial organizing serves to miscount the homeless, namely to deny them their place in the city and cast them as outsiders. The particular ‘spatial atmospheres’ and ‘artifacts’ act as ‘generators of affects’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 123); they foster an affective relation to homeless people as bodies disturbing the order, ‘spectres lounging on benches’ (Stevens, 2017, p. 676). They are made into ‘bod[ies] out of place’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 39; emphasis in original) in terms of the material city space.² Indeed, Thanem’s (2011, p. 450) study captures how architects describe homeless people mobilizing affects of disgust and fear: ‘People slept there overnight, it smelt like a urinary and it was generally unpleasant. [. . .] the woman who took pictures for us of the old precinct had to run away because a junky tried to steal her camera. That’s how frightening an environment it was.’ However, Stevens argues, this does not result in homeless people leaving the city but rather wandering around to find ‘places to defecate or money to buy food right now’ (Stevens, 2017, p. 677; emphasis in original). Put differently, as they are withheld their place in the city, their very status as Other is reinforced.

Stevens’ (2017) study also discusses how homeless people are discursively constructed as Other through the ‘anti-social behavior discourse’ (p. 686). Such othering ascribes agency and voice to the homeless (e.g. as free citizens), yet simultaneously associates them with danger and irresponsibility. While Stevens points to the relevance of physical and spatial dimensions beyond discourse, we argue that these dimensions are of central importance to understand the status of the homeless as Other. The homeless may be discursively constructed as citizens with voice, yet the materiality of the city expresses disgust and fear vis-a-vis homeless people, denying them a place in the city and reducing them to bodies that produce noise.

Taken together, in rereading studies through our Rancièrian lens, we identify practices of miscounting: how bodies are ordered, assigned to a certain place (e.g. the prison) or banished from certain spaces (e.g. the city) in ways that can be both subtle and forceful. This very ordering of bodies builds on and reinforces a certain affective relation vis-a-vis the Other, namely one shaped by fear, disgust or a sense of danger. The refugees or the homeless, to stay with our examples, are reduced to ‘nameless beings’ incapable of intelligible speech.

Organization and recounting the Other

There are studies that allow us to identify practices of recounting, whereby the status as Other is challenged. For instance, Karaliotas and Kapsali (2020) look at how activists together with refugees squat in a building called Orfanotrofio in the centre of Thessaloniki, Greece. The squat opens up a new space for refugees outside their allocation to the state-run so-called ‘temporary accommodation centres (TACs)’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 8). We suggest that the refugees’ allocation to TACs constitutes a form of miscounting that serves to not only ‘maintain [. . .] a distancing between ethnic Greeks and newcomers’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 10), but also casts refugees as Other. Karaliotas and Kapsali describe how the new space, Orfanotrofio, unsettles this miscount. It allows for a space in which previously separated actors share their everyday life: the activists and refugees cook and eat together, and engage in decision-making processes based on the ideal of equality. Although Karaliotas and Kapsali (2020, p. 15) describe how inequalities, for instance in terms of ‘privilege and capital – money, status, cultural capital and so on’ keep reappearing, Orfanotrofio turns into a ‘home’ where the boundary between ‘citizen’ and ‘noncitizen’ is blurred:

[T]his process of making home was entirely different from the housing practices orchestrated by official actors, exceeding statist limits of hospitality not only discursively but also through embodied, material and affective everyday praxis. Orfanotrofio was not just a space for being housed, but demarcated an active appropriation of space and social relations. (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 409)

The case of Orfanotrofio exemplifies how ‘spatialization and the opening of spaces and infrastructures of dissensus’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020) are central to recounting. Like the Aventine Hill for the plebeians, Orfanotrofio opens up a new space for refugees and activists to negotiate a different order, one that allows them to form their own institutions, such as house meetings and their own practices of coexistence in everyday life. Here equality is not simply claimed but practised through the shared efforts of turning Orfanotrofio into a home. Recounting entails a shift in affective relations: Orfanotrofio opens up a space for ‘“meaningful encounters” where people discussed, laughed and played’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 409). Seemingly trivial activities of everyday life ‘embody significant connotations of care and belonging’ – the notion of home thus marks an ‘embodied, material and affective everyday praxis’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 409). Through these practices refugees assume voice, and resist their designation as unintelligible subjects – something that, however, only works to a certain extent as the One – the government, the police and the Greek society at large – continues miscounting them (see the next section).

Reinecke’s (2018) study on Occupy London, a social movement against social and economic inequality, points to similar practices of recounting. She describes what happens when homeless people join the Occupy London camp, which is set up and largely run by middle-class protesters. As the Occupy movement aims to enact radical forms of equality – a form of ‘prefigurative politics’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1300) – the homeless are initially welcomed: ‘by virtue of contributing one’s body to the occupation, anyone camping could automatically be an occupier’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1307). The camp’s openness provides opportunities for homeless people to no longer be cast as Other. Here recounting takes place to the extent that homeless people and activists share camp life, e.g. cooking, eating, building tents and cleaning together.

We can see how recounting is accomplished through a shift in affective relations: quoting the activist Kim, Reinecke (2018, p. 1307) states that “the intimacy and the necessity to live alongside one another” (Kim), including cooking, eating, building tents and cleaning while pursuing a common purpose, generated affective solidarity and intimacy: “You’re very intimately related, you’re sharing the same mud” (Kim). This cohabitation in the camp is central to the breaking down of the common social barriers between middle-class and homeless people. Equality is further sought to be enacted through initiatives such as the ‘Homelessness Action Week [. . .] which aimed at breaking down the distinction between the categories of “homeless” and “occupier”’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1309). Through the shared camp life, middle-class occupiers could experience some of the hardships of homeless life, developing ‘a deeper political consciousness’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1308) concerning inequalities.

The study of Sasson-Levy and Rapoport (2003) points to a different recounting practice: that of staging, of performing the body in ways that unsettle the Other’s assigned place in society. They explore the Jewish-Israeli women’s anti-war protest movement ‘Women in Black’, an all-female movement protesting the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The activists go to a central square in Jerusalem every week dressed completely in black. Their protest happens against the backdrop of women in Israel being positioned through the

field of motherhood that conceives of the female body through the prism of reproduction and child rearing, the discourse that conceives of women as sexual objects, and the traditional Jewish discourse of chastity that requires women to conceal their bodies and restricts them to the domestic sphere. (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 396)

We suggest that Sasson-Levy and Rapoport point out how women in Israeli society are positioned within what is termed the oikos rather than the logos. In ancient Greek, the oikos denotes both the separation of the household from the public sphere as well as the reproductive sphere from the political sphere (Söllner et al., 2018). As such, women are not understood as political subjects but as the reproductive Other. So how do the women manage to unsettle such miscounting by engaging in recounting?

Rather than formulating a political programme, which leaves the body ‘unmarked’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 398), the women perform political action through staging their bodies. Their protest disturbs the existing order by physically occupying the central square:

After [arriving at the central square,] pausing for a brief exchange with their friends, the protestors would climb over a fence surrounding the square onto a round, hollow makeshift stage on which each took a more or less fixed position. In climbing over the fence, which formed a symbolic divide between the women and the Israeli public sphere, the women signaled the beginning of the protest activity. (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 385)

The climbing over the fence serves to symbolically and physically stage the ‘intrusion’ into the public sphere from which the women are otherwise excluded: the Women in Black defy their otherness arranged around motherhood, sexualization and chastity that casts them into the realm of oikos. Instead, by entering the public, they, like the plebeians on Aventine Hill, stage themselves as equals in public and political discourse; their staging is thus performative of the very equality they seek. This exemplifies how they produce ‘both the argument and the situation in which it is to be understood’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 57). The women manage to make themselves count as ‘autonomous political citizens’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 396).

In sum, on the basis of these studies we develop different practices of recounting, such as embodied staging, reconfiguring space and sharing everyday life. All these practices mobilize affect (e.g. creating a sensual atmosphere of homeliness) aimed at disordering, if not transforming, the existing affective relations that miscounts certain people. However, as we develop next, recounting, as much as miscounting, does not produce a fixed and stable order but one that remains contested and can change.

Organization and the struggles over otherness

In Reinecke’s (2018) study of Occupy London, the homeless people’s recounting, their inclusion into the camp by being counted as ‘occupiers’ is followed by miscounting: middle-class protesters soon manage the homeless, and use the latter’s physical presence strategically, for example to make the camp appear populated while the former go to work. Divisions arise between the protesters who still have a home to go back to and the homeless who camp for their survival. Some protesters suggest that the homeless are disruptive rather than productive, that they block proposals and are ‘muscling their behaviour rather than trying to get to grips with their voice’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1312). Thus, protesters question the homeless’ ability to speak sensibly. Protesters affectively relate to the homeless people as uncivilized and dangerous Others. Some activists refer to them as people who ‘pee into their own water’ (Reinecke, 2018, p. 1312).

Thus, the enacted order that transcends homeless status as Other through recounting does not last. With time, they begin to count again not as equals but as people without voice that threaten the middle-class protesters’ community. Importantly, such miscounting of homeless people does not remain unquestioned within the camp either. Reinecke (2018, p. 1311) points to conflicts within the camp: some activists argue that such miscounting undermines the core idea of the Occupy movement – enacting equality – as it introduces ‘a legitimate “occupier” category’. From this case we can learn that the status as Other is not fixed but can evolve: the recounting of the homeless as voice only lasts for a short period of time until they are again largely perceived as noise within the camp.

Karaliotas and Kapsali’s (2020) analysis also shows how overcoming otherness through recounting is contested. The ‘home’ the activists and refugees enacted is situated on a plot of land owned by the Greek Orthodox Church. After a shift in the Greek refugee policy, the police enforce the churches’ ownership rights, leading to the refugees and activists being ‘forcibly evicted’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 415) and the entire building being demolished. Karaliotas and Kapsali (2020, p. 416) argue that this forceful eviction is not indicative of Orfanotrofios’ ‘undeniable limitations but [it happens] exactly because it [Orfanotrofio] refused to accept the de-politicized rendering of the “refugee crisis” as a “problem” to be solved through techno-managerial and humanitarian responses’ – a rendering that marks the refugees as the Other. Following the eviction, the refugees that lived there are relocated to temporary accommodation centres. Such miscounting, that of ‘returning everyone to their allocated places’ (Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 416), serves to reestablish the refugee status as Other. Karaliotas and Kapsali’s study indicates how the status as Other is contingent on the political context and the actors involved. The struggle over otherness takes place between different actors: here the refugees, activists, the church and the government/the police. Whereas the refugees and activists engage in recounting, transcending otherness for a certain time and in a certain space, this does not imply that they permanently succeed in a recounting of refugees within society at large.

Sasson-Levy and Rapoport’s (2003) analysis allows us to see how the Women in Black’s recounting sparks fierce responses aimed at miscounting. These responses do not primarily target the protesters’ message but their very position as members in the public sphere. As Sasson-Levy and Rapoport (2003, p. 396) quote one of the women:

I found it difficult to swallow so many remarks each Friday. They [passersby] told me how fat I was, and that if I looked different I wouldn’t have to stand there. They told me to go home and lose weight so then maybe some savior would come along and rescue me and I wouldn’t have to stand there anymore.

Taxi drivers are described as especially ‘vociferous’ as ‘they would [. . .] shower the women with sexist catcalls and curses’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 385). Protesters are faced with ‘sexist’ comments that ‘lumped together gender, patriotism, and national conflict, [. . .] such as “Arafat’s slut,” [. . .] or “You should be fucked and then killed”’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 395). These reactions illustrate how the Women in Black are supposed to be removed ‘from the political sphere, the public arena, and the boundaries of the Israeli collective’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 396); they should return to the oikos. Similar to the patricians’ indignation towards the fact that the plebeians addressed Menenius Agrippa as equals, the passersby are outraged about the women’s ‘audacity in voicing’ (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003, p. 396) themselves as political beings, thereby challenging the status quo as belonging to the realm of oikos.

All in all, recounting seeks to shift affective relations in order to challenge the established order and its forms of otherness. However, such shifts can be contested, facing renewed and continuous miscounting, involving practices as radical as the forceful if not violent (re)ordering of bodies. Thus, there can be ongoing dialectic struggles over otherness that are contingent on the social and political context, involving different actors.

Concluding Discussion

In this paper, we have developed an understanding of otherness, othering and the Other that extends the theoretical repertoire of organization theory. Existing research studying otherness largely focuses on the Other as silenced, if not silent. Here the underlying assumption is one of universal intelligibility, namely that the Other is perceived as an intelligible subject by the One. Drawing on Rancière’s work, we have problematized this assumption and developed a new perspective where the Other is cast as noise. Here the Other is not even approached as an intelligible speaking being, and the relation between the One and the Other is therefore not primarily one of discursive interactions but of affective relations. We have developed the concepts of miscounting and recounting to illuminate how such otherness emerges and can be unsettled. The following concluding discussion draws out implications of our Rancièrian inspired theorization and points out directions for future research.

An agenda for otherness research

We call for research to draw more attention to the most under-privileged and excluded people in societies – people whose status as a speaking being is denied. Examples can range from refugees, homeless people, Sinti and Roma and, more generally, people who are treated by the One as ‘barbarians’ – as an uncivilized, primitive or even animalistic Other, incapable of ‘talking sense’. Importantly and as our analysis of miscounting and recounting has shown, who is counted as intelligible or not, who is the One and the Other, is not absolute and fixed. The struggle over otherness, which can assume different shapes and forms depending on the social and political context and the actors involved, takes place within a dialectic of miscounting and recounting. This is also apparent in Havercroft and Owen’s (2016) discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement. They illustrate how liberal and conservative audiences relate to the movement differently, ranging from viewing the protesters as reasonable human beings formulating a political demand (thus as people with voice) to just ‘looters’ that ‘act crazy’ (Watkins et al., 2020), delegitimizing their claims by perceiving them as what Rancière terms noise.

For otherness research to empirically capture the Other as noise, it is necessary to focus on affect in the form of sense perceptions, atmospheres, the spatial and corporeal in a specific context. In researching the ordering of bodies and their assignment to particular spaces, scholars can identify forms of miscounting that involve affects, such as disgust or fear, serving to ‘stabilize [our] attachments to the institutional scaffolding of our social and political infrastructure’ (Otto & Strauß, 2019, p. 1810). When empirically encountering practices such as the reconfiguration of space, the reordering of bodies or embodied staging, research may face forms of recounting that mobilize affects to ‘potentially destabilize and unsettle . . . [people] into new states of being’ (Fotaki et al., 2017, p. 4). As the very aim of recounting is to break with the existing distribution of the sensible, recounting may become, for instance, visible when people make ‘a scene. A grand slam,’ as Frantz Fanon (1986, p. 114) has claimed for the racialized, colonized other.

While our paper has developed a first set of practices concerning miscounting and recounting, we call for future research to explore further practices that produce or unsettle otherness. Studies may explore the role of organizations, forms of ‘organizationality’ (Blagoev et al., 2019; Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015) and organizing. The empirical studies we have discussed above point out how organizations produce the Other as noise, for instance by categorizing and sorting people in certain ways. Simultaneously, organized efforts, for example in the context of social movements, serve to overcome otherness. Moreover, in Karaliotas and Kapsali (2020), the then Greek Deputy Minister for Citizen Protection, Nikos Toskas, is cited to distinguish between formal (governmental) and informal organization:

These squats [like Orfanotrofio] are squats without a cause. They are a caricature of symbols that create insecurity, they provoke an illusion of freedom, they are not an expression of rights claiming . . . The big effort is the organised effort, it is not the effort of self-organised actions . . . Why did all these well-intended people that were gathered there not support the organised structures? (Toskas cited in Karaliotas & Kapsali, 2020, p. 17)

It would be of interest to gain more insights on how different organizations, forms of organizationality and organizing can achieve a more lasting shift regarding who is counted as Other. Research may address how attempts at recounting interrelate with the social and political context and different actors within this context. Here studies may also look at the role of institutions and professions in the struggle over otherness. For instance, the field of psychology has shaped how people of colour are treated and perceived in society (Mama, 1995).

This will require research to take an interest in ‘a detailed treatment of embodied and lived experience’ (Pullen et al., 2017, p. 112) within a field, and potentially develop the capacity of what Gherardi (2019, p. 749) has termed ‘affective attunement’:

We can train and entrain ourselves to recognize affect in the intensity of encounters and to enact ‘affective resonance’ as an active form of attunement, when we activate the process whereby bodies resonate when the intensity is transmitted between affective bodies, discourses, and different social worlds.

Examples of such affective attunement range from paying attention to the anger and social awkwardness involved when one is being ignored by a familiar person in the elevator (Pullen et al., 2017; also cited in Gherardi, 2019) to becoming spatially and affectively aligned to the rhythms of city life, such as the sense of haste and urgency characterizing London (Nash, 2020). As ‘every social order [. . .] is a specific order of affects’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 116), it is tantamount for otherness research to focus much more strongly on the realm of affect. Only in this way can we understand how a specific social order casts certain people as Other. This is not to say that affect only matters in cases of otherness where the Other is cast as noise. Given that affect constitutes an inherent feature of any social order, it also matters where otherness relates to silence. However, the very notions of noise and silence imply different sensual experiences both for the One and the Other. The significance of affect may become particularly apparent in cases where the Other is cast as noise as here affect surfaces in ways that ‘can only be ignored with the greatest effort’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 119).

Similarly, this does not mean that discourse no longer matters for our Rancièrian inspired lens. Following Rancière, otherness entails both discursive (e.g. ‘words’) as well as affective (e.g. ‘being affected’) dimensions. Affective and discursive forms of othering and otherness are not categorically distinct but relate to each other in manifold ways – an interrelation that is also a subject of discussion in the emerging literature on affect (Beyes & De Cock, 2017; Fotaki et al., 2017; Otto & Strauß, 2019; Pullen et al., 2017; Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015) in our field. While affect goes beyond discourse by placing the body and sense perception at the conceptual centre, we do not postulate an either/or relation: affects are ‘both cultural and material’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 115; emphasis in original). They constitute ‘persistent realities of their own right and yet their origins, effects and social intelligibility depend on cultural and historical schemata’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 115). In line with Otto and Strauß (2019, p. 1810), we therefore argue that strict ‘distinctions between affect and discourse [. . .] are neither viable nor practical’. Instead, we take a relational perspective, which suggests that bodies and affect are different from discourse, yet cannot be understood as raw and pre-discursive (in contrast to, for example, Massumi, 2007).

A Rancièrian understanding of in/equality: Beyond identity, class struggle and the ideal speech situation

Our Rancièrian lens also has implications for understanding inequality in organizations. Extant research on otherness has unearthed various forms of inequality related to un/inhabitable identities (Alcadipani et al., 2015; Pullen & Simpson, 2009; Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009), limitations in terms of what can be articulated (Mik-Meyer, 2016; Simpson & Lewis, 2005; Ward & Winstanley, 2003) or forms of ventriloquizing (Riach, 2007). More generally, research has studied ‘inequality regimes’ (Acker, 2006) pertaining, for instance, to identities derived from class, race and gender. Following Rancière, such a focus on identity assumes that the Other has undergone political subjectivation, enabling him/her to voice their particular political demands. In contrast to this, Rancière (1998, p. 100) speaks of the ‘nonidentary subject’, namely a subject without a subjectivity in the eyes of the One. Rather than assuming a discursively recognizable place to speak from through identity, the nonidentary subject – the Other – does not have such an identity. It is ‘the designation of subjects that do not coincide with the parties of the state or of society, floating subjects that deregulate all representation of places and portions’ (Rancière 1998, pp. 99–100). It is thus through disidentification as a mode of politicalization that the Other writes ‘a name in the sky’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 24): by invoking something that does not yet exist through embodiment and affect. As Fotaki and Daskalaki (2021, p. 1283) have shown with respect to women’s grassroots activism involving anti-mining protests in Greece, through embodied action, the women created a political urgency that ‘challenged performances of femininity that marginalized and excluded them from the frontiers of political life’ – thus claiming their existence as political subjects. Here the struggle over otherness is therefore one over a person’s very subjectivity and not identity – something that research on equality from an identity perspective may pay greater attention to.

Equally, Rancière’s ideas go beyond theorizations in a Marxist tradition concerning equality and class struggle as these also tend to focus on ‘the conflict between parts of society’ – between people counted as speaking beings – rather than to the ‘dispute over the existence of the dispute’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 55). From a Marxist point of view, the main struggle within society takes place between the classes of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This line of thought places the economic sphere at the centre of attention. The only way to overcome the existing inequality is for labour to organize itself. This requires the proletariat to become conscious of itself as a class, and not perceive ‘the capitalist order as given, natural, and inevitable’ (Braverman, 1998, p. 1979). Labour process theory has highlighted union organization and collective bargaining or strikes as the primary sites of class struggle. Thus, it is ‘at the bargaining table’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 179) between the ‘management and union’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 188) where class struggle takes place.

From a Rancièrian perspective, this emphasis on class struggle reduces politics to the economic sphere. It solely focuses on the ‘relation to the means of production’ (Bravermann, 1998, p. 17) and presupposes a given economic order, which provides workers a place ‘at the bargaining table’. In contrast to this, Rancière’s focus is not on class struggles that play out at the table but rather on who gets to sit at the table in the first place.

This also explains why Rancière opposes a Habermasian (Habermas, 1990) discourse ethics based on the ideal speech situation. Habermas’ ethics revolves around ‘the unforced force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 306) among equal speakers – an idea which has been picked up in organization theory in discussions of, for example, political corporate social responsibility (Acosta et al., 2019; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011). Rancière (1998, p. 47) argues that such an ethic ‘locks the rational argument of political debate into the same speech situation as the one it seeks to overcome: the simple rationality of a dialogue of interests’. The ideal speech situation presupposes the equality of those engaged in it and thus misses the Rancièrian miscount.

Implications for future research

Following this, we call for future research to look at the struggles of subjects to acquire a speaking position to begin with. Furthermore, our study has hinted at how the interrelation between affect and discourse can play out in struggles over otherness. For instance, from Stevens’ (2017) study we can learn how affective relations towards the Other, here in the form of fear and disgust vis-a-vis homeless people, may prevail over their discursive construction as citizens with voice (see also Reinecke, 2018 for comparable findings of disgust and fear vis-aà-vis homeless people). Sasson-Levy and Rapoport’s (2003) study shows how the Other, here the Women in Black, mobilize affects in the public sphere in ways that clash with their discursive construction as sexualized objects and mothers restricted to the realm of oikos. Future research may explore in greater detail how affect and discourse interrelate, that is clash or reinforce each other in struggles over otherness.

We also share Huault et al.’s (2012) call for research to shift the focus away from macro- and micro-perspectives of inequality to focus on how emancipation and equality are practically realized. As Rancière (1991, p. 137) emphasizes, ‘[e]quality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified’. Such an understanding of in/equality shares similarities with the Boggs’ (1997) idea of ‘prefigurative politics’ that emerging social movement research in our field has drawn on (e.g. Farias, 2017; Kokkinidis, 2015; Schiller-Merkens, 2022; Skoglund & Böhm, 2019; Reinecke, 2018): the ‘embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977, p. 4) of that movement. With Rancière, we suggest that such embodiment and the affective relations involved constitutes the struggle that defines the politics of the Other. Moving beyond prefigurative politics and social movements, we call for future research to develop antennas for enacted forms of equality not only as a more ‘direct form of politics’ (Schiller-Merkens, 2022, p. 5), but as the mode of pursuing social equality. This may happen in mundane ways, such as organizing spaces of cohabitation, fostering everyday encounters around shared responsibilities or even just cooking and eating together, or in more direct ways, for instance through embodied forms of protest or occupying spaces in which the Other’s existence is otherwise denied. Even if only a momentary shift in affective relations is realized, this moment indicates how the social order is contingent and can be changed.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Philipp Arnold

Notes

Author biographies

Philipp Arnold is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics of the European University Viadrina. He currently studies private security work in German reception facilities for refugees and asylum seekers. His research interests include organization theory, power, control, violence, stigma and affect in organizations.

Jana Costas is Professor of People, Work and Management at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include work, organization, power, control, identity, culture, leadership, violence and secrecy. Her monograph Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life (co-authored with Chris Grey) appeared in Stanford University Press. Her monograph Dramas of Dignity: Cleaners in the Corporate Underworld of Berlin, published by Cambridge University Press, won the EGOS Book Award 2023.

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From Silence to Noise – The Politics of the Other in Organization Theory

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Otherness in organization theory

Otherness and the nexus of discourse and identity

Otherness and polyphony

Otherness through the post-colonial lens

The Other beyond silence and voice

Towards a Rancièrian understanding of the Other

Otherness: Miscounting and recounting

The Other as noise: Miscounting and recounting in organization

Organization and miscounting the Other

Organization and recounting the Other

Organization and the struggles over otherness

Concluding Discussion

An agenda for otherness research

A Rancièrian understanding of in/equality: Beyond identity, class struggle and the ideal speech situation

Implications for future research

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biographies

References