ABSTRACT
Judith Butler’s writing can be understood as an active, evolving response to her critics, and to changing social, political and economic circumstances. Butler hints at organizational interpellations, hailing the subject into being in an embodied way, but without requiring the presence of an actual speaker, through ‘bureaucratic forms, the census, adoption papers, employment applications’ and so forth. Narrative analysis and storytelling research has made significant inroads into management and organization studies, particularly as a method of understanding ‘organizational sense-making’. The kind of approach is adopted by Kate Kenny in her study of what happens to people who speak out about corruption in their organizations and who find themselves excluded from their livelihoods as a result. Drawing on Adorno, Foucault, Levinas and Jean Laplanche, Butler develops her concern with the normative constitution of the subject into a consideration of what it means to lead an ethical life for a subject who struggles against social norms and relations through which s/he emerges.
