ABSTRACT
Judith Butler, a hugely influential but also controversial theorist, is a philosopher whose writings are not often found on the bookshelves labelled 'philosophy'. An avowed feminist, her early, major books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter are seminal within queer theory. Butler's work has provoked significant interest in management and organization studies, both through its influence on feminist or gender theories of work but also because her thesis of performativity offers ways of understanding management, organizations and work more generally. This chapter tracks how Butler has developed her theory of performativity since Gender Trouble. It devotes little attention to the still-developing theory of precarity because of the relevance of the former theory to 'critical performativity', a theory of political practice developing in critical management studies that draws, somewhat loosely, on Butler's theory of performativity.
