ABSTRACT
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet (1991), proposes ‘that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentiethcentury Western culture as a whole are structured-indeed, fractured-by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century’ (ibid., p. 1). She argues that virtually any aspect of modern Western culture can only be understood if it incorporates a critical analysis of modern homo/ heterosexual definition. Grey (1999), meanwhile, explores a somewhat similar thesis, but in relation to the identity of ‘manager’. He shows the constructed nature of the divide between manager and non-manager, and analyses a turn in language which equates management ‘with any form of social co-ordination’. We thus appear to have two universal imperatives in identity formation, two discourses which will intersect at various nodal points to produce subjectivities. One aspect of Grey’s argument, on the constructed nature of the divide between managers and other groups of workers, is the subject matter of this book, and his thoughtful and insightful paper has stimulated some of the ideas I will develop here. However, Kosofsky Sedgwick had the luxury of the word length of a book in which to develop her ideas, using a methodology, familiar within cultural studies, of using novels to explore and explain aspects of the social world. I will here therefore interrogate Grey’s notion of the construction of management through the lens offered by Kosofsky Sedgwick, so as to anticipate the arguments which will evolve in this chapter.
