Sex, Work and Sex Work

Eroticizing Organization

Joanna Brewis, Stephen Linstead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415207560
• eBook ISBN: 9781134621774
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Sex is much more rife in the workplace than many would think according to this fascinating and controversial new book. It argues that not only does sexuality pervade every aspect of organizations, but also that organization pervades every aspect of our sexuality.

This two-way conceptualization lends the book a two-part structure, covering firstly the ways in which organizational behaviour is shaped through issues such as male managers' experience of violence, organizational constructions of sexual harassment, and professionals who work with sex offenders. The second part of the book examines how sex is organized for commercial purposes, and considers sex work as an industry which can be analyzed as any other, with important insights for normal organizing. Key features of the book include sections on:

* organizing as sexual activity
* connecting desire, the erotic, the abject and organization
* the 'hidden' penetration of organization processes by sexuality
* the 'dark side' of sex and organization and the importance of transgression
* the double effect of discursive and material placing
* organizing sexuality within prostitution
* prostitution as a complex and varied industry.

Fascinating and informative, this controversial book is a valuable source of information for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of business, management and sexuality and gender studies.

Part I

Reading sex into organization

1
Violence, masculinity and management

Introduction

Death, as we have implied in our introductory chapter, inhabits sexuality and organization. It both drives and frustrates desire—it is simultaneously and paradoxically the desired release from desire and the loss against which desire is set. Indeed, in pursuing fulfilment desire actively pursues its own extinction. This inhabitation of death and desire is not simply a pathological variant of the modern imagination but, as Dollimore (1998) argues, a crucial element of the intellectual and imaginative formation of Western culture over 3, 000 years or more. Sievers (1995) has also noted the complicity of organizing with death, organizing being concerned with the punctuation and control of movement, process and change (Chia 1996) to the point at which time might become suspended and the organization itself immortal. Not only are such attempts to stop the clock illusory, but they are only accomplished by activities of division, separation and repression in the name of productivity and progress—activities which are themselves violent. Chia (1996—also see Cooper 1989; Linstead and Grafton Small 1992) has noted with Derrida that the ordering and spacing strategies which produce our sense of organization are themselves linguistic practices—more specifically, practices of writing, of inscribing experience. Language must exclude and repress that which it does not seek to express, and in doing this it does violence to the flow of the process of experience, and creates a residual element which is always outside it, but always present. As Lecercle (1990) puts it, the significance of language lies powerfully in the way in which it inscribes violence into the ways in which we think about and represent experiential reality—into consciousness itself. Violence, then, is woven deeply into both the practice of organizing and our experience of organization, yet it is only rarely acknowledged as such. But for men in particular the experience of violence—ontically the world experienced as ‘violent’-is an even more powerful shaping force on identity Although violence signifies death, it is pressed into the service of desire, making them what they are taught to feel they must be, shaping the world and the Other to their will. Where weakness is encountered as an interiority it is violently suppressed and cast out, resulting in a self-obsession which psychoanalysis would regard as narcissism. Yet those who suffer at the hands of violent narcissists often violently repress their own emotions towards violence, control, discipline and power, and lose the ability to respond naturally to events around them, social, organizational or erotic. Violence towards others may even be a consequence of such narcissism. While we need to be able to recognize and come to terms with the paradoxes of sexuality and power, death and desire, love and suffering, violent experiences may pervert our ability to do this.

Organizations are violent places, sites of violence: but they are not its only source nor the most influential, as we have implied above. In this chapter we explore some case material to consider how identity-forming non-organizational experiences of violence can shape subsequent behaviour within organizations. These connections are not commonly considered either in the study of organizational behaviour or of managerial practice, because behaviours from other arenas, cathexes, adaptations and responses, can be reproduced many years away from the original source of anxiety. These behaviours are widespread, patterned, cyclical and carry an inevitability about them that cannot be modified simply by changing behaviour alone. We concentrate on examples where the extent of pathological behaviour is easily seen, but the processes which surface are common mechanisms of ‘ordinary’ human behaviour and more attenuated experiences of violence within organizations operate similarly. Going somewhat against Foucault’s (1979) rejection of psychoanalysis at this point, we discuss these processes through the work of post-Freudian object relations theorists, Julia Kristeva, and recent theorists of masculinity. Accordingly, we argue that bureaucracies operate by ignoring the emotions at work in our behaviour and our decision-making, which renders emotion itself abject, never admitted to but always there. Men are caught up in this web of societal and organizational denial because of their traditional dominance in formal organizations and the historical association of masculinity and rationality, compounded by the dynamics of male psychology. However, traditional symbolic associations between men and physical violence introduce a problematic contradiction, and societal, cultural and organizational arrangements tend to support and facilitate the psychodynamics of denial which deals with this contradiction by producing narcissistic and addictive responses. This we illustrate by a discussion of biographical, film and novel data. We conclude by arguing that men in organizations need to learn to live with the unacceptable in themselves and their experience so as to put an end to this vicious circle of damaging and dysfunctional behaviour.

Men, violence and management

Violent behaviour can take many forms—extremely physical, sexual, intimidatory, psychological, intense, infrequent, impulsive, sustained, planned, ritualized, official, encultured, verbal, cognitive, emotional, linguistic, visual and representational among them (Lecercle 1990; Hearn 1994:735). It constrains both the violent and the victim in thought, word and subsequent interaction. Its effects spill over into areas of life beyond the initial arena of violence, and can last a lifetime. It produces anger (as well as being a product of anger) and perpetuates itself; it affects world-views, the ability to dream and to envision the future; it affects the perspective of self-worth, and the ability to cope with success and failure; it affects the ability to grow and develop and to deal with such growth in other persons and institutions; and it affects the ability to relate to self and others. The victims, the abused, not only may carry the scars and damage of violence for the rest of their lives, but ironically often find themselves reproducing those behaviours which have caused them pain in their dealings with others.

Men are the primary offenders in the overwhelming majority of violence cases and, although women are certainly capable of all forms of violent behaviour, they are not normally under pressure to embrace and incorporate violence into their gender identity in the way that males are compelled to deal with violence as a condition of masculinity (Polk 1994). That is to say, being male requires that the subject develops an attitude towards violence, whether in sport, society, the military etc., in order to be recognized as masculine; men tend to have stylized means of behaving violently; and the management of Western organizations remains overwhelmingly male.¹ This chapter focuses on the men of one family as a case study of how intergenerational violence can affect men’s development as managers, drawing on psychoanalytic theory and cultural theory in arguing that pathological behaviour is shaped by the combination of individual ego-defences and societal images of different masculinities, as well as organizational experience and circumstance.

In what follows we will first develop a theoretical background for the consideration of violent behaviour, which is grounded in psychoanalytic and particularly object relations theory as reworked by Donald Winnicott and Julia Kristeva. This centres around the concepts of narcissism and the abject, which is, as we established in the Introduction, essentially denied experience that cannot be fully suppressed by the subject. The defence against the abject is bolstered by symbolic investment in the ego-ideal, which may embody stylized or exaggerated ideas of masculinity or femininity, and the ways in which men may draw on such symbolic resources is examined through a consideration of films. Addictive behaviour as a parallel defence against the inherent self-loathing of narcissism is discussed through both personal interview data and material drawn from a novel by Alan Duff. Examples of the effects of violent behaviour on individuals are discussed based again on personal interview data and from a recent biography of a victim of child abuse. Finally, we consider some of the possible consequences for organizations.

We should emphasize here that in this chapter we do not claim that the explanation of the emergence of masculinist organizational cultures can be reduced to a description of individual psychopathology. However, in a tradition which can be traced back to Freud if not to Plato, we suggest that the study of pathological behaviours reveals processes which are at work in the ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ psyche and helps us to identify tensions which are common and widespread, though they may not be in crisis everywhere—that is to say, there are ‘normal pathologies’ (Simon 1996:100). The difference between the normal and the pathological is primarily one of degree, of a loss of a sense of limits which enables the socially adjusted personality to co-operate with others.² However, the existence of these differences should be a signal, not to reproduce the expulsion of the maladjusted and console ourselves with the thought that most people can cope with their problems without becoming dysfunctional, but to reflect on the fact that personality formation is never finished and fully formed but is constantly recursively shaped, reconstructed, reviewed and refined, as contradictions and unresolved tensions re-emerge and as new situations unfold. Social and cultural forms, discursive practices and power relations also form a shifting context, an intertext which crosses the site of subjectivity, making personality and identity perpetually emergent and incomplete projects. It is the processes at work throughout ordinary or everyday relations which the study of the abnormal helps to reveal, and to remind us of the fragility of ‘normal’ subjectivities within the field of forces helping to shape them.

Additionally, although ‘healthy’ personalities may come to operate social arrangements without undue catastrophe, there remains the possibility that extreme stress or crisis might yet produce regression to earlier and more primitive coping mechanisms for ensuring psychological survival. It is characteristic of organizations that their performative, ‘problem-solving’ orientation tends to address such issues only when they emerge as problematic, and those approaches which seek to identify and surface potential problems are often accused of creating needless difficulties for practitioners. Nevertheless, if we are to attempt to properly understand the range of influences on managerial and organizational behaviour we cannot afford to assume that what is apparently not broken does not need fixing. The interplay between individuals’ early and non-organizational experience, socio-cultural influences, career emergence and development, organizational culture and managerial behaviour remains imperfectly appreciated, and suggests some important social and psychological processes which are worthy of further attention and research.

The promise of violence

Violent behaviour often takes the form of a denial of promise, a snatching away of something almost attained, the cancellation of a project which seemed to be going well, the destruction of something of value, or the theft of a deserved reward. Frequently it is unpredictable and shocking, taking the victim by surprise, but it can also be the result of a systematic abuse of their position by those in power, and may also be a combination of both. Where the violence is a by-product of official social or organizational structures, the powerful often explicitly justify their abuse by placing the guilt and responsibility on the victim’s head, constructing the violence either as a necessary rite of passage or as a dutiful purging of the victim which will ensure redemption.³ Either way, the violence becomes more profound in denying the victim the right to define, and hence oppose, it as injustice. The capricious and explosive form of violence intimidates and invades our everyday consciousness by virtue of its possibility; the organized and ritualized form by virtue of its inevitability and its claimed necessity. Both forms affect organization as a process and organizations as institutions, but in different ways. The possibility of capricious violence causes victims and potential victims to organize their lives around this possibility, to become more self-conscious, and to learn to cope with its eventual eruption and lessen the damage of its impact. Violence which is embedded in organizational practices may be less whimsical but exerts a constant pressure on others to behave in particular ways. In fact, bureaucratic violence is the inversion of random and unpredictable violence. We might thus extend Albrow’s (1992) observation that Weber’s conceptualization of bureaucracy makes emotion its central organizing principle, given that it is constructed specifically to banish sentiment, passion, favouritism, coercion, violence, indiscipline, unpredictability and their resultant disorder from the operations of the organization—an argument which we develop further in chapters 5 and 6. However, as Weber implies, the iron cage may be cool, but it is still oppressive.

The everyday experiences of individuals also affect their behaviour in organizations. Organizations, from both Marxian and radical Weberian perspectives, can be understood as structures of domination, which institutionalize violence in their structures of authority and command. Where organizational members are abused by the system, they can be expected to display future characteristics which are typical of the survivors of other forms of abuse and are frequently detrimental to organizational survival, being antithetical to organizational learning. These behaviours include dependence/counter-dependence, aggressiveness and a punitive approach to authority, excessively tight control or a converse inability to control, inability to manage growth, unwitting reproduction of past abusive patterns, and a tendency towards narcissistic ‘addictive’ behaviour in attachments to corporate forms of the ‘ego-ideal’. Corporate culture change, business process reengineering and total quality initiatives, for example, may be seen to be expressive if superficial forms of the latter (Schwartz 1990). However, let us suspend our discussion of theory for a moment in order to examine some examples of everyday experiences which have shaped the life and organizational behaviour of one particular manager.

Like a bat out of hell…

It took me the best part of the following day to piece together the story from neighbours and my grandmother, who lived across the road, and despite my phlegmatic approach to his endeavours it took a little imagination even for my fertile 14-year-old brain. I knew he was drunk even at five o’clock the previous day, as I found him on the cold-stone of the pantry eating baked beans from the tin—he was incapable of understanding that there was a meal in the oven for him. Or perhaps he resented its presence at the hand of someone other than his wife. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d stomped on his dinner and ground the vegetables into the carpet with his foot because they weren’t ‘made with love’ as he put it. He left his car in the garage and went out for the night, which was unusual for him as he habitually drove when intoxicated to incoherence. However, I expected that he would have no stomach for trouble when he returned, and I went to bed early so that, in case he did, I would be asleep and he might not bother to wake me. It was a tactic I employed every night, praying for sleep as the fear crept over me, praying for my suffering mother, my brother, and sometimes even for death—mine, his, ours—but mostly for peace and for the three of us to be left alone.

Thus begins a narrative of one of several incidents recounted by an informant we will call Allan,⁴ a manager in his forties. Allan’s story displays some features which we think are significant for the consideration of violence in the context of organized life and organizations. One of these is that it was not only Allan’s father who had become enveloped in a distorted reality but, in complementarity, so had Allan (and for that matter his mother and brother, although they were on holiday during the incident he describes here). They organized their lives around his father’s violence, which they regarded as inevitable, although it was never predictable what precise form it would take. They developed tactics for avoiding it, delaying it, trying to shut their ears to it. They even avoided bringing their friends to the house if they knew he was at home. Yet perhaps inevitably the violence pursued them into unexpected corners of their lives. Allan continues:

Astonishingly, I slept through a night which was riotous. My father had returned home at around midnight, and had dozed in an armchair for an hour until wakened by a telephone call from his mistress, who had been observed by her husband when with my father earlier. The husband had armed himself with a bread knife and was presently pursuing her around the housing estate with a vocally professed intent on her life. My father leapt into action, only to discover that he could not find the key to the garage. Furious, he stormed across the street to where he accused my grandmother of hiding the key to frustrate his possible intentions. Some of the other residents were quite willing to call the police, two of whom lived in the same block as the old lady, so he returned home, where a neighbour spotted him breaking the window at the rear of the garage and attempting to climb through it. Shortly afterward, the doors burst open as he drove his almost new and very expensive car, Hollywood-style, out into the street, shards of glass and splintered wood scattering in cloud...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Sex Into Organization, Reading Organization Into Sex
• Part I: Reading Sex Into Organization
• Part II: Reading Organization Into Sex
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography