Papers by Caroline Clarke
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 20, 2022
Writing Differently
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Gender, Work & Organization, 2020
This article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK-based Search and Rescue v... more This article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK-based Search and Rescue voluntary organization, QuakeRescue. Based on ethnographic research, we analyze how gender is performatively constituted in this male-dominated setting, focusing in particular on how hegemonic masculinity is enacted through bodies, physicality, and technical competence. Our findings show how performative acts, predicated on essentialist understandings of superior masculine bodies, constructed femininity as limited, deficient, and Other, legitimizing the assigning of mundane, routine tasks to women volunteers. By endorsing women's presence, albeit as low-status team members, there was sufficient recognition to ensure that sedimented practices of "doing gender" at QuakeRescue remained largely unquestioned. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity predicated on bodily practices in male-dominated workspaces is oppressive in its effects, and until this is recognized and acknowledged, transformative potential is limited.
Culture and Organization, 2017
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The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs When all tha... more The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs When all that we count becomes all that counts: HR at the heart of the productivity shift Other How to cite: Bloom, Peter and Clarke, Caroline (2016). When all that we count becomes all that counts: HR at the heart of the productivity shift. HR Magazine. For guidance on citations see FAQs.
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021
What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering work on and how do they help ... more What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering work on and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a...
Human Relations, 2021
What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they hel... more What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives is both developed through and a resource for individuals’ narrative identity work. We show how organizationally-based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities that are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers...
The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations
The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organizational, institutional, ... more The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organizational, institutional, political, and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixe is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books, and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability, and security through identity. In this chapter, the authors expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity—discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control, and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of b...
Journal of Business Ethics, 2021
Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all i... more Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all its worth now represent a previously unimaginable level of exploitation? New technology has intensified milk production fourfold over the last 50 years, rendering the cow vulnerable to various and frequent clinical interventions deemed necessary to meet the demands for dairy products. A major question is whether or not the veterinary code of practice fits, or is in ethical tension, with the administration of ‘efficient’ techniques, such as artificial insemination, to enhance reproduction levels among cattle? Vets perform these interventions and their ‘success’ is measured by the maximisation of milk production, requiring perpetually pregnant cows. Our empirical research on 33 farm vets explores how their professional ethical code promising to protect the welfare of the animal ‘above all else’, is increasingly in conflict with, and subordinate to, the financial demands of clients. Since ve...
Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or sim... more Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or simply a question of practice makes perfect? This question arose from our empirical research on veterinary surgeons (vets), who we found were often struggling with the divergence between the precise and unambiguous knowledge underlying the training and the unpredictability and imprecision of their everyday practices. These are comparatively underexplored issues insofar as the literature on vets tends to be descriptive and statistical, focusing primarily on clinical matters and associated human-animal interactions. Our cliche title has a question mark because while many vets remain embedded in the disciplined ‘certainties’ and causal regularities within their training, in practice this ordered world is rarely realized, and they are faced with indeterminacy where the ‘perfect’ solution eludes them. Vets often turn these unrealistic ideals of expertise back in on themselves, thus generating do...
International Journal of Management Reviews, 2017
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Human Relations, 2015
This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia ... more This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individualistic strategy designed to moderate the pressures of excessive managerial competitive demands. Emerging from our data was an increased portrayal of academics as subjected to technologies of power and self, simultaneously being objects of an organizational gaze through normalizing judgements, hierarchical observations and examinations. Still, this was not a monolithic response, as there were those who expressed considerable disquiet as well as a minority who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work. In analysing the...
Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2012
This paper contributes to a growing literature on new public management in relation to academia i... more This paper contributes to a growing literature on new public management in relation to academia in general but more specifically UK business schools. Following interviews with a range of staff in universities, we explore the impact that auditing and monitoring interventions have made on academics and their identities. In some senses, academic identities would appear to have changed as a result of managerialist practices of audit, league tables, research assessments, and other measures of accountability for ...
The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2012
This paper is concerned with examining the reactions of managers to the process of global restruc... more This paper is concerned with examining the reactions of managers to the process of global restructuring in a large, multinational food-processing company. Much extant research concerning globalisation has focused on the wider economic, political and social outcomes. Perhaps surprisingly, relatively little attention has been given to how globalisation is experienced inside organisations. This paper examines how country-level managers have been
European Management Journal, 2007
Managers perform unseen yet significant emotion work as part of their role, particularly in a cha... more Managers perform unseen yet significant emotion work as part of their role, particularly in a change context. The suppression or expression of emotion by managers is no accident, but influenced by the over-rational portrayal of change processes. Our study uses longitudinal data to explore the types of emotion work performed by managers within different stages of organisational change. We argue that managerial emotion work is characterised by four facets: it involves high strength relationships, is unsupported, unscripted, and unacknowledged. We argue that emotion work is an important part of managerial activity, and should be acknowledged and supported by the organisation.
Human Relations, 2018
Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or sim... more Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or simply a question of practice makes perfect? This question arose from our empirical research on veterinary surgeons (vets), who we found were often struggling with the divergence between the precise and unambiguous knowledge underlying the training and the unpredictability and imprecision of their everyday practices. These are comparatively underexplored issues insofar as the literature on vets tends to be descriptive and statistical, focusing primarily on clinical matters and associated human-animal interactions. Our cliché title has a question mark because while many vets remain embedded in the disciplined ‘certainties’ and causal regularities within their training, in practice this ordered world is rarely realized, and they are faced with indeterminacy where the ‘perfect’ solution eludes them. Vets often turn these unrealistic ideals of expertise back in on themselves, thus generating do...
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Papers by Caroline Clarke
The aim of this article is to review a selection of the literature on identity at work in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) in order to raise critical questions concerning what we see as the dangers of a certain amnesia and myopia. Insofar as some the contemporary literature neglects to engage with the historical past and some of the multidisciplinary present, at best it can result in a perpetual reinvention of the wheel and at worst, a failure to fully interrogate identity. This failure results often in it being taken for granted as a given, and this leads to its discursive construction reproducing binaries of mind and body, masculinities and femininities, individual and social, and agency and structure. Here cognition and language dominate and displace any focus on the embodied ethical engagements of everyday life that prevail despite individualistic preoccupations with securing the self in social identity. A major concern of the article is to summarize important historical contributions and research that is not narrowly located within studies of management and organization to demonstrate how the amnesia and myopia within the MOS literature renders contemporary analyses less than robust. The main contribution of the article is to show how the failure to interrogate identity results in it reinforcing by default neo-liberal, masculine and disembodied everyday preoccupations with the self that put a closure on alternative practices of embodied, ethical engagement. We trust that our deliberations will be helpful to future studies in advancing beyond taking identity for granted.
Key words: identity, insecurity, body, management, organization, literature, amnesia, myopia, gender, masculine.