‘Submission’ to the rule of excellence: Ordinary affect and precarious resistance in the labor of organization and management studies

Abstract

In an unusually direct style of address, the article moves toward a novel critical practice stimulated by affect theory: inhabited criticism. This more-than-representational approach enacts vigilant attunement to the lively scenes, bodies, and trajectories of ordinary affects. I cultivate the practice by staging successive encounters with the contemporary labor of scholarship and, specifically, with an assemblage condensed as The Rule of Excellence. The first half of the article addresses The Rule through reigning critical practices in organization studies, which are recast as vacated criticism (disembodied analysis), humanized criticism (confessional tale), and reciprocated criticism (dialogue across dualisms) in order to sift their affective postures and implications for resistance. The second half then calls on affect theory to address The Rule anew, as an agentic, transpersonal current that animates academic landscapes and figures in troubling yet indeterminate ways. By performing, not only theorizing, inhabited criticism, I demonstrate how it can transcend stubborn dualisms and nourish relational enactments difficult to accomplish within the current critical practices of organization and management studies. Ultimately, I argue that inhabited criticism can (a) help us come to terms with the affective demands and limitations of all modes of criticism and (b) enact an alternative posture of resistance rooted in ‘sense-abilities’ of home, field, and their relation.