The Death of the Subject and the Life of the Organization

Abstract

Challenges to traditional notions of subjectivity have been a central preoccupation of new theory over the past 20 years, yet the clear applicability of such reconceptions of the subject to organizational studies has received little attention. This article traces the development of arguments about subjectivity from the influential essays of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and then summarizes more recent ideas about the nature of relational or positional subjectivity. These new theoretical developments are applied to organizational analysis, closing with suggested applications of new subjectivity to specific topics in organizational theory and behavior.