Critical complicity: The feel of difference at work in home and field

Abstract

This provocation to debate begins with the observation that critical management and organization scholars exhibit powerful capacity for critiquing, weaker capacity for changing, and atrophied capacity for feeling relations of power at work. Following developments in affect theory, I propose that we foster a critical practice of inhabiting, discerning, and cultivating relations of difference in our own work world as we also study power elsewhere. The argument unfolds in three turns, claiming that (1) difference at work is a constitutive sensate activity, (2) our “senses” of difference at home haunt our studies of power in other fields, and (3) we could be better change agents if we tuned in to the relation of home and field (i.e. how we are already doing what we seek to know about). Ultimately, I suggest that efforts in so-called critical performativity must also include critical vulnerability, whereby we begin to grapple with our complicity and integrate it into critical practice.