PRASAD Ajnesh - Beyond Analytical Dichotomies

Human Relations
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Beyond analytical dichotomies

Ajnesh Prasad
Human Relations 2012 65: 567 originally published online 3 April 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0018726711432183
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Beyond analytical dichotomies
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DOI: 10.1177/0018726711432183
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Ajnesh Prasad
Australian School of Business, Australia
Abstract
Management researchers habitually invoke analytical categories of difference whether
they be based on gender, race, or sexual identity in responding to issues of systemic
inequalities in organizational life. Poststructuralists and other critically orientated scholars
have cited the myriad of trajectories through which analytical categories of difference
reinscribe dichotomous modes of thinking and, therein, ignore the idiosyncrasies in
human identification and human behavior. Extending from a poststructuralist standpoint,
this article uses the question of sexual identity to advocate for the astute mobilization of
strategic essentialism. Strategic essentialism serves as a means by which management
scholars can tentatively engage with the research and the discourse that is reliant upon
identity binaries, yet without reifying ideologically bifurcated identity classes.
Keywords
diversity, feminism, organization research, poststructuralism, sexuality in organizations,
strategic essentialism
It no longer suffices to conceive of organization theory in the restricted and restrictive sense
which the predominantly structural approach circumscribes around the field of study. (Chia,
1996: 55)
[I]dentity formation . . . is a matter not only of ontology but also of strategy. (Phelan, see Smith
and Windes, 1997: 31)
[H]ow can we write about gender and acknowledge the importance of gender without
reproducing the problematic aspects of the gender binary? (Linstead and Brewis, 2004: 360)
Corresponding author:
Ajnesh Prasad, Australian School of Business, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Email: ajnesh_prasad@yahoo.ca
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Human Relations 65(5)
Introduction
Numerous management scholars have sought to conceptualize how gender, race, sexual
identity and other visible and invisible stigmas continue to operate as sources of systematic disenfranchisement within organizational life (e.g. Bell and Nkomo, 2001). As such,
researchers have identified a plethora of intra-organizational trajectories including salary differentials (Auster and Drazin, 1988), promotion and appraisal bias (Landau,
1995), and encounters with harassment (Berdahl and Moore, 2006) through which
individuals occupying one or more of these denigrated categories experience social and
economic marginalization in the workplace. While offering promising insights into the
antecedents and the consequences of systemic organizational discrimination, current
research in this field at least in the forms that have appeared in American management
journals has primarily developed from a positivist logic (Fournier and Grey, 2000).1
In spite of the fact that positivism has acquired intellectual hegemony in some geographical centers (Willmott, 1993: 681), poststructuralists and related critical thinkers
working within management disciplines have forwarded excellent critiques of how various social identities discursively manifest within organizations (e.g. Bradshaw, 1996;
Collinson, 2006; Harding, 2003, 2008). With few exceptions, much of this stream of
research has adopted a form of interpretive or an otherwise critically-orientated methodology (Lee, 1991; Prasad, 2005), which intuitively refrains from reifying and, at times,
actively subverting essentialist, and what are ultimately false, dichotomies of
female/male, black/white, and homosexual/heterosexual (for excellent conceptual critiques of these dichotomies see Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008; Hird, 2004; Pringle,
2008). This is not surprising insofar as such methodological approaches readily cohere
with the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying the poststructuralist
tradition, which fundamentally proclaims the lack of essence in social reality (Ritzer and
Goodman, 2002). In other words, what surfaces in the present poststructuralist literature
from management scholars is, on the one hand, philosophical alignment between ontology, epistemology, and methodology so described by Morgan and Smircich (1980) and,
on the other, resistance toward attempting to capture Cartesian ideals of objective truth.
While I concur with the latter suggestion in that I believe that objective truth, should it
exist, is outside the matrix of human consciousness (Morgan, personal communication,
2007), I diverge from Morgan and Smircichs reading of research paradigms that posits
a necessary unity between ontology, epistemology, and methodology.2 In sum, researchers espousing certain ontological and epistemological assumptions should not, without
critical appraisal at least, deny themselves or be denied methodological approaches that
do not neatly complement their theoretical orientation (Lee, 1991). This argument gains
purchase when exploring poststructuralist potentials for engaging in organization
research on inequality stemming from analytical categories of difference.
Poststructuralist theory has rich and diverse origins. It is the corollary of intellectual
traditions including feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and anthropology
which sought to destabilize the unitary corpus of Enlightenment thought (Agger, 1991).3
As Flax observes (1990: 7), it came in response to the disintegration of the grand ideas
that structured, legitimated, and lent coherence to so much of Western science, philosophy, economics, and politics since the eighteenth century. As critics of the Enlightenment
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found discourse to be pivotal to the reification of these systems, language became central
to poststructuralist analysis (Scott, 1994; for excellent discussion of this point from an
organizational perspective see Westwood and Linstead, 2001). Indeed, as Scott (1994:
283) explains, language elucidates how social relations are conceived because understanding how they are conceived means understanding how they work how institutions
are organized, how relations of production are experienced, and how collective identity
is established. In sum, within poststructuralist theory there is, a breakdown in the metanarrative of Enlightenment and, more broadly, a deconstruction of the universalizing
grand ideas that sustains contemporary hegemonic power relations (Flax, 1990: 7).
In repudiating metanarratives, poststructuralists recognize the perils of essentialism
(Alvesson and Deetz, 1999; Kilduff and Mehra, 1997). For example, in studying the
analytical category of race, Miles and Torres (2007: 68) argue that by appropriating the
vernacular of false binaries, critical scholars not only fail to conceptualize the vicissitudes and the nuances of the phenomenon being investigated but, by extension, a set of
implications emerge that are counterproductive to the redress of inequality. They explain
that in invoking the language of the binaries scholars risk reifying, and perhaps inadvertently legitimating, public assumptions of the existence of its fixed reference points, and
of its opposing but mutually-reinforcing ideological positions. They further contend that
in focusing academic and philosophical inquiry on the study of analytical categories of
difference scholars overlook the discursive processes that produce these differences and,
thus, fail to holistically appreciate the etiology of cultural disenfranchisement. Through
the very processes of researching them, ideas of black and white and, analogously,
woman and man and homosexual and heterosexual become further understood as
being stable, unproblematic and determined a priori (Miles and Torres, 2007; also see
Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008; Gamson, 1995; Hird, 2004, 2006).
Notwithstanding the poststructuralist critique, identities prevail as an intrinsic part of
our existential phenomenology (Ashforth and Mael, 1989). So while poststructuralists
may problematize, negate, or otherwise undermine the saliency of analytical categories of
difference, identity politics is maintained as a system for self-awareness and social demarcation (Moya, 2001). This quite logically, then, prompts the question: how can poststructuralists who seek to identify and rectify tangible social inequalities that have been enacted
by one identity group to the disenfranchisement of a fabricated relational opposite, engage
in a discourse of diversity without reinscribing the dichotomous ethos of essentialism?
A tentative response to this query comes in the form of the postcolonial-feminist concept of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1993; Spivak and Grosz, 1990). Strategic essentialism promotes reclaiming the essential identity of a group as a temporary strategic
gesture in the interest of agency for struggle, no matter how dispersed the identities of the
members (Calas and Smircich, 1999: 662). This concept is particularly useful in organization research, and serves as an answer to the provocative question posed by Linstead
and Brewis (2004) cited in the introduction of this article. Indeed, organization researchers are offered agency through strategic essentialism inasmuch as it allows them to use
analytical categories of difference, while simultaneously confounding the underlying
assumption that renders classes of difference as being metaphysically constituted. As
Alcoff (2001: 319) advises in her account of the concept, [w]e should use identity categories only in ways that will work ultimately to subvert them.
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In sum, the aim of this article is to utilize poststructuralist thought to illuminate how
strategic essentialism can be integrated into contemporary organization research. On this
front, I contend that strategic essentialism can realize two mutually enabling objectives:
i) it can serve as a salient tool in the poststructuralist endeavour to transgress from delimiting essentialisms; and, ii) it can appropriate and cautiously deconstruct the discourse of
the essentialist. In this way, I move against the current of what is now Lordes (1984)
famous line: The masters tools can never dismantle the masters house. Indeed, following from Spivak, I believe that a strategic engagement with the discourse of essentialism, which would provocatively expose the inherent fallacies of essentialism, is precisely
what is necessary to dislocate the locus of essentialisms oppressive power that functions
as the means by which to maintain contemporary injustices within organizations.
The focus of the present article is on sexual identity, for which there are two important
reasons.4 First, the study of sexual identity, relative to that of race or gender, is an inchoate focus of research within the field of organization and management studies (Brewis
and Linstead, 2000; Fleming, 2007; McQuarrie, 1998; Pringle, 2008; Ward and
Winstanley, 2003). Accordingly, it is at an important juncture. As this field develops,
critical thinkers have the opportunity to partake in the debates around sexual identity
within organizations and, in so doing, redefine its meaning, its parameters, and its undergirding assumptions. Thus far, the extant management literature has treated sexual identity either as an essentialist disposition or as a discursive component of intra-organizational
power and control. While this nascent topic has already generated promising insights for
the study of such phenomena as workplace discrimination and managerial politics, it
remains crucial for critical organization researchers to engage with broader sociological
theory on sexuality (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008) and illustrate rigorously how naturalized ideas of the homosexual and the heterosexual are socially contrived concepts and
underscore sexualitys fluid disposition (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1990; Hird, 2000; Zita,
1994). This will not only better honor individuals who are studied through a more holistic understanding of the multi-faceted dynamics of their lives, but it will also contribute
to a greater appreciation among management scholars as to the fluidity and the nuances
within human identity and human behavior (Alvesson et al., 2008). In doing so, it permits the field to transcend dualistic and essentialist thinking, which far too often silences
marginalized voices and neglected identity claims.
Second, while historically strategic essentialism has been employed in social movements for gender equality, the study of sexual identity is particularly ripe to benefit from its
application (Bernstein, 1997).5 Sociologists have long noted that sexual identity has been
obstinately perceived, by many, to be rooted in ontological fixity (Gamson, 1995; Hird,
2006). As such, while many individuals can accept the argument that race and gender are
socially constructed, there is far greater resistance to the assertion that sexuality is equally
constituted by social precepts. Through an account of the socio-religious outcry against
homosexuality, and the subsequent rejoinder that came from the activist community, Smith
and Windes (1997) provide some insights into why this might be the case. In discussing the
foundation of political and religious backlash against homosexuality, they write:
Denunciation begins in the definitional premise that homosexuality is an acquired behavior
rather than an innate orientation. Homosexual behavior then becomes perversion of the highest
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order. It is against God, against Gods word, against society, against nature [James Robison
quoted in Lienesch 84]. This view remains current. (1997: 31)
Within this statement, same-sex desire is postulated as an (immoral) choice. In response,

and quite understandably then, community activists for lesbian and gay rights, as Smith
and Windes further explain, made their case for equality by (strategically) declaring sexual identity to be an essentialist trait. Indeed, the claim that an individuals sexual identity is determined a priori, by nature, and not by autonomous choice, significantly derails
the legitimacy of the oppositions discriminatory ideological stance against lesbians and
gays (Smith and Windes, 1997). The codification of this essentialist view in popular
culture which, again, was most vigorously propagated by social activists rendered the
cultural construction of sexual identity relatively difficult to discern. It is within this
historical backdrop that the promise of strategic essentialism is amplified. That is, given
that the early demands for equality based on sexuality was premised on fixed ontological
claims, strategic essentialism can be utilized to engage in a less provocative and, institutionally less threatening discourse by which the culturally inscribed and inherently
liminal attributes of sexual identity are allowed to emerge.
The remainder of this article is organized into four substantive sections. First, I provide an overview of the concept of strategic essentialism, focusing particularly on how
the term has developed within feminist theory. Second, I illustrate the problematic ways
in which the notion of sexual identity has been studied as an analytical category of difference by management scholars thus far. Drawing on a mixture of theoretical literature
broadly spanning poststructuralist, feminist, and queer thought I critique the underlying ontological assumptions that appear to permeate management scholarship on sexual
identity. Third, I discuss how strategic essentialism can operate as an idea that emancipates critical scholars from eschewing the positivist temptation for essentialist categorizing, while concurrently allowing them to engage with the discourse of the ongoing
debates. Finally, in the fourth section, I conclude this article by identifying how strategic
essentialism can inform four current sites of organizational debate.
Conceptualizing strategic essentialism

By the late 1980s, feminist theory was in a crisis of its own making. Members of the
feminist community occupying multiple categories of marginalization accused secondwave feminism of negating their lived realities by promoting and reflecting the interests
of western, white, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual women (Mann, 1994). As such,
new repertoires of criticism against second-wave claims of universal womanhood and
womens symmetrical experiences with gender oppression emerged. Indeed, Black feminists (hooks, 1984), postcolonial feminists (Mohanty, 1988; Spivak, 1988), Chicana
feminists (Anzaldua, 1987), and lesbian feminists (Rich, 1980), each addressed either
explicitly or implicitly, and from their respective socio-cultural positions the tendency
of second-wave feminism to present a monolithic class of woman, which effectively
relegated their own unique experiences to the periphery of feminist theorizing.
Synthesizing much of this critique, at the end of the decade Crenshaw (1989) coined the
term intersectionality, which posited womens social reality to reside at the idiosyncratic
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nexus between race, gender, class, and other identity categories. In sum, during this
period, there was sustained admonition against analysing gender in isolation of other
social identities that were believed to pose different material consequences to different
women (Gopaldas et al., 2009; McCall, 2005). In commenting on the basis for the social
rifts that fermented during this juncture within feminism, hooks (1997: 485) states: The
idea of common oppression was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of womens varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by
sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices.
Interestingly, this fragmentation coincided with and, indeed, symbiotically informed
the emergence of, influential theoretical paradigms that espoused an ethos of anti-essentialism (McCall, 2005; Stone, 2004). Anti-essentialism, which was at the crux of critical
theories that gained currency during this period such as postmodernism and poststructuralism was suggested, at least by some constituents from the feminist community to
compromise their mandate for gender egalitarianism (MacKinnon, 1990; Nussbaum,
1999). Indeed, it was viewed that conceptual paradigms that relied upon anti-essentialism
much too hastily sought to destabilize or deconstruct categories of female and male,
and this, in course, was seen to prevent feminist practice from responding to genderspecific realities (Bristor and Fischer, 1993). In sum, anti-essentialist thought was
accused of effectively reducing womens experiences with patriarchy and misogyny to
esoteric theory and, by extension, it was argued that it failed to properly understand the
social conditions and the institutional environments that systematically oppress women
(see MacKinnon, 1990; Nussbaum, 1999).
Feminist concerns over imprudently relinquishing the agency of essentialism engendered renewed interest and debate on the function of essentialism in endeavours for
cultural change. Among the most notable commentators of the day, Fuss (1989: 39),
insightfully remarked, in our [feminists] well-intentioned efforts to unmask and to
denounce essentialism as a dangerous fallacy, we may have too quickly and perhaps too
uncritically embraced constructionism as necessary or only corrective. Drawing on
Spivak, she further elaborates that, in the hands of the dispossessed themselves, essentialism can be a powerful strategic weapon (p. 40). Fuss perhaps recognizes that,
[f]ixed identity categories are both a basis of oppression and the basis of political power
(Gamson, 1995: 391; also see Bernstein, 1997). Fusss advocacy for this weapon was
further mobilized through the scholarship of postcolonial-feminist theorist Gayatri
Spivak, under the rubric of, what she would refer to as, strategic essentialism (Spivak,
1993; Spivak and Grosz, 1990).
For Spivak, feminists can tentatively invoke a monolithic identity of woman for the
purpose of attaining their political objectives; however, without solidifying a permanent
or salient feminine ontology (Calas and Smircich, 1999). In other words, Spivak illuminates how strategic essentialism, while inherently being a problematic concept, can be a
mechanism through which the feminist project for gender egalitarianism is realized.
Indeed, as she writes: Feminisms return to the problem of essentialism despite their
shared distaste for the mystifications of Woman because it remains difficult to engage
in feminist analysis and politics if not as a woman (Spivak, 1993: 2). Braidotti (1994:
169) has echoed this argument, by drawing on the phallogocentric economy as formulated by Irigaray (also see Braidotti, 1993: 10), to assert that, extreme affirmation of
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sexual identity is a way of reversing the attribution of differences in a hierarchal mode,

and is a decisive system that empowers women to act. In appealing to a fixed class of
woman, Braidotti elucidates a coherent feminine identity as being a form of political
subjectivity one that she, nevertheless, indicates is ultimately in liminal transgression.6
This class of woman is useful in disrupting androcentric thought, which endemically
privileges masculinity, and in establishing a temporal sense of community (see Frye,
1996; Oseen, 1997). Neither Spivak nor Braidotti are metaphysical realists; accordingly,
neither would contend that gender is naturally affixed to a corporeal ontology (for a critique of this relationship see Hird, 2000). As such, their position on essentialism is strategically rhetorical rather than being literal. They do not afford credence to the ontology
of sexual difference beyond the political ends that it may serve.
Extending from this, it ought to be underscored that while Spivak endorses strategic
essentialism, she does not, in any way, succumb to the notion of biological determinism.
Within Spivaks conceptual framework, these two ideas are wholly disparate. Spivak
explicated that strategic essentialism should ultimately be a temporary tool to achieve a
new praxis more specifically, to bridge the disjuncture between feminist theory and
feminist practice (hooks, 1994). An essence of woman is thus a means to an end, and
should never be integrated into either the end project itself or into the foundation upon
which the project is built. Namely, as Spivak realizes, it is imperative for those feminist
projects that strategically invoke the ontological assumption of woman to ensure that
such an ontology will be discarded with at some point within the feminist revolution.
Feminist scholars who have applied strategic essentialism into their work have all too
often ignored Spivaks integral point regarding the temporality of strategic essentialism
(Danius and Jonsson, 1993; Stone, 2004). An example of this can be found in a qualitative study on feminist organizational communication by Paige Edley (2000). While
acknowledging its potential dangers, Edley attests that, strategic essentializing can be
used as a political move . . . to achieve desired outcomes (p. 279). She finds that strategic
essentialism accomplishes three objectives in the organization that she studies: i) organizational members discursively constructed the group of women as special; ii) they
essentialized negative communicative behavior in very traditional, stereotypical ways to
suppress and avoid conflict; and, iii) [they] essentialized themselves as a form of resistance (p. 287). She rationalizes her informants latent recourse to essentialism by invoking the customary logic for strategic essentialism that is, a feminine subject must be
identified for feminist theorizing and social change. However, Edley imparts no suggestion indicating when the homogenous construction of woman can be dismantled. In other
words, there is no theorization explaining at which point within the feminist revolution
can and should feminists depart with their ontological utilization of woman. Rather, it
appears as though the woman becomes discursively embedded within the political project, whereby, assumptions of sexual difference are confirmed.7
Such misappropriation of strategic essentialism has led some constituents from the
feminist community to dismiss the analytical utility of the concept in advancing feminist
projects. For instance, Kobayashi and Peake (1994: 236) identify several concerns they
have with the term and conclude that [g]iving into [strategic] essentialism, however
promising the short-term goals, may retard the process of finding more effective solutions. Similarly, cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1996: 475) writes that, [t]he [strategic]
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essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. Spivak
herself carries this line of critique further by drawing upon an interesting metaphor to
describe her worry with the frequent misuse of her concept:
When . . . the statement the personal is political came into being, given the socio-intellectual
formation, it really became quickly only the personal is political. In the same way, my notion
just simply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy no one
wondered about. (Spivak, see Danius and Jonsson, 1993: 35)
She elaborates elsewhere that: [L]ooking at the way in which this phrase was used, I
found that the word strategy was not seriously taken up. Strategy is something that is
situation-specific. Spivaks concerns are rooted in her observation that, [m]ost of the
so-called strategic uses of essentialism seemed to want to take this up as a lasting practice, rather than something that was called forth by some situation or other (see Flanagan
et al., 2007: 17). While Spivaks frustrations with feminist misappropriations of her concept are certainly understandable, strategic essentialism should not be hastily relinquished as an analytical concept owing to its uncritical conceptualization or misapplication
in prior scholarship. Indeed, when strategic essentialism is deftly mobilized it offers, as
suggested by Calas and Smircich (1999), an important option for critical scholars in
organization and management studies. This certainly includes a lens from which critical
researchers can approach the study of sexual identity.
Thus far, poststructuralist students of sexuality studies have yet to consider the potential utility of strategic essentialism. This might be explained, at least in part, by the unique
dispositional characterization of sexual identity versus other categories of difference
in organization research (Pringle, 2008). As already mentioned, while many individuals
accept the argument that gender and race are socially manifested, there is far greater
resistance to apply the same logic to understand sexual identity. Indeed, sexual identity
often succumbs to the popular assumption that it is a phenomenological attribute that is
ontologically fixed within the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Hird, 2006). This
dichotomized view is precisely what renders the efficacy of strategic essentialism.
Namely, when identity is bifurcated into two monolithic classes, like that of the homosexual and the heterosexual, strategic essentialism is a powerful mechanism by which
to consolidate group cohesion under the disenfranchised category (Calas and Smircich,
1999) and, from there, to elucidate the nuances within binary thinking. This follows cohesively from Borgerson and Rehns (2004: 458) assertion that, when dualisms are conceived semiotically they are functional in that they play a crucial role in calling attention
to subordination and oppression, provoking an awareness of hierarchy.
It is also worthy to mention that there exists a contextual element to strategic essentialism. That is, the usefulness of strategic essentialism is inherently dependent upon the
category of difference under investigation. It is invoked and rationalized, here, owing to
sexual identitys dichotomized treatment in extant literature and in popular culture
(Sedgwick, 1985; Smith and Windes, 1997). However, as Linstead and Pullen (2006:
1300) explicate, [t]he existence of a binary or dyadic system always creates a system of
latent conflict but the entry of a third term creates a new dynamic. The introduction of a
third term indicates strategic essentialisms limitations or the necessity for more
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sophisticated understandings of the concept than how originally conceived by Spivak

when studying particular identity projects. As such, strategic essentialism cannot be
employed symmetrically to de-essentialize race, religion, class or various other identity
systems. While I am certainly not negating strategic essentialisms value as an analytical
tool when conducting organization research on various other identity systems, it is crucial for scholars to be conscientious and mindful of how specifically their deployment of
the concept will confound essentialized identities.
In the following sections, I discuss the ontological themes under which organization
research on sexual identity has, thus far, been largely conducted. Thereafter, I explain
how strategic essentialism can be applied as a technique by scholars addressing social
inequalities within organizational life.
Sexuality in organization research

Organization researchers have only recently begun to explore the question of sexual
identity in the workplace with any consistency. Existing research within this domain has
been largely bifurcated along two ontological perspectives. In the first perspective,
emerging mainly from the American tradition, organization scholars have premised their
argument on foundational assumptions of homosexuality and heterosexuality (Clair
et al., 2005; Ragins, 2008; Ragins et al., 2007). Contrary to the poststructuralist position,
sexual identities within this framework are viewed as a dispositional rather than a situational corollary. In the second perspective, represented predominantly in European journals, organization researchers have approached sexuality through its discursive
relationship with power in the workplace (e.g. Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Fleming,
2007; Riach and Wilson, 2007). In this view, sexuality serves as a heuristic by which to
conceptualize organizational politics and the systems of inequality and marginalization
embedded within it. Through a few specific examples, I critically assess the extant literature in terms of how sexual identity has been tacitly defined by each of these perspectives.8 I then discuss how sexual identity is discerned by poststructuralist writers.
Before proceeding, this section merits a precautionary word on the central identity
constructs. Although in this article I critically appraise the ontological implications of
invoking concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, it is important to acknowledge that this vernacular may be used for its consistency with various organizational and
civil rights discourses. Indeed, because civil rights for sexual minorities is fraught in
conflicts over the nature of identity [and] the relationship between sexuality and identity (Creed et al., 2002: 493), many scholars and activists find it useful to apply essentialist and perhaps overly simplified labels to engage with rights discourse. As suggested
in the introduction, sexual identity as an essentialist trait was invoked, more or less strategically, by gay rights activists as part of an endeavour to combat anti-gay rhetoric and,
from there, to make the case for equal rights and social justice for sexual minorities
(Smith and Windes, 1997). Given how homosexuality and heterosexuality has been
previously deployed, it appears only logical that such terms be utilized in organization
and management scholarship. My concern remains, however extending from the critique of race presented by Miles and Torres (2007) that without discursively elucidating the inessential or liminal nature of sexual identity, this subject will develop an
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essentialized ontology much akin to how meanings of female and male and black
and white have come to be rendered concrete in many approaches to the study of gender
and race. As such, critical scholars in the field should proactively thwart any process that
reifies polarized assumptions of sexual identity.
Essentialist inquiry into sexual identity

With the aim to apportion recognition to sexual minorities in the workplace, the first
perspective explores the myriad dilemmas of coming out and hinges on conventional
categorizations of this diverse group. For example, Ragins and colleagues have used
stigma theory to investigate the likelihood of sexual identity disclosure among nonheterosexuals at work (Ragins, 2008; Ragins et al., 2007). They empirically explore the
antecedents and the implications of disclosing for this group. Notwithstanding their conclusions or their motivations for pursuing this line of study, the implications emerging
from the discourse in which they engage should be critically appraised. The sample for
the study was comprised of 534 lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees drawn from three
national gay rights organizations. Respondents of a survey were asked to identify themselves into categories of sexual orientation including heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and
bisexual. However, as the authors claim, because the aim of the study was to understand
fear and disclosure of gay identity at work, heterosexuals were excluded from the sample (Ragins et al., 2007: 1109). Herein, the bifurcation between the heterosexual and the
non-heterosexual becomes apparent indeed, gay identity is covertly defined as an
umbrella concept that encapsulates those individuals whose sexual identity is outside the
mainstream purview of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980). Likewise, because
the study surveys one groups experiences and explicitly demarcates it from a socially
circumscribed relational opposite, the cultural presumption of sexual identity as being
dichotomous is reified (akin to how race is reified according to Miles and Torres, 2007)
monolithic ideas of the heterosexual and the non-heterosexual become markers that
serve as analytical categories of difference (Foucault, 1990). Indeed, what the respondents are prompted to disclose is an essentialized and unproblematic meaning of their
sexuality; in this context, the act of disclosing effectively proves the very stability of the
identity categories that many critical theorists question. The poststructuralist concern is
that such categories overlook the fluidity and the contingency within sexuality (Gamson,
1995; Hird, 2006), which various organizational constituents may embrace; namely, the
temporal idiosyncrasies between and among these essentialist identity categories are rendered unavailable and, therein, silenced (Sedgwick, 2008).
This point is tangentially related to a hypothetical situation posed by Ragins (2008: 197):
Consider the example where a lesbian worker is assumed to be heterosexual by her colleagues.
This assumption essentially forces her to make an immediate decision: she may avoid the issue
and not correct her coworkers assumptions, or she may disclose her identity even though she
may not feel safe or comfortable sharing it with her coworkers at that time. Although she may
desire to keep her sexual identity private, her coworkers assumptions about her sexuality
makes her identity an issue by forcing her to make a decision between disclosing her identity
or allowing the assumption of a false identity to continue, thus putting her in the position of
passing as heterosexual.
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In discussing the implications of denying a stigmatized identity, Ragins explains how it

can engender pejorative consequences on the psychological well-being of an individual.
In Raginss hypothetical the workers sexual identity is ensconced in a stable foundation;
that is, the subjective position of the worker is conflated with the essentialist idea of the
lesbian. The concept of lesbian becomes (onto)logically juxtaposed with the concept of
the heterosexual however, these two value-laden ideas are culturally demarcated by the
fact that the former is considered abnormal whereas the latter is inferred as the norm
(Hird, 2000; Spradlin, 1998). Because it is only the non-heterosexual who must choose to
disclose, or not, there is an underlying cultural presumption of heterosexuality among
researchers in the field (on the latter point see Pringle, 2008). Indeed, scholars rarely discuss disclosure within the context of heterosexual identity (Button, 2004).
Clair et al. (2005) echo Raginss sentiments by further asserting that organizational
members with invisible stigmas must choose whether or not to disclose. For them, nonheterosexual individuals are in one of three classes: in the closet (no one is aware of the
identity), partially out (select others are aware of the identity), or out of the closet (everyone is aware of the identity) (pp. 812). The pervasive metaphor of the closet is quite
informative (Woods and Lucas, 1993). The proverbial closet negates the possibility of
transgression within sexual identity through its denial of social agency indeed, the closet
ensures a concrete sexual identity that may either be hidden (to be in) or revealed (to be
out). Moreover, this metaphor silences various dimensions of culture that symbiotically
interact with and therein create the dynamics of human sexual identity (Sedgwick, 2008).
The hypothetical situation as well as the reference to the closet are further problematic
in that they are predicated largely on assumptions of rationalist decision-making and,
thus, fail to account for the elements outside of rationality that are involved in disclosure
decisions. While psychological and organizational factors are often considered within
the conceptual frameworks emerging from this body of literature, there is little attention
paid to the emotional or, the traditionally classified non-rational or irrational (see
Ashcraft and Trethewey, 2004) components that may contribute to an individuals decision to disclose. As a rationalist outcome, then, disclosure is implicitly classified as a
form of intentional, reasoned, goal-directed behavior (Mumby and Putnam, 1992: 469).
Following from Mumby and Putnams (1992) poststructuralist feminist reading, it is
integral to begin to overtly incorporate noncognitive dimensions and emotional experience feelings, sensations, and affective responses to organizational situations (p. 471)
that underlie and substantively inform disclosure decisions. In sum, to commence
holistic understandings of disclosure decisions scholars might more seriously integrate
into their analyses the emotionality of rationality (Mumby and Putnam, 1992: 480) and,
therein, open up the scope of organizational irrationality within the context of sexual
identity (Ashcraft and Trethewey, 2004). A developing strand of research from critical
organization researchers has tangentially moved away from underlying assumptions of
rationality by studying sexuality as a cultural aspect of power.
Sexuality and power

Critical organization researchers have contextualized sexuality within a broader discourse of power in the workplace. Extending from analogous arguments on the discursive
578
gendering of organizations (e.g. Acker, 1990; Ashcraft and Mumby, 2004; Kanter, 1977;
Mills, 1988), these researchers contend that sexuality is embedded within workplace
practices in ways that it becomes a source of systemic power that sustains inequitable
social relationships (Macalpine and Marsh, 2005). Where this power has its most pronounced impact is in the fabrication of organization environments that revolve around a
heterosexist ideology (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008; McQuarrie, 1998); this ideology is,
of course, vested in and reinforced by the external societal culture (MacKinnon, 1979).
Indeed, as Broadbridge and Hearn (2008: S41) note, (hetero)sexual arrangements in
private domains generally provide the base infrastructure for organizations and management, which can only be achieved through womens associated unpaid labor.
Considering its etiology, it is not all too surprising that while masculinity is an implicitly
sanctioned gender identity in the workplace, femininity continues to be relegated within
most work settings (Ashcraft, 1998; Riach and Wilson, 2007). The symbiotic nexus
between gender and sexuality, suggests that the subversion of mens power will undermine the institutional edifice upon which the heterosexist ideology is maintained (Hearn
and Parkin, 1983; Pringle, 2008).9
There are several excellent examples that empirically illuminate how power traverses
organizations so as to sustain them as (hetero)sexualized spaces. McQuarrie (1998), for
instance, discusses how management classrooms are institutional spaces that are tacitly
marked by heterosexual norms. She elaborates further that, through the Othering process, organizations apportion higher status to heterosexuality, and ostracize constituents belonging to other sexual identity categories. McQuarrie highlights a social corollary
of this process: The act of labeling an associate as homosexual [is] a means through
which males strengthen their own (perceived) heterosexuality and make the labeled individual less desirable as a participant in organizational events (p. 164). Hence, the manifestation of sexuality within organizations defined, here, by the intransigent
differentiation between homosexuality and heterosexuality is a mechanism by
which intra-organizational solidarity is maintained.
More recently, Fleming (2007) vividly elucidated the intimate nexus between sexuality
and power in a richly nuanced article on how sexual identity is invoked to realize various
organizational objectives. In a qualitative study of an organization with a high commitment culture, Fleming investigates the overt entrenchment of sexuality within the workplace and identifies how the organization promoted sexual expression, both homosexual
and heterosexual, through a rhetorical and procedural culture predicated on notions of
acceptance and diversity. However, in critically appraising the tension and ambivalence
that appeared in the comments from some of the informants, Fleming concludes, drawing
on Foucauldian terminology, that the discourse of sexuality represented by claims of
openness and empowerment are a source of bio-power insofar as they are invoked by
management to engender a more productive and efficient workforce. In this way, the reeroticization of work relations is a labor process [that] absorbs sex and lifestyle and
renders it as a component of, and subject to, managerial control (p. 251).
McQuarrie and Fleming both assume the laudable task of explicating how sexual
identity harbors meanings of discursive power. Not only do these works provide many
constructive insights into the study of sexuality in organizations, but they also offer
intellectual space and opportunity to extend the frame of analysis so as to broaden the
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definitional scope of sexual identity and, in so doing, to understand its fine idiosyncrasies. One such opportunity emerges from poststructuralist theory.10 Indeed, poststructuralist thought serves as a way by which to conceptualize the nuanced complexities of
sexual identity and expression.
A poststructuralist critique
At the most rudimentary level, poststructuralism may be typified by what Lyotard (1984)
famously expressed as its incredulity towards metanarratives (also see Alvesson and
Deetz, 1999; Kilduff and Mehra, 1997), or what Fraser and Nicholson (1997) describe as
grand theorizing of social macrostructures. Akin to other critical traditions, it is explicitly historical, attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods and . . .
inflected by temporality, with historically specific institutional categories (Fraser and
Nicholson, 1997: 1434). The aim of the poststructuralist mandate is to critique metanarratives and, from there, to define human consciousness and social existence through
engagements with contextualized subjectivity (Agger, 1991).11 To appreciate this idea, it
is important to understand how metanarratives are problematically situated within, and
are informed by, socially constructed identity binaries, be they along the fault lines of
gender (e.g. Butler, 1990; Hird, 2000), race (e.g. Gilroy, 2000; Miles and Torres, 2007),
or sexuality (e.g. Zita, 1994). Indeed, poststructuralist critique, such as Derridas conjecture of difference (Mumby and Putnam, 1992), illustrates how the preservation of the
privileged identity (white, man, heterosexual) is existentially dependent upon a corresponding relegated identity (black, woman, homosexual) (see Tyler and Cohen,
2008); or, to posit it in Butlerian (1991) phrasing, heterosexuality presumes the being of
homosexuality. Working from the same current, Harding (2003) extends this idea through
consideration of the central dyadic relationship in management; she notes that every
individual in the western workforce is identified as a worker or as a manager and that the
identity of the latter is wholly contingent upon the binary existence of the former.
Elsewhere, again assuming a poststructuralist position, Harding (2008: 44; emphasis in
original) explains that identities cannot be resolved into an essence or into a coherent
whole; rather, they are post hoc impositions of a seemingly unified [label] upon a disparate and disconnected population. As such, the central aim of the poststructuralist is
to repudiate deterministic and binary logic by drawing attention to the discursive processes that culturally (re)produce social realities and the dichotomous modes of thinking
embedded within them (Butler, 1990; Calas, 1993).
In terms of sexual identity, poststructuralists disrupt the very constitution of sex
(Butler, 1990; Hird, 2000) and gender (Calas and Smircich, 1992). Often classified under
the label of queer theory (see Gamson, 1995), these scholars draw on Foucauldian
analysis to observe how homosexuality and heterosexuality are cultural productions
that intersubjectively inform the meaning of one another (for an informative discussion
on the cultural pervasiveness of these mutually dependent ideas see Sedgwick, 2008).
Indeed, for Foucault (1990), heterosexuality becomes privileged through its juxtaposition with a denigrated homosexuality, and these meanings are subsequently reified
through various social discourses. Citing Foucault, Brewis (2005: 497) summarizes this
process:
580
[T]he ways in which sex was put into Western discourse from the end of the 16th century
onwards, the proliferation of sex during the 18th century and the modern incitement to discuss
sex in endless detail have simultaneously established heterosexuality as the unassailable norm
and constituted other sexualities as abnormal.
Tangentially related to the Foucauldian reading of sexuality, Katz (2004) offers a

genealogical investigation into how heterosexuality was invented and came to be ideologically defined from the late 19th-century onwards. Katz writes that because the concept of heterosexuality is only one particular historical way of perceiving, categorizing,
and imagining the social relations of the sexes, it ought to be studied with the purposeful
aim to dislocate its socio-cultural privilege as being the normal and the natural form
of sexual expression (p. 69). Given its socially manifest nature, Butler (1991, 1993)
contends that heterosexuality is perpetually at risk and must continually engage in a set
of repetitive, or what she calls parodic, practices such as, heterosexual sex which
functions to stringently affirm the hegemonic ideals of femininity (passive) and masculinity (active). Incidentally, the very redundancy of these parodic practices function to
consolidate the discursive authority and cultural stability of heterosexuality (Butler,
1991; see also Butlers [1993] writing on performativity).
A related stream of poststructuralist-inflected scholarship reveals how sexual identities that are predicated on ontological sexual difference produce heteronormativity,
which can be described as the the normative idealization of heterosexuality (Hird,
2004: 27) or the centrality of heterosexual norms in social relations (Pringle, 2008:
S111). While feminists have long critiqued the tacit and the explicit claims of ontological sexual difference, essentialist definitions of female and male continue to prevail
in popular culture and in certain academic disciplines (Frye, 1996).12 On this point,
Hird (2004) adopts a position in feminist science studies to develop a substantive critique into how the ontology of sexual difference is often rendered concrete in research
propagated by the natural and particularly, the biological sciences (also see
Martin, 1991). The influence of ontological sexual difference within and outside of
academia, lends credence to Broadbridge and Hearns (2008: S39) recent observation
that, [s]ex and sex differences are still often naturalized as fixed, or almost fixed, in
biology.
It is equally important to note, here, that the alchemy of ontological sexual difference
is wholly dependent upon the patriarchal conflation of biological sex and cultural gender (Hird, 2004). As Pringle (2008: S112; also see Borgerson and Rehn, 2004) notes, [g]
ender [does] not avoid the oppositional duality embodied in the concept of sex, but
reflect[s] the interdependent relationship of masculinity and femininity. This reflection
pivots on genital determinism, which declares that males naturally embrace masculinity
while females naturally embrace femininity (Bornstein, 1994; Hird, 2000). This initial
conflation of sex and gender leads to the conventional model of heterosexuality, which
dictates that a man will desire-to-be a male and will desire-for a female, while a woman
will desire-to-be a female and will desire-for a male (Sinfield, 2002: 126). It is precisely these corresponding relationships whereby the heterosexual matrix is constructed
(Butler, 1990). According to Butler, this matrix serves as the grid of cultural intelligibility
through which bodies, gender, and desires are naturalized (see Ringrose, 2008: 511).13
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Repudiating essentialist readings, poststructuralists interpret sexuality and sexual

identity as inessential or, put another way, in a state of unremitting becoming (for a
sample of critical-orientated scholars who have described identity as a process of
becoming see: Alvesson et al., 2008; Ashforth, 1998; Harding, 2007). Within this
framework, sexual identity is conceived of as a process within social reality that is contingent upon its ceaseless interaction with other dynamics of culture (Berger and
Luckmann, 1967; Hatch, 2004; Smircich, 1983) they are constructed in relation to
ongoing, multilayered, and fragmented discourses (Tracy and Scott, 2006: 11). Hence,
for poststructuralists, sexual identity should be treated as historically variable . . . and
not foundational (Parker, 2002: 151). Accordingly, [s]exual identities . . . are always
invitations to dismemberment: as they are declared, so something enters in to disrupt
them, to suggest an identification with something else, or an origin somewhere else
(Frosh, 1997: 238).
The uneasiness that organizational scholars whose ideas are inflected by poststructuralist thought have with researchers that simplistically invoke sexual identity as an analytical category of difference is that it fails to recognize the vicissitudes of human
sexuality (Hird, 2006). Even the notion of sexual orientation presumes an unproblematic,
a priori sexual identity that is indifferent to the saliency of time and space not to mention that it entirely disavows the availability of human agency to do and redo identity
(see Butler, 1993). Poststructuralists raise important questions about sexual identities
that do not fit the ideology of heteronormativity (Hird, 2004; Pringle, 2008). This may be
presented in the form of seemingly paradoxical expressions such as female masculinity
(Halberstam, 1998), male lesbianism (Zita, 1994), homosocial cuckoldry (Sedgwick,
1985) or other diverse queer identities that remain outside the purview of essentialism
(Bowring, 2004; Hird, 2006). As suggested above, management researchers have all too
often, and much too uncritically, depoliticized and dehistoricized sexual identity when
offering it as an analytical category of difference (Newton, 1998; Parker, 2002). Namely,
sexual identity in organization research appears to be tacitly defined as a subjects present, concrete, and, at times, rationalist, sexual desires for members of the same-sex, the
opposite-sex, or sometimes, both-sexes (for a related discussion see Bornstein, 1994).
Accordingly, this research does not account for subjects past sexual experiences that
they may no longer identify with, and it further negates possibilities of future desire that
may deviate from present socio-sexual choices. Moreover, it wholly ignores, as queer
theorists have long explained, sexual acts certainly some heterosexuals engage in sex
acts traditionally associated with homosexuals and vice-versa and focuses entirely on
the bodies that are engaged in sex (Katz, 2004). It might, therefore, be useful for organization researchers to return to Gore Vidals provocative statement:
There is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual person. There are only homo- or
heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does
with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance. (Katz, 2004: 77)
It is in eschewing and denouncing the assumption of essentialist sexuality, as Vidal so

articulates in his proclamation, that strategic essentialism holds much promise for
organization research.
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Strategizing organization research

It goes without saying that essentialist identities have positively contributed to the social
causes for various marginalized segments of society. Conceptually they have been used
to interpret how networks of systemic power unjustly benefit one group at the expense of
another; in terms of practice, they have been part of a useful strategy in processes of early
community building (Frye, 1996; Fuss, 1989; Oseen, 1997). As Frye (1996: 1006)
describes, [t]he strategy of concretely constructing a positive category of women . . .
was implicit in the practice of forming and promoting womens consciousness-raising
groups and womens caucuses within political organizations, unions, and professions. It
is not surprising, then, that theorists seeking the redress of inequality have habitually
made recourse to an essentialist identity, though often prefacing their arguments with the
note that bifurcated identity categories are manifest in everyday social structures, which
need to be understood and deconstructed. Within the feminist literature, for instance,
several prominent thinkers have alluded to an ontological sexual difference as a means
to respond to discursive gender inequities (e.g. Gilligan, 1982; MacKinnon, 1987).
In contrast, and as the article has illuminated thus far, poststructuralist thought amplifies the pitfalls of essentialism, which include, among other things, the denial of idiosyncrasies in identification processes and behavioral practices. By emphasizing the liminal
flux in identity, poststructuralists seek to disrupt fixed reference points in dichotomous
modes of thinking and caution against totalizing narratives that claim universal validity
(Fraser and Nicholson, 1997; Ritzer and Goodman, 2002). The criticism of this approach
is that it reduces identity to a series of problematic discourses rather than comprehensively working through its entrenchment within social conditions. That is, poststructuralism is accused of prematurely deconstructing identity instead of using it as a tool to
combat the very cultural oppressions that has its origins rooted in identity politics (Bristor
and Fischer, 1993; Gamson, 1995).
Strategic essentialism can be astutely mobilized so as to allow poststructuralists to
maintain somewhat paradoxically its undergirding ethos of anti-essentialism and
deconstruction, while still addressing important social phenomena such as the embeddedness of identity and the systematic oppression of a particular group. Critical engagements with the essentialists discourse have the potential of unveiling how identity
ultimately harbors an inessential disposition. Positing this claim within the domain of
empirical inquiry returns us to the question: how can organizational scholars that ascribe
to poststructuralist thought utilize strategic essentialism in their research?
Consistent with the original purpose of strategic essentialism, it is fruitful to invoke
the concept as a means to open up the present discourse on sexual identity in organizations. Engaging prudently with sexual identity as an analytical category of difference
affords critical researchers a lens through which to conceptualize, problematize, and
apprehend the variability between homosexuality and heterosexuality; and, in tandem, to
ascertain the inherent flux in human sexual expression. Herein lays the central project for
the poststructuralist utilizing strategic essentialism. That is, to draw out, through various
methodological frameworks, the diverse expressions of sexual identity among organizational members. This can be realized through both qualitative and quantitative approaches
to social research. While a myriad of traditions within either of these research approaches
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may be adopted to illuminate diverse expressions of sexual identity, for the purposes of
this article I offer one example from each approach as way of illustration.
Qualitative analysis, as a method for gleaning insights into the meanings and understandings that are culturally associated with social phenomena, is the logical approach
for conducting research on systemic discrimination in organizations (Thurlow et al.,
2006: 217). While there is rich diversity in the methodologies that fall within the rubric
of qualitative research, its interpretive traditions especially offer novel techniques for
organization researchers to use strategic essentialism in an endeavour to unveil the
endemic and essentialist contradictions in sexual identity as an analytical category of
difference (Prasad, 2005). An exemplar of this is a recent study conducted by Ward and
Winstanley (2004), which utilizes a storytelling methodology to investigate the discursive articulation of sexual identity within organizational settings. Drawing upon the earlier work by Boje (1995), the authors observe that, [p]eople do not just tell stories: they
tell stories to enact an account of themselves and their community (Ward and
Winstanley, 2004: 223). Ward and Winstanley engage in popular discourses regarding
the social identity of lesbian and gay men; however, through storytelling, they discern
how sexual identities are constituted and reconstituted endogenous of organizations and
how such identities can be displayed, hidden, or, importantly, be in a mode of
changing.
Quantitative analysis has fewer exemplars of acknowledging the poststructuralist
fluidity in sexual identity. This is perhaps owing to its ontological and epistemological
alignment with positivism that has historically sought to attain objective truths rather than
to understand subjective processes. Notwithstanding this, there are a few promising
examples of how quantitative scholarship can employ the categories of homosexuality
and heterosexuality while still honoring the existence of sexual identities that are not
captured by these binary posts. For instance, in a study that used survey data of constituents from various segments of the lesbian community, its authors allow respondents to
claim lesbian, bisexual, straight, or other sexual identity, with the latter category
prompting respondents to self-define (Levitt and Horne, 2002). While largely remaining
within the nexus of essentialist thinking, the nuances of other identities are allowed to
emerge. This category creates uncertainty amidst the orthodox conception of sexual identity and encourages for new inquiries that will move toward explaining its respondents.
In both of these examples, the vernacular of essentialism is sustained insofar as it
permits critical scholars to engage with mainstream discourses regarding sexual identity.
This essentialism has been, purposefully or otherwise, deployed in a strategic manner.
Namely, there are interstices within the methodology of this research that reveal the tenuous nature of the bifurcation between homosexuality and heterosexuality (Hird,
2004). These references are merely two examples of how poststructuralists working
within various methodological streams in the field of organizational behavior and theory
can invoke strategic essentialism in an endeavour to begin to show how sexual identity
is not grounded in an a priori foundation. By appropriating the discourse of essentialism
they can engage with the ongoing mainstream dialogue on sexual identity in organizations; however, by strategically diverting away from essentialism, through sophisticated
methodologies, they move toward more holistically (re)presenting the idiosyncratic
sexual identities of the individuals that they study.
584
Finally, it should be noted that these admittedly cursory examples concerning the
deployment of strategic essentialism are merely intended to catalyse interest, and identify the viability, of the concept for empirical study. As the concept acquires currency
among scholars in the field, more refined examples of how to engage strategic essentialism within empirical research will surely surface. While I have purposefully provided
examples of a qualitative (interpretive-orientated) and a quantitative (positivist-orientated) study in an effort to indicate strategic essentialisms analytical breadth, there is
also much potential for the concept to move toward bridging the interpretive/positivist
divide within organization research. Commenting on the philosophical divide two
decades ago, Lee (1991: 351) provocatively asked: How . . . might the two approaches
be integrated so that organizational researchers can simultaneously enjoy the benefits of
both, rather than just one or the other? In an effort to respond to his own question, Lee
analyses an empirical case so as to illuminate how through careful research design and
implementation the two different approaches are mutually supportive, not mutually
exclusive (p. 363). As I have indicated above, as a theoretical construct for empirical
work, strategic essentialism allows for researchers to invoke identity binaries while
simultaneously confounding the coherency of the identity categories ontological foundation. That is to say, strategic essentialism provides agency for researchers to discern
the complexity indeed, the nuances and the idiosyncrasies of and within sexual identity yet without fully relinquishing the analytical value of essentialist labels. In this way,
strategic essentialism is analogous to how Mumby and Putnam (1992: 468) describe the
power of Derridas differance: Deconstructing binary opposites in texts through differance creates the space of middle voice; that is, dismantling the apparent fixed meaning
of a text opens possibilities for alternative meanings to emerge.
Conclusion
The study of sexual identity has been a largely unexplored terrain within organizational
research (Ward and Winstanley, 2003). In the last decade, however, there has been growing interest in conceptualizing how sexual identity issues manifest within organizational
life. Poststructuralists and other critical thinkers have a timely opportunity. They can
utilize strategic essentialism in an endeavour to engage with the ongoing mainstream
debates in the field, while still remaining in accords with their own ontological and epistemological commitments. They can not only question the content of collective identities but also the unity, stability, viability, and political utility of sexual identities even
as they are used and assumed (Gamson, 1995: 397; emphasis in original). In doing so,
the idea of sexual identity, far from being reified within an essentialist dichotomy, can be
interpreted as being in constant fluidity (Hird, 2006; Zita, 1994); that is, there can be new
recognition of the great diversity available to human sexual phenomenology.
Beyond the study of sexual identity per se, the deployment of strategic essentialism
has much potential for future organization research. In concluding this article, it is worth
noting four promising trajectories. First, strategic essentialisms analytical purview is not
limited to the efforts of disenfranchised groups. That is to say, it can operate as a functional mechanism by which individuals in privileged positions can de-center the locus of
institutional and systemic power within organizations and within organization studies. It
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is precisely the concern over the academys preoccupation with the center of power that
leads Hearn (1996: 612) to declare the need for the deconstruction of the dominant, in
this context the dominant of organization(s). Thus, for Hearn, scholars are charged with
the salient responsibility to study those individuals whose voices have been systematically silenced or, in extreme cases, completely erased within hegemonic organizational
discourses (Prasad, 2009). This responsibility certainly implicates the role of individuals
who occupy positions of social privilege, though admittedly such a task remains problematic. Indeed, while they have an ethical duty to de-center power so as to remedy the
marginalization of the Other, to do so would be antithetical to their own interests (Hearn,
1996). Notwithstanding this, those privileged individuals who acknowledge the inequities stemming from being afforded, and (unwittingly) assuming, statuses of power for the
mere fact that they occupy certain demographical and identity categories can invoke
strategic essentialism to destabilize the discursive unity of the center. They can essentialize their own identity with the strategic aim to reveal the concealed privilege that their
group embodies be it based on their whiteness, their maleness, or their heterosexuality.
Accordingly, through strategic essentialism they can move toward unpacking the proverbial backpack of invisible privilege (McIntosh, 1998).
Second, the recent interest among organization diversity scholars on, what McCall
(2005) labels, the complexity of intersectionality is testimony of the currency that poststructuralist and other critical perspectives have acquired in research on social identity
(e.g. Gopaldas et al., 2009; Styhre and Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2008).14 Indeed, organizational analyses of social identity are being increasingly pursued along the dual assumptions underlying intersectionality, which contend that: i) there exists mutually constitutive
relations among social identities (Shields, 2008: 301); and, ii) each social division has a
different ontological basis, which is irreducible to other social divisions (Yuval-Davis,
2006: 195). As such, a growing number of scholars perceive sexual identity to be a single
element of an intersectional phenomenon, which can only be holistically understood by
accounting for how it traverses with a subjects race, gender, class, and other social identities. Notwithstanding its theoretical purchase within organization studies, and within the
social sciences more broadly, theorists from this paradigm have noted how intersectionality is fraught with a host of new methodological challenges for conducting empirical
research (McCall, 2005). The central concern remains that by studying a particular phenomenon along a multitude of diversity categories results in ontological incommensurability, which renders approaching research questions empirically a rather difficult
methodological task (Prasad and Mills, 2010). On this front, prudent engagements with
strategic essentialism admittedly, conceptualizations that are more refined than how the
concept is presented here have the potential to advance critical organization scholarship
on analytical categories of difference by mollifying intra-group differences through the
evocation of coherent social justice projects. McCall (2005: 1773) herself observes that
some forms of intersectional complexity requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions.
Third, strategic essentialism begins to respond to the predicament of postmodernist
and, by extension, poststructuralist theory within organization studies. In his polemical
critique of postmodernism published more than 15 years ago, Parker (1995) summarizes
586
this predicament. Parker raises important concerns about philosophical claims that pivot
on the hasty rejection of modernity and the uncritical acceptance of relativism, which he
notes are central to various critical theories. Among Parkers discomfort with postmodernism is akin to the arguments presented by feminist writers already mentioned, such
as MacKinnon (1990) and Nussbaum (1999) the embrace of the most extreme version
of relativism, which he contends thwarts, if not entirely stupefies, the process and phenomenon of truth and knowledge construction. Thus, while rejecting postmodernism and
related critical theories that are antithetical to the production of knowledge and truth,
Parker (1995: 554) resists falling into the trap of nave positivism or empiricism by
declaring himself a critical modernist. While I concur with one commentator in that
Parker fallaciously construes a form of postmodernist theory that functions as a straw
man as a sort of parody for his own philosophical affirmation which is readily open
for dissection (see Carter, 1995), I equally believe that Parkers argument has much resonance with researchers within the field and ought to be addressed by scholars, especially
those whose ontological orientation is inflected by the postmodernist or poststructuralist
ethos. Contextualized within this debate, strategic essentialism highlights the idea that as
critical theorists, or otherwise as researchers who seek to embed critical theory into our
work, we need not relinquish all analytical tools that are proffered by paradigmatic
frameworks of essentialism and modernity. Indeed, poststructuralist scholars can adopt
strategic essentialism while never departing from the fundamental assumptions of its
theoretical foundation. In fact, strategic essentialism can be empirically used for the dual
but interrelated objectives of identifying the fluid aspects of social reality and of showing
the culturally fabricated nature of essentialist binaries.
Finally, strategic essentialism has the potential to further revisit the stringent demarcation between research paradigms as delineated in Burrell and Morgans influential work,
Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analyses (1979). Indeed, it extends the critique that scrutinizes the texts underlying assertions regarding the unitary nature of paradigms, which has been rigorously debated by prominent organization theorists since its
publication. For example, while acknowledging the meteoric contribution of Burrell and
Morgans arguments to subsequent organization research, Willmott (1993) is suspicious
of whether it substantively encourages theory development or whether it challenges philosophical boundaries and conventional thinking. Willmotts (1993: 682) speculation rests
in the fact that the [the text] assumes, and strongly endorses, a restriction of analysis
within the confines of four, mutually exclusive ways of seeing. Deetz (1996) reiterates
this concern by arguing that Burrell and Morgan tenaciously described their four paradigms as oscillating on a subjective/objective duality and, in so doing, represented them
as being inherently incommensurable. Thus, in following Burrell and Morgans framework, researchers must unnecessarily and, at times, uncritically accept the reified versions
of the acclaimed paradigms, which disavow any possibility of paradigmatic transgression
or amalgamation. In applying essentialism strategically, which fundamentally disrupts the
deterministic coherence of philosophical and methodological boundaries, strategic essentialism subverts the assumption that paradigms must be ontologically separable (Lee,
1991). In this way, strategic essentialism can serve as a liberating move toward epistemological ecumenicism; that is, to borrow the words of Deetz (1996: 203), to further impart
pluralism and complementarity to the field of organization studies.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Pat Bradshaw and Eileen Fischer for their astute comments on an earlier version
of this article. Informative appraisals from three anonymous reviewers and the supportive guidance from Associate Editor, Gail Fairhurst, also significantly advanced this article.
Funding
Funding for this project was generously provided through a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Notes
1. Fournier and Grey (2000) observe that non-positivist research has much greater purchase in
Europe than in the USA. They elaborate further:
It is still the case that US sociology is dominated by positivist methods and that publication
in the top journals requires conformity to this. Given the rigors of the university tenure
systems, the capacity for developing critical sociology is limited. The same arguments apply,
perhaps even more strongly, in the management field. (p. 14)
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Indeed, in terms of empirical research on diversity published in the premiere American

outlets for organization scholarship Academy of Management Journal, Administrative
Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Science, and Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes the vast majority of studies have historically
been, and continue to be, positivist in orientation.
It was from the many conversations I shared with Gareth Morgan that I came to appreciate the
argument that the purview of consciousness and knowledge is inherently limited by human
capabilities to conceptualize the external environment.
As poststructuralist theory is informed by a myriad of disciplines, it has been deployed in a
plethora of different ways within social sciences and humanities research. For the purposes of
this article, I mainly consider how feminists and management scholars have appropriated (and
extended) poststructuralism to achieve their various projects. However, it ought to be equally
noted that what joins scholars from different disciplinary affiliations to poststructuralist theory is their commitment against unitary epistemological claims engendered by Enlightenment
philosophy (Agger, 1991).
While this article focuses on sexual identity, for brevity the majority of my discussion is dedicated to the study of sexual categories of homosexuals and heterosexuals. As such, other
expressions of sexual identity or queerness that may be exhibited among individuals remain
outside the scope of this article.
Bernstein (1997: 532) has gone so far as to declare that the sexual identity movement is now
considered to be the quintessential identity movement. In her excellent article on the gay
and lesbian social movement in the USA, Bernstein develops a model to conceptualize the
three analytic dimensions of identity as they have manifested within the movement identity for empowerment, identity as goal, and identity as strategy. She concludes that identity
strategies will be determined by the configuration of political access, the structure of social
movement organizations, and the type and extent of opposition (p. 539).
This article does not deeply engage with the ontological or the metaphysical nuances that prevail in the works of different feminist writers that have approached the question of strategic
588
7.
8.
9.
10.

essentialism. A thorough reading of Braidottis work, Nomadic Subjects (1994), for example,
reveals some significant distinctions in her conceptualization of strategic essentialism versus
that of Spivaks. Braidotti appears to be most interested in invoking essentialist thought to
amplify sex differences, which is in direct contrast to Spivak who appears to situate her thinking on the subject more explicitly within the domain of the political. Hence, Braidotti heavily
relies on Irigarays construction and cultural reification of ontological sexual difference to
elucidate the utility of essentialist theorizing. As she says, Irigarays decision to [equate] the
feminine with women and the masculine with men is a source of mimesis. She goes further
to explain that, this apparent mimesis is tactical, it aims at producing difference; Iragaray
argues that there is no symmetry between the sexes, and that therefore attributing the women
the right and the political imperative of voicing their feminine amounts to deconstructing any naturalistic notion of a female nature (p. 184). Essentialism, here, is understood
as an avenue by which to illuminate differences so as to articulate feminine selves that are
neither situated within nor contingent upon androcentric binaries. While Spivak and Braidotti
predicate their consideration of essentialism on different ontological foundations, it ought to
be noted that both scholars develop their claims from the assumption that essentialism can
contribute to the project of gender egalitarianism.
It ought to be clarified that I do not suggest that Edley is an essentialist. However, she does
not satisfy the criteria of strategic essentialism as delineated by Spivak. Indeed, while the
concept of strategic essentialism is quite applicable to analyse her ethnographic data, Spivak
asserts that the researcher is also charged with the task to identify how and when the ontology
of woman can be relinquished. It is, here, within the strategic essentializing political project
that Edleys analysis falls short.
In this article, my objective is certainly not, in any way, to negate the contributions of prior
organization research on sexuality. Indeed, until about a decade ago, there was a significant
dearth of literature on sexuality in the field. As such, the scholars whose work I discuss in this
section have laudably and profoundly contributed to challenging the workplace ethos of heteronormativity and to recognizing the existence of organizational members from sexual minority
communities. Indeed, it was largely Ragins pioneering research efforts on the subject that
introduced discourse on sexual identity into leading North American management journals. In
this article, my aim is to extend the present literature in the field; specifically, to demonstrate,
using poststructuralist theory, how organization scholars can further problematize research on
sexuality by which the diversity within human sexual expression can be better ascertained.
Pringle (2008: S111) contends that organization research in the field has, thus far, separated
the concepts of gender and sexuality. Citing Ingraham, Pringle underscores the utility of the
concept of heterogender, which brings into direct scope the intimate relationship between
gender and heterosexuality. As she states, gender and sexuality, specifically [within the context of] heterosexuality, are intertwined. Concurring with Pringles point, I believe that organizational scholars ought to substantively integrate consideration of how gender and sexuality
inform one another. Intersectionality research, which I discuss in the conclusion of this article,
offers an excellent analytical paradigm from which to conceptualize how such identity categories collectively produce social realities and systems of discrimination (see McCall, 2005).
While I have not explicitly classified Flemings (2007) article within the poststructuralist
label, it should be noted that his argument, especially his use of Foucaults bio-power, necessarily shares some ontological affinity with underlying ethos of poststructuralism.
589
Prasad
11. Agger (1991) attempts to provide some sort of distinction between the theoretical insights
of postmodernism and poststructuralism. He explains that poststructuralism is a theory of
language, while postmodernism is a theory of society culture, and history. Notwithstanding
this (perhaps cursory) demarcation, Agger acknowledges that there is substantial overlap
between poststructuralism and postmodernism (p. 112). In this article, while I invoke the
label of poststructuralism, I draw on literature from both theoretical streams to develop my
conceptual arguments on sexual identity.
12. Through critical engagement with the theoretical arguments presented by Simone de Beauvior
and Luce Irigaray, Frye (1996) provides a thorough analysis of the contrasting approaches to
ontological sexual difference that feminist theory has adopted since its inception. She touches
upon the problematic debate within feminist theory discussed in the first section of this article concerning the analytical utility of feminists invoking an ontological category of woman/
women. What is particularly interesting about Fryes argument is how she engages the theoretical insights that have been developed from feminists working within complex conceptual
terrains such as existentialism (Beauvoir) and the Lacanian symbolic order (Irigaray) with a
critical analysis of a timely debate (the well publicized incident of Lorena Bobbitt castrating
her husband and the legal battle that ensued). Through this discussion, Frye insightfully reveals
how central to the Bobbitt case, and particularly the various opinions adopted by different
constituents, was the discursive meanings attributed to the concept of woman. Through her
analysis, Frye develops an excellent opportunity for scholars to engage the public by postulating the debate over ontological sexual difference beyond the parameters of the academy.
13. In a candid autobiographical discussion of how her public and her private lives as an academic intersect in the most intimate of ways, Brewis (2005) invokes the heterosexual matrix
to reflect on the implications engendered by pursuing organization research on sexuality.
Brewis explains how her research pursuits effectively marked certain gendered and (hetero-)
sexualized inscriptions onto her body (p. 498). This experience, which alludes to the cursory
conflation between ones research interests and external perceptions of ones socio-sexual
desires, once again illuminates the cultural pervasiveness indeed, the hegemonic authority
of the heterosexual matrix to authorize or attribute certain socio-sexual choices onto subjects.
14. McCall (2005) distinguishes three perspectives within the paradigm of intersectionality,
each defined by its distinct approach to social identity: inter-categorical, intra-categorical,
and anti-categorical. The anti-categorical perspective, which McCall traces to coincide with
feminist philosophical critiques of modernity and increasing disgruntlement among feminists
of colour regarding how the second-wave defined the movement, fundamentally deconstructs
analytical categories and is marked by claims that social life is much too fluid for fixed categories to capture. It is precisely this view within intersectionality that I suggest, following
from McCall, lends credence to poststructuralist understandings of social identity.
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Beyond analytical dichotomies

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Within this statement, same-sex desire is postulated as an (immoral) choice. In response,

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sexual identity is a way of reversing the attribution of differences in a hierarchal mode,

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sophisticated understandings of the concept than how originally conceived by Spivak

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Human Relations 65(5)

Essentialist inquiry into sexual identity

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In discussing the implications of denying a stigmatized identity, Ragins explains how it

Sexuality and power

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Human Relations 65(5)

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Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com at UNIV FEDERAL DA BAHIA on July 10, 2012

Human Relations 65(5)

Tangentially related to the Foucauldian reading of sexuality, Katz (2004) offers a

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Repudiating essentialist readings, poststructuralists interpret sexuality and sexual

It is in eschewing and denouncing the assumption of essentialist sexuality, as Vidal so

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Human Relations 65(5)

Strategizing organization research

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Human Relations 65(5)

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Human Relations 65(5)

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Indeed, in terms of empirical research on diversity published in the premiere American

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Human Relations 65(5)

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Human Relations 65(5)

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Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com at UNIV FEDERAL DA BAHIA on July 10, 2012

Human Relations 65(5)

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Human Relations 65(5)

Ragins BR (2008) Disclosure disconnects: Antecedents and consequences of disclosing invisible

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