Management Seminar Series
Date: Thursday 29 November 2018
Time: 10:00 - 11:30
Venue: Gilbert Scott Conference Suite 355
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Professor Melissa Tyler

Abstract:
This paper critically interrogates the idea that 'inclusion’ is a good thing in/for organisational life. Through the lens of embodied ethics, it considers the ways in which inclusion is pursued, conditionally and instrumentally, through two interrelated responses to organisational encounters with difference: an over-inclusive co-optation and an exclusionary negation. The paper examines Primark’s recent treatment of a transgender employee as an example of the latter, and the company's introduction of a range of Pride themed clothes and accessories as an instance of the former. Drawing on recent feminist writing on politics, ethics and precarity, it suggests that the simultaneous pursuit of these two strategies perpetuates inclusion as a rhetorical reification of difference that supports an accumulation-orientated approach to equality at the expense of any possibility for a genuine, recognition-based commitment to social justice to emerge.

Biography:
Melissa Tyler is a Professor in Work and Organisation Studies at the University of Essex. She is currently working on an ethnographic study of sales-service work in licensed and unlicensed sex shops in Soho, London, issues of lived experiences of gender, sexuality and ageing at work, and on gender and commemoration in work organisations.

Her wider research interests are in feminist perspectives on work and organisation, organisational space, aesthetics and materiality, emotional, aesthetic and sexualised forms of labour and childhood, sales-service work and consumer culture.

For further information and to register for this event, please email business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk.

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