Privileged irresponsibility in Harvard Business Review: a posthumanist discourse analysis of care, managerialism and inequality

Abstract

Care is essential for life; we all depend upon care from others. However, the rise of bureaucratic organizations founded on managerialist values of rationality and efficiency has contributed to the sidelining of care within organizations, so that it is unseen and undervalued in our workplaces despite being fundamental to human and more-than-human flourishing. This thesis focuses on care as an element of everyday work, rather than care as a core service (such as nursing). It questions whether privileged irresponsibility (Tronto, 1993, 2013) – the ability of those who have privilege to deny that they receive care – is contributing to economic inequality in the workplace. Viewing care through a posthumanist lens, this study embraces radical interconnectedness and a conceptualization of care as an element of immanent relationality. A model of nested onto-epistemologies is proposed, with discursive and humanist realms situated within a wider, unbounded posthumanist landscape. Care is seen as partially obscured within the discursive/humanist realm, but as an unconstrained affective process of relational and material interweaving in the posthuman realm. Braidotti’s (2019) conceptualization of power as both potestas (restriction) and potentia (empowerment) is applied to examine this situation. The onto-epistemological landscape supports a discursive, critical approach to a study of texts drawn from 100 years of Harvard Business Review (HBR). This “bridge” journal is recognized as central to Western, capitalist management thought, yielding traces of managerialist discourses as well as examples of care within organizations. The study uses selected HBR articles to examine what managerialist discourses are reproduced, where care manifests and is valued (or not) in organizational life, how managerialist discourses help produce privileged irresponsibility, and how the recognition of care relates to the perpetuation of inequality by organizations. This study offers several contributions. It identifies ways that care appears within organizational life and illustrates how managerialist discourses disrupt the provision and recognition of care. It applies Tronto’s (1993, 2013) concept of privileged irresponsibility to management and organization studies, using this concept to answer the call from Amis et al. (2020) for further investigation into the mechanisms of systemic reproduction of inequality within organizations. It suggests a link between the experience of the managerialist workplace and the “deskilling” of care and relationality in society. Finally, it offers the concept of “nested onto-epistemologies” as a way to reexamine humanist, constructivist concepts through a posthumanist lens.