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

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(Tronto, , 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 (1993Tronto's ( , 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. September, 2024It is an entirely odd thing to write a dissertation about relationships, interdependence, connectedness, and care, while sitting endless hours in solitary confinement at a computer, separate from everything and everyone.The need, and desire, to care for others kept interrupting this work, and this work required others to provide me with care that I often had no way to return.In that way, this was not an easy journey.So the biggest gratitude I must offer is to my family -Linda, Ella, Nicholas and Scarlett -for supporting me on what I know has seemed an endless journey.Thank you for putting up with my absences, and also for understanding that my unwillingness to isolate completely is one reason this project stretched so long.(Sometimes, you just have to leave the computer and bake bread!) Caring for you all, particularly through the simple daily work of the kitchen, is one of the pleasures of my life.Thank you also to my caring "family" of fellow PhD travellers, who have helped me return to the path when it seemed the idea of completing the thesis was drifting further and further out of sight.The Group of 10, you're a wonderful sounding board, source of guidance, connection, and laughs -thank you.My first cohort members -Annika Voltan and Cara Lynn Scheuer -you made the first two-month intensive memorable and fun; I felt like I jumped in the deep end and was grateful to have you to follow.Liela Jamjoom, Tianyuan Yu and Kristin Williams, my second cohort members: thank you for welcoming me so warmly and for the deep dives into all sorts of topics together.I continue to learn from you, and I am so glad to have our friendship.To others I met in the program, and in the extended "Halifax School"; I feel lucky