• DOI:10.1177/1350508416629967
• Corpus ID: 147471542

Animals and organizations

@article{Labatut2016AnimalsAO,
  title={Animals and organizations},
  author={Julie Labatut and Iain Munro and John Desmond},
  journal={Organization},
  year={2016},
  volume={23},
  pages={315 - 329}
}

• J. Labatut, I. Munro, J. Desmond
• Published 21 April 2016
• Sociology
• Organization

ions, exemplified by the gesture of ‘this is not a bite’. Massumi (2014) argues that through play we can deterritorialise ourselves and enter the ‘animal existential territory’ (p. 55). Play and becoming animal are both aspects of biophilia. Existing research within the field of organization studies on power and resistance has sadly neglected the significance of the animal in these relations. This Special Issue is in part a response to this neglect, highlighting the active role of animal agency in the process of organization. We have already discussed how animals come to be seen as passive actors not as a result of natural behaviour but as the result of a process of ‘de-animalization’ in the industrial slaughterhouse where they are systematically stripped of any agency or value other than as a commodity in a capitalist circuit of exchange (Hamilton and McCabe, 2016). In contrast to those studies in this Special Issue which investigate the treatment of animals as food (Baran et al, 2016; Hamilton and McCabe, 2016) and as feral pests (Hillier and Byrne, 2016), one paper investigates the active agency of animals showing how they are ‘constitutively entangled’ within organizing processes in the construction industry (Sage et al., 2016). This study by Daniel Sage and his colleagues shows that the animal other is not simply excluded from organization and that in addition to processes of exclusion, other processes of ‘disturbance’ and ‘invitation’ exist in organizations that reveal a range of approaches to negotiating human-animal boundaries. The active agency of animals in organizations is the subject of another paper in this Special Issue; a paper that explores the role played by Olly the cat when she is invited to live in an international airport (O’Doherty, 2016). The cat acts as a companion animal for some, as a public relations opportunity for others and also as a disruptive creature which becomes the focus for competing expressions of organizational politics. Both articles thus reveal the animal as an active participant in the dynamics of organizational micro politics and in the negotiation of organizational boundaries. This introduction began by considering examples of animals as both victims of modern industrial capitalism and as rebels who occasionally turn against their human keepers. This final section of the introduction has highlighted the role of animals in subverting the prevailing biosocial order of the modern world, in terms of, (1) animal resistance that represents a critique of the social order as a ‘world turned upside down’; (2) strategies of resistance that express biophilia, a friendliness towards life; and (3) strategies of resistance that embody a becoming animal. Animals are not simply to be protected by their human masters, rather animality and becoming animal are rich sources of rebellious and revolutionary action. These propositions rediscover animality as an ethics which expresses a respect of the animal other and a friendliness towards life.