An organization’s relationship to violence

Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that represent the world and correspond to things in it, communication remains a way to describe violence. Under this representationalist line of thinking, communication is split from the material world and cannot do harm. Similarly, when people assume that agency is a human’s intentional decision about how to act, the broader processes that inform action fade from view. An individual perpetrator becomes the sole violent actor. Both sets of assumptions make it difficult to conceptualize an organization’s role in violence. This chapter relies on feminist new materialism to problematize these assumptions. After providing an overview of the theory’s distinctive features, the chapter shows its resonances with existing scholarship on communication, agency, and organizations. These resonances provide a framework for understanding organizations to be more than mere sites for violence.

Why “beyond the rapist”?

This first chapter outlines reasons why considering campus sexual violence “beyond the rapist” matters. Many feminists assert that, to stop sexual violence, people must pay attention to the systems that surround it. Noticing those systems can be difficult, however, because popular discussions suggest that one individual rapes another. This conceptualization of sexual violence can obscure the processes and organizational dynamics that support assaults. By focusing on the growing movement around Title IX and rape at U.S. colleges and universities, the chapter introduces a key argument of the book: Feminist new materialist theories can help organizations and activists focus “beyond the rapist” and prompt systemic change. The chapter offers definitions of the book’s key terms—organization, communication, and sexual violence—as well as an overview of feminist new materialism and Title IX.

Beyond the rapist

The final chapter provides a summary of the book’s key claims. It also applies the arguments developed in previous chapters to other cases, including gun violence on U.S. campuses, the legal standard “deliberate indifference,” and USA Gymnastics’ problems with sexual assault. In so doing, it shows not only how the book’s arguments transfer to other contexts, but also how a feminist new materialist approach can guide U.S. university responses to high rates of assault. The chapter includes concrete suggestions for how campuses can move “beyond the rapist.” Moreover, through these recommendations and analyses of other cases, the chapter shows how a feminist new materialist approach can build theory about the complex relationships among violence, organization, and communication.

Agency organizes violence

As part of a material turn, organizational scholars increasingly pay attention to nonhuman agents, the things and stuff of organizing. These nonhuman agents are often discussed without consideration of difference. To encourage a more nuanced conversation about agency and the human/nonhuman divide, this chapter analyzes PRU’s boundary-making practices—the organization’s continuous decisions about who or what can act, especially in violent ways. It shows that these practices are gendered, raced, and sexualized, and they emerge as such while PRU members grapple with Title IX reporting processes. Importantly, statements and texts about violence—both forms of discourse—are considered to be agentic when they uphold whiteness. In contrast, their capacity to act is minimized when they challenge systemic racism or identify patterns of violence. Though some scholars are concerned that discourse has become too muscular, this chapter shows that the agency of discourse—when considered in proximity to Title IX and sexual violence—is far from uniformly too forceful. Drawing on scholarship rarely read among organizational scholars, this chapter issues a caution: Theories that minimize the supposedly bulging biceps of discourse may keep a violent status quo in place.

Violence communicates differently

This chapter begins to conceptualize sexual violence as a series of material–discursive intra-actions. It does so by drawing upon a case study at a university regarded for having some of the most effective sexual violence policies in the United States, the pseudonymous Public Research University (PRU). An analysis of the systems for reporting rape and other assaults at PRU shows that these processes rely on representationalist frameworks that have problematic raced and gendered consequences. The reporting system allows PRU to overlook lots of violence. Moreover, marginalized members of the university do a disproportionate amount of the labor to run the system. The chapter relies on the feminist new materialist concept of diffraction to show that reports to Title IX officers are not mere descriptions of sexual violence, but the outcome of material–discursive processes. The chapter advances a material turn by using violence as a focal point for theory that is neither wholly constructivist nor wholly realist.