Oppression

Conceptual Overview

Organized action by necessity contains an element of enacted power, and it seems relatively uncontroversial to claim that oppression is a potential facet of all organizational life. Some would even say that it is omnipresent in contemporary organizations, as it is an inevitable and necessary part of a structure that has to build divisions between the powerful and the subordinate or “subjugated.” The existence of oppression in contemporary organizations is in fact very difficult to ignore and exists on several levels, from the individual to the systemic. However, when we talk of oppression, we commonly refer to something more overarching than individual bullying, and as an analytical device, it often assumes and provides an ideological basis for the identification and critique of oppressive structure—such as corporate capitalism, sexism, and the like.

Although oppression seems to be ubiquitous and forms part of many theoretical approaches to organization studies, it has not been widely theorized as a perspective on organizational life. Instead, it is most often studied under the guise of three other concepts: domination, control, and resistance. Domination—understood as having authority and exercising power over someone—is a central part of any understanding of power, and it is frequently studied in theories of organizational behavior. Although closely related to the concept of oppression, the two concepts are not synonymous. Similarly, although control is both seen as an essential element of oppression and often perceived as oppressive, there is a need conceptually to separate these terms. Still, we can see the three concepts as interrelated or coconstitutive of one another, particularly when it is recognized that domination and control are prerequisites of oppression.

Resistance, which is often understood as the counterforce to oppression, can in a similar vein be seen as a symptom of oppression. Resistance has in fact become one of the more common approaches to understanding oppression, no doubt because it is easier to identify overt acts of resistance than it is to expose with any clarity an ideologically normalized status quo through which one group exerts arbitrarily justified power over another. That said, the very nature of oppression as a silent and invisible structure means that merely analyzing the explicit and overt modes of resistance can never fully come to grips with the phenomenon itself. Again, we can see here that resistance and its identification are something that can be used to understand oppression, but in so doing, this analytical exercise avoids theorizing oppression as such.

To understand how the concept became part of the critical discussion in organization and management studies, one must take account of the work of Karl Marx and the development of Marxist thinking. For Marx, oppression springs from and is a necessary part of class struggle and is thus ever-present in organizations under capitalism. In his analysis, one class's gaining control over the mode of production will fix one specific ideology into all social structures, thereby placing other classes into a subordinate position. Oppression thus springs from the way in which one class can use a material relation to establish its dominance and embed it into a social system, a process that is intimately connected with the ways in which the means and relations of production are controlled.

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