Unpacking complexities of managerial subjectivity: An analytic fixation on constitutive dynamics

In the critical streams of organization studies managerial subjects are destabilized through different discursive approaches, and discussions are raised to advance these further. This revitalizes conceptual debates of the complex relations of organizational discourses and subjective agency, and the analytic challenges of discourse/Discourse-distinctions and avoiding agency-structure-dualism. This paper proposes an integral conceptualization of subjectification that directs analytic attention to the complex constitutive dynamics of organizational discourses and agency normative to organizational practices and reality constructs. Inspired by poststructuralist theorizing in social psychology, subjectification is conceptualized as simultaneous co-productions of subjection and agency in intersecting discourses, and, hence, better unpacked with sensitivity to this complexity. The analytic potential is discussed with a case-study of public managers in collaborative governance processes in the Danish day-care sector. With complex-sensitive analytics the paper contributes to the ‘plurivocal’ debate on advancing organizational discourse approaches.