Interrogating the Negative Discourse of Performance Appraisal

Abstract

It is possible that performance appraisals embody imaginations of the law in terms of making organisations as rationally ordered spaces. However, this fantasy of law may open several violent possibilities in the conduct of appraisals and may reduce employees into technical subjects rather than dialogical and political actors. Therefore, performance appraisals may embody the dirty work of expunging the political subjectivity of employees. Specifically by relying on narrative accounts of fifteen Indian managers, we argue that performance appraisals could constitute employees within dramas of atonement, nastiness and tragic heroism. Overall, we argue that it may be useful to consider all work as dirty work and understand processes of social construction through which dirtiness of many forms of work is concealed. Within the context of dirty work, this may be a more effective strategy for resisting the selective construction of stigmas.