Organizational Shunning: The Disciplinary Functions of “Non-Sense”

Focusing on the symbolic processes that create “outsiders-within,” this article examines the discourse surrounding employees within an organization who are excluded from the everyday rites and rituals that signify organizational membership. What symbolic constructions typify the discourse of those who fall between the cracks of the day-to-day cultural system? Rather than assume that organizational shunning is an infrequent and brief process, this analysis illustrates how the organized silence invoked during shunning transforms organizational paradoxes and competing values into individual personality problems that can be safely located outside the boundaries of the sense-making processes of the organization. In this way, organizational shunning functions as a disciplinary practice that affirms power relations and simultaneously reifies partisan decision-making premises and priorities.