What I Was Looking For Before I Knew What to Call It

I spent years feeling like I was out of place at work. That there was something wrong with me. That there was a performance in the workplace, a dance that everyone else understood but I didn't. The way colleagues seemed to navigate professional life with an ease I couldn't replicate for myself. The right tone in a meeting. The right amount of visible enthusiasm. The right way to promote oneself or network upward. The right performance of ambition that was enough to signal seriousness.

I watched others curiously, as if I was on a foreign planet, to figure out the dance and attempt to model it. It felt effortful in a way that didn't seem to be effortful for others.

I won't assume I know or understand the internal experience of others. Whether they felt the same friction and had simply learned to carry it more smoothly, whether the performance had become so internalized it no longer registered as performance, or whether they never felt the tension at all.

What I do know is that something in me kept registering a gap. Between what work was described as and what it actually was. Between the language organizations used about themselves and what I watched happen inside them. Between the invitation to bring my whole self to work and the gradual realization that only certain parts of that self were actually welcome. Between the celebration of an achievement and the next breath needing more faster, seemingly communicating the celebration is a token and on the race to never enough.The incongruence was persistent and coming from multiple angles. I couldn't absorb and normalize it the way the professional context seemed to require.

I think that's connected to being neurodivergent. Something about the way I'm wired made the gap stay loud when it might otherwise been normalized — a particular angle of sight. I couldn't pretend my way past it, which meant I had to find another way to deal with it.

What I went looking for was language. Mechanisms that could help me name what I felt but couldn't see: the unnamed structures, the moral directives built into common workplace phrases, the way 'good' identities get defined, narrowed and enforced, the ways the incongruent are normalized and made invisible. This is what I found and am further exploring.

Act One: Critical Theory — The Frankfurt School

I first stumbled upon a critical theorist out of the UK that was a breath of fresh air. It was my first key that there were established ways to dissect and understand what I felt.

Who they are: Critical Theory began in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research. Its founding thinkers are often called the Frankfurt School. The core names are Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who together argued that what a society calls rational, natural, or inevitable is often none of those things. It's a particular arrangement of power that has learned to make itself invisible. Herbert Marcuse extended this argument into consumer culture and the workplace, examining how systems of control get internalized until they feel like personal preference. Jürgen Habermas examined how communication itself can be distorted by power: how the conditions under which we talk, agree, and decide are never as neutral as they appear.

The concept: The Frankfurt School gave me the first thread of naming the felt thing I sensed. They called it ideology, not in the casual sense of "a set of beliefs," but in the deeper sense of a worldview so thoroughly embedded in the structures of everyday life that it no longer reads as a worldview at all. It reads as reality. The arrangements that serve particular interests, that concentrate power, that extract labor, that sort people into hierarchies, don't announce themselves as arrangements. They present as common sense. As the way things are. As what any reasonable person would recognize as normal.

What Critical Theory does is make that invisibility visible. It asks:

• Who benefits from this arrangement feeling natural?

• What would have to be true for this to feel inevitable rather than constructed?

• What questions does this common sense make illegitimate to ask?

What it gave me: The foundational permission to question what presents itself as given, common sense, obvious, and that doing so is legitimate intellectual work rather than paranoia or ingratitude.

Where it leaves me wanting more: Critical Theory works at a high level of abstraction. It tells me that power hides inside common sense, but it doesn't give me a method for identifying and naming the specific language or vehicle through which that happens in an organization

Act Two: Kenneth Burke and Rhetorical Analysis

Who he is: Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was a literary theorist and rhetorician who spent his career asking how language acts on people. He was working decades before "organizational culture" was a phrase, but he described its mechanics with precision.

The concept: Burke developed the idea of terministic screens: the observation that every term we use is a kind of lens. It prioritizes certain things into view and deflects others out of frame. The selection isn't neutral or accidental. Terms carry histories, embedded assumptions, and implied moral judgments that we absorb along with the word itself.

You can see this in phrases like 'above and beyond' in a performance review or 'you have to act like you want it' in self-help books. These terms makes extraordinary effort visible and moralize it as excellence. What these terms deflects, quietly without a chance for discussion, is the question of what the baseline is, who decides it, whether it's sustainable, and what it costs to perform at these levels indefinitely. The screen is doing that work every time the phrase is used, whether the person using it intends that or not.

Other screens we can question are: High Performer. Culture fit. Resilience. Dedication. Grit. Growth Mindset. Bring your whole self to work. What do these select? What do these make invisible? Who benefits from this particular framing?

What Rhetorical Analysis and Burke gave me: A way to analyze language use. The narration. The genre. The style. The frames. A question I could ask about almost any organizational phrase: what work is this language doing? What is it making visible or invisible? What is it implying?

Where he leaves me wanting more: Burke explains how language frames reality. He's less interested in the institutional machinery that determines which frames get amplified, written into policy, and eventually treated as common sense. He tells me what the screen does. He doesn't fully explain how it got installed, or who it benefits and why.

Act Three: Norman Fairclough and Critical Discourse Analysis

Who he is: Norman Fairclough (b. 1941) is a British linguist who developed Critical Discourse Analysis, a method for examining how language carries and reproduces power, and specifically how ideology becomes invisible through repetition until it reads as common sense rather than as a set of choices serving particular interests.

The concept: Fairclough calls it naturalization: the process by which a particular way of speaking about something gets repeated across enough documents, speeches, reviews, and onboarding materials that it stops reading as a perspective and starts reading as reality.

The language of high performance, culture, commitment, and merit didn't emerge organically from the workplace. It was produced, refined, and disseminated and arrived in organizations pre-packaged, as though it had always been there. The performance review isn't just a document. It's what Fairclough would call a discourse technology: a tool that constructs the worker as a particular kind of subject, one whose worth is measurable, rankable, and contingent on organizational criteria someone else designed.

What I find most useful here is the concept of what can be said in a given discourse. Not just individual word choices, but the whole architecture of which questions are askable, which framings are available, and which things are so assumed they require no defense. In most organizational discourse, the assumption that workers should be ranked by performance, that some workers are inherently more valuable than others, and that commitment is demonstrated through availability — these are rarely argued for. They're just the air in the building.

What Fairclough gave me: The institutional explanation Burke doesn't provide. Not just what the screen does but how it got there, who benefits from its presence, and why it feels like air rather than architecture. This is where the unnamed thing I'd been feeling started to become genuinely nameable. I don't mean as the result of individual bad actors, but as systems producing language that serves specific interests while feeling like professional common sense so it is mindlessly propagated.

Where he leaves me wanting more: Fairclough is primarily concerned with structure and power. He's less focused on why individual people with full access to their own discernment still participate. Why do we feel the pull of recognition and want to be seen as the high performer even when we can see it is artificially constructed.

Act Four: Social Psychology — Asch, Milgram, Tajfel, Cialdini

Who they are: Four researchers whose work, taken together, describes the largely invisible ways that group context shapes individual behavior, belief, and identity in ways that feel like personal choice rather than predicable behavior.

• Solomon Asch (1907–1996) ran conformity experiments in the 1950s showing that people would align their stated perceptions with group consensus even when the group was clearly wrong. Not because they were deficient but because the pull toward social agreement is strong. The need to belong, to not stand apart, to not be the one who sees it differently changed what the participants were willing to say out loud, and possibly on what they allow themselves to perceive.

• Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) demonstrated through his obedience studies that ordinary people comply with authority to a degree that shocked them, pun not intended. Situational pressure is far more determinative of behavior than character or values. Most of us significantly overestimate how much our internal compass governs our actions when the situation is pushing in a particular direction.

• Henri Tajfel (1919–1982) and John Turner developed Social Identity Theory, the finding that humans define themselves substantially through group membership. Belonging to a group shapes what we value, how we perceive those outside it, and which behaviors feel natural and right inside it. Professional identity isn't separate from this. It's one of the most powerful group identities many people hold.

• Robert Cialdini (b. 1945) documented the mechanics of social proof, when people are uncertain about what to do or feel, they look to what others around them are doing and feeling, and calibrate accordingly. When everyone in a room treats something as meaningful, it becomes meaningful, not because people were manipulated but because that's how social reality is constructed.

What this gave me: The answer to why people perform culture and play the expected roles and games of organizations.

It isn't because of false consciousness or moral failure. It's that humans are profoundly social animals operating in group contexts that exert real pressure on perception, behavior, and self-concept. Tajfel tells that we define ourselves partly through our organizational group. Asch tells us the group's consensus shapes what we do and perhaps perceive. Cialdini tells us we look to others to know what to feel. Milgram tells us the situation is doing more work than we want to believe.

None of this means change is impossible. It means an alternative requires awareness, intention, some friction against the current. Like overcoming the bystander affect, It doesn't happen automatically. And naming these realities can be done without cynicism. It's accepting our human condition and working with it.

Where it leaves me wanting more: Social psychology describes mechanisms without asking whose interests those mechanisms serve in a given context or if and how they are being manipulated. It explains how conformity operates without asking why this particular conformity was organized here, by this institution, in service of what.

Act Five: Critical Organizational Studies

This is where I am today... I'm still reading, but I want to name it because it's where my path is heading next.

What it is: Critical Organizational Studies is a field that examines organizations as sites of power, meaning-making, and identity construction. It asks not just how organizations function but whose interests they serve, what they require of the people inside them, and how those requirements get naturalized into professional common sense. It lives primarily in communication and sociology departments, which may be part of why it took me a while to find it.

The names appearing on my reading list: Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, who have spent careers applying critical theory to management and organizational life. Arlie Hochschild, whose concept of emotional labor, the managed, performed feeling work that organizations require and rarely name as work, resonates sharply with everything I've been circling. More to come as I move deeper into the field.

Why it feels like the right destination: COS does something the other tools alone don't: it says that the experience of being inside an organization, navigating its power structures, absorbing its language, performing its identity requirements, is itself a legitimate site of knowledge. The practitioner's felt experience isn't just background color. It's data.

That matters to me personally. Twenty-five years of working inside organizations isn't just context for this research. It's the primary material. COS is the first field I've encountered that treats it that way.

Further Reading

Critical Theory / Frankfurt School

• Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

• Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man (1964)

• Jürgen Habermas: The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)

• Raymond Geuss: The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

Rhetorical Analysis / Burke

• Kenneth Burke: Language as Symbolic Action (1966)

• Kenneth Burke: A Grammar of Motives (1945)

• Sonja Foss:Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice

Critical Discourse Analysis / Fairclough

• Norman Fairclough: Language and Power (1989)

• Norman Fairclough: Analysing Discourse (2003)

• Teun van Dijk: Discourse and Power (2008)

Social Psychology

• Robert Cialdini: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984)

• Elliot Aronson:The Social Animal (1972)

• Philip Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect (2007)

Critical Organizational Studies

• Mats Alvesson & Hugh Willmott: Making Sense of Management (1996)

• Arlie Hochschild: The Managed Heart (1983)

• More to come.