Dressing Corporate Subjectivities: Learning What to Wear to the Bank

This chapter is an experiment in writing subjectively about subjectivity. It gives an account of a four year study that was designed to discover the learning strategies used by disabled employees within a major financial institution that I refer to as Everybank. By "playing" with the research team's experience as female academics -- our bodies, our wardrobes, our clothing practices -- I explore what my co-investigators and I learned of our own subjectivity in the course of researching "corporate disability." Even as we attempted to maintain an external focus on the learning practices of disabled employees, we were compelled to attend to what we ourselves were being taught through an unfamiliar set of relations. Inhabiting corporate spaces and interacting with corporate managers meant learning new practices of communicating and interacting: speaking, writing but also dressing. For members of the research team, passing through corporate environments has given new meaning to the term "self-study." I conclude that learning by watching and learning by doing have not yet given way to computerized self-directed learning, at least not when it comes to the acquisition of work-able workplace subjectivities.