Summary 

Organizations are soundscapes – reverberating with sounds and particularly the 
sounds of voices. Somehow however voice sonics, that is the sounds of voices and not the words carried on those sounds, have escaped attention in management studies. This absence of analysis is peculiar given voice sonics’ undoubted influence on management, careers and on the general day-to-day functioning of organizations. Our paper, published in the Journal of Management Studies addresses this absence: It introduces sonicity and explores its powerful absent presence. 

Organisational soundscapes and the study of voices 

Organizations resonate with noises: they are soundscapes. Echoing through those soundscapes are human voices that speak words that are carried through the air. Sonicity is the vehicle that carries the words, not the words themselves. It is usually ignored: it does not seem to contribute much – it is words that are important. Yet voice sonics influence meaning-making, organisational culture, leadership, the image that people present, career progression,  etc., etc. The most obvious example is the voice of authority. It is a deep, resonant voices that commands attention, insisting the words it carries are listened to. A person is equated with their voice, so it is difficult for people with squeaky, nasally or weak voices to be regarded as authoritative. Yet sonicity remains largely unregistered in management studies. This paper opens the door to hearing and understanding voice sonics in the workplace and across organisations more widely. 

We focus in the paper on a case study of the voices with which we are most familiar – our female voices. Throughout our careers we have found our voices drowned by louder, usually masculine, voices of authority. One of us, long ago, was advised to strengthen her voice by filling her mouth with pebbles and projecting through the obstruction. It didn’t work. But over the course of our long careers organisational soundscapes have changed: the corridors and offices of managers and senior professional staff are now occupied by women as well as men.  Women’s voices were confined to production lines, secretary’s offices, shop counters, kitchens, cleaners’ store cupboards, typing pools, the beds of the sick and frail, until the last quarter of the 20^th century. Women’s voices were ‘noise’ carrying meaningless chatter – or so it was assumed. Now they echo through corridors of power. What are the implications of these changes? 

Women’s entry into managerial and professional roles 

To answer this question, we explored philosophy and psychoanalytical theory, settling on the works of psychoanalyst and thinker Jessica Benjamin, and influential philosopher Judith Butler. Butler’s work took us back to Ancient Greece and to the tragedy of Sophocles’ The Antigone. Antigone, daughter/sister of Oedipus, was walled up in a cave for disobeying the king’s orders. Does that moment commemorate the millennia-long banishment of women’s voices from the public stage? Benjamin’s work took us to an erotic novel that has been fundamental to her theorising, The Story of O.  The film of that novel captures the cultural imaginary of voice sonics: the female and the weak, younger brother have light voices, the man who manipulates both of them has a voice, educated in elite institutions, carried on resonating voice sonics. If we had written this paper in the 1990’s we would have stopped there: this is part of the explanation for the inequalities between male and female in organisations, we would have argued. But now female sonics echo around the public spaces of organisations and, because women’s voices echo with care, the implications may be many. What could it mean that organisational soundscapes now echo with care as well as authority, on sonics that penetrated into, through and around all the air spaces of organisations?  

Gendered organisational soundscapes and an ethical theory of power-to-care 

We answered that question with another one, but for rhetorical purposes only. Is it a coincidence that organisations have become much more aware of environmentalism, of ethics, of the ills of lack of diversity, etc., since women’s voices, resonating with care, entered places from which they had long been banned and from there send ‘care’ into every corner of a building? We argue it is not; in ways that can hardly be fathomed, sonicity influences how we think, feel, act and expect to be treated, so the infiltration into organisational systems of sonics resonating with care may influence what organisations do.  

But, it could be argued, ‘care’ symbolises weakness – will female sonics not be blown away during hard times, such as the current moment when a project to reinstate patriarchy appears to be underway? In search of an answer, we returned to Ancient Greece with Butler, to peer – from a safe distance – at the Furies. Their response is that feminine sonics can ROAR. Indeed, feminine sonics is not weak sonics but is a sonicity of power; they carry both power and care. Feminine sonics, we conclude, have the power to roar and thus a power-to-care that is resistant to the stealing away of compassion in the treatment of the other.  

The next task is to explore different forms of voice sonics: the sonicity of classed, aged, sexed, racialised, inter-sectional and ‘other’ voices. It should and could be taken into other organisational domains, such as that of politics: was it the powerful sonics of Trump’s voice that helped his return to the White House in 2025, and is it the nasal sounds of the UK prime minister elected in 2024 that contribute to the collapse in his standing? The answer is ‘perhaps’. This is a first experiment in understanding sonicity and voice sonics at work. We hope many more will follow.