The face is a significant locus of power upon which judgements concerning a person’s status, worth and attractiveness are made. This study contributes to knowledge of facial norms’ shifting performative power in daily organizing, theorizing facial beauty as a communicatively constituted authoritative text. We achieve this through blending Butlerian and communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) theorizing. This allows us to enrich understandings of power and performativity’s necessarily entangled and co-constitutive unfolding, as we trace how a normative understanding of facial beauty becomes more and/or less performatively powerful through embodied-textual processes. Our theorizing is generated from an ethnography of a UK cosmetics firm and demonstrates how facial beauty functions as a (figurative) authoritative text that corporealizes, subjectivizes, and is resisted by makeup artists within a confluence of (concrete) text and conversation. We show how through communicative, citational and embodied processes of corporealization, regulation and subjection, everyday performances like makeup applications become performatively powerful on the ground level of interaction. Further, returning authoritative texts to their original figurative formulation uncovers something of how their transformative power shapes organizing’s ongoing accomplishment.

脸是一个重要的权力中心，根据它来判断一个人的地位、价值和吸引力。这项研究有助于了解面部规范在日常组织中不断变化的表现力，将面部美感理论化为交流构成的权威文本。我们通过将 Butlerian 和沟通作为组织构成 (CCO) 理论相结合来实现这一目标。这使我们能够丰富对权力和表演性必然纠缠和共同构成展开的理解，因为我们追溯了对面部美的规范理解如何通过具身文本过程变得或多或少的表现力。我们的理论是从一家英国化妆品公司的民族志中产生的，它展示了面部美容如何作为一种（比喻性的）权威文本，将其具体化，主观化，并在（具体）文本和对话的汇合中受到化妆师的抵制。我们展示了如何通过交流、引用和具体化的过程肉体化、调节和服从，化妆应用等日常表演在互动的基础层面上变得强大。此外，将权威文本回归其原始的比喻表述，揭示了它们的变革力量如何塑造组织的持续成就。