Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

aeo Introduction aeo The Five Factors aeo Consistent HR Practices: The Whole Can Be More Than the Sum of the Parts aeo Employment and Economics aeo Employment as a Social Relation aeo Voice: Unions and Other Forms of Employee Representation aeo Employment, Society, and the Law aeo Internal Labor Markets aeo High--Commitment HR aeo Performance Evaluation aeo Pay for Performance aeo Compensation Systems: Forms, Bases, and Distribution of Rewards aeo Job Design aeo Staffing and Recruitment aeo Training aeo Promotion and Career Concerns aeo Downsizing aeo Outsourcing aeo HRM in Emerging Companies aeo Organizing HR Appendix A: Transaction Cost Economics Appendix B: Reciprocity and Reputation in Repeated Interactions Appendix C: Agency Theory Appendix D: Market Signaling and Screening

战略人力资源 : 总经理的思考框架 = Strategic human resources : frameworks for general managers

Consumption and Identity at Work.

The editors of this collection declare its mission to be to ‘stimulate thinking on quality-related issues and to facilitate bringing quality into the mainstream of organisational effectiveness’ (p. ix). I understand the first of these goals, but the precise meaning of the second defeats me; in a way, this is emblematic of the volume as a whole. There is some very interesting material here, and some useful guides to prior work—but there is also much to mystify and some disappointments. The book opens with an erudite and lengthy piece by Lengnick-Hall which plays with the idea that existing Total Quality (TQ) thinking and practice is premised on stable and repetitive environments and organisations, and, in these oso-turbulent times, some new thinking is required. After a brief introduction to TQ, there is a lot of discussion on the wild and intriguing world of complex adaptive systems, with allusions to many relevant literatures. This is an important issue, and has much in common with the debates which gently rage in this journal about the prospects for rational intervention in human systems—although the article ignores Beer, Checkland and Mingers and others whose perspectives would be informative. Indeed, Lengnick-Hall’s analysis focuses on the dynamic instability of human systems rather than the subtler philosophical problems about system ontology and epistemology. Nevertheless, it would be churlish to complain about such omissions when there is such a fecund supply of citations from strategy, operations and organisational analysis, and even (curiously) the poppsychology of Michael Scott Peck. The key weakness of the article is that its abstract prognostications are under-illustrated, and careful use of real examples would make the argument more convincing. Strangely, interesting examples are only a few pages away, and the article by Easton and Jarrell on the Japanese concept of Hoshin Kanri (loosely, ‘policy deployment’, a neglected element of Japanese TQ thinking which relates to the generation and cascading of plans for operational improvement) would be an excellent starting point for a discussion of Lengnick-Hall’s themes. Easton and Jarrell compare the experiences of three US organisations who each work with some variant of the technique, and then contrast these implementations with the ‘ideal’ Japanese system—a highly formal process of planning and control which seems to lie in diametric opposition to LengnickHall’s ruminations on managing complexity. Unfortunately, comparisons are drawn against how Hoshin Kanri is supposed to work in Japan rather than against empirical data from Japanese companies: a matched pair comparison would be more interesting. Nevertheless, the chapter contains some useful commentary and some illuminating insights. Elsewhere in the book, several papers give rather cursory coverage of important ideas without offering new data or sufficient depth to really push the debates forward: Greller presents an outline of feedback in TQ systems, and Knouse examines reward and recognition schemes. Both will be useful for teaching, but had the two authors collaborated one would have expected a richer set of ideas to emerge. Harvey, Buckley and Novicevic examine the important question of how TQ ‘culture’ translates across national boundaries in multi-national corporations, but also settle for ruminations and pointers to further work rather than the presentation or discussion of data. Vaughan and Renn present a systematic and informative account of what they term ‘Customer Service Citizenship Behaviour’, and reflect on how employees and customers interact with the notions of ‘organizational justice’ and the degree of support perceived to be available in the organisation in regard to customer service. The article is well-argued and thoughtful, and is worth closer reading by anyone interested in the management of services in which direct customer–employee contact is central. The final chapter, by Handfield, Calantone and Ghosh, is the most disappointing. At last, the reader is offered a chapter with data, but the methods used are suspect and the resulting conclusions are unsupported by the research. Some rather over-ambitious claims do not seem to integrate with the more thoughtful theorisations offered earlier in the book. Incidentally, the authors ignore the controversy regarding the Baldrige award, and the view of WE Deming (whom they cite approvingly) who once wrote that the award ‘transgresses all that I try to teach’. Overall, the volume is a useful addition to the literature, although it does not live up to its potential. One might hope that for subsequent volumes there might be a greater degree of integration between the contributions, and a more obvious contribution from the academic editors. It is also plagued by more typographic errors, misspelled names, and missing references than one would expect in such an expensively produced book from a respectable publisher.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jors.2601260.pdf

Doing Critical Management Research

This article reports a qualitative study of several coworking spaces conducted over 3 years. We build on Foucault’s reflection concerning heterotopias to develop a new concept – that of ‘syntopia’ ...

Coworking spaces as places where economic diversity can be articulated: Towards a theory of syntopia:

Psychoanalytic perspectives (such as the Kleinian/Bionian and Lacanian literature) have made significant contributions to the study of affect in organizations. While some have pointed out the affects involved in work tasks, most of this literature generally focuses on the affects linked to organizational life (such as learning, leadership, motivation, power, or change). The center of attention is not on affects associated with the work process itself. We draw from the French psychodynamic theory of Christophe Dejours—who is yet to be known in English language organization studies—to make the following contributions. First, we show the relationship between affect and working by discussing Dejours' notions of affective suffering, the real of work, the significance of the body, and 'ordinary sublimation'. Second, we advance critical research in organization studies by demonstrating the centrality of work in the affective life of the subject. Third, the article reinterprets Menzies' well-known hospital case study to illustrate how Dejours' theory extends existing psychoanalytical approaches, and especially to point to the significant role of the work collective in supporting workers to work well. We conclude by suggesting that if the centrality of work in the affective life of the subject is acknowledged, it follows that resistance strategies, and work collectives' struggle for emancipation, should focus on reclaiming work.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1350508416668191

Work as affective experience: the contribution of Christophe Dejours' 'psychodynamics of work'

Over the past 15 years, an increasing number of researchers have become aware of what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's work can contribute to management and organization studies. The number of publications on the subject has significantly risen, at the risk of leading to some apparent heterogeneity of the topics covered and a potential distortion of the Lacanian concepts when used in management and organization studies. In this article, we aim to map this emerging field of research, bring to light the theoretical basis common to those works so as to make the Lacanian theory used to study management and organization more legible, and discuss the limitations and opportunities implied by such a Lacanian approach. We organize the published works around two main orientations, each helping to address specific issues: a clinical orientation, within organizational psycho-dynamics, and a critical orientation, related to critical management studies.

https://hal-upec-upem.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01591534/document

Clinical and critical: The Lacanian contribution to management and organization studies

Work as affective experience: The contribution of Christophe Dejours psychodynamics of work

The case presented here shows how a set of Lacanian concepts can be useful for analysing the behaviour of the employees' representatives in a factory belonging to a large globalized and financialised corporation and threatened with closure. We identify a central characteristic of this organization (the obliteration of symbolic authority) to identify the psychic processes the employees' representatives go through as a result of this characteristic and the impact in terms of their difficulties in exerting resistance. We rest our analysis on the distinction Lacan makes between utterance and enunciation and make use of the concepts of master signifier, symbolic authority, fantasy and superego. We show that in this case the absence of symbolic authority leads the staff representatives to be taken over by the fantasy of a tyrannical and unbarred Other that has the absolute power to close down the factory at any time, and to feel guilty that they never do enough, a typical sense of guilt resulting from the superego's unfulfillable demands. This theory is also relevant for understanding the paradoxes of resistance: the staff representatives will need to reintroduce a symbolic authority so as to be able to start resisting and no longer be overwhelmed by the fantasy of an unbarred Other. We emphasize the benefits of using a Lacanian approach for understanding how discursive, psychic and emotional processes are joined in the power relations characteristic of a global capitalist corporation, and reflect on the structural conditions in which resistance is possible in contemporary organizations.

https://hal-upec-upem.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01123563/document

Bénédicte Vidaillet

Papers

Coworking spaces as places where economic diversity can be articulated: Towards a theory of syntopia:

Work as affective experience: the contribution of Christophe Dejours' 'psychodynamics of work'

Clinical and critical: The Lacanian contribution to management and organization studies

Work as affective experience: The contribution of Christophe Dejours psychodynamics of work

Working and Resisting when One’s Workplace is Under Threat of Being Shut Down: A Lacanian Perspective