Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

The Rise of the Creative Class

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The Future of the Capitalist State

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

The work of Jacques Lacan has become an influential source to most disciplines of the social sciences, and is now considered a standard reference in literary theory, cultural studies and political theory. While management and organization studies has traditionally been preoccupied with questions of making corporations more efficient and productive, it has also mobilized a strong and forceful critique of work, management and capitalism. It is primarily as a contribution to this tradition of critical scholarship that we can see the work of Lacan now emerging.

In this edited collection, a number of organizational scholars have made common cause with political theorists and psychoanalysts. Together they explore the many intersections of Lacan and organization. The contributions address a series of pertinent questions: What are the new templates for control in the workplace? How is subjectivity produced in contemporary organizations? And how can a Lacanian reading of contemporary work politics render new insights into resistance and ethics?

This edited collection includes contributions from Peter Fleming, Rickard Grassman, Jason Glynos, Campbell Jones, Carol Owens, Andre Spicer and Yannis Stavrakakis.

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Lacan and organization

We draw on Lacan’s notion of language to study employee subjectivity in a public sector organization (Publica) in the Netherlands. Our main contribution lies in using Lacan’s theorization of language and subjectivity as a basis for a detailed textual analysis of how local organizational discourses shape and inform the subjectivities of employees. We situate our approach within the literature on subjectivity, language and power in work organizations before describing how we carried out interviews to elicit interviewees’ accounts of performance management. The mechanisms of metonymy and punctuation, two central features of a Lacanian conceptualization of language, are analysed by means of a relational analysis of key performance signifiers that we identify in the interview texts. We show how the signification of performance in Publica is pinned down by a central empty signifier which can be understood as a ‘quilting point’ and serves as a site for employee desire and identification. Finally, we show how desire and identification are channelled in specific ways to activate employee self-regulation in achieving the devolvement of responsibility and labour intensification.

Performance Pinned Down: Studying Subjectivity and the Language of Performance

This article explores the question of identification through a Lacanian lens, paying specific attention to the interruption of identification in the self-presentation of employees. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real is taken up here as a conceptualization of the limits inherent in representation, and the unexpected effects of signification that go beyond the meaning effects engendered in the process of speaking. Identification is viewed here as an iterative condensation and simplification of recurrent significations within a local organizational context, aiming to displace and repress the indeterminacy of meaning and the failure of intentionality in discourse. Interview material from a public sector case study is used to analyse identifications with images of the ‘ideal employee’, which can be interpreted through interviewees’ moves to demarcate themselves from images of the ‘non-ideal’. The analysis then turns to examine interruptions in this self-presentation in the form of slips, contradictions and breakdowns of the narrative. The article concludes that the examined interruptions indicate considerable space for resistance and re-signification in identifications.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1350508410363122

‘Not even semblance’: exploring the interruption of identification with Lacan:

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore the notion of desire in relation to subjectivity at work by drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan. It aims particularly to consider the possible ways in which desire is evoked and channeled in managerial practices that are aimed at managing the self.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an illustration of this by a reading of how developmental HRM practices attempt to elicit and channel subjects' desire.Findings – Particular images promulgated by these practices appeal to the subject in such a way, that it becomes caught in a relationship of fascination with them. These practices thereby attempt to create identification with a fantasmatic image of the self, and in so doing, to shape subjectivity in line with managerial objectives. It is also argued that a different modality of relating to desire can provide a way of avoiding the most detrimental effects associated with these practices, and I indicate possible ways in which this different modality or “travers...

Traversing the empty promise: management, subjectivity and the Other's desire

Business schools have become implicated in the widespread demonisation of the financial classes. By educating those held most responsible for the crisis – financial traders and speculators – they are said to have produced ruthlessly talented graduates who have ambition in abundance but little sense for social responsibility or ethics. This ethical lack thrives upon the trading floor within a compelling critique of the complicity of the pedagogy of the business school with the financial crisis of the global economy. An ethical turn within the curriculum is now widely encouraged as a counteractive force. Within this paper, however, we argue that taking this ethical turn is not enough. For business ethicists to learn from the financial crisis, the crisis' legacy needs to be taken account of, and financialisation needs to be taken seriously. Pedagogical reform cannot bracket itself off from the crisis as if it were coincidental with or separate from it. Post-crisis pedagogy must rather take the fact that it is requested now, in light of the crisis, as its very point of departure. The financial crisis must not be understood as something to be resisted in the name of Business Ethics. Instead, the financial crisis must be understood as the very foundation for contemporary Business Ethics in particular and for contemporary business and management education more generally.

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Casper Hoedemaekers

Papers

Lacan and organization

Performance Pinned Down: Studying Subjectivity and the Language of Performance

‘Not even semblance’: exploring the interruption of identification with Lacan:

Traversing the empty promise: management, subjectivity and the Other's desire

The financialisation of business ethics