The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism in the Ways Older Ethiopian Children Construct their National Identity and Implications for Social Studies Education

Abstract:In the aftermath of World War II, American science fiction frequently turned to the trope of the autonomous nuclear family homesteading the cosmos in their own little space ship. This particular depiction of family reflects an ideology of frontier nostalgia, but it also almost inevitably conflates fatherly patriarchal authority with the strictures of naval discipline, providing an unsettling note of authoritarian tyranny in a genre intended to reinforce ideologies of “togetherness” and the comfortable “natural” order of familial authority. Analyses of Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, TV series Lost in Space and Star Trek, Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Disney’s Miles from Tomorrowland, and the graphic novel series Saga trace the decline of the “retrospective utopian” patriarchal family model and counterbalance it with the emergence of new, more flexible family authority structures appropriate to the twenty-first century.

Mutiny on the Sofa: Historical Patterns of Patriarchy and Family Structure in American Science Fiction, 1945–2018

eXistenZ and the Spectre of Gender in the Cyber-Generation

Sigmund Freud and the second-century CE dream interpreter Artemidorus of Daldis displayed a certain degree of respect for their patients or clients. This shared attitude was supported by a similar commitment to empiricism. Their similar methods in dealing with patients draw attention to their basic differences in understanding dreams in general and in interpreting incestuous dreams specifically. Freud and Artemidorus stand at variance in their interpretation of such dreams because they had different notions of the individual. For Freud, humans were defined by their biological history as animals. For Artemidorus, humans were defined by their roles in society. As a result, Freud believed the Oedipal complex to be nearly universal but represented cryptically in dreams, but Artemidorus found numerous direct examples of incestuous dreams that were to be interpreted according to the context of the dreamer’s social position.

Oedipal Complexes: Freud and Artemidorus

After introducing the problematic from the perspective of organisation studies - the growing awareness of the tenuous nature of organisational reality and the difficulty we have in constructing texts that deal with this tenuous reality in a reflexive way - I explore the key characteristics of Dick's novels and the essence of his writing techniques. This is followed by a discussion of Ubik to give the reader a flavour of a typical Dickean novel. I conclude with the logical, but rather too predictable, discussion of the importance of Dick for the field of organisation studies. Of course, it would be nonsensical to suggest that we can apply Dick in the way it has happened with Foucault, Derrida or Elias, but to name a few. Yet there is be something curiously attractive about an author who used the most trashy tropes of a genre (SF) to create a body of work that both transcends and invigorates that genre. Could this point to an analogue in organisation theory that might enable us to frame new possibilities of writing or reading organisational narratives? Perhaps.

Of Philip K. Dick, reﬂexivity and shifting realities : Organizing (writing) in our post-industrial society

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Citations

Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism in the Ways Older Ethiopian Children Construct their National Identity and Implications for Social Studies Education

Mutiny on the Sofa: Historical Patterns of Patriarchy and Family Structure in American Science Fiction, 1945–2018

eXistenZ and the Spectre of Gender in the Cyber-Generation

Oedipal Complexes: Freud and Artemidorus

Of Philip K. Dick, reﬂexivity and shifting realities : Organizing (writing) in our post-industrial society

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