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11 – 20 of 41The purpose of this paper is to add to current discussions on the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in organizational change. Specifically, It argues that critiques of Lacan's work…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to add to current discussions on the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in organizational change. Specifically, It argues that critiques of Lacan's work must be acknowledged and incorporated into these discussions. To date, there remains a silence surrounding these critiques within organization studies.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents the existing studies that draw upon Lacan's work in the context of organizational change initiatives. It highlights the value of this theory. Next, it outlines critiques of Lacan's concepts of phallus and incest taboo, and show how these concepts can be exclusionary.
Findings
The paper finds that there remains little debate within organization studies around such critiques. Lacan tends to be employed in ways that risk reproducing particular, exclusionary aspects of his theory. A homophobic and patriarchal legacy persists in appropriations of his writing. It outlines alternative ways of reading Lacan, which aim to avoid such exclusions. It shows how introducing such alternatives is a difficult project, first, given the silence surrounding critiques of Lacan in the organizational change literature. Second, following Foucault, It argues that language has power: a patriarchal schema is self‐reinforcing in its persistence within a particular discipline, and thus difficult to dislodge.
Research limitations/implications
Given these findings, the paper concludes that organization theorists and practitioners ought to engage with critiques of Lacan's work, when employing it in their own. The silence surrounding such legacies is dangerous. It argues that the first step in engaging with Lacan's work should be to give voice to such critiques, if his writing is to be employed in the practice and study of organizational change.
Originality/value
This paper provides a unique engagement with Lacan's work in the context of the study and practice of organizational change interventions. It presents an evaluation of well‐known critiques and useful recommendations for theorists and practitioners considering a Lacanian approach to this area of management studies.
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This paper aims to employ the concept of subjectivity taken from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Slavoj Žižek's idea of the law, enabled via its “inherent transgression”, to critique…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to employ the concept of subjectivity taken from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Slavoj Žižek's idea of the law, enabled via its “inherent transgression”, to critique the premises of neolibertarian theory about the market's superior ways of organizing society.
Design/methodology/approach
An alternative conceptual framework is being developed and applied to the analysis of the transition from a planned to a market economy in former socialist countries using the example of informal payments in the health system in Russia. The proposed schema builds on the idea of the subject eternally divided between the imaginary conceptions of the self/the other, and the socio‐symbolic order, which is offered to theorize on the role of phantasy in this transformation.
Findings
The applied (psycho)‐analytic schema reveals why the totalizing discourse of the market is no less tyrannical and no less totalitarian in its intent than the socialist ideology it opposes. The central argument is how dominant ideologies are made of, and stand for, an unattainable phantasy, as it was demonstrated in both socialism and the market.
Originality/value
By re‐engaging psychoanalysis to understand social and political projects and by unearthing the imaginary underpinnings of the symbolic order, the study argues for considering the phantasmatic dimensions of political and organizational transformations in management studies.
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Rasmus Johnsen, Sara Louise Muhr and Michael Pedersen
With the help of Slavoj Žižek's concept of interpassivity, this paper seeks to illustrate the frantic activities performed by employees to maintain a separation between the idea…
Abstract
Purpose
With the help of Slavoj Žižek's concept of interpassivity, this paper seeks to illustrate the frantic activities performed by employees to maintain a separation between the idea of an authentic self and the idea of a corporate self. Furthermore, this paper aims to illustrate these activities empirically.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical example is based on a case study of three of the largest international consultancy firms. About 50 consultants were interviewed in this study, but this paper primarily focuses on the experiences of one of these consultants, and goes into depth with his experiences to illustrate the frantic mechanisms of interpassivity.
Findings
The paper shows how the maintenance of an “authentic self” outside of the corporate culture demands a distinct and frantic activity; that this activity can best be understood as interpassive in the sense that it involves taking over the passive acknowledgement for which someone else is responsible; and how the separation of an authentic from a corporate self, rather than resist the demand to enjoy one's work – prescribed by contemporary management programs – nourishes it.
Originality/value
The paper builds on recent literature on cynicism and normative control in organisations. It introduces interpassivity to this discussion.
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The purpose of this paper is to address the intensive spread of the English language in Central and Eastern Europe as an aspect of postsocialist transition.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the intensive spread of the English language in Central and Eastern Europe as an aspect of postsocialist transition.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper analyses the discourses and ideologies related to the spread of English in postsocialist Poland, drawing on insights from critical discourse analysis and language ideology. The empirical material discussed comprises newspaper articles dealing with the topic of language policy in Poland, with a focus on the media campaign, “battle for English”.
Findings
The paper finds that the spread of English is facilitated by powerful discourses propagating the knowledge of English together with the ideology of neo‐liberal economic and social transformation. The exploration of the discourses inherent in the story of the “battle for English” enables the links between the linguistic practices applied by individual actors and the ideologies conveyed by the discourses found in mainstream media to be made explicit.
Research limitations/implications
An awareness of the mechanisms of discourse and ideology allows us to question both the drive behind and the social impact of the spread of English in Central and Eastern Europe.
Originality/value
The paper offers a novel theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding on postsocialist transition.
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Juup Essers, Steffen Böhm and Alessia Contu
The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of this special issue highlighting some of the distinctive features of Žižek's Lacan‐inspired thought relevant to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of this special issue highlighting some of the distinctive features of Žižek's Lacan‐inspired thought relevant to the role of ideologies in organizational change management.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach used aims to show how ideological and ethical ramifications of Žižek's recent analysis of a “Jacobin” change paradigm can affect thought on everyday change practices in business and management.
Findings
Some parallels are drawn between current change practices and narrative tactics employed by Robespierre during the Jacobin reign of terror to “extort” the commitment of participants in the change process.
Practical implications
This paper/special issue invites reconsideration of our late capitalist intellectual/practical “reflexes” in change management, i.e. to reassess their ideological mechanism.
Originality/value
Žižekian/Lacanian approaches to organizations and change are especially suitable for this purpose but have only recently begun to emerge.
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This paper seeks to demonstrate that gender research is crucial to understanding post‐socialist transformations and wider changes in social life. Focused on employment experiences…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to demonstrate that gender research is crucial to understanding post‐socialist transformations and wider changes in social life. Focused on employment experiences and gender identities of two generations of Bulgarian women, it aims to highlight the complex intertwining of social structure and individual agency and to point out how processes of continuity and change constitute the post‐socialist transformation and individual life journeys.
Design/methodology/approach
Informed by feminist analyses of gender and citizenship, generation theory and qualitative interviews, the paper employs the notion of gender imaginaries in comparing continuity and change in gender policy and individual experiences.
Findings
The paper argues that significant changes occurred after 1989 in the ways official gender imaginaries were constructed through law, policy, and public discourses. In comparison to this, individual women's gender imaginaries entailed not only change but also sustained attachment to paid work, rejection of domesticity, and continued feelings of gender equality. This suggests that stable and often unquestioned notions of gender had a significant role for individual imaginaries. In addition to this, some of the most considerable changes were manifested in the notions of risk and uncertainty, which have become central aspects of the post‐socialist gender imaginary, particularly in relation to paid work.
Originality/value
The paper engages in a comparison of employment experiences of two generations of women thus directing its enquiry to the combination of individuals' agency in crafting one's life journey and the constraints of social structures and existing gender inequalities. Thus, transformations in individual lived lives of women are seen as interrelated with social change and historic location.
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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…
Abstract
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 “traversal” may take shape.
Originality/value
The paper analyzes the use of desire in management practices.
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Peter Bloom and Carl Cederstrom
This paper has three purposes. The first is to introduce the concept of fantasy, based on Lacanian pyschoanlysis, in order to link theoretically the role of narrative and affect…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper has three purposes. The first is to introduce the concept of fantasy, based on Lacanian pyschoanlysis, in order to link theoretically the role of narrative and affect in organizational strategies of control. The second is to use this concept to illuminate the fantasmatic as well as ideological character of so‐called “market rationality.” The third is to reveal three dominant fantasies organizations draw on in an age of market rationality.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is primarily a conceptual investigation into the ways Lacanian psychoanalytic theories can help link the phenomena of narrative and affect within strategies of organizational control and second, how this relates to current trends of market rationalism.
Findings
Drawing on a psychoanalytic register, the paper argues that organizational control strategies revolve around the presence of a fantasy which is comprised of a symbiotic stable fantasy promising psychological wholeness and an unstable fantasy threatening to prevent this achievement. Further, it reflects on how emergent notions of market rationality, analogous to themes of a “boundaryless” or “protean” career, draw on a particular anti‐organizational fantasies to affectively grip subjects within their values and practices. Three fantasies employed by organizations in an age of market rationalism were then identified.
Research limitations/implications
In broader terms future research can turn to the concept of fantasy to better explain organizational control and ideological interpellation of employees, particularly in regard to concepts of narrative and emotion for this process. Specifically, this paper offers an innovative way to understand and investigate market rationality and changing cultures of organizations within the globalizing economy.
Originality/value
This paper offers the category of Lacanian fantasy for linking narrative and affect in managerial ideologies. Additionally it draws on Lacanian theory to provide a more coherent and theoretically sophisticated account of market rationality and organizational strategies countering this trend.
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