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The analysis of organizations has a debt vis-à-vis the sociologist Max Weber who built its theoretical foundations. The concept of limited rationality was later proposed by Herbert Simon and then followed by sociologists of organizations. This paper tries to go beyond that approach. It uses a psychoanalytical perspective based on Jacques Lacan's work and on the case studies of two high-tech companies. We focus on signifiers and the role of the unconscious process inside organizations. We then propose an alternative model of interpretation of organizational dynamics different from the mainstream, which is dominated by the reference to instrumental rationality.

Psychoanalysis and management are “strangers” to one another for epistemological reasons mainly related to their different spiritual fathers, scientific goals, validation criteria and dominant methodologies. However, some of these spiritual fathers did, in the early twentieth century, have the intuition of interesting partial convergence. Today, there is some good research, even if marginal, in both the managerial and psychoanalytic fields, being conducted at the intersection of psychoanalysis and management. This research focuses more on a psychoanalytical attentiveness to management acts than on a managerial use of psychoanalysis, which would, in fact, contradict basic psychoanalytic hypotheses and methodologies.

This paper introduces this special issue and initially provides some contextual background to the field of psychodynamics, its significance to organisational studies and the understanding of behaviour in organizations. The internationally-based papers in this special issue are then introduced and summarised.

Introduces Freud’s discovery of an active unconscious as at the heart of many psychodynamic processes. Also introduces the papers in this special issue.