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This chapter explores dominant ideologies theoretically in an organizational setting. A framework is developed to advance our understanding of how ‘dominant ideological modes of rationality’ reflect predictability through the reproduction of accepted truths, hence social order in organization. Dominant ideological modes of rationality constitute professional identity, power relations, and rationality and frame prevailing mentalities and social practices in organization. It is suggested that members’ categorization devices structure and constrain social practices. Supplementing the existent power literature, the chapter concludes that professional identity produces rationality, power and truth – truth being the overarching concept assembled through the rationalities assembled in professional members’ categorization devices. Research and managerial implications are discussed.

Virtually since its birth 200 years ago, modern economic thinking has been plagued by the question of what role to assign to values in economic theory and research. The dominant stance, initially set forth by Nassau Senior and rigorously reiterated and sophisticated by J. S. Mill, J. M. Keynes, Lionel Robbins, J. A. Schumpeter and M. Friedman, has been that scientific economics and ethical questions must be kept unambiguously separate. Scientific or positive economics deals with questions of fact or “is” questions, while normative economics deals with value or “ought” questions. As scientists, economists must content themselves with the analysis of positive issues. Values are viewed as beyond the purview of science, and consequently they must be taken as given, determined by social processes in which the economist might participate only as citizen. That this is the dominant understanding of what an appropriate stance toward values must be is attested to by its appearance in the preface or introductory chapter of most mainstream economics textbooks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the British social formation, especially after 1960, there has been a tendency towards an external mode of control of industrial relations which is based upon the internal regulation of labour collectivities. The article argues that corporatism and hegemony are both inextricably linked facets of the same process — the ideological control of the IR system, embodying both corporate agencies and hegemonic relations, by a state which has various forms.

The assumption of wealth creation as the dominant motive underlying entrepreneurial efforts has been challenged in recent work on entrepreneurship. Taking the perspective that entrepreneurship involves emancipatory efforts by social actors to escape ideological and material constraints in their environments (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009), researchers have sought to explain a range of entrepreneurial activities in contexts that have traditionally been excluded from entrepreneurship research. We seek to extend this research by proposing that entrepreneurial acts toward emancipation can be guided by different notions of the common good underlying varying conceptions of worth, beyond those emphasized in the view of entrepreneurial activity as driven by economic wealth creation. These alternative conceptions of worth are associated with specific subjectivities of entrepreneurial self and relevant others, and distinct legitimate bases for actions and coordination, enabling emancipation by operating from alternative value system perspectives. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on multiple orders of worth (OOWs), we describe how emancipatory entrepreneurship is framed within – and limited by – the dominant view, which is rooted in a market OOW. As alternatives to this view, we theorize how the civic and inspired OOWs point to alternate emancipatory ends and means through which entrepreneurs break free from material and ideological constraints. We describe factors that enable and constrain emancipatory entrepreneurship efforts within each of these OOWs, and discuss the implications of our theoretical ideas for how entrepreneurs can choose among different OOWs as perspectives and for the competencies required for engaging with pluralistic value perspectives.

Modern economics, because of its instrumental orientation and its adherence to positivistic canons of science, suffers from two pernicious illusions. The first is that the discipline fails to acknowledge its own participation in the determination of the ends to be sought. The task of positivistic economics, guided by instrumentalism, is seen as the search for efficient means for attaining ends which are externally given. Second, modern economics pretends that empirical testing, in combination with testing for logical consistency, can be counted upon for ensuring scientific progress. As a result of these illusions, modern economics has become preoccupied with the seemingly endless formalisation of an exceedingly narrow body of theory. Because mainstream economics lacks an adequate methodological foundation, it has not only substantially abdicated its function of providing public enlightenment, but it is too readily used as ideology.