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Article
Publication date: 3 April 2009

Casper Hoedemaekers

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…

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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.

Details

Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 22 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0953-4814

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 12 October 2011

Christopher F. Zurn

This chapter is a critical review of Amy Allen's book The Politics of Our Selves. It briefly reconstructs some of the book's impressive achievements: articulating a synthetic…

Abstract

This chapter is a critical review of Amy Allen's book The Politics of Our Selves. It briefly reconstructs some of the book's impressive achievements: articulating a synthetic account of gendered subjectivity that accounts for both subjection and autonomy; imaginatively integrating poststructuralist and communicative theories; and, furthering important new interpretations of Butler, Foucault, and Habermas. It also raises critical concerns about Allen's project: her specific conception of autonomy and its justification; her suspicions of the notion of historical progress; her psychological explanation of the continuing power of pernicious norms of gendered subjectivity; the usefulness of psychoanalysis for critical social theory; and, the role of cultural, structural, and materialist explanations and political strategies.

Details

The Diversity of Social Theories
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-821-3

Book part
Publication date: 5 December 2018

Thomas Raymen

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is rooted in ultra-realist criminology theory and transcendental materialism’s…

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is rooted in ultra-realist criminology theory and transcendental materialism’s innovative conceptualisation of subjectivity. The chapter outlines both of these perspectives and how they differ from existing criminological theory in order to explore both how and why individuals in contemporary society are so committed to the values, symbols and identities of consumer capitalism. The chapter then employs this theoretical framework to problematise and deconstruct the dominant conceptualisation of parkour as a mode of performative resistance, by drawing upon theoretical ideas such as precorporation, the reversal of ideology and interpassivity.

Details

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-812-5

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 4 April 2017

Ricarda Hammer

Examining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial…

Abstract

Examining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial representations and to provide new, anticolonial imaginaries. It demonstrates how the experience of the racialized and diasporic subject, respectively, creates a kind of subjectivity that makes visible the work of colonial cultural narratives on the formation of the self. The article first traces Fanon’s and Hall’s transboundary encounters with metropolitan Europe and then shows how these biographic experiences translate into their theories of practice and history. Living through distinct historical moments and colonial ideologies, Fanon and Hall produced theories of historical change, which rest on epistemic ruptures and conjunctural changes in meaning formations. Drawing on their biographic subjectivities, both intellectuals theorize cultural and colonial forms of oppression and seek to produce new knowledge that is based on practice and experience.

Details

International Origins of Social and Political Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-267-1

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Making Sense of Ultra-Realism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-170-0

Book part
Publication date: 28 March 2022

Johan van der Walt

In his work Homo Juridicus, Alain Supiot considers the construction of legal personality by force and virtue of law as a precondition for human liberty. Michel Foucault views this

Abstract

In his work Homo Juridicus, Alain Supiot considers the construction of legal personality by force and virtue of law as a precondition for human liberty. Michel Foucault views this same construction of legal personality – the construction of the subject through strategies of power, he calls it – as a ‘construction’ of liberty that is considerably less free than it is made out to be by the Enlightenment law reform projects proposed by Cesare Beccaria and other prominent eighteenth century law reformers. Foucault’s scepticism vis-á-vis Beccaria and others evidently also implies a critical stance vis-á-vis contemporary humanist understandings of law such as Supiot’s. This chapter will endeavour to explain what is at stake in the difference between these very different conceptions of legal personality by relating it to the problematics of subjectivity that came to the fore in the thinking of Hegel and the German Idealists.

Details

Interrupting the Legal Person
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-863-0

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 September 2021

Aliza Luft and Susan Thomson

The social categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi” have long been central to Rwandan politics, though never more so than during the 1994 genocide, when they formed the ultimate divide: kill…

Abstract

The social categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi” have long been central to Rwandan politics, though never more so than during the 1994 genocide, when they formed the ultimate divide: kill (Hutu) or be killed (Tutsi). Since then, the Rwandan government has sought to eliminate these categories and replace them with a new, national identity category of “Rwandan.” This chapter draws on theories of state symbolic power and legibility to analyze how top-down projects of remaking Rwandans are being received from below. Specifically, we examine ordinary Rwandans' responses to gacaca, a community justice practice central to the state's National Unity and Reconciliation Program, and find Rwandans resent efforts to “unmake race” in favor of “nation” because the state's account of genocide in gacaca does not allow them to sincerely express their experiences; it activates traumatic pasts for what they feel is superficial national reconciliation; and it detracts from their material needs. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between compliance and conviction in research on state efforts to transform civilian subjectivities. They also suggest directions for further research. Namely, future research on state symbolic power should attend to how individual experiences with violence mediate top-down efforts at remaking civilian subjectivities, to how different forms of governance shape civilian resistance to state categorization and classification projects, and to what kinds of interests are likely to motivate people to alter their self-perceptions. We conclude by arguing for more work on state race and nation-making from the perspectives of its targets.

Details

Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-219-6

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 February 2018

Michalinos Zembylas

The purpose of this paper is to revisit Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” and the perennial challenges of researchers to collect information about the Other…

1591

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to revisit Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” and the perennial challenges of researchers to collect information about the Other, focusing on the recent developments in affect theory.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper brings into the conversation the recent work on affect and sentimentality by Lauren Berlant with Spivak’s claims in the essay concerning the representation of the subaltern by scholars and researchers. The paper draws on Berlant’s work to trouble the liberal culture oftrue feeling” as well as the liberal subject implied in Spivak’s essay as a subject who is “actively speaking.”

Findings

Recent theoretical developments on the affect theory make an important intervention to the perennial methodological tensions about representation, ontology and epistemology – as raised by Spivak and others over the years – and inspire new ways of thinking with the tools of doing qualitative research.

Originality/value

Bringing into the conversation, the affect theory and Spivak’s iconic essay have important methodological implications for qualitative research.

Details

Qualitative Research Journal, vol. 18 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1443-9883

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 August 2010

Guy Jumarie

The purpose of this paper is to explain why fractal, self‐similarity, and fractional Brownian motions are so pervasive in human systems.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explain why fractal, self‐similarity, and fractional Brownian motions are so pervasive in human systems.

Design/methodology/approach

The analysis involves mainly relative observation, Minkowskian observation, Euclidean observation, and fractional calculus.

Findings

It is shown that observation with informational invariance, which is a modeling of subjectivity, creates fractal, and self‐similarity.

Research limitations/implications

This result could have an application to the quantitative analysis of volatility in finance, for instance.

Practical implications

The paper supports the use of fractional dynamics to describe human systems.

Originality/value

The paper provides practical arguments that may explain why fractals are so pervasive in natural science, and mainly in systems involving human factors.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 39 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 August 2002

Pawan Budhwar, Andy Crane, Annette Davies, Rick Delbridge, Tim Edwards, Mahmoud Ezzamel, Lloyd Harris, Emmanuel Ogbonna and Robyn Thomas

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce …

56835

Abstract

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Details

Management Research News, vol. 25 no. 8/9/10
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0140-9174

Keywords

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