Death and Organization: Heidegger’s Thought on Death and Life in Organizations

Abstract

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Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

“…An emerging stream of research has started to question the meaning and consequences of death for organizations (Reedy & Learmonth, 2011). Noting that death anxieties and fantasies of immortality produce alienation and oppression (Sievers, 1990, 1993), it encourages a more ‘authentic’ engagement with death (Smith, 2006) as a form of emancipation, as our feeling of finitude provides us with a ‘sense of ourselves as autonomous moral agents’ (Reedy & Learmonth, 2011, p. 124). To contribute to this stream of literature, we study what Agamben (1998) calls a ‘regime of death’.…”

Organizations and death – a view from death studies

“…Whether mortality is so anxiety-provoking to humans that they inevitably repress awareness of it is a question on which scholars disagree. Some, such as Heidegger (Reedy and Learmonth 2011) and Becker (1973) argue that denial of death awareness is a major driving force in human behaviour. This raises questions for organisations: 1) Does a person's denial of personal mortality drive his or her behaviour in organisations, and if so, how and with what consequences?…”

“Earthquake Will Pass, and the Life Will Go On”: a Critical Reading of Public Spots of Dask

“…However, in contrast to the neoliberal governmental valuation of feeling at home, we point out that feeling at home cannot be attained by arriving and staying at safe individual harbours or by limiting being exposed. Feeling at home can embrace the unhomely when the groundlessness (Kraftl, 2007;Reedy & Learmonth, 2011)-and precariousness (Butler, 2009; Lorey, 2015)-of life is acknowledged. With this acknowledgement, we can feel at home within 'co-exposition' (Nancy, 2008).…”