Grounding in the unconscious: “The field” in psychosocial organizational ethnography

Abstract

Psychosocial research, which explores the unconscious and affective dynamics of organizational and social phenomena from critical perspectives, often adopts ethnographic methods. However, its locus, the unconscious, has an obscure, diffuse and dynamic nature that calls into question two central assumptions of conventional organizational ethnography: that an organization is a self-contained physical (research) site, and ethnographic research is best led by participant observation. The unconscious is produced by countless agents dispersed across time and space, making it impossible to readily identify a research site. Furthermore, psychosocial phenomena cannot be physically demarcated because a multitude of discourses, imagery, psyches, bodies, and objects are enmeshed in them. These raise contentious ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions for psychosocial researchers. In this article, we ruminate on “the field” in psychosocial organizational ethnography, seeking a robust epistemological and methodological approach to constructing and dwelling in an unconscious research site. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, we present a conceptual discussion of these issues and translate them into ethnographic methods illustrated by examples from the authors’ research. By critically re-evaluating the question of “the field,” we contribute to ethnographic studies of organizational phenomena with “fuzzy fields” without self-evident boundaries that draw on diverse onto-epistemologies.

Why Do We Desire and Fear Care: Toward developing a holistic political approach

“…We then transfer our affect developed through relating to concrete people who cared for us to social institutions and values (the big Other) in our later lives that become the symbolic stand-in for them (Stavrakakis, 2008). Symbolic and imaginary identification with others and the big Other can explain the role of affect in various social domains (for discussion, see Özdemir-Kaya & Fotaki, 2022, 2023). Object relations’ notions of precarious existence and the Lacanian subjection to symbolic social norms are crucial to understanding the embodied vulnerability at the heart of the proposed care approach.…”