‘Not even semblance’: exploring the interruption of identification with Lacan

) Entrepreneurship, incongruence and affect: drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organization. Organization (in press). AbstractIn recent years, entrepreneurship has been reconceptualised as social change.Understood as such, entrepreneurship can be viewed to disrupt and disturb the social order. We argue in this paper that Foucault's notion of heterotopia and Lacan's concepts of the real and anxiety help us to conceptualize the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change, and understand why the latter may encounter social resistance. Our contribution to critical entrepreneurship literature is to first emphasise that entrepreneurship instigates social change by introducing incongruence, and second, to highlight that this process can be affective: it can create anxiety. The paper uses an illustrative historical case-example of a Swedish anti-racist commercial magazine (Gringo) to elucidate these points. We conclude by pointing out that anxiety may be necessary for the provocation of social transformation.

Section: Methodological Contextmentioning

confidence: 54%

Entrepreneurship, incongruence and affect: Drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organisation

Dashtipour

Rumens

2017

“…But, when seen from a Lacanian perspective, identity in the workplace is problematic primarily because it is structured around a fundamental lack, which is precisely what is missing from the discourse, in which identity is articulated as a definable entity (Driver 2009c). This lack appears as that of an essence, in the sense, for example, of 'being professional' (Kosmala, 2013) or 'being an ideal employee' (Hoedemaekers, 2010). The above mentioned Lacanian concepts (lack, imaginary identification, jouissance) then not only help to explain why the imaginary register proves so powerful, in that it promises wholeness and jouissance to the subjects, who dream themselves as non-lacking (Dashtipour, 2009;Hoedemaekers, 2009;Roberts, 2005), but they also make it possible to explore this failure and the liberating and empowering struggles that may accompany it when lack is recognized and articulated, rather than covered up (Driver, 2008(Driver, , 2013(Driver, , 2017.…”

Section: Motivation Organizational Commitment and Professional Identmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such is the case of professionalism, as an unattainable ideal, which they constantly strive to attain (Kosmala and Herrbach 2006) or of employability, in relation to which they will inevitably prove 'never employable enough' (Cremin, 2010). The Lacanian approach makes it possible to not limit oneself to denouncing problematic issues, but to also to envisage possible ways out (Hoedemaekers, 2010).…”

Section: Motivation Organizational Commitment and Professional Identmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Clinical and critical: The Lacanian contribution to management and organization studies

Arnaud

Vidaillet

2017

Over the past 15 years, an increasing number of researchers have become aware of what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's work can contribute to management and organization studies. The number of publications on the subject has significantly risen, at the risk of leading to some apparent heterogeneity of the topics covered and a potential distortion of the Lacanian concepts when used in management and organization studies. In this article, we aim to map this emerging field of research, bring to light the theoretical basis common to those works so as to make the Lacanian theory used to study management and organization more legible, and discuss the limitations and opportunities implied by such a Lacanian approach. We organize the published works around two main orientations, each helping to address specific issues: a clinical orientation, within organizational psycho-dynamics, and a critical orientation, related to critical management studies. KeywordsCritical management studies, Lacan, organizational psycho-dynamics, psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan's work began to be used for studying organizations and management at the turn of the 2000s. A number of publications by French, Belgian and English authors led the way (Arnaud, 1998(Arnaud, , 2002(Arnaud, , 2003aFleming and Spicer, 2003;Roberts, 2005;Vanheule et al., 2003;Vanheule and Verhaeghe, 2004;Vidaillet, 2007Vidaillet, , 2008a. A more visible and structured expression of this interest in In this respect, the purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we aim to review most of the publications which, in the last twenty years, have revolved around Lacan and organizations. This will enable us to identify the various areas of inquiry linking these works, so as to map this emerging field of research, without forcing it into a rigid and ostensibly orderly representation (Contu et al., 2010;Jones, 2010).The task here is to develop around Lacan, what has already been developed in the field of organizational psychoanalysis around Freud and the post Freudians (Carr, 2002;Carr and Gabriel, 2001). Secondly, when reviewing this fairly recent literature, we intend to show why and how Lacanian concepts may be useful in exploring various theoretical perspectives and new ways of approaching practical issues in MOS. Thirdly, we propose to organize Lacan-inspired research around two major orientations that developed in distinct academic fields and with different objectives (Butler, 2008) despite some citation overlaps between both entities: the first orientation, of a clinical nature, pertains to organizational psycho-dynamics; the second, qualified as critical, relates to critical management studies (CMS). The very existence of this second orientation has much to do with the fact that Lacan's work has been disseminated far beyond the borders of analytical circles and particularly, outside France, in the academic philosophical arena, which it has entered with no particular link to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis (Badiou and Roudinesco, 2012).On the one hand, a ...

“…The answer we find in a post-foundational approach is that we can go some way in addressing this lack by searching for ambiguities within a discourse, since these tensions often belie and underlying lack which cannot be fully covered over, or sutured (Howarth, 2000;Laclau, 2005;Glynos and Howarth, 2007;Hoedemaekers, 2010a). Ambiguities are perhaps most visible when discourses are used in inconsistent fashions.…”

Section: Identifying Lackmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse of the real kind: A post-foundational approach to organizational discourse analysis

Cederström

Spicer

2013

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. In response to the postmodern invasion of organization studies, some critics have issued increasingly loud cries that we should 'get real' about organizational discourse Permanent repository linkanalysis. But what precisely do these proponents take to be the 'real'? In this paper we trace out some of the attempts of 'getting real', arguing that these approaches have some important limitations. We then explore the relevance of a post-foundational approach to discourse, which, we argue, have far reaching implications for the study of organizational discourse. We argue that such approach offers us a way of theoretically linking the 'real' with (1) the way discourses are structured around fundamental gaps, (2) how discourses are brought together through nodal points, and (3) how discourses generate affective and emotional attachment. We then offer some suggestions of how these points can be used to study the organizational processes. We conclude by reflecting on some of the limitations of this approach to studying discourse.2