Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis

Abstract

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept’ that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces’ of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting’ to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns’ in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing.

Local Government Chief Executives’ Everyday Hauntings: Towards a Theory of Organizational Ghosts

“…Though these are unsettled concepts which elude straight classificatory control (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013;Cixous, 1976;Jay, 1998), marshalling these associations for an articulation of ghosts and hauntings in organizational settings highlights the significance of legacies, vestiges and the inheritances of past action; emphasizes our intensive relations with context and the importance of sensuous knowledge; and opens up the potential for inquiry which explores the liminality of leaders who are operating at borders and boundaries of competing priorities for action (Orr & Vince, 2009;Rhodes 2007;Rhodes & Price, 2011). Booker (2010) emphasizes the pervasiveness of the supernatural in western popular culture.…”

“…Joining these scholarly conversations about the unstable, trembling and imaginational nature of organizations, and heeding Beyes and Steyaert's (2013) call for work which is 'attuned to and seeks to enact the affective forces that haunt and unsettle organizational life' (p. 1458), this paper now explores the idea that organizations are spectral spaces, teeming with ghosts, and examines the implications of this insight for thinking about leadership action.…”

Performing the Digital : Performance Studies and Performances in Digital Cultures

“…What mainly comes into view in this line of thought, then, is the everyday performances in organizations and how to think of organizations as made up of such mundane performances. Moreover, there is also work on theaters as well as theatrical performances or interventions as cases of organizing (Beyes/Steyaert 2006), for instance by investigating the practice of Rimini Protokoll (Biehl-Missal 2012;Beyes/Steyaert 2013;Schipper, this volume).…”

“Det løber mig koldt ned ad ryggen” Hjemsøgte øjeblikke i organisatorisk praksis

“…Selvom hjemligt i udgangspunktet var associeret med familiaert, venligsindet og et sted fri for spøgelser, blev begrebet over tid mere og mere ambivalent, indtil det blev blandet sammen med dets modsaetning, det uhyggelige eller det uncanny (Freud, 2003, s. 134). Dermed kom begrebet uncanny til at betyde den forvirrende, men nagende følelse af, at noget fremmed forekommer en foruroligende hjemligt (Freud, 2003, s. 148; se også Beyes & Steyaert, 2013). En af Freuds definitioner på det uncanny er 'den art af skraemmende, der på maerkvaerdig vis kan ledes tilbage til noget, der engang var velkendt og i lang tid var familiaert.'…”