Fantasy spaces and emotional derailment: Reflections on failure in academic activism

Against a backdrop of contentious political landscapes of Brexit and the Trump victory, we reflect on our own experience of an attempt to engage in an activist event for academics that failed. We contend that our experiences of failure in this event, revealed by fantasy spaces and emotional derailment, serve as lessons for reinvigorating possibilities for academic activism. To provide background, we describe an event designed to form a policy as a collective response to the populism of Donald Trump. We then reflect on our role as critical scholars in this event that failed to meet our objective and taught us other important lessons. Our analysis leads us to address three orthodoxies: diatribes decrying the awfulness of Trump and his administration cronies create fantasy spaces that might ‘feel’ good, but are actually counterproductive; academia itself is a site for activism that has far-reaching implications; and hiding failure is a form of collaboration with performativity. Our provocation is, in part, to resist the ‘heroic’ and grandiose success story narrative—both in academia and activism. We do this by foregrounding vulnerability through sharing our own story of failure and reflecting on some of the devices that derailed our attempt at academic activism.

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

This paper examines the organization of death. Through an ethnographic study, we examine how a geriatrics department guides the end of life. Drawing on Agamben, we show that organizations that are dedicated to life, but regularly confronted with death, develop dispositifs (mechanisms, technologies, practices and relationships) to turn biopolitics (power over life) into thanatopolitics (a regime of death). We also show how the inherently political meaning of life disrupts such government of death. The inclusion of political life in a regime of death disrupts organizational practices that find themselves facing fundamental questions of what makes a life worth living, who can decide not to prolong life, and based on which criteria.

I lost my baby today: Embodied writing and learning in organizations

This article focuses on miscarriage and the sharing of intimate experiences as an example of alternative writing that can be used to challenge and resist dominant masculine discourse in academia. It steps back from patriarchal forms of writing organizations and contributes in three ways: in terms of methodology through the use of multi-voice autoethnography that embraces evocative language; with regard to the subject matter, by sharing a narrative that focuses on the bodily and dirty in day-to-day organizing; and in style, by going beyond traditional structures to foster personal, fragile and reflexive narratives that can enhance the understanding of lived experiences in organizations. More specifically, the first author’s autoethnographic account of perinatal loss in the context of contemporary academia is used as an example of resistance to patriarchal norms of organizing.

Work, love, and death-thought accessibility: A terror management investigation

Terror management theory suggests that following culturally derived scripts for valued behaviour protects people from death concerns, and conversely, not meeting standards for cultural value can weaken this protection, heightening mortality concerns. Using this conceptual framework, we examine (1) how considerations of loss of employment, a source of cultural value for many, relates to the accessibility of death-related cognition, and (2) the moderating role of job market health, and (3) involvement in close relationships. Study 1 found that writing about being unemployed (vs. a control topic) led to greater mortality-related cognition. Study 2 found that considering unemployment heightened death cognition, but only when participants were led to perceive the job market as unhealthy. Finally, Study 3 found that considering unemployment led to greater death cognition, but not for those involved in a close relationship. Findings offer insight into a previously overlooked consequence of unemployment, and factors that may serve a protective function.

Deconstructing the ‘older worker’: Exploring the complexities of subject positioning at the intersection of multiple discourses

This study adopts an intersectional approach to explore the complexities and contingencies of subject positioning in the case of an individual older worker. Five deconstruction strategies are applied to an older worker’s account of his experience of the workplace to unveil the variety of discourses and taken-for-granted assumptions that regulate individual identity formation and contribute to perpetuating the marginalization of the aging organizational subject. Deconstruction analysis shows how the unique positioning of the research subject emerges at the intersection of complex discourses of age, enterprise, family, death, and mental and physical health, casting him as both victim and perpetrator of inequality across a kaleidoscope of interacting categories of oppression. The analysis contributes to the critique of the binary dualism implicit in the victim–perpetrator paradigm dominating mainstream research and policy making on age discrimination in the workplace. It also advocates for new conceptualizations of aging at work that recognize the systemic nature of inequality as the product of intersecting systems of power relations.

Toward more reflexive, empowering, and ethical metaphorical organizational research

This study aims to take forward Gareth Morgan’s call for more reflexivity and self-deconstruction in metaphorical organizational research by developing a novel framework for the production and use of metaphors. Drawing on psychoanalytic theorizing, this framework seeks to move the field toward an approach to metaphors in which metaphors can be explored as symptoms of our struggles with unconscious desire. This, in turn, offers opportunities for engaging in more reflexive, empowering, and ethical metaphorical research.

Identity Work as an Event

Depending on the dualisms of mind–body, subject–object, inside–outside, and so forth, most identity work studies in organization studies neglect the affective and material aspects of identity work. Drawing on an ethnographic study and practice theory, I analyze how the live-statue enacts her identity in the street. Her identity work can highlight the affective and material aspects of identity work beyond dualisms. Conceptualizing identity work as an event depending on existential feelings, I found that the live-statue’s identity work depends on existential feelings of “submission to the street” that have both active and passive aspects, and which emerge from the process of to affect and to be affected. My study also highlights this process within situated interactions and material arrangements.

Should Environmental Concern Pay Off? A Heideggerian Perspective

Organizations often motivate their environmental efforts by arguing that ‘good ethics is good business’. Though instrumental arguments of this nature put environmental concerns firmly on the corporate agenda, it comes at a price. Such reasoning relies on age-old fact-value distinctions, from which perspective rational subjects must gather the facts on how to treat the environment as a useful object. According to this logic, means-to-an-end relationships are the primary motivation for all action. Drawing on the insights of Martin Heidegger, we show how the preoccupation with gathering facts to justify environmental initiatives on the basis of ‘efficiency’ impoverishes our thinking about what is essential to our existence. Heidegger’s thinking allows us to appreciate how our belonging to a particular ethos orientates us in the world in meaningful ways. We therefore advocate an approach to organizational environmentalism that goes beyond ‘the business case’, without appealing to abstract normative principles. This approach also provides new perspectives on what notions such as ‘ecological citizenship’ may entail.

Caring Leadership: A Heideggerian Perspective

This paper develops the idea of caring leadership based on Heidegger’s philosophy of care. From this perspective, caring leadership is grounded in the practices of ‘leaping-in’ and ‘leaping-ahead’ as modes of intervention in the affairs of the world and the efforts of others. This involves gauging and taking responsibility for the ramifications of intervention, balancing the urge for certainty of outcome and visibility of contribution with the desire to encourage and enable others. Our analysis suggests several twists to contemporary leadership debates. We argue that the popular models of transactional and transformational leadership are to be critiqued not for their over-reliance but, rather, their under-reliance on agency. This is a different kind of agency to that of heroic or charismatic models. It involves tolerance of complexity and ambivalence; a rich sense of temporal trajectory; concern for one’s presence in the world; and crucially, the ability to resist the soothing normativity of ‘best practice’. From this position, we argue that the problem with the growing scholarly interest in an ethic of care is that it provides too tempting a recipe to follow. In a Heideggerian view, caring leadership has little to do with compassion, kindness or niceness; it involves and requires a fundamental organization and leadership of self.

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

This paper develops a theory of organizational ghosts, a concept that describes the haunted and burdensome aspects of organizational life and in particular of leadership action. The concept of organizational ghosts is not offered as yet another metaphor, a lens through which to analyse particular organizations. Rather, I offer my discussion of ghosts as a theoretical concept that explains how inheritances of the past haunt the relations and struggles of the present. I tell a ghostly tale of the everyday leadership and learning practices of UK local government chief executives, and provide an exploration of organizational ghosts as a contribution to the growing interest in the action in the shadows, atmospheres, margins and boundaries of organizations. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of UK local councils, and embracing the multiplicity and heterogeneity of organizational ghosts, the paper considers the theoretical, political and ethical stakes involved in taking ghosts seriously. Its contribution is to show how ghosts are insinuated in organizations and to highlight leaders as figures who are both willing agents and uneasy hosts of hauntings, and to point to the mediating role of leaders in handling confrontations between the past, the present and the future.

It’s a Bittersweet Symphony, this Life: Fragile Academic Selves and Insecure Identities at Work

This article demonstrates the importance of studying insecurity in relation to identities at work. Drawing upon empirical research with business school academics in the context of the proliferation of managerialist controls of audit, accountability, monitoring and performativity, we illustrate how insecurities in the form of fragile and insecure academic selves are variously manifested. Emerging from our data were three forms of insecurity—imposters, aspirants and those preoccupied with existential concerns, and we analyse these in the context of psychoanalytic, sociological and philosophical frameworks. In so doing, we make a three-fold contribution to the organization studies literature: first, we develop an understanding of identities whereby they are treated as a topic and not merely a resource for studying something else; second, we demonstrate how insecurity and identity are more nuanced and less monolithic concepts than has sometimes been deployed in the literature; and third, we theorize the concepts of identity and insecurity as conditions and consequences of one another rather than monocausally related. Through this analysis of insecure identities, insightful understandings into the contemporary bittersweet experiences of working in academia, and specifically in business schools are developed that could prove fruitful for future research within and beyond this occupational group.

The Process and Mechanisms of Organizational Healing

Organizational healing refers to the work of repairing practices, routines, and structures in the face of disruption and strengthening organizational functioning through social relationships. Healing, more than resilience, coping, or recovery, enables greater organizational strength than what previously existed. Its unique characteristics make it an important construct for further explaining what accounts for developing exceptional organizational systems. Based on the financial and economic challenges facing Prudential Real Estate after the housing market crash in 2008, and parallels from physiological healing processes, I provide an in-depth description of the process of organizational healing that is supported by four mechanisms: empathy, interventions, collective effort, and leadership. Together the process and mechanisms explain how organizational healing enables both resilience and strengthening. These mechanisms point to activities practitioners and leaders may consider when promoting virtuous human systems.