Alessia Contu

Decaf Resistance: On Misbehavior, Cynicism, and Desire in Liberal Workplaces

The author reconnects resistance in production to its radical roots. Current literature suggests that resistance in the liberal workplaces of late capitalism has gone underground, becoming mostly evident in unofficial, offstage practices such as cynicism, parody, and humor. The author argues this resistance is too often a decaf resistance. This is a resistance without the cost of radically changing the economy of enjoyment, which ties us to our master. The author argues that resistance, as a real act, which suspends and changes the constellation of power relations, has a cost that cannot be accounted for in advance. To understand this cost, we need an ethics, which the author calls, following Lacan, the Ethics of the Real.

Studying Practice: Situating Talking About Machines

Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines (TAM) is celebrated for communicating something of the richness and complexity of work practices. Our endeavour is to connect the current wave of interest in practice with Orr’s focal attentiveness to the practices of photocopier-repair technicians. More specifically, we revisit how, in TAM, a careful examination of work practice is commended by Orr as a way of ‘deepen[ing] our under-standings’—for example, about ‘the relations of employment and the role of work in the constitution of workers’ identity’. This central theme of TAM, we contend, provides illuminating insights into, and poses interesting questions for students of, the politics of work organization. The novelty of our reading of TAM stems from a mobilization of some Marxist and Lacanian ideas, as developed in theorizations of hegemony, that enable us to problematize both the self-identification of the technicians as heroic, and the distancing of their practices from the corporation’s bureaucratic prescriptions. Our particular interest lies in unpicking the politico-economic significance of the technicians’ practices; and, more specifically, their relevance for understanding the reproduction of capitalist work relations.

NGOs management and the value of ‘partnerships’ for equality in international development: What’s in a name?

‘Partnership’ is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation strategies for effective international development. We call such an ensemble of policies and practices the ‘partnership discourse’. We explore the value of the term ‘partnership’ in international development with an empirical focus on the African context and issues of equality in relations between international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are routinely characterized as partnerships. The results of our research in Uganda indicate that a hiatus exists between the rhetoric and reality of such partnerships. Partnerships on the ground reproduce relations of inequality characterized by subordination and oppression. The retroductive explanation we offer for such an emergent picture is to recast partnerships not as neutral management tools, but as political processes actualized in a terrain that is contested and uneven. Our theoretical contribution is to develop a political theorization of inter-organizational relations that allows us to explore the social consequences, specifically on inequality, associated with the partnership discourse. Our substantive contribution is to elaborate the value of the term ‘partnership’ in the international development domain. Its value is to smooth over antagonism and co-opt dissent by proposing a solution to effective development that is both ethically and managerially good.

Editorial: Jacques Lacan with organization studies

The articles in this special issue celebrate the late arrival of Jacques Lacan into organization studies. Each article takes up ideas from Lacan in order to read organization and organizations studies differently, taking on questions as diverse as enjoyment, creativity, stress and identity through to the very nature of the human and the endeavour of organization theory. Our introduction to this special issue aims to un/tangle three key points. First, we aim to provide a basic compass, which might enable those unfamiliar with Lacan’s territory to release themselves of any existing fears about language and about consciousness, and prepare themselves for the real shock of an encounter with Lacan. Second, we situate Lacan with organization studies, which will involve asking why organization studies always seems to arrive late to the scene of theoretical crimes and, moreover, asking what it is about organization studies that has delayed the entry of Lacan until now. Third, we introduce the six contributions to the special issue.

On boundaries and difference: Communities of practice and power relations in creative work:

Tensions and struggles are a usual occurrence when knowledge ‘to get the job done’ needs to be produced at the boundaries of different disciplines and skills. Yet, power struggles have been often overlooked, and a deeper understanding of power dynamics in, and between, communities of practice is needed. An ethnographic study of the work practices of a digital media agency is utilised as a basis for the conceptual work of addressing tensions and struggles evident in creative design work. The approach developed here reactivates the critical and relational perspectives of communities of practice theory rearticulating it with the insights of Laclau and Mouffe’s site ontology. This study offers a transformative redefinition of communities of practice’s existing theoretical kit. It also shows how creative abrasions are situated in the broader politics of management and organisation of creative design work.

Multinational corporations’ politics and resistance to plant shutdowns: A comparative case study in the south of France

MNCs’ politics has been considered a ‘contested terrain’ and further research is needed into the dynamics between the Head Office’s drastic restructuring decisions and local responses to understand how collective resistance is performed, and on what conditions. A neo-Gramscian approach is developed to analyse two plants in France facing drastic restructuring, including shutdown. We trace the dynamics of forces significant in aligning resisting subjects. We identify two structural processes – chains of equivalence and chains of difference – which were significant to the constitution of resistance. This article contributes to the development and refinement of a neo-Gramscian approach to management and organization studies in general and to multinational corporations’ politics in particular. It refines the study of multinational corporations’ politics by explaining how collective resistance is constituted and organized, what favours and limits the possibility of creating a collective antagonistic front and the role of local managerial resistance.

Corporate Robespierres, ideologies of management and change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of this special issue highlighting some of the distinctive features of Žižeks Lacan‐inspired thought relevant to the role of ideologies in organizational change management.Design/methodology/approach – The approach used aims to show how ideological and ethical ramifications of Žižeks recent analysis of a “Jacobin” change paradigm can affect thought on everyday change practices in business and management.Findings – Some parallels are drawn between current change practices and narrative tactics employed by Robespierre during the Jacobin reign of terror to “extort” the commitment of participants in the change process.Practical implications – This paper/special issue invites reconsideration of our late capitalist intellectual/practical “reflexes” in change management, i.e. to reassess their ideological mechanism.Originality/value – Žižekian/Lacanian approaches to organizations and change are especially suitable for this purpose but h...

Rationality and Relationality in the Process of Whistleblowing: Recasting Whistleblowing Through Readings of Antigone

Reporting wrongdoing is seen as desirable to fight illegal practices, but whistleblowers often suffer retaliations and are in need of protection. Overall, whistleblowers engender strong reactions and are cast either as saints or rats. I consider why whistleblowers are seen as unsettling and ambivalent figures by exploring the analogy between Antigone, the Sophoclean heroine, and whistleblowers. These reflections reconfigure the rationality and relationality of the process of whistleblowing. The rationality of the whistleblower is singular and not easily subsumed into universalizing norms which explains some of the limits reached by the empiricist pro-social research agenda. The relationality of the process of whistleblowing indicates that the reactions of those who hear the whistle are as important. This opens up to an appreciation of the ethical and political valence of the process of whistleblowing and highlights a number of counter-intuitive and interesting issues in its synchronic and diachronic dimension.

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies:

In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze the rising awareness, both within the critically oriented and the broader organization studies community, that we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political, and environmental realities we live in in unforeseen and unimaginable ways. For many of us, the financial crisis of 2008 had crystallized the notion that capitalism in its very nature is in continuous crisis, as shown by four decades of persistent decline in economic growth rate and rise in overall indebtedness and economic inequality (Streeck, 2014, 2016). Yet the political debacle of party politics in the United Kingdom and the United States together with the rampant populism in various European countries have highlighted that this is not just another installment of a crisis-prone economic system. These ‘electoral mutinies’ suggest that what is under crisis is the governance system of neoliberalism itself (Fraser, 2017). The responses to this crisis have been proved severely wanting, leading to the weakening of all social and political institutions that offer a semblance of protection to the vulnerable (Wahl, 2017).

‘… The point is to change it’ – Yes, but in what direction and how? Intellectual activism as a way of ‘walking the talk’ of critical work in business schools

This article is a call to embrace and work towards a specific form of intellectual activism in business schools. Based on the inspiring work of Professor Patricia Hill Collins and other Black feminist and post-colonial scholars, intellectual activism is here defined as ‘the myriad ways in which people place the power of their ideas in service to social justice’. This article calls for and delineates a positive response to the current crisis by identifying key features and areas of work that scholars can engage with in ‘walking the talk’ of critical work in business schools.