Astrid Kersten

Diversity management: Dialogue, dialectics and diversion

This paper uses Habermas’ model of dialogue and the public sphere to provide a critical examination of organizational diversity management. The paper argues that, in spite of the dialogic and inclusive claims made by the diversity movement, its basic framework and methods serve to limit and repress productive dialogue on race rather than produce effective organizational change. The diversity movement represents an important ideological strategy that seeks to re‐assert the privacy of the corporate sphere and its employment decisions, making its emergence a significant element of the general social‐political attempt to manage and contain racial conflict and social contradiction.

Organizing for powerlessness. A critical perspective on psychodynamics and dysfunctionality.

Develops a critical perspective on organizations and psychoanalysis. Following a brief review of various strands of psychoanalytic theorizing about organizations, argues that psychoanalysis can make an important contribution both to recognizing and to restoring the human subject in the organization. However, psychoanalysis also runs the risk of becoming complicitous with the larger context of domination that structures and governs organizations, unless it explicitly acknowledges and incorporates this context. Discusses the importance of acknowledging relations of power, recognizing the normalization of dysfunctionality in organizations, and moving away from individualizing issues of emotion, resistance and control.

When craving goodness becomes bad: a critical conception of ethics and aesthetics in organizations

Using critical aesthetics, this paper shows the essential ideological and control linkages between ethics and aesthetics in organizations. Using Katebs concept of aesthetic cravings, the paper explores the role of emotional and psychological attachments in organizational reality construction and their implications for organizational change and organizational control.

Unveiling the global spectacle: Difference, identity and community

This paper analyzes the ‘seeing’ of difference, and its relation to identity and community. It argues that Western images of the Other are part of an obfuscating global spectacle and it explores ways in which this spectacle manipulates and diverts our perceptions of difference, obscures social and political contradictions, and blinds us to the possibilities of an inclusive, democratic and pluralistic society. By examining the complex ways in which vision and identity are shaped by social narrative and esthetic cravings, we show how traditional views of identity and community can be altered for the better by interrogating and reimagining visions of self and Other.

Bringing Theory Down To Earth

For the past four years, I have taught Organization Theory to graduate and undergraduate students. My own perspective in teaching these courses is that theory is an essential part of life-that the theories we use affect everything we see and do, directly or indirectly. Students, on the other hand, tend to enter the course with the view that theory is abstract, useless and unrelated to their professional interests and goals. I will describe the approach I take to convince students of the importance and relevance of theory in general and in organization theory in particular.