Campbell Jones

The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship

This paper engages with debates on enterprise culture and one of its key subjects—the entrepreneur. Enlisting the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to explain the continuing failure of entrepreneurship discourse to assign the character of the entrepreneur a positive identity. Shifting away from stable categories such as ‘the entrepreneur’, we describe entrepreneurship in terms of Lacan’s concept of the Real and Žižek’s concept of the sublime object. This allows us to critically scrutinize the operation of the phantasmic category of the entrepreneur. In addition to indicating some prospects for the future of psychoanalytic cultural criticism in organization studies, we make a case for a continual questioning of the subject, a questioning that is today being foreclosed by those critics who were first to call the subject into question.

Unmasking the entrepreneur

his unique book argues against the ideas of entrepreneurship that prevail in much of business practice as well as in popular and academic representations of the entrepreneur. The authors demonstrate how conceptual and political problems with entrepreneurship work and how they are interconnected. Building on recent critical studies of entrepreneurship, they ask what lies behind the friendly face of the entrepreneur.

Foucault's Inheritance/Inheriting Foucault

This paper outlines a set of considerations on the politics of reading by suggesting a concept of inheritance to think about the reception of Michel Foucault in organization studies. On the one hand we consider what Foucault inherited from others, the interpretations and decisions he made in relation to an earlier tradition, while on the other hand we consider how Foucault s work has been inherited as it has moved into organization studies. We read Foucault with the assistance of concepts of reading and inheritance that we, in turn, have appropriated from Jacques Derrida, which offer potential ways of considering relations between writers and the way that inheritances are instituted in practices of reading. This involves insisting on the necessity of engaging with a number of complexities, contradictions and double-binds in the texts of Foucault (and others).

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.

Sociality and Money

This is a translation of ‘Socialite et argent’, a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of interhuman relations of exchange and the social relations – sociality – that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as ‘nonindifference to alterity’ it appears here as ‘proximity of the stranger’ and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the other person. Money both encodes and effaces sociality, both designates and disguises social relations. It arises from the way that needs and interests are manifested in exchange relations, in what he calls the ‘interestedness’ of economic life. But interests are always already cut through by the fact that being is always ‘being with others’. Being is always ‘interbeing’. Interestedness is always confronted by disinterestedness, that is, by a sociality marked by the ‘goodness of giving’, attachment to and concern for the poverty of the other person. Levinas concludes with a discussion of sociality and justice, posing questions about the tension between the demand to respond to an Other immediately before me and at the same time to respond to the demands of an other Other (the third person) who also invites a response.

Sucking, Bleeding, Breaking: On the Dialectics of Vampirism, Capital, and Time

In this paper we argue for a dialectical understanding of vampirism, capital, and time, which involves placing each of these elements in tension, both internally and in relation to each other. Starting from Marxs comments on the vampiric nature of capital, we draw out the importance of time in his argument. Rather than simply adding time to vampires and capital, we argue for a critical rethinking of time which, responding to Bergson, poses a ‘dialectic of duration’ in which time is neither simply continuous nor discontinuous. Drawing on vampire literature and film, we trace this dialectic of duration through the erratic feeding habits of vampires, of capital, and of contemporary producers and consumers. Reflecting on the meaning of time for Marx and for capital, we raise questions about resistance and the future, and conclude by outlining a temporal dialectic of capital that stresses both the reproductive risk and the political promise of the vampire.In this paper we argue for a dialectical understanding of vampirism, capital, and time, which involves placing each of these elements in tension, both internally and in relation to each other. Starting from Marxs comments on the vampiric nature of capital, we draw out the importance of time in his argument. Rather than simply adding time to vampires and capital, we argue for a critical rethinking of time which, responding to Bergson, poses a ‘dialectic of duration’ in which time is neither simply continuous nor discontinuous. Drawing on vampire literature and film, we trace this dialectic of duration through the erratic feeding habits of vampires, of capital, and of contemporary producers and consumers. Reflecting on the meaning of time for Marx and for capital, we raise questions about resistance and the future, and conclude by outlining a temporal dialectic of capital that stresses both the reproductive risk and the political promise of the vampire.

Book Reviews: Outside Organization Theory: Repositioning Organization Theory: Impossibilities and Strategies, Steffen Böhm. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, £55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781403943637

itself would have enhanced this text. Especially, I sense an oscillation between postmodern conceptualizations of gender coupled somewhat awkwardly with more modernist categories. In a point related to but going beyond this issue, I worry that the authors constructed a heterosexual fi eld of desire around their treatment of gender, and when opportunities emerged to push our theoretical understandings of gender into queerer directions (as several times they did), the authors left such gendered possibilities and embodiments unnecessarily opaque. Overall, however, I strongly recommend Halford and Leonard’s Negotiating Gendered Identities at Work as an important application and extension to the empirical and theoretical arenas of feminist organizational scholarship.