David P. Levine

The corrupt organization

This article explores the psychic meaning of corruption understood as an attack on norms of conduct in organizations. The primary focus is on why individuals fail to become securely attached to norms, and on the part played in this failure by certain key features of corruption: greed, arrogance, a sense of personal entitlement, the idea of virtue as personal loyalty, and the inability to distinguish between organizational and personal ends. The essay considers the moral dimension of the problem and suggests that conduct normally interpreted as corrupt often expresses a powerful attachment to primitive moral thinking rather than a rejection of morality.

Theories of political economy: Neoclassical political economy

The time since the publication of Adam Smiths Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 to the present day spans over two hundred years. Although there are important elements of continuity from Smith to the present world, neoclassical economics is not just a modern, updated version of classical political economy. The beginnings of the neoclassical system are placed in the 1870s with the rise of marginalist economics. Before the 1870s economics as a system of thought was dominated by the classical agenda: growth, distribution, and the labor theory of value. After the 1870s, this agenda changed in important ways, although it did not change overnight. To simplify a complex chapter in this history of economic thought, the marginalist revolution succeeded in doing two things. First, it advanced a theory of value grounded in the intensity of subjective feelings (subjective utility theory). And second, it developed the marginal calculus as a powerful conceptual and methodological tool. The upshot of these two developments was that, over the span of the next three to four decades, the emerging neoclassical consensus succeeded in replacing the labor theory of value with one grounded in subjective utility and placed the ideas of “marginal product” and “final demand” at the center while elbowing into the wings the concepts of total product and total demand. With these new ideas gathering momentum as they spread during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the economy came to be thought of less in terms of material production and reproduction and more as a logic of human action.

The Ideal of Diversity in Organizations

This article offers a psychodynamic exploration of the organizational commitment to diversity. Based on a brief review of organizational rhetoric, two themes are identified. The first is the denial of hatred, which is argued to express the operation of a fantasy of the organization as the peaceable kingdom. This fantasy imagines the organization as a home for those with strong originary group identifications, while refusing to consider how attachment to group identity can foster hate and exclusion. The second theme is the equation of knowledge useful to the organization with life experience connected to group identity. The emphasis in the rhetoric of diversity on the value of experience is linked to a strategy for coping with loss that seeks to make the experience of loss a source of strength. The importance of acknowledging the reality of hate and of coping with, rather than denying, the consequences of loss is emphasized.

Thinking about doing: On learning from experience and the flight from thinking

This article explores the relationship between learning, thinking, and doing. A case study of a course in group dynamics is presented, and the desire of students in that course to learn about groups simply by being in a group is considered. The article argues that the desire to learn simply by having an experience expresses a conservative impulse. If all we have is an experience, all we can learn is the inevitability of repeating it. This makes learning from experience the enemy of creativity as its purpose is not to discover what might be, but to assure the reproduction of what is. Learning from experience in this sense means failing to learn from experience. Failure to learn from experience is linked to fear of thinking. When the group is imagined to be a refuge from thinking, appeal to learning by doing expresses the need to replace learning with belonging.

Poverty, capabilities and freedom

The idea of poverty has played a central role in political economy since the first pages of the Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith distinguishes between what he calls the civilized and savage states of man. Classical economists connected the idea of poverty to the idea of subsistence, and the idea of subsistence to the capacity to maintain a way of life of a particular kind, appropriate to the occupant of a well‐defined position in society. The attempt to define poverty in this way runs into difficulty, however, in a modern rather than subsistence‐based economy. In this essay, the idea of capabilities is developed in a specific direction to suggest a way of thinking about poverty suitable to a modern society. Poverty is defined as the opposing pole to freedom, and freedom is linked to creativity in work. Creativity in work is considered the exercise of a human capability, specifically the capability to do skilled labor. Poverty results, then, either when this capability does not develop, or when the opportunity to exercise it is unavailable.

The fantasy of inevitability in organizations

This article explores the fantasy that an organization must exist, that the world outside cannot go on in its absence, and that the organization is somehow woven into the fabric of society so as to make it inevitable. Inevitability is part of a grandiose fantasy expressed in the idea that, however many competitors the organization may face, it remains the one true organization, while the others must be judged false claimants. Operation of the fantasy suggests, therefore, the presence of a narcissistic disturbance in the organization. Inevitability is contrasted with indeterminacy, which expresses the organizations capacity to suspend assumptions and preformed knowledge about itself and its world. The article considers indeterminacy an emotional capacity and inevitability the result of the inability of the organization to have access to that capacity. The distinction between inevitability and indeterminacy is seen to have important implications for the possibility and nature of organizational change.

Creativity and Change On the Psychodynamics of Modernity

This article explores the psychic meaning of change. Modernity is often conceived as a system of change. Indeed, the business mentality that dominates organizational life in modern societies insists that the central problem organizations face is adapting to change. The celebration of change we associate with modernity does not take into account the hidden or psychic meaning of change. The psychic meaning of change is expressed in the manic state we often observe in those who imagine themselves the agents of change. The manic state is linked to a hidden objective of change, which is control and domination. In this article, a distinction is drawn between the psychic meaning of that change linked to manic states and the psychic meaning of change linked to the expression of human creativity. The distinction between types of change is used to suggest an important distinction between modern and traditional society.

Theories of political economy: Marxian political economy

With Marxism, there are many possible vantage points from which one can discuss political economy. Marxists have seen the political in the very separation of civil society from the public arena (limiting rights and equality to the latter), the class process by which surplus value is “appropriated” under capitalism, the role of the state in managing the interests and affairs of capital, political (that is, state-backed) guarantees of property rights, revolutionary activity to alter the political institutions of capitalism, and the bargaining between labor and capital for control of the economic surplus. Although these vantage points may supply political content to Marxian economics, the senses in which they do so are not obvious. Even the concept of class, certainly a mainstay of Marxian theory, is not obviously political. Classes can exist even in a society where individuals are disconnected, unaware of common interests, and politically unorganized. Nevertheless, owners of capital may exist and hire those who sell their labor power. Further, production of value and surplus value can occur. In this kind of economy, politics would not be evident in the daily operation of class processes (though the state would have to underwrite private property rights). There would be no struggle for the surplus, no power bargaining between labor and capital, and no state intervention to control labor. The use of the term “political economy” in Marxian theory does not directly refer us to studies of the relation between economics and politics.

Political Economy and the Idea of Development

This paper explores the questions: what are the main organizing concepts of the older political economy of Smith and Marx; and how do they differ from those typical of more recent work in political economy? Special emphasis is placed on the importance of an idea of development in the older political economy, and on how that idea has been replaced in the newer political economy by notions of power and interest. The paper considers how the absence of a concept of development in the newer versions of political economy limits the scope and depth of these versions. Recent criticism of the idea of development is also considered. In light of this criticism, the paper considers weaknesses in the concept of development in the older political economy. However, rather than fully accepting the critique of the idea of development, the paper suggests that weaknesses in the classical construction can be corrected by paying closer attention to how we understand the ends of the development process.

Justice and Economic Democracy

This paper explores the relationship between justice and democracy with special reference to economic democracy. Those who favor greater economic democracy sometimes equate justice with democracy, seeing in greater democracy the key to a more just society. The author presents a critique of this idea, arguing that greater democracy does not mean greater justice, but can easily lead in the opposite direction. The equation of justice with democracy is often linked to communitarian ideals that subordinate the individual to the group, and to concepts of politics that blur the distinction between private and public, political and economic. The paper explores the significance of group life for economic justice, the concept of politics appropriate to normative theory in political economy, and the problematic ideal of government that derives from equating justice, democracy and government. The paper considers both workplace democracy and the democratization of economic policy making.