Scott Loren

Rogue Logics: Organization in the Grey Zone

This paper explores the concept of the ‘rogue’ through an examination of how the figure appears in business ethics and as the rogue trader. Reading the rogue trader through institutional logics and Jacques Derrida’s book Rogues, we suggest that the rogue is not on the dark side of organization so much as in an indeterminate grey zone, where the boundary between acceptable behaviour and misconduct is unclear. We further argue that this boundary is necessarily unclear as it is in the nature of organization, at least within capitalist trading systems, to push the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable. The rogue thus helps produce the boundaries of ethically acceptable organizational behaviour in the very act of transgressing them. The location-bound specificity of the rogue, as well as the symbolic process of naming an individual or a state a rogue, finds a relevant correlate in the villain, as Derrida suggests. But what we call ‘rogue organization’ may be constitutive of organization per se. As such, there is a potential roguishness in organization that should be addressed when considering the dark side of ethics in organization studies.

An American Odyssey of Suffering : Aesthetic Strategies in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave

Abstract In her seminal study on racial melodrama, Linda Williams suggested that “variations of the melodrama of black and white continue to be necessary to the way mass American culture ‘talks to itself’ about race” (2001: 301), with cinema as a means for cultures to reflect on unresolved social tensions through fictional forms. Williams’s choice of phraseology is reflexive of the theory informing her book: melodrama, a protean meta-genre and cultural mode, mobilizes cinematic aesthetic hyperbole and filmic realism, seeking to make an unspeakable moral order “legible”; a “mute text” used to conjure occult knowledge (This concept is established in Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976). See Williams 315, endnote 17 for her use of the terms “moral occult” and “moral legibility”.). Configured around signs of virtue and villainy through racial difference, racial melodrama’s Manichaeism of good and evil allows for intense, emotive cinematic identification, capable of reconciling “the irreconcilables of American culture” (Williams 2001: 299). Hailed as the most important cinematic event in years, the critical success of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) seems to attest to the continuing legitimacy of Williams’s claims (See, for example, the The Guardian reviews and the list of accolades at imdb.com: [accessed 13 February 2014]. [accessed 10 February 2014].). This paper positions 12 Years a Slave in a melodramatic thematics of race. Examining the narrative and aesthetic strategies of McQueen’s adaptation alongside generic conventions, it considers the ways in which the film, as a racial melodrama, negotiates ambivalences and contingencies of historic national trauma through a narrative of Manichaean moral legibility.

Melodrama After the Tears. New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood

Melodrama,it is said, has expanded beyond the borders of genre and fiction to become a pervasive cultural mode, with distinct signifying practices and interpretive codes for meaning-making that assist in determining parameters for identification throughout a variety of discourses and mediated spaces, be it the public spectacle of personal suffering, the emotive coding of consumer practices, or the sentimentalization of national politics. If melodrama is so culturally pervasive and emotionally persuasive, then what is its political potential, both within and beyond symbolic fictions, and what might its limitations be? This volume represents both a condensation and an expansion of melodrama studies. It condenses elements of theory on melodrama by bringing into focus what it recognizes as the locus for subjective identification within melodramatic narratives: the suffering victim. Taking as its point of departure Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that “[o]ne of the characteristic features of melodramas is that they concentrate on the point of view of the victim,”4 this volume provides an expansion by going beyond the methodology of examining primarily fictive works, whether from the stage, the screen or the written word, for their explicit or latent commentary on and connection to the historical contexts within which they are produced. Though many of the contributions also address melodramatic works of fiction in relation to historical contexts, most of them apply theory from melodrama studies and the analysis of victimhood directly to historical events, social conditions and non-fictive cultural artifacts. Thus the expansion is not one beyond genre, a move that has been important in melodrama studies, but an expansion completely beyond generic and fictive forms, to contribute to a socio-cultural theory of melodrama.

What’s the Matter: Race as Res

Calling for a reconsideration of race in response to ‘post-race’ discourses, W.J.T. Mitchell’s inspiring address at the first congress of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies made at least three major claims.1 First, and perhaps most central to his argument, is that the power of deeply ingrained social ontologies is not to be underestimated. Notions that have served to organize and structure thoughts on the nature of being are neither easily nor quickly altered. Race, it must be recognized, is everywhere. Perception in and of the world is encoded, if often unconsciously or indirectly, through race. This leads to a second claim: that the notion of nature, or of second nature, stemming from the beginning of a critical left theory following Hegel and Marx up to Benjamin and Adorno/Horkheimer, needs to be revived. Cultural studies, indeed the greater portion of the humanities, has become so convinced of its social constructivist logic that it is in danger of neglecting nature – or something like it, a second nature – altogether. Mitchell argues that this is a mistake; that if we neglect the immovable truth of nature, or let’s say the tenacious tendencies of second nature, we run the risk of all-too-easily replacing one socially ontologizing concept with another. The point is well taken: paradigm shifts and social ontologies don’t change overnight, but are rather subject to long, uneasy processes. Following this logic, it is more and more often said that the tendency to prematurely hail the end of an era is a symptom of the time after modernism, and the eagerness to ‘post-’ an era, a logic, a paradigm, or an ontology often runs the risk of being counterproductive: thus we have Mitchell’s welcome call for a reconsideration of race.