2

Lacan at Work !

Jason Glynos

As a site of wealth creation, work and the organization of work receive

critical attention from many disciplines and from many traditions of
thought. In this chapter I explore why one might want to supplement
existing approaches to work and the organization of work – both
psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic – with ideas drawn from the
field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I suggest that there are advantages to
organizing this Lacanian intervention around the category of fantasy,
but that there are also aspects of this approach that demand further
development if we are to offer a convincing critical explanation of
workplace phenomena.

Psychoanalysis Beyond the Clinic

The collection Lacan and Organization evokes a domain much larger than
itself, a domain defined by the attempt to apply psychoanalytic theory to
anything outside the clinic. It also evokes worries about the legitimacy
and propriety of such applications. No doubt these basic worries are
common to most domains in the social sciences, and are of a piece with
Foucault’s characterization of social science as essentially marked by the
empirical-transcendental doublet. In this view, social science never
ceases to doubt and revise its founding premises; never able, therefore,
to ‘move on’ to the register of ‘normal science’. And yet there also
appears to be something provocative about psychoanalysis itself and the
very idea of deploying its concepts and insights in a social science
context.
Historically, of course, psychoanalytic theory has been applied to a
wide range of social and political phenomena (the pathologies of

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various institutions, the behaviour of leaders and the masses, religion,

art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, class, gender, crime, sexual
perversion, and so on). Work initiated and inspired by the Frankfurt
School is one of the most well known examples, involving the
application of Freudian psychoanalysis to various social and cultural
phenomena, such as political leadership, anti-Semitism, and
consumption practices (Reich, 1970; Fromm, 1966; Marcuse, 1955;
Adorno et al., 1950; Rieff, 1966; Brown, 1959; Lasch, 1980; Sloan, 1996;
Sennett, 1998). And yet such applications have often been plagued by
the twin fears of whether ‘psychoanalysis is true’ and whether one is
‘true to psychoanalysis’.
Usually cast in the terms of positivist science, the first fear expresses
a worry about whether clinical psychoanalysis, as a discipline, can
generate predictions that can be verified or falsified in the same way as
natural science. Not only does this entail the adoption of a highly
restricted and restricting conceptualization of the relation between
clinical psychoanalysis and science: unless it conforms to this sort of
deductive-nomological model it also rules out, in an a priori fashion, the
possibility that the conceptual grammar of psychoanalytic theory can be
considered helpful to a field of inquiry beyond the clinic.
But if one is not particularly worried about whether psychoanalysis
‘is true’ in a ‘scientific’ or epistemological sense, there is still the fear
that one is not being ‘true to psychoanalysis’. What is at stake in this
case is not the ‘truth of psychoanalysis’ as such. What is at stake is the
integrity of psychoanalysis beyond the clinic: can one venture outside the
clinic and still claim to exercise fidelity to the psychoanalytic enterprise?
This question, of course, suggests that the extra-clinical articulation of
psychoanalytic concepts is unorthodox in some sense. But as Ernesto
Laclau points out in a different context, ‘if by orthodox doxa one
understands philological obsession and mechanical repetition of the
same categories without ‘developing’ them as required by new contexts,
it is clear that any intellectual intervention worth the name will be
“heterodox”’ (Laclau in Butler, Laclau, !i"ek, 2000: 64-5).
Consider the emerging field of psycho-social studies (Clarke et al.,
2008; Hoggett et al., 2010; Clarke, 2008; Layton, 2008a, 2008b; Hollway,
2004; Walkerdine, 2008; Frosh and Baraitser, 2008; Wetherell, 2008;
Rustin, 2008: 407-11), a domain defined by the systematic use of
psychoanalysis for social scientific research. Given that there are

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different schools of psychoanalysis it is obvious that there are also

different heterodox forms of psycho-social studies. Frosh and Baraitser,
for example, identify Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as the two
main approaches in this kind of work in the UK (2008: 354). And what
has been said of the application of psychoanalysis to social and political
studies can also be said of the application of other traditions of thought
to the analysis of social and political phenomena, such as hermeneutics,
critical realism, and so on. Each of these domains is internally
fragmented, generating a wide range of competing heterodox
approaches to the study of social and political phenomena.
And yet the question remains how to evaluate the relative merits of
competing ‘heterodox’ approaches, whether such approaches are
inspired by psychoanalysis or not. It is difficult to conduct any sort of
comparative evaluation at an abstract or purely theoretical level, so one
way to proceed (that avoids the twin fallacies of positivism and
‘orthodoxism’) is to situate such approaches in relation to a
problematized set of phenomena. We can, for example, consider a
problem field linked to work and the organization of work.

The Problem with Work: Why Psychoanalysis?

When travel, preparation, and worry are added together, the time
devoted to work-related activities in formal organizations can amount
to a large chunk of one’s life. And while the workplace continues to be
regarded as a site of wealth production, social and technological change
continually transform working practices, as a function of place, time,
and control.1
In this context, it is not surprising that the concept of work itself
becomes unstable. Is unpaid childcare work, for example? Should work
be seen predominantly as a function of wage-labour? More broadly:
how can or should people cope with changes in the workplace,
including changing management practices? What role should resistance,
struggle, and politics play in this context? How best to characterize and
evaluate workplace practices, including the conditions under which
these practices can or ought to be contested? What conditions might
promote ethical and political responses to legitimate grievances, and/or
avoid the building up of ressentiment?
Such questions force us to inquire further: what is a worker’s
relation to the wealth produced? Who should appropriate it? And how

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should it be distributed (see, for example, Resnick and Wolff, 1987;

Gorz, 1999; Pettinger et al., 2005)? With the conceptual boundaries of
work becoming increasingly permeable and fragile, answers to these
sorts of questions will have implications whose effects will irradiate
outward into many spheres of action, including the spheres of the
family and the citizen.
With what resources can one tackle these sorts of questions, and
why might one think that a psychoanalytic approach can supplement
existing approaches? Labour process theory and the debates
surrounding it, have been one important source of inspiration for those
wishing to think critically about workplace practices; and so one way to
understand the psychoanalytic intervention is to situate it in relation to
such debates. For this reason it may be helpful to briefly sketch the
basic parameters of this theoretical exchange, which range from more
objectivist to more subjectivist understandings of workplace dynamics.2
Firmly situated on the objectivist side of this debate, Harry Braverman’s
Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974), and other work it has inspired (e.g.,
Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999), deploy Marx’s ideas in order to oppose
the view that resistance in the workplace results from a conflict between
the structure of the workplace and the personal goals of rational agents.
Instead, resistance is conceived as a function of the ‘objective’
exploitation of labour by capital. In addition, Braverman expands upon
Marx’s remarks in Capital that managers function as ‘special wage
labourers’. He emphasizes how managers share ‘in the subjugation and
oppression that characterizes the lives of productive workers’ (1974:
418), casting them as ‘targets of capitalist control’ and thus ‘not simply
or principally [as] its agents’ (Willmott, 1997: 1334). In this view,
managers are conceived as functional and subservient to capitalist
imperatives just as much as traditional labourers.
Located somewhere in the middle of the macro-objectivist and
micro-subjectivist poles of the debate is Michael Burawoy (1979, 1985),
according to whom workers should not be reduced to their functional
position in the process of capital accumulation. Influenced by critical
theory and the work of Gramsci, Burawoy suggests that Braverman’s
account needs to be supplemented by an appreciation of the way
capitalist structures are reproduced through the active participation of the
workers, managers included. In this view, the political and ideological
dimensions of workplace practices (conceived as the production of
social relations, and the experience of those relations, respectively) are

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about as significant as the economic dimension (conceived in terms of

the production of things). Showing that there is a place for the
subjective judgement of workers in the capitalist process means that
departures from dominant capitalist logics of accumulation are just as
possible as their maintenance. Yet no sooner is the subjective
dimension introduced by Burawoy than it is quickly reabsorbed into a
higher level of objectivity, since the subjective dimensions identified are
considered by him to be independent of the particular people who
populate the workplace (Willmott, 1997: 1342).
Burawoy’s failure to take the question of subjectivity sufficiently
seriously has prompted many scholars working out of the labour
process tradition to explore the potential of Foucauldian and
poststructuralist approaches, in order to better exploit and develop
Burawoy’s original insights in a more satisfactory way (e.g., Knights and
MacCabe, 2000, 2003; Thomas and Davies, 2005; O’Doherty and
Willmott, 2001a, 2001b; Willmott, 2005; Fleming and Spicer, 2007;
Spicer and Böhm, 2007). In the former case, the issue of subjectivity is
cast in terms of identity. Here, the worker’s identity is shaped and
disciplined via technologies which impinge on his or her sense of self –
technologies linked to performance and career anxieties, such as various
audit and performance-related pay schemes. In the latter case, attention
is paid to possible resistances to such micro-physics of power, and
especially to the political dimension of workplace practices.
The tendency of many poststructuralist approaches to highlight the
importance of the political dimension of workplace practices signals a
desire to eschew the idea that the economy is an extra-discursive force
outside of, and acting upon, politics, culture, and society. On the
contrary, such a poststructuralist perspective seeks to make explicit the
idea that the economy is discursively constructed and thus contestable.
The political dimension of workplace practices is thus theorized in a
way that diverges from the way politics and power are often
understood. The concept of the political is theorized not as a function
of the way that power is distributed in the organization, where power is
understood in terms of identifiable sovereign authority, capacities,
resources, interests, structures, or a dispersed micro-physics of power
(Lukes, 1974; Knights and Willmott, 1989; Clegg, Courpasson, Phillips,
2006). From the point of view of poststructuralist theory, the political
dimension of a practice is understood in relation to a negative ontology,
where to subscribe to a negative ontology means simply to affirm the

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absence of any positive ontological foundations for the subject (or, to

put it differently, to affirm the radical contingency of social relations).
Far from leading to a kind of free fall into relativism, such a perspective
expands the scope and relevance of critical analysis because it
emphasizes the situated, precarious, and thus potentially political,
character of interests and structures themselves.
The appeal of psychoanalysis can be understood in this context. The
attraction of psychoanalysis – and I would argue the attraction of
fantasy as a key psychoanalytic category in particular – can be
understood in part by reflecting on the emergence and development of
poststructuralist political theory and analysis. Central, in this regard, are
what have been labelled the linguistic and affective turns. The linguistic
turn (Rorty, 1967) signalled an appreciation of the symbolic dimension
of political practices (Edelman, 1964), especially the importance of
discourse and identity in thinking about political mobilization.
Nationalist, feminist, environmental, and gay and lesbian movements
emphasized the importance of the stories that people tell each other in
shaping their political identity. More importantly, it highlighted the
constructed character of political identity and discourse, calling for
subjects to affirm this constructed and contingent character (e.g. Laclau
and Mouffe, 1985; Connolly, 1995).
Many welcomed these developments because they marked a move
beyond standard analyses that emphasized the ‘givenness’ of class,
gender, and other interests. They pluralized perspectives on political
mobilization and engagement beyond those grounded in interest-based
rationalities. Nevertheless, there are many who feel that emphasizing the
contingent and constructed character of discourse underestimates the
inertia and force of social norms and practices. According to this view
the roles of the emotions and passions have been neglected, and the
analytical focus needs to shift to affects. The so-called ‘affective turn’
indicates a need or demand to acknowledge affects as central to political
theory and analysis (e.g., Massumi, 1996; Ahmed, 2004; Stavrakakis,
2005; Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras, 2006).
Psychoanalytic theory possesses categories (such as fantasy, and
associated concepts like transference, the unconscious, and so on),
which are invoked specifically because they are able to capture the
combined centrality of both the symbolic and affective dimensions of
social and political life (see also Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2010). Against

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the background of the sorts of question I outlined earlier, a

psychoanalytically-inflected poststructuralist approach can offer a
decidedly critical – not simply constructivist – edge. Even so, a lot
hangs on how the basic ontology underpinning psychoanalysis,
including the idea that the subject is constitutively split between its
symbolic and affective sides, is cashed out in theory as well as in
practice. It is for this reason that it is helpful to explore the utility of
psychoanalysis with reference to the specific domain of work and the
organization of work. But which psychoanalysis?

The Problem with Work: Which Psychoanalysis?

Ever since its foundation in 1946, the Tavistock Institute of Human
Relations has been a hub of activity where mainly Kleinian-inspired,
object relations psychoanalytic theory was applied to areas outside the
clinic, including, notably, the area of work and organizations (see Trist
and Murray, 1990).3 But there has also been a recent spate of
anthologies exploring the connections between psychoanalysis and
organizational studies (e.g., Contu et al., 2010; Essers et al., 2009; Carr,
2002; Walkerdine, 2008a; de Swarte, 1998; Carr and Gabriel, 2001;
Hinshelwood and Skogstad, 2000; Hinshelwood and Chiesa, 2002;
Neumann and Hirschhorn, 1999; Obholzer and Roberts, 1994). There
are also those who have debated the utility of psychoanalysis for the
understanding of organizations.4 Nevertheless, many reviews of the
current state of this interdisciplinary field call for a more critical and
systematic uptake of psychoanalysis in the study of organizations and
management (Carr, 2002: 344; Glynos, 2011; Glynos, 2008a; Glynos
and Stavrakakis, 2008).
There are many ways one can classify the literature at the
intersection of psychoanalysis and organization studies. Some have
sought to do this by drawing a distinction between using psychoanalysis
to study the nature and significance of particular organizations in relation
to their wider social and cultural context on the one hand, and using
psychoanalysis to draw out lessons about how to intervene into particular
organizations with the purpose of achieving a specific aim or goal on
the other (Carr and Gabriel, 2002).5 In the former case, key
psychoanalytic concepts are used to shed light on how people’s personal
histories are connected to their experiences in the organization (such as
the unconscious or transference). In the latter case, analysts are
concerned about how to reform management structures and how to

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overcome resistance to consultants’ recommendations. Such a

distinction, of course, should not be overdrawn. As Carr and Gabriel
point out, many individual scholars have made important contributions
to both sorts of literature (2002: 353). The work of Czander (1993) or
Arnaud (1998), for instance, would be hard to classify as either a study
or an intervention. It is, rather, a question of emphasis.
In addition, however, it is not possible, at this level of abstraction at
least, to say anything concrete about the ontological, normative, and
ethical assumptions of those whose work favours one of these two
aspects.6 In fact, the choice of such assumptions can itself become the
source of alternative ways of slicing the literature in this interdisciplinary
field. And this raises an interesting question. I have already mentioned
that there is a basic, albeit healthy, debate about how to best deploy the
insights of psychoanalysis in a non-clinical context. What is often not
addressed in any systematic detail is why, beyond legitimate (and to a
certain extent unavoidable) reasons concerning individual intellectual
trajectories, one should choose to rely on one psychoanalytic tradition
rather than another when addressing a non-clinical issue – concerning
work relations or the management of an organization, for example.
It is well known how the history of clinical psychoanalysis is marked
by multiple schisms. The field of clinical psychoanalysis bears the traces
of this history, reflecting – to put it positively – a correspondingly rich
pluralism. But what are less often examined when psychoanalytic theory
is treated as a source of cross-disciplinary inspiration are the differential
implications for a non-clinical problem as a function of a particular
school of psychoanalysis. Scholars often elide this fundamental point,
perhaps because there is an implicit awareness that such an admission
would only reinforce the prejudice of psychoanalytic naysayers, or more
likely, cause vacillators to misinterpret such an admission as an
admission of weakness and invalidity. When there is disagreement over
the sense and significance of basic psychoanalytic categories, such as
transference and countertransference, ego ideal and anxiety, affect and
meaning, interpretation and technique, fantasy and even the
unconscious, it becomes difficult to sustain the idea that psychoanalysis
is ‘one’.7
The implication of this is two-fold. First, it encourages one to be
more specific about the school presupposed in articulating a
psychoanalytic perspective or category. (This helps rather than resolves

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the problem, because not only is there not ‘one’ psychoanalysis, there
are also profound disagreements within each school.) Second, one can
enhance the analytical potential of an adopted psychoanalytic
perspective by comparing and contrasting it with other psychoanalytic
approaches to similar sets of non-clinical issues. It is this set of issues
that offers a vantage point from which to evaluate not only whether
psychoanalysis is helpful in supplementing non-psychoanalytic
approaches, but also in evaluating which sort of psychoanalytic
approach is helpful and why.
This latter evaluative exercise has hardly been explored. Undertaking
such an exercise would begin to answer some interesting questions not
only about the substantive issues under investigation, but also about the
nature and significance of the difference between psychoanalytic
schools in a non-clinical context. It would shed light on how best to
characterize the distinction between two sets of differences:

1. differences between approaches inspired by psychoanalysis and

other approaches; and

2. differences between approaches inspired by different

psychoanalytic schools.

Each of these sets of differences can be examined from the point of

view of a concept, a problem, or both. Take the first set of differences,
for example. One can pick out a key concept like fantasy and begin to
examine how this concept (and related concepts such as utopia,
metaphor, rhetoric, stereotype) has been deployed differently by
psychoanalytically-inspired and non-psychoanalytic approaches. In what
follows however I focus on the second set of differences (i.e., between
approaches inspired by different psychoanalytic schools).

At the most abstract level, one could compare and contrast approaches
in the plane of theory. That is to say, one can pick a category and
examine how different psychoanalytic schools treat that category, say
between Lacanian and Kleinian schools (see Burgoyne and Sullivan,
1997; Frosh and Baraitser, 2008). For example, Klein’s more substantive

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conception of the unconscious could be compared and contrasted with

Lacan’s more dislocatory and substanceless conception. And the same
can be done with respect to transference and countertransference, or
the category of fantasy (see, for example, Steiner, 2003).
In the case of fantasy, what Klein and Lacan share is the rejection of
the classical view that it should be linked in any simple way to the
pleasure principle and to illusion. In the classical view, the aim is to
make the subject’s reliance on fantasy fade so as to better adjust to the
demands of reality. Klein and Lacan, however, both question the
epistemological premise upon which this stark separation between
fantasy and reality is established and maintained. Rather than taking the
demands of reality for granted, these are, on the contrary, put into
question. But once reality is problematized in this fashion, so is its
relation to fantasy. Instead of contrasting fantasy with reality, Klein and
Lacan were keen to stress the role fantasy plays in structuring the
subject’s reality and were thus also keen to foster a stance toward the
world which reflected this constitutively blurred boundary. Lacan’s
ethical injunction to ‘traverse the fantasy’ (as opposed to ‘abandon the
fantasy’), and Klein’s privileging of the depressive position over the
paranoid-schizoid position’s overly strict dichotomization of the world
into good/bad, fight/flight pairs, both seek to give expression to a
subjective stance more tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty.8
Nevertheless, there are also differences in their conceptualizations
of fantasy – profound differences having to do with the role of the
image, emotion, meaning, language, subjectivity, and libido (see Leader,
1997: 89-92). Yet the significance of these differences (and even the
robustness of identified similarities) is hard to discern if we remain
exclusively at the level of abstract theory. Clearly, there are clinical
implications, which follow from these onto-theoretical differences (see,
for example, Burgoyne and Sullivan, 1997). But I think it worth
considering how such differences might also play themselves out in
relation to problematized phenomena beyond the clinic too.

There have been attempts to separately apply Kleinian and Lacanian

ideas to extra-clinical domains generally, and organization studies in
particular. But it is striking that there has been virtually no work
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comparing Lacanian with other psychoanalytically-inspired approaches

to work and the organization of work.9 Comparative exercises generally
are rare, but these are certainly more populous outside the Lacanian
orbit (see, for example, Czander, 1993; and Czander et al., 2002).
Czander (1993), for one, conducts a comparative exercise examining
classical psychoanalysis, object relations, and self-psychology. A
dialogue with Lacan may perhaps begin by critically engaging with
Czander, and with others such as Hinshelwood et al. (Hinshelwood and
Skogstad, 2000; Hinshelwood and Chiesa, 2002) or scholars linked to
psychosocial studies (e.g., Clarke et al., 2008, Hoggett et al., 2006), by
highlighting where convergences, divergences, and productive affinities
lie.
An engagement with Czander from a Lacanian point of view might,
for example, question the centrality attributed to the psychological
health of the individual. This focus sets important limits upon the
critical potential of this particular psychoanalytic approach – at least in
the way it is being deployed here – because it marginalizes an ethics
premised on split subjectivity. This underlying psychologistic tendency
is evident in his self-psychological ideal of a mentally healthy person,
who is ‘a person with a firm or secure self system, motivated by a
striving for power, a realization of basic idealized goals, and an ability to
tap basic talents and skills that are consistent and capable of forming an
arc between the person’s ambitions and ideals’ (Czander, 1993: 74).10 It
is also evident in Czander’s invocation of a Kohutian self-psychological
approach to issues of occupational choice. Using post-classical,
Kleinian, and post-Kleinian ideas, Kohut (1971) and Kohut and Wolf
(1978) develop a typology of characterological styles, and Czander seeks
to relate these characterological styles to occupational choice (Czander,
1993: 79-80):

These characterological styles are representative of fixed ways of

interacting and negotiating relationships with objects in the world.
Occupational choice is gratifying only when it is suitable to the
individual’s characterological style. Characterological style consists of
traits and mannerisms adopted as a response to anxiety. If an
occupation suits one’s characterological style, it means that the
occupation provides avenues for self-expression, anxiety will be reduced
and a degree of comfort will be attained. These styles are self-protective
in that they protect against anxiety but also protect the employee’s

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fantasy life from real and imagined psychological injuries. (Czander,

1993: 80)

Czander thus presents a clear picture of the individual as necessarily

possessing features drawn from a predefined set.
Apart from marginalizing an ethical perspective premised on split
subjectivity, this psychologizing tendency also tends to marginalize
wider critical perspectives, largely because Czander tends to take the
aims and goals of organizations for granted (1993: 176-7, 200-1; see also
Czander, 2001). In other words, the terms of the debate are defined by
fairly narrow operational objectives, evident from the list of
characteristics Czander regards as typical of an unhealthy organization:
‘unprofitability; interpersonal conflict; high turnover; low morale;
internal conflict; high absenteeism; no growth; poor labour-
management relations; and work sabotage’ (Czander, 1993: 198; see also
117-8, 122, 142-3).11
In general, however, we could say that the focus of a large swath of
psychoanalytical approaches to work and the organization of work are
concerned with problems which are defined in relation to a positivized
conception of an individual’s psychological health or a positivized
conception of an organization’s operational health. These health ideals
frame a whole range of commonly analysed problems in this area:
absenteeism, bullying, stress, workaholism, compulsiveness,
occupational choice, motivations for continuing or abandoning work,
reasons for particular style of management, trust, and sexual
harassment.
These are, of course, important problems that deserve our attention.
It is also true that such psychoanalytic perspectives, as commonly
applied, contrast with and broaden the more conventional economic
perspective on work and organizations. The latter assumes that the
subject is motivated by material goods and must be managed on that
basis. The former, on the other hand, suggests that the subject is moved
by psychological motives such as the wish to control or be controlled by
others, or to secure the approval of others, etc. However,
psychoanalysis often gets deployed in a way that is too focused on the
individual and how the individual copes psychically with the demands
of the organization, and thus in a way that marginalizes the wider social
and political significance of organizational norms and behaviour.

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The task of comparing different psychoanalytic schools from the point

of view of a specific problem area can be further refined by adding a
particular psychoanalytic theme or category to the domain of work and
organizations. Not many direct and systematic problem-driven,
category-centred comparisons exist yet, even though the number of
concept-oriented studies is increasing within approaches inspired by
particular psychoanalytic schools. For example, key categories examined
and explored from a Lacanian point of view in the context of
organizational studies include transference (Stavrakakis, 2008; Arnaud,
1998); symptom (Cederström and Grassman, 2008); sinthome
(Hoedemaekers, 2008); subjectivity (Cederström and Willmott, 2007;
Hoedemaekers, 2007; Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007); jouissance
(Kosmala and Herrbach, 2006); imaginary/symbolic/real
(Hoedemaekers, 2009); the imaginary (Roberts, 2005; Vidaillet, 2007);
demand/desire (Arnaud, 1998); interpassivity (Johnsen et al., 2009);
fantasy (Chang and Glynos, 2011; Glynos, 2008a; Glynos and
Stavrakakis, 2008; Willmott, 2007; Contu and Willmott, 2006; Bloom
and Cederström, 2009; Fotaki, 2009; Hillier and Gunder, 2003, 2005,
2007); identification (Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Contu, 2008); master
signifier /object a (Jones and Spicer, 2005). Outside the Lacanian orbit,
these include: the oedipal complex (Lister, 2001; Baum, 1991); emotion
(Carr, 2001; Antonacopoulou and Gabriel, 2001); and fantasy
(Guinchard, 1998; Baum 1991, 1994; Gabriel 1995, 1997, 2008b;
Walkerdine, 2005, 2006).
A concept promising considerable potential to yield insights in the
field of organizations studies from a comparative point of view is the
category of fantasy. As we saw earlier in relation to Lacan and Klein, the
way fantasy is conceptualized within different psychoanalytic schools
can diverge. Nevertheless, in most cases, fantasy raises common
epistemological and ethical issues linked to the way the subject relates to
the world in general and the world of work in particular. This suggests
that a more systematic investigation of the way fantasy can be deployed
in the analysis of workplace practices may be very productive, an
investigation which could be enhanced further through a suitably
constructed comparative exercise. As a general rule there have not been
many studies that have focused their analytical interventions into

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workplace practices around the category of fantasy, and to my

knowledge there has been no cross-psychoanalytic comparative work
on fantasy in the workplace.
The works of Kernberg and Kets de Vries comprise two exceptions
to this general rule (Kernberg, 1976, 1998; Kets de Vries, 1991; Kets de
Vries and Miller, 1984) and they are not alone.12 These particular
‘theorists suggest that organizational structures are created to reflect the
unconscious fantasies associated with the wishes and needs of
executives’ (Czander, 1993: 103). Taking a post-Kleinian, Bion-inspired
approach, Kets de Vries has constructed a five-fold typology of
organizations and corresponding dysfunctions, in terms of the motives
and fantasies informing them: paranoid, compulsive, dramatic,
depressive, and schizoid. Thus, fantasies of persecution, control, and
dependency, for example, correspond to the paranoid, compulsive, and
dramatic organizational structures respectively (Kersten, 2001: 458-10).
Moreover, such a framework has been deployed to understand the shift
from one to another structure (Kersten, 2007).
Nevertheless, there have been a number of drawbacks to this
approach, as pointed out by sympathetic critics (Kersten, 2001; 2007).
First is the tendency to treat as self-evident that a particular organization
is dysfunctional (or not, as the case may be), there being little, if any,
discussion of the criteria being deployed in order to make such a
determination. Second, such an approach tends to view the relationship
between executive management and employees in overly individualized
and uni-directional terms, thus failing to grasp ‘the dynamic and
structural quality of power as well as its dialectical potential for
generating its own resistance and denial’ (Kersten, 2001: 462). As
Kersten puts it:

The key theme underlying most of the neurotic organization literature is

that the neurotic style of top executives has a strong influence on the
overall functioning of the organization, including its strategy, culture,
structure, and the nature of group and interpersonal relations, such that
individual pathology becomes organizational pathology. (Kersten, 2001:
458)

In this view, the employees’ ‘group fantasy both feeds and complements
a management style that is insular, rigid, and fixed, based on the
antagonistic impulses that characterize the various neurotic styles’
(Kersten, 2007: 67). Remedies to the dysfunctional operation of
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organizations, then, involve targeting the top executives for therapeutic

intervention, removing them, or hoping some major dislocation takes
place (Kersten, 2001: 463). Employees tend to be treated as fairly
passive subjects responding to the acts of their superiors.
Finally, the wider social, political, and ideological context tends to be
ignored, implicitly regarding the latter as unimportant or marginal for
the critical understanding of the organization. Kersten turns to
Habermas’ critical theory in developing this vantage point, in which the
ideal of open and undistorted communication is held as a counterpoint
to Kets de Vries’ individualizing, personalizing, and psychologising
tendencies. She appeals to critical theory in order to add a ‘more specific
consideration of the structural and ideological impact of the
organizational and social context on psychodynamics’ (Kersten, 2001:
453).
Using critical theory to articulate psychoanalytic insights to the
organization (rather than, say, systems theory or indeed no socio-
political theory whatsoever) is an important advance. Nevertheless,
many problems remain. For example, there is no discussion of how best
to conceive the relationship between psychodynamics and the wider
social and political structures. There is also no systematic discussion of
either the role of fantasy in thinking this relationship, or the content of
fantasy, especially from the perspective of ontology, ethics, and
methodology. This is especially crucial in light of a prima facie
contradiction between the Habermasian ideal of undistorted
communication and the Freudian ontology of split subjectivity in which
miscommunication is considered – in important respects – ineliminable.

While both Kleinian and Lacanian traditions are considered influential

in organization studies, and while the latter is still considered to be the
‘new kid on the block’, there are several reasons to be optimistic that a
Lacanian-inflected political theory of discourse is better suited to help
situate psychoanalytic insights in a way that can overcome some of the
‘internalizing’ and ‘individualizing’ tendencies already mentioned –
tendencies which account either for the absence of critical engagement
with company norms (Kets de Vries) or for the too abrupt imposition
of other norms from the ‘outside’ (Kersten).
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Jason Glynos

No doubt taking particular understandings of the health of an

organization for granted is by no means a necessary outcome of
adopting a Kleinian, object relations perspective. Yet it is an identifiable
tendency, which may have its origins in Klein’s widely-noted inclination
to divide the world into an internal and external one, privileging the
internal world in terms of explanatory efficacy (Leader, 2000: ch. 2).
Leader, for example, argues that the object relations tradition

tends to assume that the category of object is more or less a given (the
mother, the breast, etc.) and that this given can be the subject of
predicate qualification (for example, ‘is good/bad’). A rich theory of
judgement, if it had been formulated in this tradition, might well have
encountered a number of counterexamples, and Lacan’s work on this
theme suggested that in fact the so-called ‘object’ was outside the field
of predication. Rather than being the subject of meaningful predication,
it could only be inferred from the points in a patient’s speech where
meaning seemed to collapse. (Leader, 2000: 209)

Of course the negativity of Lacanian thought, the absence of an explicit

positive programme, has served for some as a counterpoint to Kleinian
and object relations approaches to politics (cf. Rustin, 2001: ch. 7).
Operating at a fairly high level of abstraction, this cannot be denied.
However, there are advantages to abandoning the language of
internality/externality from the point of view of political analysis. For a
start, it allows one to avoid assuming ‘that everything a patient might
think of is… thought of as inside themselves’ (Leader, 2000: 86) and so
more likely to avoid taking it for granted as essential to them. Instead it
shifts our attention to wider symbolic, cultural, and social factors
(Leader, 2008: 107), suggesting that Lacan would be a more natural
bridge to examining the political and ideological aspects of
organizations, and organizational culture.

Lacan at Work
A turn to the category of fantasy offers one way to harness Lacan’s
psychoanalytic insights for the study of organizations.13 As already
mentioned, Kets de Vries and Kersten’s work belong to a small but
significant literature that explores workplace practices from the point of
view of fantasies.14 Such studies are significant because they represent
initial attempts to document the content of workplace fantasies, trading
on the powerful intuition that they have an important role to play in our

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understanding of how social practices – in this case workplace practices

– are organized, sustained, or potentially transformed. They make
interesting observations and generate some useful critical insights. In
my view, it is possible to build on these insights by linking them more
explicitly and systematically to the question of ideology, thereby making
the political and normative significance of fantasy clearer. In order to
see this I offer an initial sketch of the logic of fantasy (see also Lacan,
1966-7). I then use empirical material from existing literature to
illustrate this logic. My strategy here is to narrow the focus of my
inquiry to those scholars who explicitly appeal to a Lacanian
understanding of psychoanalysis and fantasy – primarily to minimize
conceptual overdetermination and ambiguities.
In a first approach we could say that the logic of fantasy names a
narrative structure involving some reference to an idealized scenario
promising an imaginary fullness or wholeness (the beatific side of
fantasy) and, by implication, a disaster scenario (the horrific side of
fantasy). This narrative structure will have a range of features, which will
vary from context to context, of course, but one crucial element is the
obstacle preventing the realization of one’s fantasmatic desire. In
Lacanian psychoanalysis, realizing one’s fantasy is impossible because
the subject (as a subject of desire) survives only insofar as its desire
remains unsatisfied. But the obstacle, which often comes in the form of
a prohibition or a threatening Other, transforms this impossibility into a
‘mere difficulty’, thus creating the impression that its realization is at
least potentially possible. This gives rise to another important feature of
fantasy, namely, its transgressive aspect: the subject secures a modicum
of enjoyment by actively transgressing the ideals it officially affirms (see
also Glynos, 2003a; 2008b), for example by trying to eliminate the
identified obstacle through illicit means. In this view, there is a kind of
complicity animating the relation between the official ideal and its
transgressive enjoyment, since they rely on each other to sustain
themselves. Fantasy, therefore, is not merely a narrative with its
potentially infinite variations at the level of content, although it is of
course this too. It also has a certain logic in which the subject’s very
being is implicated: the disruption or dissolution of the logic leads to
what Lacan calls the aphanisis, or vanishing, of the subject (as a subject
of desire). In sum, the logic of a fantasmatic narrative is such that it
structures the subject’s desire by presenting it with an ideal, an

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Jason Glynos

impediment to the realization of an ideal, as well as the enjoyment

linked to the transgression of an ideal.15
This conception of fantasy can be readily linked to the literature in
organizational studies. Several studies on employee cynicism, for
example, suggest how transgressive acts can sometimes serve to
stabilize an exploitative social practice, which they appear to subvert
(Willmott, 1993; du Gay and Salaman, 1992; Fleming and Spicer, 2003;
Contu, 2008). Taking their cue from Michael Burawoy’s study of factory
workers in Manufacturing Consent (1979), they draw the conclusion that
informal games and cynical distance toward the control systems and
company rules imposed by management often have the effect of
sustaining the oppressive system which they ostensibly transgress.16 In a
related vein, and referring to Gideon Kunda’s study of cynical workers
in Engineering Culture (1992), Fleming and Spicer emphasise how
‘employees performed their roles flawlessly and were highly productive’
despite their recourse to ‘humour, the mocking of pompous official
rituals and sneering cynicism’. They suggest how cynicism could help
sustain employees’ belief that they are not mere cogs in a company
machine, thereby allowing them to indulge in the fantasy that they are
‘special’ or ‘unique’ individuals (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 164). That
such cynical-transgressive acts sustain the social practice being
transgressed appears to be corroborated by studies, which show how
personnel officers of many companies actually advise workers not to
identify with corporate culture ideals too strongly, and to retain a
healthy distance from the company script (Ashforth and Humphrey,
1993; Leidner, 1993; Sturdy et al., 2001).
These studies point to the normative and political significance of
workplace fantasies. In fact recent developments in political discourse
theory bring into focus the critical potential of a Lacanian conception of
fantasy by situating fantasmatic logics in relation to what have been
called, following the work of Ernesto Laclau, social and political logics
(Glynos and Howarth, 2007; see also Stavrakakis, 2007). My claim here
is that appeal to these logics helps make clearer the normative and
ethical implications of the category of fantasy (see also Glynos, 2008a).
In general terms, the category of ‘logics’ seeks to capture the purposes,
rules and self-understandings of a practice in a way that is sensitive to
the radical contingency of social relations, or what in Lacanian parlance
is called ‘lack in the Other’. Logics thus furnish a language with which
to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and

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transformation of practices, thus making the approach flexible enough

to deal with the porous and shifting boundary of ‘work’ in a wide range
of contemporary organizational practices. A practice is here understood
in broad terms to comprise a network of activities and intersubjective
relations, which is sufficiently individuated to allow us to talk about it
meaningfully and which thus appears to cohere around a set of rules
and/or other conditions of existence. In this view, a practice is always a
discursive practice, which is meaningful and collectively sustained through
the operation of three logics: social, political, and fantasmatic logics. If
social logics assist in the task of directly characterizing a practice along a
synchronic axis, then political logics can be said to focus more on the
diachronic aspects of a practice, accounting for the way it has emerged
or the way it is contested and/or transformed. And if political logics
furnish us with the means to show how social practices come into being
or are transformed, then fantasmatic logics disclose the way specific
practices and regimes grip subjects ideologically (Glynos, 2001).
In the remainder of this section I continue to focus on the way the
logic of fantasy sustains particular work relations and patterns. Fantasies
supported by the prospect of big profits, generous pay packets, career
advancement, consumption of prize commodities, and hobbies, are an
obvious way to think about how patterns of work are affected and
sustained by fantasies. But such fantasmatically-structured desires shape
the nature and content of demands made by workers and by
management, as well as the way they are responded to. But in what way,
more specifically, does fantasy sustain the existing political economy of
work? One way of thinking about this is in relation to the political
dimension of social relations. Insofar as fantasies prevent or make
difficult the politicization of existing social relations, relations of
subordination inclusive, one can say that fantasy helps reinforce the
status quo. The logic of fantasy, then, can be construed as a narrative
affirmed by workers, often unconsciously, preventing the contestation
of suspect social norms, and making less visible possible counter-logics.
Consider Willmott’s reinterpretation of a study by Brown and
Humphreys of a new further education college following the merger of
two former colleges (Brown and Humphreys, 2006). In his reading of
their study, Willmott finds both nostalgic fantasies of the past, as well as
wishful fantasies projected onto the future (Willmott, 2007). According
to Willmott, in the newly constituted college Alpha College, the obstacle

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preventing the realization of particular desires is key to understanding

the function and significance of these fantasies.
Each member of the new staff belonged to one of three groups: ex-
Beta employees (these are the new college staff that come from Beta
college), ex-Gamma employees (these are the new college staff that
came from Gamma college), and the new senior management team.
Interviews with staff members revealed how each group became an
element of narrative condensation for the others’ fears and anxieties,
serving as key talking points around which they could each consolidate
their respective identities. Ex-Beta staff and ex-Gamma staff regarded
the senior management team as incompetent; but they also regarded
each other with suspicion and resentment. Precisely because these
scapegoating fantasies enabled the construction of a common identity,
which offered an informal and convenient receptacle for, or
displacement of, their distinct grievances, it also suppressed an
alternative articulation of grievances and the kind of cross-group
collective mobilization that this may have made possible.
While Brown and Humphreys emphasize how employees’
interactions tended to consolidate their differential and oppositional
identities with respect to each other, Willmott points to alternative
norms and possibilities present, but not emphasized, in the interview
extracts presented. For example, both ex-Beta and ex-Gamma staff
invariably evoked norms linked to educational and pedagogic ideals,
which appeared to them to have been eclipsed by the dominant social
logic of business efficiency and productivity. Alpha College was
increasingly sedimented in the mould of a business. Contesting this
norm in the name of an alternative educational norm may have served
as a way to mobilize support across groups. The suggestion here is that
such unofficial and collective grumblings were underpinned by
scapegoating fantasies; and that because they offered individual groups a
modicum of relief (or enjoyment in Lacanian terms), they were not
easily jettisoned in favour of alternative pathways – more political
pathways for example.
The above illustration suggests that fantasies play a role not just in
sustaining workplace practices generally, but also in sustaining relations
of domination or exploitation more specifically. In my view, there are
both ethical and normative aspects at play here, and that these aspects
are often conflated. My sense is that it is useful, from a critical point of

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view, to treat these aspects as analytically distinct where possible (see

also Glynos, 2008a). While the ethical aspect of fantasy relates to the
level of a subject’s libidinal investment in its narrative, the normative
aspect relates to the norms of the practice the fantasmatic narrative
appears to sustain.
The claim here is that the more subjects are invested in fantasies, the
more likely they are to read all aspects of their practice in terms of that
fantasmatic narrative, and the less likely they are to ‘read for difference’.
Counter-logics are precisely those potential alternative discursive
patterns that inhere in the interstices of workplace practices that would
provide a counterpoint to a dominant social logic. The subject tends to
use fantasy as a way to protect itself from ambiguities, uncertainties, and
other features which evoke intimations of anxiety. But it is precisely
those ambiguities that open up possibilities for critical distance and
alternative ‘becomings’. It thus becomes important to make explicit the
normative framework that the researcher brings to the analysis and,
through a process of articulation, to actively bring it into contact with
those concrete alternatives residing in the practices themselves (Glynos
and Howarth, 2007: 177-97).
The insights generated by such a Lacanian-inflected discursive
approach to work and the organization may offer us a way to overcome
some of the problems identified in approaches inspired by other
psychoanalytic schools, and to generate a research programme intended
to explore the links between ethics, fantasy, and normative critique in
the study of organizations.17 Such a research programme would address
some fairly basic questions, which are important from the point of view
of analysis and critique. For example: how should one characterize the
workplace practice as a function of social logics and norms? In what
sense is the researcher’s implied conception of exploitation related to
the idea that subjects ought to exercise meaningful control over their
working conditions (or some other idea)? What aspects of a concrete
workplace practice appear to reflect this implicit grievance or to
embody alternative normative potentialities? Finally, how do the
identified fantasies operate in such a way as to make less visible to the
subjects themselves both the potential grievances and potential
alternative ways of structuring workplace practice?

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What Next?
To date there have been few systematic attempts to ascertain in a
general way the political significance of fantasy and other key psychic
processes, especially in relation to organizations. Moreover, most
analyses that invoke the term ‘fantasy’ rarely elaborate the ontological,
conceptual, and methodological parameters in detail or
unproblematically, and so I believe we still need to determine the
specificity and worth of fantasy for organizational studies in a much
more rigorous and nuanced manner. There are at least three interrelated
ways one can imagine the research programme of ‘Lacan and
Organization’ advancing, each construed as addressing a particular
deficit: a normative deficit, an ethico-empirical deficit, and a
methodological deficit.

(1) The normative deficit

The critical impulse informing many studies that explore the role of
fantasies and other psychic processes in organizations target norms,
whose suspect nature is often taken for granted, branding them
explicitly or implicitly as exploitative or oppressive, or as serving vested
interests (often qualified as market capitalist interests). Consider the
claim that transgressive ‘indulgency patterns’ (Gouldner, 1955; Mars,
1982; see also Roper, 1994) ‘have long been recognized by researchers
as an important part of maintaining workplace relations of power. In
turning a blind eye to minor infringements such as petty pilfering and
“fiddling”… more consequential disruptions [to, for example, profit
maximizing activities] are avoided’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 167). This
is clearly an important observation whose significance can be
appreciated via Lacan’s theory of subjectivity and fantasy. Indeed it
points to the need to start engaging with the reasons why particular
relations of power ought to be regarded as suspect, and how precisely
such relations of power colour the content and modality of fantasmatic
engagement. Here fantasies could be seen as key to understanding how
such relations of power are maintained, but the norms embodied in
these relations still need to be linked systematically and/or explicitly to
broader normative theories informed by sociological and economic
considerations. This would have the effect of transforming latent
‘crypto-normative’ tendencies into more explicit and convincing
normative engagements.

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In order to do this one could start by asking what contribution the

appeal to fantasy and other psychic processes could make in critically
engaging with the dominant norms of contemporary political economy,
namely those norms for which markets and capitalist firms – and the
neoclassical assumptions that usually underpin them – function as
models or paradigms. From this point of view, advocates of the
dominant conceptions of political economy are seen by many as
apologists of the status quo, reinforcing existing power relations and
ideals (Galbraith, 1975; Gorz, 1989, 1994, 1999). In challenging the
hegemonic theories and practices of political economy, therefore,
opposing approaches can be said to yield a fairly expansive definition of
the field of critical political economy, which would include Marxist, post-
Marxist, critical realist, feminist, environmentalist, and poststructuralist
approaches within its ambit (e.g., Callinicos, 2001, 2006; Crouch, 2005;
Jessop, 2002; Best and Connolly, 1982; Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006;
Resnick and Wolff, 1987, 2005; Ruccio and Amariglio, 2003).
A specifically Lacanian critical political economy, then, would begin
with the assumption that economic life is embedded in social and
political relations, highlighting the complex and overdetermined
character of economic relations and identities. Here subjects are not
only consumers, but ‘also citizens, students, workers, lovers, and
parents, and the lives they live in each of these roles affects their
involvement in the others’ (Best and Connolly, 1982: 39). Noting that
subjects are multiply affiliated is not uncommon in the literature of
course. The observation, however, raises a question about how best to
understand the ways in which multiple subject positions combine,
separate, or dissolve. From this point of view it is possible to draw on
the hermeneutical, post-marxist, post-structuralist work of Best and
Connolly (1982), Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2005), Gibson-Graham
(2006), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Laclau (1990) and others, to
articulate a connection to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (see also
Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Ozselcuk, 2006; Madra, 2006; Ozselcuk and
Madra, 2005). Such an exercise would help make a specifically Lacanian
contribution to the critical political economy of work – a field which
seeks to politicize dominant socio-economic arrangements,
justifications of wealth and income inequality, as well as the various
structures of accountability to stakeholders and the public at large
(which secure and bolster the allegiance of those subject to such
arrangements and structures).

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Clearly this complicates our picture of the relation between

psychological and economic interests, at least as traditionally
understood. In emphasizing the symbolic and undecidable character of
interests as such, a Lacanian-inflected political theory of discourse
problematizes the traditional economic view in a profound way. It does
not merely contest the view that the only interests that can act as key
motivating factors are economic or material interests, and that these
motivating interests need to be pluralized beyond material interests to
include psychological or cultural interests. It also challenges the idea
that such interests have a motivating force which is independent of the
way they pass through the self-interpretations of subjects, thereby
pointing to the fantasmatic and potentially political aspects of those
interests. Such an approach, therefore, shares an important affinity with
those cultural economists who argue that ‘[t]he economy does not exist,
out there, but is enacted and constituted through the practices,
decisions, and conversations of everyday life’ (Deetz and Hegbloom,
2007: 325; see also du Gay, 1996; du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Pettinger et
al., 2005). Noting the central role that work plays in social life, they
suggest that its meaning and materiality demand careful and critical
analysis that is rooted in context and history in order to evaluate the
scope of its influence and possible trajectories of transformation. In this
view, a focus on experimental, alternative, or minority community
economies might serve as a way of throwing light on the historically
contingent and normative character of dominant cultural economies
(Gibson-Graham, 2006; Glynos, 2008a; Glynos and Speed, 2009). A
Lacanian-inflected approach would clearly focus on aspects of those
practices that exhibit the presence of split subjectivity, the unconscious,
and fantasy, but it would seek to draw out the implications of such
community economy analyses for normative and ethical critique.
One interesting and potentially rich case study with which to
explore these themes would involve looking more closely at the
organization of psychoanalytic practice itself. Some studies, for
example, have already started to look at the tensions and paradoxes of
ongoing attempts by the state to regulate the practice of psychoanalysis
in the UK and Europe more generally. Such efforts reveal not only deep
divisions between regulatory and psychoanalytic aims and objectives,
they also point to divisions among different psychoanalytic
organizations. This is because proposed new governance regimes entail
the introduction of various guarantees and measurable quality standards

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that would, according to many scholars, spell the end of psychoanalysis

(Parker and Revelli, 2008a; 2008b; Burgoyne, 2008; Litten, 2008; Leader,
2004, 2008). This implies that certain normative, sociological, and/or
political economic conditions would have to be in place to make it
possible for an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ to exist. Such a case study,
moreover, would be further complicated by the fact that it would be
considered relevant at multiple levels. For example, such a study may be
expected to say something about the survival of psychoanalytic practice
itself, defined in terms of concepts like split subjectivity and fantasy. But
such a study would also involve invoking these categories to examine
how political mobilization against such regulatory efforts succeeds, is
pre-empted, or thwarted. It would explore the multiple roles that
fantasy and ethics can play in policy making and in policy
implementation, including the struggles engaged in by various agencies
at and across each of these levels.

(2) Ethico-empirical deficit

Closely connected to the normative deficit is what I call the ethico-
empirical deficit. There is a general consensus in the literature that the
mode of engagement associated with an ethics of ‘openness’ is to be
preferred, especially when thinking critically about the political economy
and about the transformation of the organization of work more
specifically. What receives much less attention in this literature,
however, are questions about (1) what these alternative modes of
engagement actually look like in practice; and (2) the conditions under
which a transition is made from one to another mode of engagement.
There is of course considerable theoretical reflection on the concept
of ethics in Lacan, which for many has become synonymous with the
idea of ‘traversing the fantasy’. But there is a need to add to these
ontological discussions a more robust ontical base by, for example,
building up a corpus of empirical examples, exemplars, or paradigms of
different sorts of ethical engagement associated with the ‘dissolution’ of
the logic of fantasy. This would entail supplementing existing studies
that furnish negative critiques of modes of engagement characterized by
‘closure’ with rich phenomenological accounts of what appears on the
‘other side’ of posited fantasmatic traversals. This may offer us a way to
deepen our theoretical understanding of the idea of a ‘logic of fantasy’,
including how various ethical, normative, and sociological dimensions
interconnect. In particular it would seek to show how various logics of

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fantasy can underpin either regressive or progressive programmes, and

how the dissolution of such fantasmatic logics affects the normative
trajectory of such programmes.
Such a shift of focus toward greater empirical detail and
ethnographic nuance would also help avoid a temptation which
Genevieve Morel finds even in a clinical context, namely, a temptation
to subordinate ‘the end of each analysis to a theory posited in advance’
(Morel, 2004: 3). Noting how Lacan uses the expression ‘traversing the
fantasy’ only once in his career (Morel, 2004: 1), she calls on analysts to
heed Freud’s and Lacan’s reminders to affirm the analyst’s non-
knowledge as much as possible. Such a view is not without theoretical
implications for socio-political analysis, since it would entail
rearticulating the relation between ethics and fantasy in novel ways,
mediating and amplifying them with the help of other concepts such as
mourning.18 One promising way to explore these themes may be to look
more carefully at the ethical possibilities opened up by different
configurations of workplace democracy. What conditions and devices,
for example, might promote a specifically democratic ethos in
organizations akin to a Lacanian ‘ethics of the real’?19

(3) Methodological deficit

Finally, many scholars point to the dangers of abstract theory, of
departing too much from the contextualized self-interpretations of the
subjects under study, and of not reflecting sufficiently on the role of the
analyst in the method and the manner in which the study is conducted
(Ashcraft, 2008: 383-6; Deetz, 2008; Kenny, 2009). Of course the
profound implications that unconscious processes have upon empirical
data gathering techniques and analyses is widely recognized, discussed
and debated in the context of the clinic. However, there is a striking gap
in the literature dealing with the application of specifically Lacanian
insights to extra-clinical domains generally, and the domain of work and
organizations specifically. Though this is partly due to its relatively
nascent status (Contu et al., 2010; Essers et al., 2009), it does
nevertheless point to what I call a methodological deficit.
I construe the notion of a methodological deficit here in the widest
possible sense, aiming to capture the full range of theoretical issues that
arise when deploying psychoanalysis in the activity of describing,
explaining, evaluating and criticizing in the social sciences, including
those issues linked to the ontological and epistemological dimensions of
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any social inquiry. Many, for example, urge caution against the various
dichotomizing, psychologizing, individualizing, and reductionist
tendencies of some approaches (e.g., Wetherell, 2008; Branney, 2008;
Layton, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008a). Even so, the reference to a
methodological deficit should also be understood to aim at more
technical matters concerning, for example, the analysis of texts and
other media, as well as the role that interviews, ethnographic
observation and diary notes can play in drawing out the psychoanalytic
dimension of analysis in forceful and convincing ways. Again, there is
little systematic and sustained discussion of method in this narrower
sense from a Lacanian point of view in organization studies or indeed in
many other areas beyond the clinic.20
Interestingly, there is considerable debate and discussion outside
Lacanian circles about these sorts of issues regarding the use of
psychoanalysis beyond the clinic. And this suggests that cross-
psychoanalytic comparative research with a methodological focus might
provide another way forward for Lacanian-inspired organizational
studies scholars.21 Such an exploration would not only assist in the
development of a robust and defensible stance on issues of
methodology and technique, it would no doubt also carry important
theoretical and empirical implications when these issues are
reconsidered from the point of view of ontology and critique.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have suggested that a Lacanian conception of fantasy
and associated psychic processes can provide a productive segue into
the study of the organization of work. The focus on fantasy, in
particular, is attractive for a number of reasons. Apart from its intuitive
appeal and broad relevance for issues of normative and ideological
critique, it neatly condenses many insights of psychoanalysis linked to
the unconscious, transference, repression, and so on, thus serving as a
way to focus and systematically tease out the psychoanalytic
implications for the critical analysis of work, as well as the differential
implications of different psychoanalytic schools in the domain of
organization studies.
The privileging of culture, language, and ethics in Lacan’s corpus
suggests that the ideological, normative, and political aspects of work
practices may be more readily discerned when examined through this
particular psychoanalytic prism, thereby problematizing, rather than
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taking for granted, the nature and content of an individual’s or

organization’s ‘good psychological health’. A Lacanian-inflected political
theory of discourse seeks to move beyond approaches that take the
norms, ideals, and goals of organizations for granted, and could help
throw light on the more collective and political aspects of such
practices, highlighting the normative and ideological relevance of
psychic processes. By situating the logics of fantasy alongside social and
political logics, Lacanian insights can be brought to bear on the study of
organizations by making this relevance explicit.

Notes
! I thank the editors Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers for their
very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Thanks also to Bob
Hinshelwood, Mike Roper, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Hugh Willmott for their
feedback.
1 Yiannis Gabriel uses the image of a ‘glass cage’ to capture the contemporary
landscape of work and organization, in contrast to Weber’s bureaucratic
‘iron cage’. For Gabriel, the era of the ‘glass cage’ is characterized by the
increasing role of the consumerist ‘exit’ strategy, the individual ‘voice’ at the
expense of collective voice (unionism) and loyalty to the organization
(Gabriel, 2008).
2 For useful overviews, see Jermier et al. (1994); Knights and Willmott (1990);
Spicer and Böhm (2007: 1668-1672).
3 Cf. also the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of
Organizations, founded in 1983: http://www.ispso.org/.
4 See, for example, the debate between Jaques (1995a; 1995b) and Amado
(1995).
5 According to Carr and Gabriel (2002: 352-62), examples of the former
include Sievers (1986; 1994; 1999) and Schwartz (1987; 1999); on
transference: Baum (1987), Diamond (1988), Gabriel (1999), Oglensky
(1995); on unconscious motivations to work: Baum (1987), Obholzer
(1999), Smelser (1998), and Sievers (1986); on the way wider social and
cultural norms and trends shape the organizational psychodynamics: Carr
(1993), Maccoby (1976), Lasch (1980); on how organizations both provoke,
and provide protection from, anxieties: Jaques (1952, 1955), Menzies (1960),
Menzies-Lyth (1988), Trist (1950), Trist and Bamforth (1951), Miller (1976),
Baum (1987), French and Vince (1999), Gould et al. (1999), Hirschhorn
(1988), Stacey (1992), and Stein (2000); on how organizations can stimulate
creativity and contentment and help realize collective visions: Baum (1989),
Carr (1998), Gabriel (1993, 1999), Hirschhorn and Gilmore (1989), and

40
 Lacan at Work

Schwartz (1987). To which can be added, on the role played by need, desire,
and transference in the consultation process: Arnaud (1998); on the role of
fantasy in absenteeism: Guinchard (1998); on the role of the mirror stage in
workplace envy: Vidaillet (2007); on the role of the imaginary order in the
context of workplace burnout: Vanheule and Verhaeghe (2004); on the
relation of jouissance to cynicism in audit firms: Kosmala and Herrbach
(2006). And examples of the latter include dealing with a wide range of
themes, including consultancy and management themes. They come from
people who have worked closely in or with the Tavistock clinic in the UK,
such as Lewin (1947), Bion (1948/1962), Jaques (1952), Menzies-Lyth
(1988), Trist and Bamforth (1951), Sofer (1961), Miller and Rice (1964),
Miller (1976), Obholzer (1999), Obholzer and Roberts (1994), but they also
include others, such as Mangham (1988), Kets de Vries (1991), Kets de
Vries and Miller (1984), Levinson (1972, 1976, 1981), Zaleznick (1977,
1989a, 1989b), Gould et al. (1993, 1999), Krantz (1989, 1990), Hirschhorn
(1988, 1999), Hirschhorn and Barnett (1993), Hirschhorn and Gilmore
(1989), Diamond (1993, 1998), Stein (1998, 2001), Bain (1998), and Long
(1999). Other examples include: on psychoanalytic coaching of managers:
Brunner (1998); consultancy: Seel (2001); management of change: French
(2001).
6 At some points, Carr and Gabriel appear to think this is possible; see, for
example, Carr and Gabriel (2002: 353).
7 Consider the claim by Antonacopoulou and Gabriel, for example, that
‘psychoanalytic approaches insist that there is a primitive, pre-linguistic, pre-
cognitive and pre-social level of emotions, an inner world of passion,
ambivalence and contradiction…’ (2001: 438). This understanding of
emotion, however, is not shared by all those who claim to adopt a
psychoanalytic approach, foremost among these being Lacanians and
discursive psychologists. Obviously, this throws into doubt the universalist
aspiration attached to such a claim. Yet, this internal pluralism of
psychoanalysis is recognised by many authors, even if sometimes only
implicitly. In one article, for example, it is noted how a particular diagnosis
of an organization’s workings regarded as necessary a good understanding
of Bion’s psychoanalytic theory of groups (Paul, et al., 2002: 391). For
examples of an explicit acknowledgement of this plurality, see Hoggett
(2008: 379-80), Frosh (2008: 420), and Layton (2004; 2008a).
8 To this list we could add many other similar formulations, such as Bion’s
notion of ‘negative capability’ as a way of fostering a degree of ambiguity
and paradox.
9 One example of a work which moves in this comparativist direction is
Vidaillet (2007).

41
Jason Glynos

10 For a similar view, consider the following account of the possible uses of
psychoanalysis in the study of organizations. ‘As a technique which by
strengthening the patient, aims at reconciling the pursuit of truth with the
overcoming of resistances, psychoanalysis can make a contribution to
organizational theorists and practitioners alike. As a theory of
demystification, psychoanalysis can be a useful tool in dealing with the
neurotic qualities of organizations’ (Carr and Gabriel, 2002: 362).
11 For a critical assessment of Czander from a different vantage point, see
Zaleznik (1995).
12 Other exceptions include Gabriel (1995, 1997, 2008a); Walkerdine (2005,
2006); Byrne and Healy (2006); Contu and Willmott (2006); and Willmott
(2007).
13 There are, of course, scholars inspired by the Kleinian tradition who use
fantasy as a central analytical device in the study of organizations, but it is
by no means a common choice. Perhaps this is because, as Gabriel points
out, if for Freud ‘emotions derive from fantasies which, in turn, are
compromise formations between desire and the forces of repression, for
Klein, fantasies are derivatives, not causes of emotions’ (Gabriel, 1999: 221;
see also Isaacs, 1948). In addition, while Klein focuses much more on the
meaning and content of language and fantasy, the accent falls much more
on the structural or formal qualities in Lacan (Leader, 2000: 215-19; 2008:
130-1). For an illustration of how fantasy structures reality (including one’s
occupational choice, sexual relations, choice of partner, relations with family
and friends) from a Lacanian point of view see Morel (2004: 15-19).
14 See also Walkerdine (2005; 2006); Gabriel (1995; 1997); Contu and Willmott
(2006); Willmott (2007); and Byrne and Healy (2006).
15 Czander points out how ‘[f]antasies can generally be divided into categories,
such as active or passive, dominating or submissive, aggressive or
libidinal…’ (Czande, 1993: 80-1). This presents an interesting attempt to
clarify and refine the concept of fantasy into conceptions of fantasy. It may
also warrant some close comparative analysis with a Lacanian concept of
fantasy, especially given the following very resonant formulation by
Czander: ‘Unconsciously, success means that a wish may be gratified. If this
wish is a merger with the gratifying object, the employee may unconsciously
undermine or withdraw from the success out of the fear that the object will
consume him/her, just as an overbearing mother may consume an infant.
Thus the gratification of the unconscious fantasy may precipitate fears of
engulfment’ (Czander, 1993: 97).
16 On the role of games, play, and humour in work and organizations, see also
Andersen, 2009 and Westwood and Rhodes, 2006.

42
 Lacan at Work

17 For a similar set of ideas emerging outside the Lacanian orbit, consider
Lynn Layton’s notion of ‘normative unconscious processes’ (Layton, 2002;
2004; 2006; 2008a). For general issues concerning the ambiguous way the
critical impulse manifests itself in Critical Management Studies research, see
Brewis and Wray-Bliss (2008). Though operating with slightly different
aims, assumptions, and emphases, there appears to be enough of a
resonance to suggest that an exploratory comparative project may be
productive in advancing our thinking about how best to relate an ethics of
psychoanalysis to wider normative social and political concerns.
18 For a sample range of ways of thinking about mourning in this way, see
Leader (2008), Butler (2004), Hoggett et al. (2006), and Gabriel (2008c).
19 For a call to explore the relation between a radical democratic ethos and an
‘ethics of the real’, see Mouffe (2000: conclusion); on this, see also Glynos
(2003b). For a Kleinian approach to workplace democracy, see Diamond
and Allcorn (2006).
20 This contrasts sharply with other (non-Lacanian) psychoanalytic approaches
to social science research, which have considered these matters in
considerable and systematic detail – e.g., Hollway and Jefferson (2000),
Branney (2008), Hoggett et al. (2006), Clarke (2002; 2006; 2008), Hollway
(2008), Gabriel (1999: ch. 11), Frosh and Young (2008), Hinshelwood and
Skogstad (2000: ch. 2), Kvale (1999), Thomas (2007), Walkerdine (1997: ch.
4), and Walkerdine et al. (2001: ch. 4). The International Society for the
Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, founded in 1983, also focuses on
exploring methods for identifying and accessing the unconscious
dimensions of organizational life (see http://www.ispso.org/). However,
examples of partial exceptions to this general rule exist: e.g., Parker (2010a;
2010b), Hoedemaekers (2007), Lapping (2007), Millar (2006), Branney
(2006), Hollway (1989), and Walkerdine (1987).
21 How, for example, might techniques and methods from other
psychoanalytic traditions be adopted and adapted from a Lacanian point of
view? See, for example, Walkerdine (2008: 344), Branney (2008), Hoggett et
al. (2006), Czander (1993: 123-143), Hollway and Jefferson (2000);
Walkerdine et al. (2001), Frosh et al. (2002), Stopford (2004), Frosh and
Baraitser (2008), Hinshelwood and Skogstad (2000).

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