The unmanaged organization: stories, fantasies and subjectivity

Abstract

This paper argues that within every organization there is a terrain which is not and cannot be managed, in which people, both individually and in groups, can engage in unsupervised, spontaneous activity. This is referred to as the unmanaged organization, a kind of organizational dreamworld in which desires, anxieties and emotions find expressions in highly irrational constructions. The chief force in this terrain is fantasy and its landmarks include stories, myths, jokes, gossip, nicknames, graffiti and cartoons. In the organizational dreamworld, emotions prevail over rationality and pleasure over reality. The paper argues that fantasy offers a third possibility to organizational members, which amounts to neither conformity nor rebellion, but to a grudging material acceptance accompanied by a symbolic refashioning of events and official stories. Far from being a marginal terrain, it is suggested that the unmanaged organisation is rich, multidimensional and the natural habitat of subjectivity. Four different modes of subjectivity are identified and discussed in connection with different types of organizational narratives: (1) the subject as hero; (2) the subject as heroic survivor; (3) the subject as victim; (4) the subject as object of love.

Descriptors: control, dreams, management, myths, narrative, organizations, psychoanalysis, resistance, storytelling, symbolism

Introduction

The concept of control lies at the core of numerous discourses on organizations. It has featured prominently in managerial literature since Taylor and Fayol and has been a central pillar of organizational theory since Max Weber's work on bureaucracy. Standing for order, predictability and reliability, control has become virtually co-extensive of what we understand by `organization'. More recently, control has been at the crossroads of two vigorous academic debates which are now taking notice of each other, the debates on labour process and organizational culture.

Much of the discussion sparked off by Harry Braverman's work (Braverman 1974) has addressed the issue of control over the labour process -- alternative `strategies' of control available to management as well as different forms of worker resistance. Control may not be such a prominent feature of arguments surrounding organizational culture, which have been dominated by concepts like meanings, values, symbols, archetypes and myths. Nevertheless, as several contributors in this debate (e.g. Turner 1986; Rosen 1985; Sievers 1986; Smircich 1983; Willmott 1993) have noted, control is rarely far beneath the surface. Exemplified in attempts to import Japanese management techniques into Western companies, such strategies aim at ideologically dominating the workers (Willmott 1990; Willmott 1993). Control, according to this view, is achieved through the use of language, for example, by attaching labels such as `professional', `academic' or `ancillary' to specific occupations or grades (Habermas 1977: 359); the use of symbols, such as massive corporate headquarters, expensive logos, etc. (Gagliardi 1990); the use of rituals, such as corporate ceremonies (Rosen 1985) and of officially sponsored myths (Gabriel 1991b). In an interesting re-enactment of the labour-process debate, the organizational-culture debate has emerged with its own version of the control-resistance dialectic. The workers, it is argued, may submit to management's cultural assaults but they also resist them, by developing their own sub-cultures and counter-cultures. These may challenge or ridicule the organization's shibboleths, expressing cynicism and detachment at managerial attempts to whip up commitment and enthusiasm.

In this paper, I will argue that both debates have tended to adopt an over-managed and over-policed image of organizations, an image in which both politically and symbolically the individual is over-controlled and over-socialized, his or her options being essentially to submit or to rebel. It is not surprising that both of these debates have lately been pursuing the issue of subjectivity, which has almost been obliterated. Following the work of Michel Foucault (Foucault 1976), several authors (Knights 1990; Willmott 1990; Collinson 1992) have sought to rediscover or more precisely to reconstitute the human subject, `not as a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power' (Cousins and Hussain 1984: 251), but as the product of organizational practices and resistances to such practices. These practices are essentially classifying, dividing and naming practices seen by Foucault as constantly engendering relations of power (Foucault 1976: 93).

This paper argues that subjectivity at the workplace must also be examined outside participation in, or rejection of, control practices in a different set of constructions. I will propose that within every organization there is an uncolonized terrain, a terrain which is not and cannot be managed, in which people, both individually and in groups, can engage in all kinds of unsupervised, spontaneous activity. These activities occasionally engage with the practices of power, principally through the medium of fantasy. I will refer to this terrain as the unmanaged organization, a kind of organizational dreamworld in which desires, anxieties and emotions find expressions in highly irrational constructions. This organizational terrain has not received the attention it merits, since the managed, controlling and resisted organization (in part due to the very practices Foucault has identified) is consistently privileged within organizational discourses at the expense of the unmanaged, the uncontrolled and the unmanageable.