This article introduces contemporary discourses of ‘work–life balance’ as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian ‘death drive’ to highlight the importance of ‘disequilibrium’ for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossible pursuit of ‘equilibrium’ maps out onto present desires for ‘work–life balance’ and its subsequent production of a regulated ‘imbalanced’ subject. It argues that individuals are maintained as subjects through their identification with and paradoxical enjoyment, or jouissance, from being ‘imbalanced’. Consequently, capitalist work and organizations stand as the contemporary limit of ‘life’ through their fundamental role in producing and sustaining this ‘imbalanced’ subject in search of ‘balance’. It is ironically in this longing to overcome this ‘imbalance’, to ‘work to live’, that individuals remain even more strongly a capitalist and organizational ‘subject of desire’. They literally cannot go on subjectively ‘living’ without capitalist work.

PurposeThis paper has three purposes. The first is to introduce the concept of fantasy, based on Lacanian pyschoanlysis, in order to link theoretically the role of narrative and affect in organizational strategies of control. The second is to use this concept to illuminate the fantasmatic as well as ideological character of so‐called “market rationality.” The third is to reveal three dominant fantasies organizations draw on in an age of market rationality.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is primarily a conceptual investigation into the ways Lacanian psychoanalytic theories can help link the phenomena of narrative and affect within strategies of organizational control and second, how this relates to current trends of market rationalism.FindingsDrawing on a psychoanalytic register, the paper argues that organizational control strategies revolve around the presence of a fantasy which is comprised of a symbiotic stable fantasy promising psychological wholeness and an unstable fantasy threatening to prevent this achievement. Further, it reflects on how emergent notions of market rationality, analogous to themes of a “boundaryless” or “protean” career, draw on a particular anti‐organizational fantasies to affectively grip subjects within their values and practices. Three fantasies employed by organizations in an age of market rationalism were then identified.Research limitations/implicationsIn broader terms future research can turn to the concept of fantasy to better explain organizational control and ideological interpellation of employees, particularly in regard to concepts of narrative and emotion for this process. Specifically, this paper offers an innovative way to understand and investigate market rationality and changing cultures of organizations within the globalizing economy.Originality/valueThis paper offers the category of Lacanian fantasy for linking narrative and affect in managerial ideologies. Additionally it draws on Lacanian theory to provide a more coherent and theoretically sophisticated account of market rationality and organizational strategies countering this trend.

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This paper critically reconsiders dominant understandings of morality and subversion within organizations. Existing organisational literature does not adequately address the important productive role of morality for producing and justifying everyday subversive practices as well as the use of subversion to legitimate power relations and dominant values. Drawing upon interactionist insights, we develop a practice-based account of morality, highlighting the means through which subversion retroactively legitimates the diverse range of actions performed by organizational subjects. This form of retrospective reasoning, which we term 'moralization', serves as an important resource for subjects to actively negotiate the often competing moral and practical demands placed on them as organizational subjects. Consequently, we position subversion as an important means of accomplishing, legitimating and preserving a given organizational order, rather than a 'common sense' view that subversion necessarily subverts organizational values. In doing so we make explicit the 'positive' function of rule-bending for processes of organizational control.

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