Clinical and critical: The Lacanian contribution to management and organization studies

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, an increasing number of researchers have become aware of what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's work can contribute to management and organization studies. The number of publications on the subject has significantly risen, at the risk of leading to some apparent heterogeneity of the topics covered and a potential distortion of the Lacanian concepts when used in management and organization studies. In this article, we aim to map this emerging field of research, bring to light the theoretical basis common to those works so as to make the Lacanian theory used to study management and organization more legible, and discuss the limitations and opportunities implied by such a Lacanian approach. We organize the published works around two main orientations, each helping to address specific issues: a clinical orientation, within organizational psycho-dynamics, and a critical orientation, related to critical management studies. KeywordsCritical management studies, Lacan, organizational psycho-dynamics, psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan's work began to be used for studying organizations and management at the turn of the 2000s. A number of publications by French, Belgian and English authors led the way (Arnaud, 1998(Arnaud, , 2002(Arnaud, , 2003aFleming and Spicer, 2003;Roberts, 2005;Vanheule et al., 2003;Vanheule and Verhaeghe, 2004;Vidaillet, 2007Vidaillet, , 2008a. A more visible and structured expression of this interest in In this respect, the purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we aim to review most of the publications which, in the last twenty years, have revolved around Lacan and organizations. This will enable us to identify the various areas of inquiry linking these works, so as to map this emerging field of research, without forcing it into a rigid and ostensibly orderly representation (Contu et al., 2010;Jones, 2010).The task here is to develop around Lacan, what has already been developed in the field of organizational psychoanalysis around Freud and the post Freudians (Carr, 2002;Carr and Gabriel, 2001). Secondly, when reviewing this fairly recent literature, we intend to show why and how Lacanian concepts may be useful in exploring various theoretical perspectives and new ways of approaching practical issues in MOS. Thirdly, we propose to organize Lacan-inspired research around two major orientations that developed in distinct academic fields and with different objectives (Butler, 2008) despite some citation overlaps between both entities: the first orientation, of a clinical nature, pertains to organizational psycho-dynamics; the second, qualified as critical, relates to critical management studies (CMS). The very existence of this second orientation has much to do with the fact that Lacan's work has been disseminated far beyond the borders of analytical circles and particularly, outside France, in the academic philosophical arena, which it has entered with no particular link to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis (Badiou and Roudinesco, 2012).On the one hand, a ...

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