‘It Sends a Cold Shiver down my Spine’: Ghostly Interruptions to Strategy Implementation

Abstract

This paper offers new theoretical and empirical understanding of interruptions to strategy implementation by drawing attention to their ghostly nature. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for thinking about the ghostly by combining Freud's concept of the uncanny with theorizing in cultural geography on collapses of linear time as well as with Avery Gordon's sociological work on ghostly matters. Empirically, the paper examines the ghostly nature of strategy interruptions through a detailed analysis of conversations between middle managers at a strategy seminar in a Danish local government. I portray the uncanny moments where the familiar account of organizational purposes is not so self-evident anymore, but all of a sudden appears rather disturbing. I show how middle managers envision other, darker futures and express the feeling that something else, something different from before, must be done, although they cannot say exactly what. Going beyond previous accounts of strategy interruption e.g. as deliberate resistance of middle managers, the paper contributes with new insight into the moments where the neat ordering of organizational realities performed by corporate strategies break down and middle managers come into contact with the broader social and political stakes of their work.

The haunting specter of retro consumption

“…Gabriel, 2012; Lambert, 2019; Schuster, 2016) and in the intensities of the “seductive” characteristics of consumption spectacles (Hietanen et al, 2020a). Derrida’s haunting denotes similar overwhelming relations but with a temporal twist that brings in “broken fragments of time” (Pors, 2016: 1646), where the historical force of hauntology exists, undergirding every present, and thus should be seen as in no way “an abnormal state” (Fiddler, 2019: 3). As such, it can also be understood as a “cultural memory” but of the most abstract kind where it is only carried from event to event without necessarily being actively remembered in any coherent way (Etkind, 2009)—that “what could be otherwise” but what nevertheless never quite made it.…”

“…These ghostly matters have nevertheless received notable scholarly interest in neighboring fields (e.g. Beyes, 2019; Orr, 2014; Pors, 2016; Pors et al, 2019). Adopting the concept and filtering it through its “darker” no-future sense in Fisher (2014; also Reynolds, 2020), we wish to add to Jameson’s (1991) notion of the postmodern “loss of historical depth, analogous to the schizophrenic’s inability to distinguish fully between past, present and future” (Brown, 2001a: 310) and thus suggest a contemporary zeitgeist that pertains to a striking lack of a temporal horizon of our times (see Carstens, 2018; Hietanen and Andéhn, 2018).…”

The Topographical Imagination: Space and organization theory

“…In its inquiry into the heterogeneous assemblages of material things, actor network theory is similarly exposed to an illusion, though here it is the ‘realistic illusion’. The rough insistence on the ‘flat’, somehow democratic configuration of multiple actants tends to suppress the influence of emotions and affects, as well as risking indifference to imaginative power, to gaps and pauses, and to the ghostly presences of absent but felt forces (Pors, 2016; Thrift, 2000). By assuming space is first there , so something present from which to then go forth and explore the relationality of things, proponents of actor network theory tend to ignore how interactions among things are thoroughly steeped in space, not just materially, but in affect and presences-absences.…”

The ghost of capitalism: A guide to seeing, naming and exorcising the spectre haunting the business school

“…Grønbaek Pors (2016) employs the notion of ghostliness to analyse strategy implementation. Her ethnographic study of Danish local authorities, focused mainly on school managers, shows the development of conflicts between the strategic and managerial logics: top management versus the everyday work at the schools.…”

“…In this way, capitalism in business schools is characterized by the kind of ghostliness described by Grønbaek Pors (2016): something that makes us pause, largely invisible but not entirely. It creates disturbances and dislocations in our experiences that we have no means of addressing.…”