Rethinking Emancipation in Organization Studies. In the light of Jacques Rancière's Philosophy

The demand for emancipation was once something we only associated with oppressed social groups such as Women, Workers or the colonized who were seeking to escape from various forms of domination which they had long been subjected to. Today, some of the most privileged groups in our society such as middle managers and professions talk about their thirst for emancipation. They seek this precious and awe inspiring goal through participating in management courses (Gosling, 2000), reading various forms of management literature which promises to turn them into revolutionaries (Jacques, 1996), and engaging with various journeys to free themselves from the shackles of thought control and simply 'be themselves' at work (Fleming, 2009). Corporations routinely sell themselves as a route to emancipation for their consumers and employees. One only needs to think about the recent advertisement for Virgin which replaced the famous images of the revolutionary Ché Guevara with Richard Branson. The message seems to be clear - it is not just radical political movements that can provide emancipation, corporations can too! The fact that emancipation has lost its anchor in radical political movements and shocks and scandalizes some. For others, it is a kind of an indication of how endlessly flexible and omnivorous capitalism is insofar as it is able to adopt nearly anything - include forms of virulent anti-capitalism - to further itself. While these two explanations are certainly appealing, we think that the widespread adoption of this culture of emancipation actually underlines the increasing uncertainty and fragmentation that has taken place around the term. For us this is due to a shift in focus of understanding of emancipation. Previously, emancipation was understood as a form of wide-scale transformational change in society achieved through intellectuals enlightening people who find themselves dominated. This notion informed studies of emancipation for many years. The result was that research on emancipation tended to focus on either documenting large scale challenges to capitalism and management or agitating for emancipation through a progressive enlightenment of the audience. This approach to emancipation began to fall out of favour as it was accused of being too grandiose - subjects were positioned as victims of managerial knowledge which they could only escape from through the progressive enlightenment under the tutelage of critical intellectuals. Such disenchantment led researchers to turn their focus towards more minor forms of micro-emancipation whereby people momentarily escape from domination in their everyday life through minor activities (eg. Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). This focus produced a deep body of literature that documented the various ways individuals seek out micro-emancipation in the workplace (eg. Zanoni and Jensens, 2007). However, recently we have witnessed some important questions being asked around this research agenda. In particular, some are concerned that it has begun to fundamentally constrain how we think about forms of emancipation, creating a myopic focus on small-scale struggles and fundamentally ignoring many of the broader social struggles that challenge management. In this paper we seek to overcome these problems associated with macro as well as micro-emancipation by positing a new conception of emancipation offered in the recent thought of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, emancipation should not be seen as an ideal to be reached, but as a postulate to be acualised in day-to-day practice. He points out that equality can be actualized by interrupting the order of sensibility (rather than through quotidian everyday acts), through creating a sense of dissensus (rather than collaboration and attempts to create consensus), and attempts to singularize the universal (rather than through fragmentary struggles). By focusing on these three processes, Rancière enables us to see a range of emancipatory struggles that we were blinded to by both accounts of marco-emancipation (which went looking for grand revolts) as well as micro-emancipation (which focused on everyday transgression). In particular it enables us to register the kinds of emancipation movements that have frequently been left out of accounts of emancipation in organization studies. These include the self-education movements, proliterian intellectual movements, as well as forms art. Rancière's account of emancipation allows us to extend how we think about processes of emancipation in and around organizations in three ways. First, it allows us to register activities in our theoretical gaze that we had previously ignored or discounted. Macro-emancipation focuses our attention on collective movements which are organised and micro-emancipation focuses our attention on often individual every-day activities which are not organised. In contrast, Rancière draws our attention to various emancipatory movements that are often collective, but are not formally organised. This broadens the range of forms of emancipation we can study. Second, Rancière allows us to rethink how exactly emancipation works. Instead of focusing on creation of new states of freedom (as studies of macro emancipation do) or attempts to seize fleeting forms of freedom (as studies of micro emanciption do), Rancière's work allows us to see how emancipation involves the transformation of the sensible. This re-orients our studies to how emancipation movements seek to change what and how we actually see the world. Finally, Rancière allows us to move beyond the assumption that contemporary resistance is fragmented and disorganised by registering how individual forms of resistance are experienced as an embodiment or singularization of universal struggles. Doing this allows us to recognise the link between the specific demands of many resistance movements and more universal claims such as dignity, recognition, and justice. By making these three contributions, we hope to move beyond either an elitist account found in studies of macro-emancipation and the banal account found in studies of micro-emancaiption. In order to make this argument, we proceed as follows. We begin by reviewing the two dominant conceptions of emancipation. First we look at three different modes of emancipation that have been successively pursued - political emancipation, economic emancipation and ideological emancipation. We then look at the ways in which organization studies has suggested these struggles take place - through 'macro-emancipation' or 'micro-emancipation'. In this review we highlight the shortcomings of these two existing conceptions of emancipation. We then introduce a third conception of emancipation inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. After we have outlined this, we then draw out the implications of this for the study of emancipation in organization studies. We conclude by sketching out what new areas of emancipation this allows us to understand and perhaps engage with.Rancière ; emancipation ; critical theory ; critical management studies ; micro emancipation

Challenging Lincoln: How Gettysburg’s Lincoln-centric Emancipation Narrative Has Overshadowed Local Black History

When it comes to symbols of emancipation, President Abraham Lincoln is king. No other person is more associated with the abolition of slavery than The Great Emancipator himself. This holds true in Gettysburg just as much as it does throughout the country. Only last September, Gettysburg College erected a statue of Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation in the hope that it would promote the discussion of race relations in America today. Yet when it comes to commemorating and remembering the struggle for emancipation, Lincoln is far from the only face that we should look to in our historic town. [excerpt

Ex Parte Dismissal Hearings

An ex parte hearing is an emergency court hearing, in which only one party appears before a judge and requests a dismissal from foster care, or emancipation, without a defendant's presence. The ex parte hearing is a tool used by attorneys when timing is essential in the emancipation process

President Lincoln Finds a Permanent Seat on Campus: The Dedication of the New Abraham Lincoln Statue Outside Stevens Hall

Students, faculty, and visitors to Gettysburg College have likely noticed the most recent addition to our campus. Last Friday, a brand new bronze statue of President Abraham Lincoln was dedicated outside Stevens Hall. The statue, which stands nine feet tall, depicts a seated President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and was designed by Stanley Watts, who also designed the Lincoln statue outside the Gettysburg Public Library on Baltimore Street. The statue unveiling comes almost 153 years to the day when President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which gave the Confederate States 100 days to return to the Union before emancipation would become law [excerpt]

Crusade for Justice and the Question of Authenticity in African American Autobiography

This article aims at investigating the concept of authenticity and its connections with authority and cultural dominance in Ida B. Wells\ub4s Crusade for Justice. Set in the Reconstruction period, Wells\u2019s autobiography incorporates authenticating strategies typical of slave narratives and post-Emancipation political memoirs, therefore it can be analyzed as a work of transition that embodies the profound shift in authenticating issues occurring after Emancipation

Europe: from emancipation to empowerment

Marx is dead. But so is Hayek. With neoliberalism crumbling, Europeans are beginning to wonder what it is that is really wrong with the current European Union. The paper proposes the following answer: To this day, European integration has not been a process of emancipation. This shortcoming, however, is not written on the Union’s face. It requires, pursuant to best psychological traditions, a careful analysis of symptoms. One indication of the absence of emancipation is, indeed, the Union’s rhetorical embrace of empowerment

Sublime in Its Magnitude : The Emancipation Proclamation

Book Summary: Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had officially gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and the proposed Thirteenth Amendment had become a campaign issue. Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment captures these historic times, profiling the individuals, events, and enactments that led to slavery’s abolition. Fifteen leading Lincoln scholars contribute to this collection, covering slavery from its roots in 1619 Jamestown, through the adoption of the Constitution, to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. [From the Publisher

Emancipation. Emancipation Ode.

Charleston, South Carolina, 1902. Six verses. Written by Jno. Nathl. Samuels-Belboder, of British Guiana, sojourning in Charleston, South Carolina.https://dh.howard.edu/og_poetry/1013/thumbnail.jp

Destroying the Right Arm of Rebellion: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln\u27s Emancipation Proclamation was a gamble. If it were to succeed, it could cripple the economy of the South, decimating its war effort, drive the border states to accept compensated emancipation, ending slavery as an institution in the United States, and accelerate the end of the war, ensuring the endurance of the United States of America. If it were to fail, it could spur the border states to secede, galvanizing the South, render Abraham Lincoln a political pariah with two years remaining in his term, deflating the North, and encourage European states to broker a two-state solution in North America, sending the concept of the American republic to the history books as a failed experiment. Lincoln appreciated these high stakes as he methodically built the case for emancipation during the first two years of his presidency, drawing on his decades of experience in Illinois courthouses to develop what would be the most consequential legal argument he would ever have to make. That Lincoln had long thought slavery was a moral wrong was insufficient justification to decree its demise; he had to build a case that could withstand scrutiny from an adversarial federal court system and avoid a legal challenge until after the war, when he could pursue the permanent recourse available only through a constitutional amendment. This paper explores the legal and political arguments Lincoln and his critics proffered and weighs the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation

Victim of Emancipation: Adams County Flustered

Republican stalwart newspaper The Adams Sentinel ran nothing in its folds hinting at the editor\u27s elation over the Emancipation Proclamation in the days following the document\u27s release. In a terse column, headed, Proclamation of the President, ran the document, unadorned with either accolades or contempt. Elsewhere in the paper\u27s folds, the news hovered back and forth over the fields around Sharpsburg and word of the lackadaisical pursuit of Lee\u27s army into Virginia. The deep meaning of one of Lincoln\u27s most momentous moments seemed to be lost on the Republicans of south-central Pennsylvania, as they eschewed the topic, pussyfooted around it and went out of their way to nearly ignore the document which sat in Washington City with its ink still drying