Entrepreneurship, incongruence and affect: drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organisation

In recent years, entrepreneurship has been reconceptualised as social change. Understood as such, entrepreneurship can be viewed to disrupt and disturb the social order. We argue in this paper that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Lacan’s concepts of the real and anxiety help us to conceptualize the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change, and understand why the latter may encounter social resistance. Our contribution to critical entrepreneurship literature is to first emphasise that entrepreneurship instigates social change by introducing incongruence, and second, to highlight that this process can be affective: it can create anxiety. The paper uses an illustrative historical case-example of a Swedish anti-racist commercial magazine (Gringo) to elucidate these points. We conclude by pointing out that anxiety may be necessary for the provocation of social transformation

British citizenship and the ‘other’: an analysis of the earned citizenship discourse

This paper presents an analysis of interviews conducted with citizenship officers in London, working within the field of British naturalisation. We draw from a rhetorical psychology perspective to study the dilemmatic tensions that exist in the participants’ discourse about naturalisation applicants who are constructed as 'good’ and ‘bad’, as both ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of British citizenship. In line with a rhetorical approach, we argue that these different constructions of the migrant are strategic and are associated with different constructions of Britain as humanitarian and tolerant, on the one hand, and as being under threat by the in flux of immigration, on the other hand. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ambivalence for processes of inclusion and exclusion

Introducing the French psychodynamics of work perspective to critical management education: why do the work task and the organization of work matter?

In this essay, we call on critical management education to focus on the organization of work and the nature of work tasks. While critical action learning and both reflexive and psychodynamic approaches to management education situate learning in actual work experiences, they do not explicitly encourage reflection on work tasks and the organization of work. Our aim is to draw on the French psychodynamics of work perspective to argue that reflection on concrete experiences and processes of work is important because work has significant implications for workers’ health and for society. We also use two vignettes to discuss the implications of French psychodynamics of work for the practice of critical management education

Work as affective experience: the contribution of Christophe Dejours' 'psychodynamics of work'

Psychoanalytic perspectives (such as the Kleinian/Bionian and Lacanian literature) have made significant contributions to the study of affect in organizations. While some have pointed out the affects involved in work tasks, most of this literature generally focuses on the affects linked to organizational life (such as learning, leadership, motivation, power or change). The center of attention is not on affects associated with the work process itself. We draw from the French psychodynamic theory of Christophe Dejours – who is yet to be known in English language organization studies – to make the following contributions. First, we show the relationship between affect and working by discussing Dejours’ notions of affective suffering, the real of work, the significance of the body and ‘ordinary sublimation’. Second, we advance critical research in organization studies by demonstrating the centrality of work in the affective life of the subject. Third, the paper reinterprets Menzies’ (1960) well-known hospital case study to illustrate how Dejours’ theory extends existing psychoanalytical approaches, and especially to point to the significant role of the work collective in supporting workers to work well. We conclude by suggesting that if the centrality of work in the affective life of the subject is acknowledged, it follows that resistance strategies, and work collectives’ struggle for emancipation, should focus on reclaiming work