The essay as an endangered species:should we care?

The essay as a literary genre has, over the centuries, delivered profound insights into a wide range of topics and even contributed to social and political change. As part of academic apprenticeship, the essay has served to develop students’ intellectual and reflective qualities and to assess their mastery of many different disciplines. Yet, in recent times, the essay has lost some of its allure, arguably becoming an endangered species both in its political and academic uses. Politics and public debates are increasingly dominated by gladiatorial spectacles, punditry, sound bites and an overt commercialization of political campaigning. Academic research in the social sciences, for its part, has come to rely increasingly on a genre of scientific writing, the ‘research paper’, which has become institutionalized and has moved increasingly away from the qualities of the essay. For the purpose of student assessment, essay-writing is rapidly replaced by other types of academic work such as projects, case studies, portfolios, tests, and indeed ‘papers’. In this essay, I argue that while the genre of the essay is neither the only nor the major means of developing and disseminating knowledge in management and organizational disciplines it retains an important role in today’s fast-moving, complex and commercialized environment. The essay gives a voice to an author’s creative imagination, enabling him or her to critique assumptions that are rarely questioned and explore new possibilities for intellectual and social change. As such it can still make a useful contribution both in academic and political fields

Planar Friction Modelling with LuGre Dynamics and Limit Surfaces

Contact surfaces in planar motion exhibit a coupling between tangential and rotational friction forces. This paper proposes planar friction models grounded in the LuGre model and limit surface theory. First, distributed planar extended state models are proposed and the Elasto-Plastic model is extended for multi-dimensional friction. Subsequently, we derive a reduced planar friction model, coupled with a pre-calculated limit surface, that offers reduced computational cost. The limit surface approximation through an ellipsoid is discussed. The properties of the planar friction models are assessed in various simulations, demonstrating that the reduced planar friction model achieves comparable performance to the distributed model while exhibiting ~80 times lower computational cost

Moral emotions and ethics in organisations: introduction to the special issue

The aim of our special issue is to deepen our understanding of the role moral emotions play in organisations as part of a wider discourse on organisational ethics and morality. Unethical workplace behaviours can have far-reaching consequences—job losses, risks to life and health, psychological damage to individuals and groups, social injustice and exploitation and even environmental devastation. Consequently, determining how and why ethical transgressions occur with surprising regularity, despite the inhibiting influence of moral emotions, has considerable theoretical and practical significance to management scholars and managers alike. In this introduction, we present some of the core arguments in the field; notably, the effect of organisational life and bureaucracy on emotions, in general, and moral emotions, in particular; the moral standing of leaders, managers and followers; moral challenges raised by obedience and resistance to organisational power and ethical blindspots induced by what may appear as deeply moral emotions. These issues are explored by a collection of geographically diverse articles in various work contexts, which are thematically organised in terms of (i) moral emotions, ethical behaviour and social pressure, (ii) moral emotions and their consequences within/across levels of analysis, (iii) psychoanalytic perspectives on the management of moral emotions, (iv) virtue and moral emotions and (v) moral emotions and action tendencies. We end by suggesting certain avenues for future research in the hope that the endeavour initiated here will inspire improved practice at work. Keyword

Leadership in a post-truth era : a new narrative disorder?

This essay, and the speical issue it introduces, seeks to explore leadership in a post-truth age, focusing in particular on the types of narratives and counter-narratives that characterize it and at times dominate it. We first examine the factors that are often held responsible for the rise of post-truth in politics, including the rise of relativist and postmodernist ideas, dishonest leaders and bullshit artists, the digital revolution and social media, the 2008 economic crisis and collapse of public trust. We develop the idea that different historical periods are characterized by specific narrative ecologies, which, by analogy to natural ecologies, can be viewed as spaces where different types of narrative and counter-narrative emerge, interact, compete, adapt, develop and die. We single out some of the dominant narrative types that characterize post-truth narrative ecologies and highlight the ability of language to ‘do things with words’ that support both the production of ‘fake news’ and a type of narcissistic leadership that thrive in these narrative ecologies. We then examine more widely leadership in post-truth politics focusing on the resurgence of populist and demagogical types along with the narratives that have made these types highly effective in our times. These include nostalgic narratives idealizing a fictional past and conspiracy theories aimed at arousing fears about a dangerous future

Organization studies:a space for ideas, identities and agonies

In this piece I argue that Organization Studies, like other academic journals, is not a sovereign subject able to chart its own path and make sovereign decisions on its strategy and direction. Instead, the journal is seen as embedded in complex networks of institutions and practices over which the editorial team has limited control; chief among them are the conventions of peer review, the proliferation of academic journals, the escalating pressures on academics to publish and the ceaseless struggle to improve ranking and citations. A useful way of looking at the journal is as a place where, following different institutional practices, ideas arrive, settle and meet each other, sometimes fight it out or, more often than not, decide to coexist in a civilized and polite way. Like the spaces of large cities, journals too become spaces crucial for the formation of individual and group identities, something that is accompanied by much agonizing about quality, acceptance, purity, contamination and even annihilation. The paper concludes with some reflections on the ethic of rational critique, at once the bedrock of academic discourse but also capable of inflicting much damage and of prematurely closing promising lines of inquiry. The author proposes that this ethic must be complemented by an ethic of care which stems from a recognition of fallibility and limits to our rationality. An ethic of care must inform not only the interactions among a journal's different stakeholders but may spread to an attitude of stakeholders towards the journal itself, an attitude that approaches the journal as a valued intellectual space to be nurtured and cared for

Identity, choice and consumer freedom – the new opiates? A psychoanalytic interrogation

Psychoanalysis opens a variety of windows into understanding contemporary consumption and consumerism. The psychoanalytic theory of defence and the unconscious enables us to understand why commodities, from fast cars to luxury chocolate, so readily stand in to offer substitute gratification for deeper repressed desires and why the meaning of such commodities is liable to become mobile and unstable (Baudrillard, 1988 [1970]). The psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism (Freud, 1914) and the mirror stage (Lacan, 2006) provide powerful entry points into understanding our culture's obsession with image (Cluley and Dunne, 2012), whilst the theory of neurosis offers significant insights into the addictive and deeply irrational qualities of contemporary consumption (Lasch, 1980). Object relations theory (Winnicott, 1964) enables us to understand how material objects, from early childhood attachments to teddy bears, act as bridges between our sense of self and what we come to view as an external world deeply indifferent to our desires. Several other psychoanalytic concepts and ideas have proven particularly helpful in contemporary discourses on consumption. This essay draws its inspiration from Freud's theory of religion (Freud,1927, 1930) to test the view that the consumer's freedom to choose and construct an identity is an illusion in the technical sense - a fantasy that discloses deeper desires and offers substitute gratifications for the discontents inflicted on us by contemporary consumer culture. Like earlier illusions, the illusion of freedom and the derivative illusions of choice and identity may provide some consolation, but, arguably, then deepen the discontents for which they purport to offer comfort

Reflexivity and beyond – a plea for imagination in qualitative research methodology

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, important as reflexivity is, it does not constitute the gold standard of qualitative research. Instead the author makes a plea for the use of sociological imagination. Design/methodology/approach – The paper makes use of data from the ISI Web of Science database to demonstrate the increasing popularity of the concept of reflexivity. Findings – All researchers exercise reflexivity in as much as carrying out research alters both the subject and the object of the research. Conscious reflexivity enables researchers to question their assumptions and consequences of their work but does not guarantee high quality research. For this, creative imagination in recognizing the creative possibilities afforded by the data, are essential. Originality/value – Arguing against the emerging orthodoxy of qualitative research methodology, the original proposal of this paper lies in its plea to relax methodological strictures and judge the quality of research pragmatically in terms of its scientific value and social usefulness

Beyond Compassion: Replacing a Blame Culture With Proper Emotional Support and Management Comment on “Why and How Is Compassion Necessary to Provide Good Quality Healthcare?”

The absence of compassion, argues the author, is not the cause of healthcare failures but rather a symptom of deeper systemic failures. The clinical encounter arouses strong emotions of anxiety, fear, and anger in patients which are often projected onto the clinicians. Attempts to protect clinicians through various bureaucratic devices and depersonalization of the patient, constitute as Menzies noted in her classic work, social defences, aimed at containing the anxieties of clinicians but ending up in reinforcing these anxieties. Instead of placing additional burdens on clinicians by bureaucratizing and benchmarking compassion, the author argues that proper emotional management and support is a precondition for a healthcare system that offers humane and effective treatment to patients and a humane working environment for those who work in it