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Organization Studies
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On Lacan and the `Becoming-ness' of Organizations/Selves

Nancy Harding

University of Bradford School of Management, UK, N.H.Harding{at}Bradford.ac.uk

Poststructuralist accounts of organizations understand them as flows, as verbs in process of always-becoming. Subjects who work `in' organizations are similarly always in a process of becoming. Organization and members are mutually constitutive, each enfolded within the other. The process by which each is enfolded within and constituted by the other is what is explored in this essai. Its aim is to analyse something of the becoming-ness of organizations/selves, in which the researcher-self is imbricated in this becoming-ness and must therefore be part of that which is studied. To achieve this aim I draw on Lacan's concepts: of the mirror stage, or how I am in an agonistic relationship with the other; Nachträglichkeit or the reliving of the past in the present (deferred action); and identification. I apply these concepts to an interview I, an academic, carried out with a manager, emphasizing the importance of these organizational identities in our encounter with each other. The conclusion I reach is that the organization I am `in' is at the same time `in' me: there is no inside and no outside.

Organization Studies, Vol. 28, No. 11, 1761-1773 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840607082225
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