In each of the other chapters of my thesis I devote space to explaining and discussing specific aspects of Lacan’s body of work. I did consider attempting to assemble all of this into the literature review – as that might be a more common pathway – but I decided that would be problematic as it would be out of context and more frustrating than it needs to be. That said in this section I am going someway towards explaining how Lacanian theory has appeared in the organisation studies literature to date.
In many ways trying to summarise Lacanian theory in any comprehensive way is futile because I will certainly fail to do justice to Lacan’s own writings and that of subsequent
authors. Lacan’s contribution to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis alone is immense. His seminars extend over more than two decades and introduce, analyse and detail an extensive array of inter-related concepts with a healthy disregard for discipline boundaries. Since the late 1970s Lacan’s work has been applied to broad variety of fields including extensively in cultural studies, ideology, film theory, philosophy, literature, linguistics, social theory and many others. I cannot provide a coherent picture of this body of work in this thesis, but within this I do hope to be productive (see Hoedemaekers, 2007, p. 17 for a discussion of his concept of what constitutes a 'productive failure'). Specifically I hope to be productive by focussing on a selection of Lacan’s primary work and other Lacanian literature on the discipline of organisation studies as it relates to fat, fatness and body image. This condensed body of literature is however still broad in discipline including some directly in organisation studies but also studies in philosophy, feminism, gender studies, clinical psychoanalysis, sociology and others. This body of work does not directly address the psychology of fat, but the way the scholars apply Lacan the study of organisations illuminates how I approach the industry of weight- anxiety.
Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework represents a relatively new addition to what is a well established tradition of looking at the unconscious in organisational settings (Jones & Spicer, 2005). In the following paragraphs I attempt to briefly describe the ‘line of flight’ (Fleming, 2002) that I think demonstrates why Lacanian psychoanalysis has been added to the repertoire in organisation studies.
There are two strands to my analysis of this issue, one strand looks at the development of psychology as a discipline within management and organisation studies since the early
twentieth century. I see this movement as existing within the rational modernist perspective prevalent in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second strand considers the influence of the ‘turn to language’ experienced within psychology and the human sciences generally in the 1970s and the subsequent evolution of the postmodern perspective in organisation studies. Both strands are necessary to trace Lacan’s line of flight into organisation studies.
Cooper & Burrell began the introduction in their classic 1988 paper ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction’ with a summary of the “self-analysis and self doubt” (p. 92) that characterised the human sciences at the time. They explain that the debate was “polarized around two apparently conflicting epistemological positions: modernism with its belief in the essential capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of rational thought and postmodernism with its critical questioning, and often outright rejection, of the ethnocentric rationalism championed by modernism” (p. 92). Much water has travelled under the bridge since the publication of this paper and its contemporaries, including the introduction of many forms of critical analysis critiquing the rational modernist project of organisation studies. Psychoanalysis is a more recent entrant into this group and is becoming more and more used as a viable form of critical analysis in organisation studies. I think the reason for this growth in popularity is because of the radically different formulation of subjectivity offered by psychoanalysis. It rejects traditional rational notions of subject, and particularly the self as subject – in fact the beauty of using a psychoanalytic framework resides in its unique ability to re-position the subject outside of rational assumptions about self-hood therefore giving voice also to the irrational.
Organisation study’s inheritance of Lacan has been described in some detail in Jones and Spicer (2005), whom discuss both the lack and uptake of general psychoanalytic and specifically Lacanian concepts in organisation studies. As Jones and Spicer explain, the body of research applying aspects of Lacanian theory to the study of organisations is growing, although Lacanian analysis of organisation is still an emerging field. Roberts (2005) for instance focussed Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary on disciplinary processes in an organisation. Jones and Spicer (2005) themselves looked at the empty signifier of the ‘entrepreneur’ and expose both its broad influence and fundamental lack (of content) using Lacan’s advanced conceptualisation of the three registers (Hoedemaekers, 2008) and particular the notion of the Real.
Drawing on Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic, Gilles Arnaud (2002) has contributed significantly to providing an alternative reading of organisational activities. In particular his analysis on the compulsion to repeat as a playing out of an unconscious debt residing in long ago formed chains of signification add much to the understanding of managerial inappropriateness. Also his work on developing a framework for Lacanian inspired executive coaching adds a substantial amount to inspiring organisations to consider psychoanalytically based treatments to organisational problems (2003). In a similar vein Vanheule et al (2003) investigated organisational burnout using Lacan’s ‘intersubjective’ relationship between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers.
More recently some Lacanian analysis of organisations has focussed on food within organisations. Driver includes some Lacanian analysis of employees’ narrative accounts of eating in their organisational settings (2008). Driver’s research is only a start at looking psychoanalytically at food in the workplace though she does show how using a
Lacanian understanding of the relationship of researcher to researched (or subject- supposed–to-know to patient) can be complicit in evoking specific notions from the researched. Driver has also contributed significantly in relation to organisational identity and lack (2009) and in relation to experiences of 'otherness' within organisational settings (2007). Fotaki has used psychoanalysis to explore health systems and policy-making (Fotaki, 2006, 2009) including using Lacanian ideas to demonstrate how the imaginary constructs reality and rationality. I like how Fotaki describes why she has “turned to psychoanalysis . . . for it provides us with one of the most sophisticated and most devastating critiques of the idea of a rational agent driven by the utility maximization principle in his/her actions” (2009, 143). This is one reason why I find myself drawn to Lacan - because of the nonsensicality of rationality in the weight-loss industry.
Also recently, Casper Hoedemaekers has provided a significant contribution to setting Lacan to work. His doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive empirical application of Lacan to the study of subjectivity at work, his analysis focussed around the three registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. One of the most useful concepts Hoedemaekers introduces is the idea of a “productive failure” (Hoedemaekers, 2007, p. 17). He uses this when describing the kind of success a student of the university can expect when working in a Lacanian frame, this resonates with me as within the failure to represent resides a productive element.
My inheritance (Jones, 2002) of Lacan comes partly through another ‘other’, affiliated with organisation studies, but coming more directly through clinical psychoanalysis and social psychology. Partly this path has been forged by Wendy Hollway (1989). It seems that social and critical psychologists are incorporating psychoanalytic, including
Lacanian, concepts with increasing vigour. Parker explains that this may be to do with psychoanalysis’s rather different formulation of subjectivity (Ian Parker, 2001) which gifts psychologists an alternative (and perhaps more useful?) way of understanding a subject. I have highlighted Hollway in particular because her heritage resonates with me. Hollway used several psychoanalytic sources, including Lacanian theory, to analyse and theorise human behaviour, the results of which were published in her 1989 book Subjectivity and Method in Psychology. She was particularly interested in the relationship between desire and subjectivity and in her early work was one of the first to show the worth of this approach for understanding how social relations can be understood with Lacanian subjectivity. I see my own work as inheriting an understanding of the application of Lacanian subjectivity from Hollway’s work. Inheritors of Lacan via Hollway include authors such as Peter Branney (Branney, 2006, 2008) who applied psychoanalysis, including Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine domestic violence policy, including New Zealand domestic violence policy.
Finally psychoanalytic literature specifically approaching eating disorders from a Lacanian framework. Gabriella Ripa de Meana’s book ‘Figures of Lightness’ on anorexia theorises how the desire a western self has to symbolically fit-in operates psychoanalytically (1999). I see links to Ripa de Meana’s conceptualisation of anorexia with anxious fat men, particularly relating to the experiences of a shared system of signification and its generalisation to understanding the sets of neuroticisation that may be present within our society.
This section has only briefly introduced the array of Lacanian literatures in (and out) of organisation studies.