Organizational Miasma

I couldn't resist an article in organization studies that has "miasma" in the title: "Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma" by Yiannis Gabriel, who is affiliated with the University of Bath School of Management, which also has Andrew Brown on faculty.  I wonder if I can find a way to hang out there at some point.    

Miasma is used here in terms of psychoanalysis, in which it describes "a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual."  Gabriel's organizational miasma infects all those who work in an organization.  He bases the development of this idea on a case study of an organization that has gone through a sudden and disruptive transformation that threw out an established organization narrative, culture and people in favor of something meant to modernize the organization and make it more competitive. One thing I like about Gabriel's stated approach is that he wants to use trauma to develop observations about what might be considered more normal conditions, in tune with an approach to psychoanalysis in which normal behavior contains within it elements shared with psychotic behavior, and studying extreme behavior provides insights on understanding everyday behavior.  I believe the issues of depression and dispossession are very common, and not limited to organizations that have engaged in spectacular attacks on the previous order, or which have particularly mismanaged changes. 

It is also the case that a cult of change controls much management thinking.  Management and organization theory seem to presuppose the need for transformation of organizations, and elevate "transformative" leadership to the highest rank. I've lived with this most of my career in management, having entered business school in years dominated by anxiety over competition from Japan.  That anxiety has led to successor anxieties reliably. 

The characteristics of miasma are devaluing and objectifying the individual (employees and customers), absence of will to resist, self-criticism, devaluing the past, absence of stories and narratives about the past, feelings of inadequacy and uncleanness. (Gabriel p 1142).  He describes it as a disease that  "undermines people’s faith in their gods, their institutions and their identity" (p 1148).

Why is this happening--at the crux Gabriel draws from the work of the next person I need to add to my list to check out, Howard Stein, one of whose books is Nothing personal, just business: A guided journey into organizational darkness (Quorum 2001). He fingers the problem as misplaced faith in organizations as source of immortality, and people sacrifice themselves psychically.  "But the gods of the bottom line are implacable. They demand human sacrifices...the religion of the bottom line acknowledges no permanent authority, no human is too important to be dispensed with when his or her usefulness is over. This creates an ethos of survivalism – a constant anxiety over each individual’s and each organization’s ability to survive in what is construed as an environment of endless terrors and turbulence" (Gabriel 1143). 

Gabriel sees some origins in the neo-liberal shift of the 80s, but I think it goes back further--like Sandberg and Catlaw, I'll point to the secularization of religious values as an effective but problematic underpinning of capitalism as per Weber. I'm working on Harvey's book on neo-liberalism and will write on that soon.  I think that from a British perspective, the 80s are more clearly a watershed than in the US, where the move towards more social responsibility is something of a departure from old norms. 

One thing that is interesting is that if you are in fact a dinosaur and still engaged with traditional religion, you hardly see your organization as representing immortality.  In a denomination like Presbyterian, the existential threat is just over the horizon.  It is hard to imagine the denomination existing in 50 years, and one wonders what will happen to its values and ideas for what they are worth. Instead, it engages you a project of resistance, and asks that you commit yourself to actively build identity and institutions, and a place for God--physically, organizationally, socially, and politically. 

The description above about an environment of "endless terrors and turbulence"--that's the starting point for Marcuse, but now cast not in terms of nuclear annihilation, but a more pervasive and pernicious terror that is nearly the explicit content of the generally understood employment contract.