Editorial

Citation

Magala, S. (2007), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2007.02320eaa.001

Editorial

Emotions do not have an easy life in general, and in organizations they tend to be discriminated against. Women, who have been traditionally attributed with a more developed emotional and social intelligence, still face more glass ceilings than men, who are less frequently suspected of being emotionally or socially intelligent. Perhaps, this is the result of a widespread hypocrisy. We all understand how powerful emotions are in determining both a choice of a cup of tea and of a leader, a partner for life and a colleague for a project. We also know that our activities and plans about sex and power generate the strongest emotions. We all understand very well that sex and power matter, but we are relieved when fellow academic researchers point out that nobody managed to make research on sex and power respectable. Power studies were unable to prevent individuals and movements from high-jacking even the most sublime and fertile ideas. Marx had stumbled upon the most exciting applications of Darwin's concept of evolution to the reality of social processes. However, after the first excitement with the productive forces, which make everything solid melt into thin air and with the class struggles, which put historical reason on a battle-horse, admiration for historical materialism cooled down. Ideology of non-ideological political reason turned out to be as good a window dressing for a totalitarian state and industrialized genocide as racial, religious or any other ideologies of the past. Power still attracts research attention, but a mix of cynicism and criticism never reaches revolutionary boiling point of no return. Freud had stumbled upon interesting practice of increasing an individual's orientation in his or her dark corners of the soul. He formulated brilliant hypotheses about the fine balance between the costs of maintaining civilization, which taxes us with self-policing censorship of ourselves and the benefits of a genuine development of a truly, freely and creatively socialized individual. Again, it soon turned out that Freud's great ideas are no guarantee that his followers will manage to continue peaceful cooperation among themselves and with the rest of the academic and therapeutic establishments. Eventually Freud had been gently but decisively expelled from the house of science, which worries psychoanalysts until today:

If the sphere of biology is what is somatic and without meaning, and the sphere of psychology is what is mental regardless of its physicality, then the psychical, as the site of their interchange, must contain elements of both. It must be conceived as physical without being devoid of meaning, and psychological without being non-bodily. Since, these are properties which are normally defined against each other, Freud's `science of psychoanalysis' stands for their potential compatibility. Its true foundational principles must be both empirical and hermeneutic. In the face of Freud's idiosyncratic metapsychological vision, for Habermas as for Grünbaum and for Nagel, the question of the relation between the causality of intention and the causality of matter arises anew (Gomes, 2005).

Needless to say, emotions do survive, flourish and matter, as some theoreticians of organizations and organizing know at least since Freud, and most since the first book publications of Kets de Vries on demons and leadership, Joanne Martin on suppression of gender conflict in organizations and Yiannis Gabriel on unconscious outbursts of emotions discovered when we analyze organizations “in depth.”

This is why Michaela Driver analyzes suffering, which goes on in organizations and powerfully colors and influences the sensemaking patterns. It also shapes overall spirituality of the workplace. Virpi-Liisa Kykyri focuses on an ambiguous consulting practice of shaping “tricky situations,” in which emotional negotiation and control of criticism, blame, shame and guilt play a major role and can even facilitate interactional build-up of change dynamics. Arthur Sementelli focuses on metaphors we live by in public organizations and tries to investigate the possible uses of the mass culture as a repertory of future metaphors (his choice is Robocop, not exactly the daily fare of organizational “imaginizing” these days). Janet Sayers examines the language of a popular management book (Lovemarks) in order to perform rhetorical analysis and produce a pastiche, a satirical parody of commodity fetishism and managerialism embedded in mainstream publications. Donald McCormick tries to broaden Goffman's dramaturgical analysis of the theatre of daily life – as it is performed on organizational stages (racial and gender harassment in a public organization play a prominent role in casting and plotting). Chris Shanley takes us to the managerial navigation of an organizational change in residential aged care industry – a branch of services, which undergoes dramatic changes at the moment under the powerful pressure from pension funds, insurance companies, governments and the aging professionals. Finally, Mitchell Lee Marks tries to present the hidden dialectics of mergers, acquisitions, downsizings and restructurings and tries to work out consulting and managerial methodologies for providing people with emotional support as the essential ingredient of organizational renewal. Long live emotions?

Rotterdam, March 20, 2007

Slawomir Magala

ReferenceGomes, L. (2005), The Freud Wars, Routledge, New York, NY, p. 73.