Uncanny organization and the immanence of crisis: the public sector, neoliberalism, and Covid-19

Abstract

This paper uses the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny to develop a new perspective on crisis, one that challenges its association with turning points and opportunities. It highlights the immanence of crisis in organizational life. Crises under consideration include the historic Covid-19 global pandemic, and examples of crisis in public sector organizations shaped by neoliberalism. Engaging with the work of Julia Kristeva, the uncanny is explored as an integral part of our subjectivities, one which disrupts our social stabilities and patterns of organizing. A montage of autoethnographic vignettes is assembled to illustrate the eruption of the uncanny unconscious, a dynamic that unsettles our routine impositions of order and control. Examining crisis through the lens of the uncanny brings to the fore the elusive and affective aspects of socio-political and organizational life. This perspective draws us away from an understanding of crisis as a passing phenomenon or as an opening that can be instrumentalized for cunning managerial purposes. Instead, it suggests the more radical insight that crisis is a condition of organizing.