Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma

Introduction

Psychoanalytic ideas have been widely contested, rejected and assimilated by different fields of the human and social sciences as well as by wider culture. The therapeutic ethos augured by psychoanalysis now suffuses wide areas of mass culture, just as the sexual symbolism of everyday objects to which it pointed its sights has now become the sine qua non of contemporary consumerism. The field of biography has been re-orientated to include minuscule detail of the heroine’s or villain’s early childhood, comfortable in the assumption that many subsequent triumphs and aberrations can be traced in the infant’s experiences. Several of the human sciences have embraced or assimilated the concept of the unconscious, as Foucault reminds us, as ‘what is there and yet is hidden’ (Foucault, 1966, p. 374), yet, paradoxically maybe (and psychoanalysis teaches us to be very suspicious of paradoxes), much of academic psychology today faces firmly towards what is not hidden.

Organizational theory has treated psychoanalysis as an interesting, occasionally witty or slightly wild, guest at its party. Some psychoanalytic concepts have filtered into wider discourses of organizations and some psychoanalytic theories discover points of contact with non-psychoanalytic discourses. Academic conferences and journals occasionally run special events, like the present one, seeking to promote a wider cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic and organizational theories, making some notable but localized contributions. In general, it would be fair to say that psychoanalysis, in spite of such efforts, has had a modest impact on mainstream discourses and arguments regarding organizations.

A substantial spectrum of the psychoanalytic perspectives on organizations has addressed organizational ‘pathologies’ – phenomena that are seen as unusual, dysfunctional, damaging and painful for organizations and their stakeholders. A sizeable amount of this literature has used terms from individual pathology, such as narcissism, paranoia, schizophrenia and perversion, to describe collective states of mind, conscious and unconscious (see, e.g., Long, 2008). A sub-set of this literature has been linked to quasi-therapeutic interventions aimed at returning pathological organizations to some state of normality that echoes Freud’s aim of ‘transforming … neurotic misery into everyday unhappiness’ (Freud & Breuer, 1895, p. 393, emphasis in the original). This has prompted Gabriel and Carr (2002) to distinguish between two contrasted psychoanalytic perspectives on organizations, namely, ‘Studying organizations psychoanalytically’ and ‘Psychoanalysing organizations’.

Theorists adopting the former approach have sought to study organizations as dominant elements of Western society and culture, examining their demands on individuals, their influence on interpersonal relations in and out of work, their effects on people’s emotional lives and the manner in which they feature in people’s fantasies and dreams. A whole range of organizational phenomena can be approached in this manner, including leadership, group dynamics, insults and jokes, sexual harassment, psychological contracts and obedience, and so forth (see, e.g., Gabriel, 1991, 1998b, 1999; Schwartz, 1987, 1990; Sievers, 1986, 1994).

The second approach starts from a more pragmatic concern, seeking to psychoanalyse organizations as though they were ailing patients. If psychoanalysis can return a patient to normal functioning, can it not be used as a method of organizational intervention, enhancing organizational functioning? Organizational interventions seek to identify repressed forces, such as rivalries, fears of failure, anger over betrayals, disappointments and frustrations, which systematically inhibit collaboration, creativity, harmony and organizational performance and to redress them. Following important work on groups by Bion (Bion, 1961), this approach was pioneered at the Tavistock Institute in London (see, e.g., Jaques, 1952; Menzies Lyth, 1988; Miller, 1976; Trist & Bamforth, 1951), and in the United States, by scholars such as Levinson, Zaleznik, Hirschhorn, Diamond, Stein, Krantz and theorists/consultants associated with the William Alanson White Institute (eee, e.g., Diamond, 1993; Hirschhorn, 1988; Levinson, 1968/1981; Zaleznik, 1977).

Certain theorists (e.g. Baum, 1987; Diamond, 1993; Driver, 2003; Fotaki, 2006; Hirschhorn, 1988; Sievers, 1999; M. Stein, 2007a, 2007b) have sought to combine the two approaches, in the tradition of early psychoanalysis which aimed to derive insights about what is viewed as ‘normal’ from studies of neurosis, perversion and irrationality, based on the assumption that normality itself is an ‘ideal fiction’ (Freud, 1937, p. 231). According to this view, no individual is perfectly normal: both in their actions and in their thoughts, people behave in strange, unpredictable, destructive, and even ‘mad’ ways. Scratch beneath the surface of any person and you will discover madness, neurosis and ‘abnormality’. The line between normal and pathological is a shifting, precarious and socially constructed one, as is evident when specific conditions (ranging from masturbation and homosexuality to dyslexia and shyness) cross the line and are reclassified. This is the approach taken by this paper, one that starts with a discussion of a specific organization that many would describe as toxic, dysfunctional or pathological, to derive knowledge and insights into less extreme forms of organizational unwell-being and also into the factors that prevent many other organizations from lapsing into similar extreme symptoms. In this regard the paper follows a structure not dissimilar to the one established by Freud in his case studies – where the symptoms of a particular patient, Dora, the Wolfman or little Hans, present the analyst with a series of puzzles and riddles that call for interpretation and elucidation, which, in turn, advance theory building and lead to some more or less speculative conclusions. The unit of analysis of this paper will remain stubbornly the organization; although reference will be made to specific actors, the processes and phenomena described here are collective ones and cannot be attributed to individual psychopathologies.

The paper’s destination is to develop, with the help of psychoanalytic ideas as well as concepts drawn from studies of ritual and purification and ancient Greek tragedy, a theory of organizational miasma, a concept that describes a contagious state of pollution, material, psychological, moral and spiritual, that afflicts all who work in particular organizations. Miasma will be offered not as another organizational metaphor, a prism through which to view organizations. Instead, I will delineate the fundamental dynamics of organizational miasma as a theoretical concept that accounts for and explains certain puzzling qualities in specific organizations. These include an experience of pollution and uncleanliness, an incapacitating ethos of self-criticism, an inability to maintain boundaries between public and private lives, a silencing of organizational stories, a compulsive scapegoating and, above all, a paralysis of resistance. Using the concept of miasma, I will propose that attempts to cleanse such organizations, eliminate the pathologies and return them to health often lead to an intensification of these pathologies.

An Organizational Case Study

Respecting the suffering of people in profound distress presents the theorist of organizations with far greater challenges than the challenges facing psychologists and researchers who study individuals. With organizations it is all too easy for the anonymity of the organization to be broken by virtue of one or two significant details that are vital for analysis but make the identification of the organization possible. I have made every effort in the narrative that follows to protect the confidentiality of the organization and people I describe; hence I have altered certain significant details, without, I believe, altering the underlying patterns. I have also, of necessity, had to be more vague about my own involvement with the organization in question than I would have liked, for exactly the same reasons. It is an organization which I had an opportunity to observe over a number of years, as a stakeholder; I was able to conduct numerous interviews and conversations with almost all its members and participated in many meetings and events.

The organization in question was a semi-autonomous part of a larger and prestigious group in a knowledge-intensive industry, employing approximately 60 highly skilled professionals and a larger number of support staff. The organization had undergone a sudden and dramatic change, following the arrival of a new leader who had overseen a move to a spectacular new building and had initiated a total overhaul of all of the organization’s symbols, logos, publicity materials and website, as well as many of its products. A sharp discontinuity separated the new organization from the old, whose leader had been prematurely retired and never reappeared on the premises.

The past was vilified as a period of institutionalized mediocrity that was unsustainable. According to the new leader’s rhetoric, it had been a time of cheerful and messy indulgence that had led to underperformance and declining standards. The old organization, the new leader argued, had tolerated far too many eccentric and erratic artisans who had failed to keep up with the times, and the time was now ripe for a radical shake-up which would unleash the organization’s true potential, one that would raise it to world-class status. As a result, some individuals were offered ‘generous severance packages’. The alternative would have been that their lives would have ‘become difficult’. Nearly all of those approached accepted these packages. Several more came forward asking if they too were eligible and, after cursory discussions, many of them started to leave too. Some of them were older individuals opting for early retirement or new independent careers as freelance consultants. Others became refugees to more hospitable environments of competitors who were pleased to hire them. Most of those who left had been valued individuals with strong reputations. Yet, their departures were mostly unceremonial and their legacy forgotten with indecent haste. Later, I heard it said repeatedly that they had not been up to the standards expected by the new regime. Within two years of the changes, nearly two-thirds of the old workforce had left.

A feature of the new regime was its very considerable preoccupation with image, sometimes at the expense of substance. Inordinate amounts of time were spent in meetings to determine and enforce a house style in all communications, presentations to external bodies, relations with customers and so forth, and truly vast amounts of money were spent on rebranding, PR and presentation. Consistent with this preoccupation with image was the incessant repetition of the official institutional story with its well-rehearsed signifiers, such as ‘excellence’, ‘cutting edge’ and ‘world class’. This was essentially an aspirational story – a wish-fulfilling balancing act between where the organization would like to be and a sense that it was there already. In this official story, many of the organization’s participants featured as stars, internationally known celebrities in their fields, innovative, adventurous and totally outstanding.

Yet, what I observed in many top meetings that I attended was quite different. Far from being treated as stars, I was struck by the extensive ‘objectification’ of employees, who were treated as pawns on a chess-board, arranged and rearranged, deployed, redeployed and discarded with no regard to any desires or aspirations of their own. The organization’s customers too were regularly subjected to this kind of objectification, treated as resources to be used and exploited. The short-hand way of expressing this objectification was that people were ‘treated without respect’. Yet, what I found remarkable was that many of the employees who were victims of this objectification adopted it fatalistically for themselves. Many came to view themselves as objects of no intrinsic value but merely as resources adding or failing to add value to the organization. Their stories were silenced by an ethos that stressed that if one did not wish to be part of the organization’s new story, one had no place in it. And this was the case for many.

An outstanding characteristic of the new organization was the constant undermining of individuals’ self-confidence by the very fetishization of the organization’s new image. A pernicious critical ethos installed itself in the organization, one that affected nearly every person I had an opportunity to talk to and many activities. Its core message was ‘X is not good enough’, where X could stand for a person, an activity, a department, groups of customers, suppliers, etc. This criticism was rarely rationally driven – for example, unsuccessful projects had often evaded criticism and become ‘no-go areas’ of discussion; yet, many routine and successful activities came to be criticized as flawed and ineffective. People too were criticized, by focusing on whatever aspect of their performance could be criticized, no matter how effective or successful they were in everything else they did. Many of them were said to be ‘past their sell-by date’, a term I found especially distasteful.

As with objectification, criticism became internalized and part of the way many employees came to view themselves. Constantly measuring themselves against the idealized standards of the official story, the stars, the celebrities, the world leaders, it was not surprising that they found themselves lacking in some way or another. As a result, a widely felt depression afflicted many participants and was apparent but not generally discussed. People rarely smiled and rarely joked. Occasionally feeble black jokes surfaced, lacking the rebellious and original qualities of real humour. Even among the higher leadership echelons, feelings of doom and gloom regularly prevailed, often associated with the futility of fighting the wider organizational bureaucracy or the competitors’ ability to succeed in projects at which this organization was failing.

The organization’s shiny glass building was originally meant to symbolize the transition from the organization’s indulgent and artisanal past to its modern and self-confident future. Instead, it became the focus of constant griping. People frequently complained of breathing difficulties, headaches and other physical symptoms, which they attributed to the hot and stagnant air and the failure of the air-conditioning system. For prolonged periods, a putrid smell pervaded the building, caused by faulty sewerage pipes and blocked drains, contributing to a sense of failure and decay.

Finding oneself in such an organization one may initially believe that one can keep it at arm’s length, that one can maintain a purely instrumental relation to it, safeguarding one’s personal and family lives from its effects. This, however, quickly dissolves as barriers and barricades prove inadequate to stop uncomfortable feelings of colluding and being compromised through this collusion. Discussions with numerous members of this organization revealed self-doubts, self-criticisms and profound feelings of uncleanliness. Eventually such feelings affected most things one did or thought. Participants reported the dramatic transformation in their sleeping patterns which become saturated with nightmares – a central theme of these nightmares was an impostor syndrome (Kets de Vries, 2005) revolving around inadequacy, exposure and shame. Acute anxiety attacks were common upon waking up. A tendency to spend more and more time on the premises of the organization along with an inability to do creative or original work while being there was also reported.

One especially interesting feature was the gradual decline of organizational storytelling. While the old building had been abuzz with stories, banter and gossip, the shining public spaces of the new building rarely hosted any informal conversations or filled with laughter; in the tiny, claustrophobic private offices, staff could occasionally be seen conversing in whispers; many of these whispered conversations concerned the imminent departures of yet more staff or the latest directive, target or missive from the organization’s head. Griping was a regular feature of these conversations. I was surprised by the absence of any angry or defiant narratives, any tragic stories or any nostalgic recreations of the golden past. A profound silence surrounded people’s actual experiences, rarely broken by very brief escapes into black humour or knowing nods. Just as some people succumb to an incurable illness by allowing it to colonize and monopolize every aspect of their life story, writing itself into every episode and every judgement, the organization’s ‘state of mind’ (Long, 2008) would appear to colour most moods, interpretations and judgements.

Overall, I would describe the feelings I observed as a profound sense of dejection and loss of self-esteem, a lowered level of energy and interest with corresponding inhibition of activity, and a strong expectation of punishment that closely match the symptoms noted by Freud in his article on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). What was remarkable was the sudden and complete transformation of those who had been competent, outgoing and active into self-doubting and inward-looking people almost paralysed by fear, self-doubt and self-criticism. While the term ‘burn-out’ may have been used to describe some of these symptoms, there is one circumstance that mitigates against its use – many of the individuals afflicted by it made very complete recoveries as soon as they left the organization and moved to other jobs. This is something that I had numerous opportunities to observe – their recovery was almost as sudden and complete as their collapse. There were, however, certain individuals who never recovered.

Organizational Darkness

Against a background of staff constantly and unceremoniously departing, willingly or unwillingly, the main features of the case that make it especially interesting to the theorist of organizations can be summarized as follows:

In explaining these symptoms, I first turned to the wide-ranging literature that deals with the psychological consequences of downsizing and job loss. A substantial amount was inspired by the extensive round of dislocation undergone by many industrial societies but especially the United States in the 1990s (Ehrenreich, 2005; Uchitelle, 2006). One theorist who has made a considerable contribution to the psychological and social damage caused by these phenomena has been Howard F. Stein, a psychoanalytic anthropologist who carried out research in numerous organizations undergoing downsizing. In Euphemism, spin, and the crisis in organizational life, Stein (1998) argued that the very terms used to denote the phenomena under investigation are euphemisms that represent not a ‘social construction of reality’ but a systematic assault on meaning. Terms such as ‘downsizing’, ‘rightsizing’, ‘RIF’ (reduction in force), ‘managed health’, ‘re-engineering’ and so forth are not merely attempts to conceal the bleak and brutal realities of many American workplaces, but defile the human spirit, by forcing on it a seemingly unanswerable logic of markets, economic necessity and bottom lines.

In the follow-up, Nothing personal, just business: A guided journey into organizational darkness, Stein (2001) argues that the unanswerable logic of markets, economic necessity and bottom lines becomes a new fundamentalist religion that turns organizations into a place of darkness, where emotional brutality is commonplace and different forms of psychological violence, dehumanization, including degradation, humiliation and intimidation, have become the norm. Behind calls for flexibility among the employees, Stein sees the rise of the religion of the bottom line as one which is oblivious to all human values and blind to all suffering but demands constant sacrifices. Stein’s use of the word ‘religion’ is neither accidental nor a euphemism – instead, it captures the nature of a misplaced faith that organizations can give their loyal worshippers a taste of immortality. Whereas in previous eras, religion had offered some consolation, meaning and a promise of salvation, people now turn to work and the world of seemingly immortal organizations for immortality. Inasmuch as they are part of long-standing, powerful organizations, people feel that they too share a part of this immortality. But the gods of the bottom line are implacable. They demand human sacrifices. Immortality requires that those who fail to add value be dispensed with. They are the ‘collateral damage’. No suffering and no savagery is too great, so long as it is justified by the bottom line. People become dispensable pawns, resources to be used, exploited and discarded. Today’s exploiter becomes tomorrow’s discarded pawn, since 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. A small drop in profits is instantly seen as an omen of a cosmic force boding disaster and calling for sacrifices. Immediately, the eye is cast to spot the suitable sacrificial lamb, the next candidate for downsizing and ‘RIFing’.

There is a fair literature, both psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic, on different forms of organizational oppression, bullying and humiliation (Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006; Czarniawska, 2002; Diamond, 1997; Faÿ, 2008; Fineman, 2003; Fortado, 1998; Frost & Robinson, 1999; Gabriel, 1998a; Martin, 2000; Pearson, Andersson, & Wegner, 2001; Sims, 2003; M. Stein, 2000, 2007b; Vidaillet, 2008). What makes H. F. Stein’s contribution especially interesting is the link that he offers between public humiliation and private emotional experience of being worthless and feeling guilty. He argues that the religion of the bottom-line (like some other religions) grows on the systematic dissemination of the belief that no-one is good enough – no employee is good enough, no venture is good enough, no action is good enough (Bunting, 2004). Of course all organizations inflict blows to our narcissism (Gabriel, 1999), but what we have here is a sequence of blows to our entire personhood, the product of a principle of managed social and organizational change whose model, Stein insists, is nothing short of the holocaust. Images from the holocaust saturate Stein’s observations of corporate America, which he documents in a sequence of hugely impressive case studies. The core equation for Stein is an experiential and emotional one:

Organizational darkness is not the fact of the ‘symbolic’ equation of the American workplace and the Holocaust, but the emotional experience of the workplace that makes the metaphor – and certain recurrent others – plausible and, for many, emotionally apt and ‘right.’ (Stein, 2001, p. 15)

Whichever part of the corporate landscape Stein casts his eye on, he observes the same experiences – a pervasive sense of helplessness coupled with a systematic turning of a blind eye (‘Business as usual, nothing personal’), a recurring surfacing of apocalyptic images of annihilation, a naturalization of a pseudo-clinical language of death (‘dead wood’, ‘dead meat’, ‘excess fat’, ‘targeting’ etc.) and, above all, a constant split between good and evil, useful and useless, deserving and undeserving, healthy and diseased.

Stein’s symbolic equation of the brutalities of corporate America with the sufferings of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, politicos and others at the hands of the Nazis is undoubtedly one for which he may be challenged; it is also one of which he is himself acutely aware and repeatedly addresses. Does it not diminish the Nazi brutality and the suffering of its victims to have it compared with the less complete suffering of the victims of corporate America? Further, does it not obliterate vital distinctions of politics to equate Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish problem with the regular changes in labour force dictated by new technologies, new markets and new competitors? Stein’s resolute view is that terror is terror and symbolism is real. ‘Corporate cleansing’ is not just analogous to ‘ethnic cleansing’ but they both rely on the same psychodynamic processes, which view the survival of the whole (the organization, the society, the nation) as depending on ‘the expulsion of unwanted parts’ (Stein, 2001, p. 69). Stein views the grotesque lament of Hans Frank, the odious Governor General of Poland under the Nazis, as emblematic of modern management: ‘My only wish of the Jews is that they should disappear.’ What today’s manager wants is that the weak, the ineffectual, the recalcitrant, the ones who fail the excellence test and do not add value, should simply disappear. Thus, Stein maintains that

even though American-style organizational totalitarianism [from the 1980’s through the present] has primarily symbolic casualties, they are casualties of terror nonetheless. One should never say that these are ‘only’ the victims of psychological oppression. And even though most of those who have been disposed of [via downsizing and other forms of ‘managed social change’] are resilient and find other jobs (usually of lesser pay, benefits, and status), they carry the emotional scars of betrayal and of having been treated as inanimate ‘dead wood’ or as ‘fat’ to be trimmed. Once we recognize the official language of economics to be the smokescreen that it is, we have no trouble in discerning the brutality – even sadism – that it has obscured. (Stein, 2007, p. 18)

A vicious circle is thus established, one in which attempts to cleanse the organization of toxicity, end up reinforcing it.

The Nazi Genocide as Ritual Sacrifice and Purification

It is this link between genocide, ethnic cleansing and ritual purification that forms the backbone of Robert Jay Lifton’s (1986) study of the Nazi genocide in The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. How is it possible, asks Lifton, that a large number of German physicians, some with Nobel prizes, could have spearheaded a campaign that started with forced sterilization and culminated in the genocide of millions of people? Lifton’s core argument is that genocide was an attempt to purify Germany from what was seen as the contagious sickness represented by the Jews, the Gypsies and all other social pathogens. Doctors colluded and even spearheaded this in the belief that they were helping heal the nation’s body by ridding it of pathogens. Following World War I, Germans experienced an immense sense of loss, followed by a failed regeneration and a ‘collective desperation for a cure’. Killing, like ritual sacrifice, then emerged as the attempt to rid the nation of the pollution represented by the Jews, the Gypsies and others who have infected it. The perpetrators of genocide, argues Lifton, thought that purification would restore Germany to wholeness and perfection. ‘Genocide is a response to collective fear of pollution and defilement. It depends upon an impulse toward purification resembling that given collective expression in primitive cultures’ (Lifton, 1986, p. 481). But this is also the impulse noted by Stein in his case studies – the religion of the ‘bottom line’ requires sacrifices to purify the body of the organization from the ineffective and those who fail to add value. And in the highly image-conscious organization I delineated earlier, this same impulse may have led to the belief that if only the unwanted parts (those that ‘tarnish the brand’) could be gotten rid of, the organization would shine like a beacon of pure light, coupled with the sudden realization that the unwanted parts could be gotten rid of.

Lifton’s argument (which finds strong support in later work on ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ by holocaust historian Saul Friedländer, 1997) relies on two features of the Nazi genocide – medical fundamentalism that cast physicians as the vanguard in the struggle for national purification, and bureaucracy that, as others have also noted, created ‘absolute barriers of thought and feeling between [genocide] and the outside world’ (Lifton, 1986, p. 496). Similar phenomena can be observed in the world of organizations – the vanguard of the assault on the ineffective and weak is constituted by various downsizing gurus and their prophets, ‘Chainsaw Al’ and ‘Neutron Jack’. Walls of silence, shame and anger separate off those who are discarded from those temporarily safe. As we noted earlier, there is a fundamental difference between killing people and dismissing them from their jobs. Nothing can match the horrors of the numerous genocides that have punctuated the last 100 years. Yet, the symbolic function of purification can be performed in many different ways (Stokes & Gabriel, 2010).

The link between genocide, killing and purification knows countless manifestations. Following events in Bosnia in the 1990s, the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has assumed its place in the vocabulary of distasteful euphemisms for genocide. ‘Mopping up’ or ‘cleansing operations’ is a term used to describe the work of humanitarian organizations that are involved in mitigating the worst consequences of catastrophes, whether caused by humans as in Rwanda or by nature as in New Orleans, Pakistan, Iran and countless other places. It is notable that outsourcing of such ‘cleansing operations’ by governments allows them to ‘wash their hands’ of any possible involvement in causing the disasters in the first place. What we find in these cases are attempts to lift an affliction through what are presented as purification measures. In every instance, the aim of these measures is to lift the miasma, and in every instance, as we shall proceed to show presently, the consequence is its perpetuation and deepening.

Organizational Miasma and Toxicity

Miasma is a term that emerges from Greek tragedy. It is a term regularly used to describe a family, a city or a venture in the grip of disease, disorder and fear. It is a highly toxic state of affairs capable of afflicting everybody and of corrupting the institutional and moral fabric of a social unit. The cause of the miasma, as Parker (1983), a classicist who has carried out the major theoretical work on the topic, argues, is often attributed to a single individual who has offended a deity by defiling a sacral command or by breaking a vow. In Sophocles’s Theban trilogy, Oedipus brings miasma to Thebes through his unwitting transgressions of parricide and incest. Oedipus is the miasma – he is the bringer of desolation, devastation, disease and death to his city (Sophocles, 1984, esp. verses 22–30).

Miasma goes well beyond physical or even moral uncleanliness, indicating an affliction that is enduring and cannot be washed away, although certain actions are taken to deal with it. It is a state of rottenness for which individuals may be responsible and are certainly held to be responsible, but that afflicts the entire state. A fundamental property of miasma is that it is highly contagious. The individual who brings miasma infects everyone he or she touches. Vegetti argues that

it is a sin that goes beyond the ordinary legal and moral limits and brings divine vengeance on the head of the guilty person, spreading out to affect the whole community … and passing inexorably from one generation to the next. The idea of miasma probably has a concrete origin, representing the filthy, soiled state of someone who lives outside the standards of his or her community. In its most powerful sense, it refers to the bloodstained hands of the murderer or the sores of someone who might be seen as the victim of divine punishment. (Vegetti, 1995, p. 260)

Once unleashed, the miasma is capable of afflicting everyone but also of sparing some people, or, as Dodds eloquently puts it, it operates ‘with the same ruthless indifference to motive as a typhoid germ’ (1968, p. 36).

Miasma, like toxicity, a concept developed in the sphere of organizations by Mark Stein (2007b), coincides with an unconscious fantasy of being been polluted by toxic substances. But miasma goes beyond mere toxicity in three significant ways: first, it is highly contagious; second, miasma, unlike toxicity, cannot be metabolized or neutralized through the deployment of suitable defensive mechanisms; and third, it generates a self-reinforcing vicious cycle, where attempts at purification deepen the condition. Thus, miasma brings about a state of moral and spiritual decay, a corruption of all values and human relations of trust, love and community – people suspect their neighbours of being the cause, scapegoating and witch hunts are rife.

It is not accidental that the idea of miasma found a hospitable discourse in medicine where, over a number of centuries, it was considered as the cause of medical infection, carried by putrid, poisonous vapours, identifiable by their foul smell. This theory reached its peak in the 19th century when it was used to explain the spread of cholera in large metropolitan centres and initiated a series of sanitary measures (Halliday, 2001). Like many theories, it had numerous successful (and beneficial) applications before it was eventually discredited by the discovery that most germs were transmitted through water rather than through air. All the same, some rituals of the miasmatic transmission of disease persist to this day – people ventilate their houses and feel suffocation when they find themselves in enclosed spaces. Contemporary variants of miasma can be found in concerns over toxic fumes and secondary inhalation of tobacco smoke.

It is my contention that the concept of miasma may hold the key to understanding some of the key features in our case study. It readily accounts for the absence of resistance. External violations and threats may be resisted or fought against, but the same can hardly be said for inner violations and decay. In fact, miasma appears to infect resistance itself, compromising it, polluting it and subverting it. Second, miasma accounts for the contagious qualities of depression and the experience of never being ‘good enough’. Third, it accounts for the continuous scapegoating, where the leader is readily seen as the bringer of the miasma. Fourth, the concept of miasma may account for the self-defeating attempts to relieve the condition through constant sacrifices, staff shedding and organizational cleansing. Fifth, and most important, the concept of miasma may account for the profound feelings of uncleanliness and depression, that cannot be defended against through conventional individual or social defences and which violate personal and organizational boundaries.

Theorizing Miasma

In seeking to understand the causes of miasma and the attempts to deal with it, Parker (1983) has used the classic work of van Gennep (1960) and Mary Douglas (1966 [2002]; 1975) to argue that miasma is a state of pollution that is likely to happen in periods of sudden and severe transition from one state to another. Thus, the numerous rituals that accompany birth, death and marriage are intended to prevent the possibility of pollution, which in Douglas’s (1966 [2002]) terms is a general property of ‘the betwixt and between’. Of particular interest in connection with miasma are the funerary rituals, aimed at removing a dead person from the world of the living and consigning him or her to the world of the dead. Mourning, argues Parker, is a period when the living enter the same ‘between’ land as the dead before burial or cremation:

During the period of mourning, a two-way transition occurs; the dead man moves from the land of the living to that of the spirits, while the survivors return from death to life. The last rites finally incorporate the dead and the living in their respective communities. (Parker, 1983, p. 60)

During mourning, familiar pursuits, such as eating, dressing and so on become forbidden or heavily regulated. Unless surrounded by such rituals, persons in transitional positions (corpses before burial, newly born babies before they have been named) as well as those who come into contact with them become dangerous and potential causes of miasma for all others. In organizations, the presence of people who are ‘betwixt and between’, doomed but not yet departed, may represent a similar source of miasma, in the absence of the traditional rituals that accompany people’s arrivals and departures. This is a feature which H. F. Stein (2007) has emphasized, as indeed have Frost and Robinson (1999). In general, during periods of sudden organizational change, rituals of separation and incorporation may become neglected, allowing contact with ‘walking corpses’. But what exacerbates the miasma is the presence of a ‘murderer’ or ‘murderers’ whose hands are dirty with human blood, irrespective of their motives or rationalizations. As Parker argues, miasma ‘is dangerous, and this danger is not of familiar secular origin. Two typical sources of such a condition are contact with a corpse, or a murderer’ (Parker, 1983, p. 4).

Scapegoating is inextricably linked to miasma – Oedipus was expelled from the city of Thebes to rid her of the pollution he had caused. The Greek ritual of ‘pharmakos’ is a close parallel to Hebrew scapegoating, only it involved the banishment or sacrifice of one of a community’s marginalized members as the price of purification for the rest. In organizations, we are presented with a double scapegoating – the (new) leader scapegoats the old leadership along with the dead wood (the abject (Kristeva, 1982; Lyotard, 1993) or the dirt (Douglas, 1966 [2002]) that it has bequeathed them, viewing the downsizing as the necessary purification ritual which will augur a new beginning. However, the downsizing, the bleeding of an organization by its ruthless leader, is experienced by many organizational members as the true miasma. Hence the leader becomes scapegoated by many of the followers. Leaders in miasmatic organizations, far from embodying Arendt’s (1963) ‘banality of evil’, are viewed as majestic evil-doers, god-like figures whose omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are combined with omnimalevolence. The workers, for their part, become objects pure-and-simple, devoid of aspiration, and fit for deployment, redeployment and discarding. Murderers and corpses fill the spaces of miasmatic organizations. All relations and activities become contaminated. Unlike other instances of organizational brutalization, miasma does not invite resistance, fight and retribution. Instead, it undermines people from within; people lose their confidence and self-esteem, moral integrity evaporates and a moral and psychological corruption sets in. Guilt, shame, inadequacy and depression become endemic, spreading into people’s homes and family lives.

Parker’s theory of miasma finds a psychological parallel in Freud’s well-known essay on melancholia (depression).

The distinguishing features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (Freud, 1917, p. 252)

Freud compares melancholia with mourning and observes many similarities. There is, however, a key difference. In mourning all emotional attachments have to be withdrawn from a lost object that no longer exists. This is done with the help of rituals but above all requires a great deal of psychological work that leaves the mourner exhausted and drained. Melancholia, like mourning, is a response to a loss or a separation, but one where the subject does not know what it is that has been lost. Even when the sufferer is aware of the loss, Freud suggests,

he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. … In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. (Freud, 1917, p. 254)

Freud concluded that in melancholia a split takes place in the ego, where ‘one part of the ego sets itself against the other, judges it critically, and as it were, takes it as its object [of criticism]’ (Freud, 1917, p. 256).

While Freud observed the similarities between mourning and depression, he did not exactly see them as alternatives. This is, however, fairly widely accepted now – depression is seen as setting in when, for any number of reasons, mourning has not been accomplished (Yalom & Yalom, 1998). Following Lindemann’s (1944) pioneering work, many psychologists (e.g. Smelser, 1998) have noted how when a public disaster takes place (Lindemann studied the survivors of a nightclub fire in Boston during World War 2) a sequence of phases of bereavement takes place. Survivors go through various standard phases, notably, (1) denial of the event and the loss, (2) a period of idealization of the lost ones, (3) anger at their disappearance, (4) guilt, self-accusation and blame for ‘not having done enough’, (5) scapegoating others. Eventually, once the proper mourning rituals have been followed, most people are able to overcome their grief and resume their lives, realigning their social and emotional attachments, and forming new routines and new attachments. Similar processes have been observed in other community disasters. In Smelser’s view these phases are also characteristic of many different separations that we experience in life, including divorce, estrangement, moving jobs and houses and so forth.

Now, in the case of organizational miasma, many conditions conspire to prevent mourning and even to disallow and dis-’honor’ it (Meyerson, 2000). The ‘old’ organization, far from being idealized, is routinely vilified as old-fashioned, inefficient, sclerotic, etc. Feelings of loss and grief for the organization that has been changed by an ‘irreversible discontinuity’ are disavowed and repressed. Likewise, old colleagues, leaders, practices and so forth are denigrated as dead wood, behind the times or burnt out. We may hypothesize that organizations especially susceptible to miasma are those undergoing rapid transformation, caught in Douglas’s ‘betwixt and between’. These may include organizations caught in a shift from a public service ethos to a market-driven one or from product-based to customer-based values. However, the crucial factor triggering miasma would be the unseemly dismissals of visible members of staff and the perception of the leadership as having blood on its hands. In the absence of proper mourning, we would expect the scapegoating and ruthlessly self-critical processes noted earlier, leading to a generalized climate of depression, self-reproach, mistrust and suspicion.

Discussion and Conclusion

An organization in a state of miasma reminds us of a city in the grip of a deadly and contagious disease, like the one that afflicted Pericles’ Athens, so brilliantly described by Thucydides (which also profoundly influenced Sophocles’ depiction of Oedipus’ Thebes) or Camus’ Oran in The Plague. In such a city, no-one appears immune, no-one is spared. The disease undermines people’s faith in their gods, their institutions and their identity. Like the disease, the miasma cannot be fought or resisted. Initially, people may think that they can protect themselves or their families by raising barriers and constructing safe refuges. Some people may almost believe that they can continue to live their lives and tell their stories as if the miasma did not exist. But such measures soon prove ineffective and soon the spiral of panic, pollution, scapegoating and depression takes over. One is reminded of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, when it was viewed as the result of divine retribution for sexual corruption; or of the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, when local inhabitants suffered the most debilitating physical, emotional and spiritual consequences, irrespective of the scientists’ reassurances that the magnitude of the toxicity had been exaggerated. More crucially, it reminds us of the toxic social dynamics that afflict entire societies that turn against specific groups, be they political refugees, economic migrants or long-established members of religious or other minorities, as the bringers of pollution and corruption.

Attempts to fight miasma through decisive ‘cleansing’ action are no more successful than attempts to fend it off through the erection of boundaries. Miasma erodes boundaries and silences stories. As noted earlier, members of miasmatic organizations found it impossible to maintain boundaries between life inside and outside work or boundaries between sleeping and waking experiences. Depression and anxiety affected them through and through and spread to others in the familial environment. Organizations in a state of miasma are de facto total institutions, in the enlarged sense that Clegg and his colleagues have proposed:

they surround the person at every turn and cannot be escaped; they produce and reproduce the normalcy of life inside the institution, however abnormal it might seem from outside. Thus, total institutions … contain the totality of the lives of those who are their members. (Clegg et al., 2006, p. 147)

Confronting the absolute certainty of death, different cultures have long sought to provide consolations in numerous ways, most notably through the certainties of faith in particular gods. The Greeks gave up the search for such consolations and ended up with two things, philosophy and tragedy. Philosophy rested on the belief that certainty and truth should be sought in rational argument rather than in divine revelation. Tragedy was the fruit of the discovery that truth is unstable and unable to offer the certainty they, like others, craved. The fate of humanity, as Freud never tired of repeating (Freud, 1927, 1930), is truly tragic. When people act in the confident belief of pursuing their interests, their desires and their aims, they end up with outcomes they had never imagined. There is a vast and tragic discontinuity between the proclaimed intentions of people’s actions and the outcomes of these actions. Suffering in tragedy is not merely incidental, it can never be merely the outcome of a natural disaster, no matter how bad it is, unless the victims can in some way be seen as having brought it down through their own actions, knowingly or unknowingly. Suffering in tragedy is brought about by the actions of the protagonists themselves. Tragedy is never far from human affairs, even if we fail to observe it when it is staring us in the eyes. This is central to all tragedy – the participants’ incapacity to recognize the true significance of what engulfs them. Immersed in illusions, they seek to escape through actions that lead to their escalating entrapment.

Miasma helped the audiences of dramatic performances make sense of the prolonged and undeserved sufferings of the protagonists. It helped them come to terms with the cruelties, injustices and sorrows that they watched on stage. It helped them reach catharsis, an emotional purgation brought about by witnessing terrible things befalling others with no harm to themselves (Nuttall, 1996). The marble seats on which they sat offered a sterile environment protecting them from the toxicity that saturated the heart of the theatre, the orchestra. But for the protagonists of the drama there was no catharsis, only suffering and belated recognition. Catharsis is the privilege of the audiences that witness their suffering, their folly and their downfall. In the organizational theatres that become sites of miasma, there are no spectators (unless maybe visitors from outside, members of other organizations) and therefore there is no catharsis. If this paper has established something, it is that the search for catharsis merely reinforces the miasma.

The point of this paper is not to examine whether and how organizations that find themselves in the grip of a miasma may right themselves. If we return to the vital part played in the dynamics of miasma by the inability to mourn and consequent lapse into depression and scapegoating, it would seem that any attempt to transcend these dynamics must start with a recognition of what has taken place, a recognition of the loss, the pain, the tragedy. Recognition of what has been lost is a precondition for turning depression into mourning, and failed cleansing into partial healing. As psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, who dedicated his life to researching the unconscious dynamics of ethnic and international conflicts and violence, has argued:

Mourning allows us to accept that a loss or a change has occurred. Without mourning we are trapped in the struggle to accept the tragedy and to adjust to life after it. If that struggle is not won, we cannot move on with our lives. We metaphorically remain hiding in the basement after the tornado has passed over and fair weather has returned. An individual, or a society, traumatized deliberately by others has a tendency to remain in the basement. The sense of shame, humiliation, and helplessness may become internalized, which consequently complicates the survivors’ guilt. (Volkan, 2003, p. 82)

Mourning can help people come out of the basement and resume their lives, not without scars, but maybe without open wounds. Learning from societies that have managed to recover from profound trauma, injustice and pain, it may be that some organizations that find themselves in the heart of darkness can move towards the light by acknowledging past injustices without vindictiveness, past mistakes without guilt, and past losses without despair.