ABSTRACT
In chapter 1, we examined the workings of the abject in the psychology of the individual manager; in chapter 2, we considered a collective manifestation of and response to it; and, in chapter 3, we looked at an example of the social regulation of the abject and its effects. In this chapter, we focus again on the abject and the ways in which it disturbs the boundaries of ‘normal’ organizing, but here we look at the labour of those individuals who have to work with it beyond the point of prohibition. Such work, located as it is in the space of the abject, raises important issues for our overall argument given that, according to Bataille and as established earlier, work more generally is part of the process by which we (ultimately unsuccessfully) ‘flee’ from death. The abject therefore has no legitimate place in work, because it is the abject which reminds us of, or brings us close to, the experience of death, the point at which we plunge back into the ‘concrete totality’ from which we originally emerged, losing self, individuality, meaning, role and function in the process.
