ABSTRACT

As we observed in our introductory chapter, recent thought on the role of the erotic in organizations has broken with orthodox modernist accounts of the need to suppress sexuality and intimacy, urging instead that sex be recognized as an unavoidable feature of workplace life, and arguing that it can perhaps provide the basis for re-energized relationships between work colleagues (Pringle 1989; Burrell 1992a; Hines 1992; Gherardi 1995). In this body of thinking which, following Burrell, we term reeroticization theory, the possibility of eroticized organizations emerges not just as a potential, but as a prescription. Although it has roots in the work of Reich (1969, 1972) and Marcuse (1968, 1969), such thought is also influenced by the more recent and arguably postmodernist theorizing of Cixous (1988) and Baudrillard (1990, 1993a, 1993b). In this chapter we aim to draw together these disparate sources so as to provide an outline of contemporary re-eroticization theory at the present time. We also identify its key theoretical flaws, but suggest that neither re-eroticization theory nor the criticisms that can be levelled at it explicitly address what we see as being the major tension underlying the different perspectives on eroticization-that is, their contrasting understandings of the nature of desire. Thus we outline in some detail our treatment of desire from a different theoretical perspective to the prevailing Freudian construction of desire as lack, one informed by the work of Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari in particular. Importantly for our purposes here, this allows us to investigate the dark side of desire, especially as it pertains to organization, and the ways in which death and the erotic are inextricably linked through dynamics of growth, change and loss. It also permits us to address Burrell’s (1997:236) retrospective take on his own work in his statement that ‘it is extremely difficult to see how re-eroticization could be progressed. Indeed it is not even clear that it should be progressed.’ That is to say, in exploring the question of whether work organizations can ever be eroticized, we also ask whether they can ever be de-eroticized, and we do this through a consideration of the role of transgression in cultural formations of desire.