SWEENEY, Marc (2018). Absent presence: can psychoanalytic theory contribute to our understanding of strategizing? Doctoral, Sheffield Hallam University.
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Sweeney_2018_DBA_AbsentPresenceCan.pdf - Accepted Version
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Sweeney_2018_DBA_AbsentPresenceCan.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.
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Abstract
This is a critical hermeneutic and psychoanalytic study exploring the question of strategy
absence in a medium-sized professional services firm. The research considered the
position of an organization which deployed a minimal strategy in spite of wide-ranging
and disruptive environmental change. It investigated the phenomenon of the absence of
strategy in this firm from within a subjectivist and interpretivist paradigm using
psychoanalytic theory.
Taking psychoanalytic theory’s premise that much of our experience is out of our
conscious awareness, and that what is unconscious exerts a considerable influence on
perception and behaviour, the research challenge was to investigate strategizing with an
understanding that some of this mental activity is unconscious to the strategist. This
presents both a problem and an opportunity for the organization, it is argued. It is
problematic in the sense that overly rational and instrumental frameworks for
understanding strategic issues will omit unconscious knowledge, which can be potentially
negative for the team engaged in strategy, but it is an opportunity because the
unconscious is a resource that is potentially available to them. Developing awareness of
the unconscious dimension to human perception and behaviour and drawing upon this
resource in strategizing practices is a developmental and reflexive process.
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory locates the unconscious in language and argues that
language itself is unconsciousness. The research is therefore a study of language in the
subject organization as members of the executive team reflect upon the strategic issues
facing them and their possible responses to them. It is argued that in the
unconsciousness of the language used by the senior team there is a presence of
unconscious, sometimes traumatic and difficult, knowledge which prevents the
articulation of strategy, or strategy discourse. This, it is argued is the presence within the
absence of strategy.
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