Abjection, Globalisation, Ethics and organisational dynamics: Lessons from The Sopranos

Abjection, Globalisation, Ethics and Organisational Dynamics: Lessons from The Sopranos
Alexis Downs & Adrian Carr

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside. . . . Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (1980/1982, pp. 1-2) In the opening episode of The Sopranos, a popular television show about the New Jersey Mafia, viewers first see the inverted "V" of a female statue’s legs, framing the mobster Tony Soprano. After suffering an acute anxiety attack, he is visiting a psychiatrist. Threatened by family schisms and by rival gangsters, Tony complains about his mother and reports a dream about a bird that flies away with his penis. Meanwhile, Carmela (Mrs. Tony) Soprano, who is having a spiritual affair with the local priest, says to Tony, "What’s different between me and you is you’re going to hell when you die." The first episode ends with a song: "The beast in me."

The series exudes psychoanalytic themes. We would like to analyze this first episode using the work of the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, particularly her theory of abjection and her essay on psychoanalysis and faith. Our question is this: What can Tony Soprano tell us about the other and how is this directly relevant to organisation studies? Tony is struggling with personal and professional — i.e., inside and outside — boundaries. We started writing this paragraph three days after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center. We are struggling with boundaries — personal, organisational, national, ethnic, religious, economic and legal boundaries. Beginning long before the attack on the Trade Center, our struggle is now violent in exactly the same sense as Tony’s. We are of the view that artefacts of popular culture, like The Sopranos, are commentaries on social issues and as such merit academic attention as they often contain broader implications for social sciences. A meta-theorising moment awaits us. In this case, we find in the first episode of The Sopranos major issues for the reading andreforming of relational dynamics in organisations.

The paper proceeds as follows. After discussing Kristeva’s theory of abjection, we analyze Tony’s abjection. Then we consider Kristeva’s assessment of psychoanalysis and faith in terms of The Sopranos. Finally, we examine the manner in which our discussion of abjection, and the clear examples illustrated in the Sopranos, has significant implications for the field of organisation studies.

The Abject and Abjection

The loving mother, says Kristeva, says to and of her child, "Isn’t he beautiful?" But these words are directed at a Third Party, a paternal presence. In other words, the child hears he is beautiful, but only accepts them if they are said to the Third Party. "Without the maternal ‘diversion’ towards a Third Party, the bodily exchange is abjection or devouring", says Kristeva (1986, p. 251). The point is, as Coats explains, "For the baby to become a subject, the mother must become an object" (2000, p. 291). The development of the subject proceeds with identification of an other through the intervention of the father, or the third party, in the relationship between mother and child. Without that Third Party, the child abjects the mother: i.e., the mother does not become an object other. More importantly, the subject, idealized in Western culture, does not stabilize as a supposedly separate entity. Abjection vitiates the object as well of the emerging subject (Kristeva 2001, p. 72). Kristeva explains,

[Abjection] is above all a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside. The relation to abjection is finally rooted in the combat that every human being carries on with the mother. For in order to become autonomous, it is necessary that one cut the instinctual dyad of the mother and the child and that one become something other. (1996, p. 118)

Kristeva’s notion of the abject and abjection is one of fundamental challenge to the borders that help frame our identity; that notion expresses the experience of the person who is diagnosed as a borderline personality. Abjection is "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (Kristeva, 1980/1982, p. 4). The abject is neither object nor subject; it is the in-between as it calls into question fundamental distinctions of self and other.

The effort to find order or organize — and, thus, separate from the mother and become a subject — moves us to engage in language and discourse. Kristeva argues that support for the subject comes from the symbolic order: i.e., from God, country, family, discourse, and language (Coats, 2000, p. 292). It is the social and linguistic order that is engaged so as to distance the abject: "the murky, ambiguous, liminal space that for Kristeva is originally associated with the mother’s body" (Chenoweth, 2003, p. 1). When we encounter the abject we feel revulsion, fear, nausea and/or disgust. In our entry into the realms of the social and linguistic we each seek individual subjectivity by moving away from the mother -- creating boundaries to insulate ourselves in an act to expel and exclude her.

For some, the process is never complete. As one commentator incisively explains:

The abject ceaselessly confronts and undermines the attempts of our discursive border-creations to form clear definitions and stable identities. The formation and maintenance of our own subjectivity continues to be haunted by this monster -- the body of the mother, the dissolution of the self. (Chenoweth, 2003, p. 2)

Thus the abject arises from unsuccessful efforts of the child to separate from the mother, who is perceived as external but also as a "menace ... from the inside". Distressed by an outside/inside menace, the subject who experiences abjection becomes obsessed with boundaries, with loyalty. As explained by Linstead, the "deject" is "driven by the need to separate the unacceptable part of themselves ... from the real self" (1997, p. 1122).

Abjection is further explained in this case study from Kristeva.

John comes into analysis with the complaints of borderline cases ... false self, sexual impotence, professional dissatisfaction. ... The theme of emptiness, explicit during the treatment of this man, generates multiple metaphors and configurations, all centred in the mother. ... [T]he mother was embodied only as abject, repulsive. ... Meanwhile, and this is the second noteworthy element corresponding to the advent of the abject, the patient has a dream. ... The father, who had been disparaged up to now, averred absent or of no account, is shyly silhouetted in the patient’s talk ... ; this to uphold him in his struggle against the abject, thus giving him stabler boundaries, selves that last a little longer before appearing to be false. (1986, pp. 263-64)

John, the "deject" who experiences abjection, knows the mother as the threat described by Kristeva in the Powers of Horror: i.e., the "threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside" (1980/1982, pp. 1-2). Unclear of the source of the threat, John, who is diagnosed as a borderline personality, feels loathing and the "spasms and vomiting that protect me" (1980/1982, pp. 1-2). The deject (the one by whom the abject exists) struggles against this threat by invoking an other, a "father who had been disparaged up to now" (1986, p. 264). If he is able to invoke the father, John manages "stabler boundaries, selves that last a little longer" (1986, p. 264). If unable to invoke the father, the deject seeks "ever more extreme forms of escapism and denial" (Linstead, 1997, p. 1122).

Abjection and the Paternal Function

Kristeva’s assertion that the maternal body poses the greatest threat to the borders defining self and other is in contrast to the work of Freud and Lacan. In their work, the paternal function is the prime focus because it carries the threat of castration and the puzzlement as to anatomical differences in the sexes. However, Kristeva’s challenge to the Freudian view questions the conflation of the maternal with female and the paternal with male. In her reading of the relationship of infant to mother in the period of the first 4-8 months of the infant, Kristeva draws an important distinction to the general reductionism that views mother as the maternal function. Mother and woman are sex related notions. The conflation, of the maternal function with being female, means women will continue to be the abject. However, maternal function need not be so tightly related. Kelly Oliver reads Kristeva’s work correctly, in our view, when she succinctly notes:

Kristeva’s analysis suggests that to some extent anyone can fulfil the maternal function, men or women.
By insisting that the maternal body operates between nature and culture, Kristeva tries to counter-act stereotypes that reduce maternity to nature. Even if the mother is not the subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a speaking subject. In fact, Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within, as a model for all subjective relations. Like the maternal body, each one of us is what she calls a subject-in-process. As subjects-in-process we are always negotiating the other within, that is to say, the return of the repressed. Like the maternal body, we are never completely the subjects of our own experience. Some feminists have found Kristeva’s notion of a subject-in-process a useful alternative to traditional notions of an autonomous unified (masculine) subject. (1998, p. 3, underlined and italics is added emphasis)

Of course, for Freud the paternal function is experienced differently for boys and girls. Boys fear actual castration, especially if their desire for their mother is exposed, and girls wonder why they were ‘castrated’. In Totem and Taboo (1913/1985), Freud argues that morality is founded upon "the two taboos of totemism" (p. 205), namely murder and incest, which "coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother … the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis" (Freud, 1913/1985, p. 192). Some years later, Freud reconsidered the founding of the Oedipus complex in his own work: that is, in the contemplation of a pre-oedipal attachment to the mother and a change of love object (see Freud, 1931/1977), as well as in the dissolution of the Oedipus complex as it "succumbs to repression" (Freud, 1924/1977). According to Freud, the girl’s playing out of the Oedipus complex requires a renunciation of the penis that is undertaken with a form of compensation -- namely, a desire to have the father’s child. The desire to have a penis transformed as a compensatory fantasy to bear a child to the father as a gift is "gradually given up … (but) the two wishes … remain strongly cathected in the unconscious and help to prepare the female creature for her later sexual role" (Freud, 1924/1977, p. 321).

Kristeva reads the incest taboo as a process of abjection. In some of her interviews (see Guberman, 1996) and her works entitled Black Sun (1987/1989) and New Maladies of the Soul (1993/1995), Kristeva argues that the manner in which the sexes experience abjection is slightly different. Accepting Freud’s notion of castration fantasy and the correlate of penis envy, and in somewhat of a Lacanian tradition, Kristeva argues that these Freudian notions mark the advent of entry into the symbolic order in which language becomes the separation "from a fusion state of pleasure. … Castration … would be the advent of sign and syntax" (Kristeva, 1993/1995, p. 14). Kristeva makes the subsequent observation:

Analytic practice has shown that in fantasies, the penis becomes the primary referent of this operation of separation and gives full meaning to the lack or desire that constitutes subjects when they join the order of language. (Kristeva, 1993/1995, p. 15, italics is original emphasis)

The male is regarded as a full subject as he possesses, in Lacanian terms, the phallus whereas the female lacking the phallus is that which is outside of or beyond the phallus. It is in this context that the male is never the abject as abjecting the phallus is an acceptance of castration. For the male, as Kristeva explains, "there is a sort of rage against mothers . . . because they [mothers] take care of the child [and] because they carry it in their bodies. And that is something that men, even if they handle the diapers, can’t do" (1996, p. 118). For the male, confronting abjection is confronting that beyond the phallus, that is the feminine. For the male, confronting abjection is possible through blurring the boundaries that the phallus establishes. In contrast, blurring the boundaries for the female requires ‘acquisition’ of the phallus. In terms of psychodynamics, the threat of the female’s acquiring the phallus appears as a threat of castration to the male. The male can separate from the maternal, but the female as a woman has a continuing identification with the abjected maternal body. It is in such a context, in a patriarchal society, the female is already the marginal and to articulate the repressed maternal is to further marginalise one’s presence in the social order.

The case of Tony Soprano

In order to answer the question posed above — What can Tony Soprano tell us about the other and how is this relevant to organisation studies? — we would like to consider Tony’s abjection. As we noted earlier, the opening scene of the first episode begins with a close-up of a female statue’s legs; we see Tony Soprano framed by the inverted V of the statue’s legs. In this frame, he appears like a child in birth, between the legs of the mother, and he is there, we suggest, in order to "cut the instinctual dyad of the mother and the child [so] ... that one [can] become something other" (1996, p. 118). Below we continue with the episode’s portrayal of Tony.

A few moments later, in the office of the psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony says, "I can’t talk about my personal life". However, encouraged by Dr. Melfi, Tony describes his activities on the day of the first anxiety attack and cryptically recounts a story about chasing and beating a customer who defaulted on a loan. In flashback the chase scene is replayed to 50’s rock ‘n roll music. Later we learn that the music is reminiscent of his parents, probably his father. When Tony was young, he observed his father beating a debtor. Tony is invoking the father in order to establish more stable boundaries for himself. Of course, Tony’s father is not Kristeva’s ideal Third Party. Tony’s father is the disparaged father. Viewers recall the theme song of the series, which includes the words "father never told him about right and wrong".

Tony’s next anxiety attack occurs when he tries to take his mother to a long-term care facility. Displaying a visceral contempt for her son’s efforts, she is unwilling to move to an assisted living center. Recounting the incident to Dr. Melfi later, Tony speaks of his father, "My dad was tough; he ran his own crew ... my mother wore him down to a little nub ... he was a squeaking little gerbil when he died." Dr. Melfi says, "Quite a formidable maternal presence". Tony’s recounting of a dream about a bird that flies away with his penis, again reinforces Kristeva’s argument about the manner in which abjection is manifest for the different sexes. Next Tony complains about the way things are "trending down ... nowadays no values". The episode ends with a song, whose lyrics include the words " the beast in me".

In the discussion between Tony and Dr. Melfi about his attempt to get his mother into a long-tern care facility, we are given a deeper insight as to the complexity of the psychodynamics of abjection. A brief extract from this interchange will suffice for our purposes:

Tony: No matter what I do, I feel guilty.

Dr. Melfi: Why?

Tony: I cannot let her live with us. … You are supposed to take care of your mother. She is a little old lady.

Dr. Melfi: Not to you, she is very powerful.

Tony: Bull-shit.

Dr. Melfi: You accord this little old lady almost a mystical ability to reek havoc.

Tony: Well, you don’t want to get her started …

Dr. Melfi: What are the loving warm experiences you remember as a child?

After only being able to remember the experience of seeing his mother laugh when his father fell down some stairs at the beach, Tony, after further pressing from Dr. Melfi on this point, storms out of the psychiatrist’s office. Such rage and anger -- displacement behaviour toward Dr. Melfi for asking questions that lay bare what he kept repressed, i.e., his mother as a menace within.

This rage-filled anger is all the more acute given that Tony’s passive-aggressive mother, Livia (like the namesake who was Emperor Claudius’s scheming grandmother), rejects his Oedipal complex in a brutal manner. Livia tells her son, to his face, his shortcomings and unfavourably compares him with her somewhat idealised memories of her late husband, "Johnny Boy". As if this rejection is not enough, later in the series we come to learn that such is the distaste that Livia has for Tony wanting to place her in a nursing home, that she gets Tony’s Uncle "Junior", to arrange for Tony to be "whacked". One commentator describes Livia, accurately in our view, as "a tough, emotionally stingy woman who wears a frown as her umbrella" (Canby, 2000, p. 65).

Clearly Tony experiences abjection, the threat that emanates from outside or inside. That threat is "the beast in me". Tony feels a menace "centred in the mother", but by talking about his father, Tony seeks "stabler boundaries". To establish those more stable boundaries, Tony needs a paternal presence to whom he can speak. The paternal presence need not be his father; the therapist can be that presence. In analysis (and we note that Tony is seeing a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst), the analyst occupies a "ridge" position. According to Kristeva, on one side, the analyst represents the maternal function; on the other, the analyst represents the paternal function (1986, p. 246).

In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith

One of the more interesting features of The Sopranos is Tony’s developing love for Dr. Melfi and the parallel spiritual affair between Carmela (Mrs. Tony) and the priest. In In The Beginning was Love, Kristeva writes; "It is want of love that sends the subject into analysis, which proceeds by first restoring confidence in, and capacity for, love through the transference, and then enabling the subject to distance himself or herself from the analyst" (1985/1987, p. 3). According to Kristeva, analysis is an "amorous discourse," and the analytic situation is the "only place" where "we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered and to search for possible new identities" (1985/1987, p. 3). Analysis is amorous discourse: "Man is . . . a subject only of the language enunciated by the other" (1985/1987, p. 27).

Like analysis, faith, according to Kristeva, "could be described, perhaps rather simplistically, as what can only be called a primary identification with a loving and a protective agency" (1985/1987, p. 24). She cites Saint Augustine who "goes so far as to compare the Christian’s faith in God with the infant’s relation to its mother’s breast" (1985/1987, p. 24). Divine love is the basis of faith. The appeal of a deity is the appeal of a whole object, which permits an emerging subject. The issue is this: If faith is love and if analysis is amorous discourse, do faith and analysis have the same functions? Carmela Soprano has her priest, and Tony has his analyst. Is analysis a kind of religion? Is analysis a substitute for religion and a form of nihilism?

In a 1988 interview, Kristeva says, "It is often said that psychoanalysis can replace religion: first people confess and then you give them hope. That may be right, but it really isn’t" (1996, p. 11). What psychoanalysis offers is knowledge of self through language. For Kristeva, the psychoanalytic "cure" as described by Freud is "‘Logos’" (1985/1987, p. 3) and recalls the Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1: 1) and "God is Love" (1 John 4: 8). Hence the title of her lectures on psychoanalysis and faith: i.e., In the Beginning was Love.

For Kristeva,

The analytic process is first and foremost an unfolding of language … . Language thus resonates between two subjects . . . After a lengthy process of remembering and self-discovery, the analysand learns to know himself, submerged though he is in the immanence of a significance that transcends him. That significance can be given a name: the unconscious. (1985/1987, pp. 60-61)

Then, having discovered "autonomy and authority", the analysand is not plagued by the false self. No longer "driven by the need to separate the unacceptable part of themselves ... from the real self" (Linstead, 1997, p. 1122), the analysand jettisons the strict rules and boundaries that previously permitted separation. The analysand understands suffering in ways that permit connections with other people.

Saying that "psychoanalysis subsumes the illusion of religion", Kristeva (1996, p. 11) clearly prefers analytic discourse with its suffering and knowledge to religious discourse. Relatedly, in subsequent episodes of The Sopranos, Carmela Soprano disillusioned by a near sexual encounter with the priest ends her spiritual affair, even as Tony Soprano continues his analysis. Analysis subsumes the illusions of religion.

What Can Tony Soprano Tell Us About the Other? : Lesson for Organisation Studies

Tony Soprano’s experience of abjection offers organisation studies insights in three areas: (1) globalisation and the spiritual; (2) group dynamics and the gendered organisation; (3) the emotional side of organisational life; and (4) the ethical side of organisations.

Globalisation and the spiritual

In 1989, Kristeva was asked:

Your recent analysis of psychoanalysis and theology is situated within a sense of historical crisis. Can you tell us more about this idea of a crisis and how it is related to the question of modernity?

She replies, in part, We are in the process of living new forms of democracy that are imposed by multinational states and societies, among other things. This concerns the problem of foreigners, but also the forms of difference that a democracy is capable of harmonizing: the differences of women, of children, difference in sexual practices, and so forth. (1996, p. 36) Kristeva does not believe that religion will solve the current crisis. Religious discourse tends to "welcome the other only on condition of delegitimating or annulling him" (1996, p. 40). Christians welcome the other on condition of conversion. And other religions, such as Islam, are "reactionary and persecutory" (1996, p. 40). Because religion cannot solve the crisis, Kristeva looks to psychoanalysis: "I consider psychoanalysis to be a means of approaching the other because the Freudian message, to simplify things, consists in saying that the other is in me. It is my unconscious. And instead of searching for a scapegoat in the foreigner, I must try to tame the demons in me" (1996, p. 41). In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is objectified — made other. The analysand "knows the unconscious, orders it, calculates with it, yet he also loses himself in it, plays with it, takes pleasure from it, lives it" (Kristeva, 1985/1987, p. 61). We might say that the analysand learns to love his neighbor as himself.

If religion cannot solve the current crisis, perhaps, rather than psychoanalysis, the modern world needs a return to spirituality. Kristeva reports various spiritualist movements in France; we note the new spirituality and religion division of the Academy of Management and research in spirituality and business (e.g. Mitroff & Denton, 1998; Wilver, 1979).

After interviewing 85 senior executives, Mitroff and Denton (1998, p. vii), for example, describe these characteristics of spirituality:

*Interconnectedness with a higher power

*Basic harmony and transcendence in the universe

*Intuitive knowledge of spiritual principles, as opposed to scientific

*Universal principles for unique individuals

Wilber (1979) describes a spectrum of consciousness. At higher levels, individuals transcend socio-cultural concerns. We think spiritual principles do provide solutions to the problem of the other, but these principles do not address the unconscious. In other words, we think, like Kristeva, that "instead of searching for a scapegoat in the foreigner, I must try to tame the demons in me" (1996, p. 41). In the words of the song from the Sopranos, you and I must tame "the beast in me".

Group Dynamics and the Gendered Organisation

A second major implication of the Kristevian commentary on Tony Soprano is the manner in which we can seek to understand group dynamics in organisations. The notion of abjection is very much in keeping with the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Kristeva (2001) has written a text on Melanie Klein, who developed the object-relations school; in it, Kristeva explains the abject in terms of object-relations. Those within organisation studies who have used a lens of object-relations to explain the manner in which we come to dichotomise the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have generally done so through reference to the notion of splitting. (See, for example, Carr, 1997, 1999; Carr & Zanetti, 1999; Swogger Jr., 1993, 1994). The work of Kristeva adds a further dimension to this understanding for it reveals how this dichotomising is not just a defence mechanism, but it is a return of a repressed struggle with abjection. Let us briefly expand on this point.

The psychodynamic process of splitting was one first noted by Sandor Ferenczi (1916), Klein’s analyst. Klein’s (1950) analysis of splitting was drawn from her study of children in the first year of life. From these studies, Klein argues that an infant in its relationship with the mother’s breast conceives it as both a good and bad object. The breast gratifies and frustrates. On the one hand the infant idealises this ‘good’ object, but on the other hand the ‘bad’ object is seen as terrifying and frustrating. It is a persecutor threatening to destroy both the infant and the ‘good’ object. The infant projects love and idealises the good object but goes beyond mere projection in trying to induce in the mother the same feelings: i.e., a process of projective identification. This stage of development Klein termed the paranoid-schizoid position, highlighting "the persecutory character of the anxiety and ... the schizoid nature of the mechanisms at work" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p. 298).

The significance of these associated processes of projection, projective identification and splitting in broader social psychodynamics is captured by Glenn Swogger Jr. (1994) in the course of an incisive appraisal of the environmental movement:

As pointed out by Horwitz (1983) and others, projective identification involves another step beyond blaming: inducing the target of the projection to experience the projected feelings. In face-to-face situations this may involve subtle nonverbal communication or various interpersonal ploys. In public situations, projective identification may involve forms of attack or accusation; legal, financial, or regulatory threats; or manipulation and exaggeration of guilt. ... Wholesale processes of projection and projective identification lead to ‘splitting’ at the social level: whole classes of people, groups, or organisations are condemned while others may be idealized. The world is composed of ‘us’ and ‘them’. (Swogger, 1994, p. 71)

In a group context, the individual may draw, in a dependency relationship, from others to help in the face of anxiety (e.g., Bion, 1961; Ogden, 1982). In what is sometimes referred to as ‘role suction’, individuals in a group may pressure a leader or authority figure into reaffirming the group (ego)-ideal (e.g. Alford, 1994). Group members, through the process of splitting, collude in their fantasies and simultaneously deny individually and collectively ‘bad’ parts in themselves and their leader.

Kristeva’s notion of abjection adds another dimension to behaviours that have previously been attributed to splitting. Rather than a primitive defence, the ‘split’ may be a return of the repressed and a threat to one’s borders. Paraphrasing and summarising Kristeva, Oliver (1998) captures this linkage perfectly when she says that abjection is:

an operation of the psyche through which subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threatens one’s own (or one’s group’s ) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence upon the maternal. Therefore, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function. (p. 3)

Abjection offers explanations to probing social conflict situations. For example, in polarized situations, distortions are created that inhibit dialogue and create climates where legitimate questions go unaddressed and judgments become impaired. By understanding abjection, we become alert to the idealization of leaders in the maintenance of boundaries. Idealization carries unreal expectations and simultaneously alerts us to lack of reflexivity in consideration of issues. We become wary of manipulation, in particular, the way in which guilt and fear can be unfairly induced in others.

The Emotional Realities of Organisation

Whilst we have a discourse that appreciates the psychodynamics of splitting, we have yet to incorporate into that discourse an appreciation of abjection. Development of that discourse foregrounds the emotional side of organisational life, with images of the feminine and maternity. We do not overturn hierarchy with a ‘binary opposite’ nor eliminate masculine attributes. However, few contributions to organisation studies draw upon psychodynamics to highlight the repression of emotions and the feminine in organisational settings. Two notable exceptions are Zanetti (2002) and Tietze (2003).

In her paper entitled "Leaving our fathers’ house," Zanetti (2002) draws upon Jungian archetypes to reveal "that contemporary organisations remain edifices constructed in the image of the fathers’ house" (p. 524). To leave our fathers’ house requires "facing and embracing the dark places we fear most" (Zanetti, 2002, p. 535). We recall what Tony said about his father: "My dad was tough; he ran his own crew ... my mother wore him down to a little nub ... he was a squeaking little gerbil when he died". Through the optic of abjection, we confront a "dark place ": i.e., "our fathers’ house" constructed to insulate ourselves against the anxiety of such a confrontation.

Echoing Hopfl (2000) and Linstead (1997), Tietze argues that the "emotions constitute the abject in organisational life" (2003, p. 66). Titled "Metaphors of the mother", Tietze’s paper proposes that metaphors create "emotional realities" and contribute to an understanding of care in organisations. As an example of the abject in organisations, Tietze describes a meeting in which an academic officer said, "‘I know that no one wants to hold the sweaty hands of first year students. People want to do sexy things, like research’" (2003, p. 73). Holding hands is abject; it’s sweaty, an exchange of bodily fluids. Holding hands is a "movement between repulsion and attraction entailed in the blurring of boundaries" (2003, p. 73). Unlike research, which is an ordered and symbolic activity, the act of holding hands is a maternal function. Tietze unsettles traditional views of organisational life as rational and purposive. Similarly, we suggest that Tony Soprano’s mobster organisation and experience of abjection unsettle us.

The Ethical Organisation

A fourth implication of our Kristevian commentary on Tony Soprano is one that relates to the subject of ethics. Tony is clearly confused about the contradictions he holds in both his feelings and his behaviour toward his mother. As the series, The Sopranos, progresses, we see further contradictions in Tony’s behaviours. For example, although Tony displays great brutality killing people with his bare hands, garrotting one victim, assaulting another using a staple gun to fasten the person’s jacket to their chest, he tenderly cares for some ducks that land in his swimming pool. He wants to raise their young, and he pines when they finally leave. Tony declares undying love and respect for his wife, Carmela and their family; yet, at the same time he owns and manages a club that features topless pole dancing, backroom sexual exploitation of women (where the entry ticket to the backroom for the ‘girls’ involved is to give the doorman $50 and, later, a "blow-job"). While he keeps "bimbo" girlfriends on the side, Tony displays unconditional love to his family. He manages his mob family with some degrees of distance, knowing the FBI’s proclivity for turning one’s ‘family’/‘associates’ into snitches.

The manner in which Tony navigates his relationships is something his psychiatrist mentions to her ex-husband who in turn makes the observation: "Finally, you’re going to get beyond psychology with its cheery moral relativism. Finally you’re going to get to good and evil, and he’s evil". This specific scene, and this particular dialogue, one commentator argues:

But that voice, from an incidental character, sounds like a disclaimer. It is out of step with the experience of watching "The Sopranos," which is gripping because it is so fraught with moral relativism". (James, 2000, p. 28)

The manner in which we relate to one to an‘other’ is the ‘stuff’ of ethics, yet without a recognition of the significance of the maternity it would appear we have a less than complete picture. Oliver (2000) similarly observes:

Without a new discourse of maternity we cannot begin to conceive of ethics. If ethics is the philosophy of our obligations to each other, then in order to theorize ethics we need to analyze the structure of our relationships to each other. And if, as Freudian psychoanalytic theory maintains, our relation with our mothers is the model for all subsequent relations, then we need to analyze our relation with our mothers. In Western culture, however, this relation has been figured as a relation to nature, a relation that threatens the social and any possibility of ethical relations. In this view the relation with the mother is not a social relation and therefore not a model for an ethical relation. In order to conceive of an ethical relation, we need to conceive of a relation with the mother as a social relation with a speaking being. (p. 156)

In order to draw attention to the maternal relation, Hopfl (2003) suggests restoring concerns of the maternal body to organisational discourse. Proposing that we look at organisation as a maternal body, she says that the idea of a maternal organisation contributes to organisation studies by raising issues of boundaries, sociality, and love.

Conclusion

Artefacts of popular culture, like The Sopranos, are commentaries that merit academic attention. Tony Soprano is struggling with boundaries and with foreigners; one episode from the second series explicitly mentions Tony’s battle with foreigners: easterners, Indians, Asians. He sets up those boundaries from foreigners to avoid the beast within. What we have seen since September 11 is a battle with foreigners and, we suggest, not much attention to the beast within. The United States and American business with its agenda of globalization might look within. What beast within engenders such terror for Americans? What is the threat that seems "to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside"? (Kristeva 1980/1982, pp. 1-2). The field of organisation studies would similarly do well to reflexively consider both: the manner in which contemporary organisations have and continue to be edifices constructed through the invisible hands of abjection; and the manner in which abjection has figured in our analysis and theorising about organisations.

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Address for Correspondence

Alexis Downs
School for Professional Studies
St. Louis University, USA
downsaa@slu.edu

Adrian Carr
School of Applied Social and Human Sciences
University of Western Sydney
New South Wales, Australia
a.carr@uws.edu.au