Accessing uncolonized terrains of organizations: uncanny force of sleep and dreaming

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper joins the debate on the ambiguous, complex, and shadowy realities of organizational life. It suggests that the psychoanalytical concept of uncanny provides an apt lens for making sense of the uncolonized terrains within organizations that escape rationalization, but that still give rise to organizational subjectivity. We propose that sleep and dreaming afford an uncolonized terrain that allows us to reveal blind spots of organizational subjectivity. Our auto-ethnographic stories, produced in the authors’ academic organization and outside the physical borders of academia, are grouped under two themes – threatening insecurity and traumatic dreams, shocking becomings – demonstrating how the uncanniness of dreams and sleeping is experienced in organizations. Put together, they manifest repressed forms of organizational subjectivity, reflecting its true vulnerable nature arising from insecurity, uncertainty and instability.