“Separation, abjection, loss and mourning: Reflections on the phenomenon of organizational miasma” Yiannis Gabriel, Royal Holloway University of London ESRC seminar series: Abjection and alterity in the workplace Seminar 1, University of Leicester, 28th May 2008 Situating abjection and alterity in the workplace: concepts and contexts Abstract This presentation offers a theory of organizational miasma , a concept that describes a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual – that afflicts all who work in certain organizations that undergo sudden and traumatic transformations. Miasma is offered not as another organizational metaphor, a prism through which to view particular organizations. Instead, I delineate the fundamental dynamics of organizational miasma as a theoretical concept that accounts for and explains numerous processes in these organizations. These include a paralysis of resistance, an experience of pollution and uncleanliness, and feelings of disgust, worthlessness and corruption. Miasma usually occurs in organizations that undergo a sudden transformation involving the discarding and loss of many of their valued members through downsizing or retrenchment, without either the necessary separation rituals being observed nor the psychological mourning. The ‘old’ organization is frequently presented as corrupt, indulgent and inefficient, contrasted to the ‘new’ organization that is entrepreneurial, dynamic and flexible. Yet, for many surviving members the new organizations is tainted by the presence of ‘murderers’, i.e. managers who have initiated a series of dismissals and ‘corpses’, i.e. employees who have been dismissed or are about to be dismissed and ‘disappear’ as ‘disjecta membra’, once alive, now discarded. The concept of miasma is first introduced with reference to its origins in ancient Greek tragedy. I then describe the way this concept helped me understand certain processes of a particular organization that had undergone a period of considerable downsizing, losing some two thirds of its workforce in less than two years. With the help of insights into miasma developed by Parker (1983) and into the symbolics of organizational downsizing as a form of genocide developed by Stein (1998; 2001), I argue that miasma is the result of a failed separation rite, one that instead of honouring loss, finitude and discontinuity in today’s organizations seeks to obliterate and repress it. In this sense, miasma represents a contemporary version of tragedy where the very attempts to dissolve it end up by feeding it.