# Dark Organizational Theory

*Brown & Reavey · Culture & Context, Critique & Boundary · Journal of Cultural Economy · 2017 · Open access*

Brown and Reavey start from what they call an established truism: organisations are defined by competing sociomaterial logics, local ways of constituting meaning by ordering discourses and materials, whose agendas rub against each other. They take Michel Serres's line from The Parasite that there is no system without parasites, so the dark side of the system is neither an exogenous shock nor a suppressed underworld. Dark-side scholarship sets out to bring hidden or dirty work to light, but often, it seems, the only people unaware of these dark sides were the analysts; all organisations engage to some degree, entirely openly, in banal violence, humiliation and degradation. Critique that keeps inverting the picture, now light, now dark, leaves management pretty much untouched.

The essay works in four pieces, philosophical, literary, empirical and conceptual. In China Miéville's novel The City and The City, two cities share the same ground, held apart by residents trained to unsee the other city, with one sanctioned crossing, and policed by Breach, a power with nothing of its own, whose boundary is nothing and nowhere until someone breaches it. In two medium-secure forensic psychiatric units, an espoused logic of patient recovery sits beside a practical logic of keeping the ward calm, which reduces risk to the institution: in one new unit the kitchens stay locked most of the time because cooking takes two staff to every patient. Sightlines from the central nurses' station are reversible: as one staff member put it, one agitated patient with a pen could take a hostage there. Though the event is rare, its anticipation, often unspoken, is a third order of reason that haunts and divides the other two. Propositions drawn heavily from Serres name the parts: stations and relations, parasitic cascades, copula as acknowledged points of passage, and breach space, which emerges when a cascade interrupts the arrangement of stations and relations.

Properly named, the dark side of the system is a penumbral space between the formal and the informal, the espoused and the practical, in which the two logics cohere. The central proposition is that anticipation of breach, rather than the specific goals of formal or informal organising, is of central significance for understanding why organisations do what they do. Rival logics can be generally acknowledged, yet members unsee them in everyday practice, disattending as far as possible, which is affective labour. They call it a descriptive practice, not a theory as such, hard to apply empirically though it enhances sensitivity to third spaces. The bridge to psychological safety is ours: acknowledged but unseen logics read as a near relation of open secrets, and members' alternation between what should happen and what actually happens as the gap between work as imagined and work as done. Built from the authors' accepted manuscript in the University of Leicester repository; not compared with the published version.

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