Abstract
Organizations can encourage their members to over-value means above ends. A case in point is the tendency among academics to over-value standardized ranking lists for academic journals at the expense of high quality research. To make sense of such seemingly perverse object choices, organizational researchers have turned to the concept of fetishism. However, organizational researchers have yet to consider how these fetishes are organized as sexual object choices—a strange omission given the expansive empirical and theoretical literature exploring fetishism as a sexual practice. Drawing a distinction between the fetishism of organizations and fetishism in organizations, the article seeks to redress this oversight.
From the palatial grounds and ivory towers of established universities to the steel and glass of the modern academic institution, it seems that organizations designed for sober judgement and the development of reasoned argument cannot eliminate sexuality. It reveals itself in the sexualized relationships between members of these organizations and in the relationships academics have to their work as well. In accounts of performance management techniques in universities, for instance, academics describe how journal ranking lists, which offer standardized guides to the quality of academic journals, have become fetish objects providing perverse but powerful pleasures.
The use of these ranking lists is a controversial topic. Critics see it as one way in which academic integrity is undermined by university administrators (De Angelis and Harvie, 2009; Macdonald and Kam, 2011). The need to quantify academic performance has meant that ‘the standing of the journal (the equivalent of the fetishized shoe) in which an article is published assumes an importance greater than its specific contents (the equivalent of the erotic qualities attributed to a shoe)’ (Mingers and Willmott, 2010: 6). Academics seeking to satisfy performance criteria have, consequently, come to attribute ‘an awesome power’ to lists (Mingers and Willmott, 2010: 6). They have been encouraged to take ‘the top journal “hit”’, calibrated through standardized list, as a ‘fantasy object’ (Willmott, 2011: 430). In other words, they have become list fetishists (Fellman, 1995).
On this point, leading organizational researchers tell us that list fetishism offers ‘complex and perverse’ pay-offs for the academic fetishist. It can certainly bring material rewards. But it also ‘reflects and reinforces scholarly introversion (aka masturbation)’ (Willmott, 2011: 435). It allows an academic to experience the masochistic pleasures of the peer review process—with rejection of their work serving to heighten their desire to publish in top-ranked journals and acceptance for publication bringing momentary joy and a new thirst for the next hit. In short, leading organizational researchers tell us, thanks to the fetishism of journal lists we get more out of publishing our research than we might like to admit.
What are we to make of such claims? Should we ignore them? Treat them as jokes? Billig (1999) argues that we should be sensitive to the ways that we talk about fetish objects as it is this that helps us to continue our fetishistic relations to them. With this in mind, given the aims of this special issue, while the general purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between organizations and sexuality through the concept of fetishism, the article describes how academic organizations set the scene for researchers to become list fetishists. In other words, the article takes accounts of journal list fetishism by leading organizational researchers at face value as a sexual fetish.
There are two dominant models for thinking about fetishism in relation to organizations. From Marx we inherit a concept of commodity fetishism as a process of hiding the organizations that produce and valorize particular objects. So consumers fetishize goods and services when they ignore the exploitative labour processes that produce them just as academics fetishize lists when they fail to recognize the arbitrary way in which they are produced (Böhm and Batta, 2010; Willmott, 2011). Marx’s concept of fetishism is, in this sense, one of subterfuge. It is a process through which we hide what Cooper and Burrell (1988) call the production of organization. From Freudian psychoanalysis, though, we inherit an understanding of fetishism as a way of making what might appear to be non-sexual into something that we can desire, devour and deflower. It is a process through which we give expression to our desires. Freud’s concept, therefore, provides a vocabulary through which we can make sense of the ways that organizations incubate fetishes and explain why people continue to fetishize certain objects even after they have been made aware of the ways those objects are produced and overvalued in particular organizational contexts (Cluley, and Dunne, 2012). It is a concept marking fetishism in organization. As such, it forces us to confront our role in our fetishes. It does not position us outside of fetishism—the ones who can see the true state of things. Instead it forces us to acknowledge our own fetishes at the same time as we analyse those of others. Recognizing the power of Freud’s concept, one consequence of the analysis is, then, to lend further support for calls to incorporate to Freud’s ideas within research into organizations.
By way of overview, the article offers a general review of the history of fetishism as a concept in social theory and as an empirical phenomenon. This is followed by a close reading of Marx and Freud to distinguish their understandings of fetishism. The article then demonstrates the kinds of organizational models on which each form of fetishism rests and illustrates a distinction between their ideas by dividing the fetishism of organizations from fetishism in organizations. The article then returns to an analysis of journal list fetishism based on accounts from individual researchers published in peer-reviewed journals, working paper series and online sources to demonstrate how a Freudian analysis can reveal the organization of fetishism.
To the land of the fetish
Within a seminal series of articles collectively entitled The Problem of the Fetish (1985, 1987, 1988), William Pietz lays out a influential framework for understanding the evolution of fetishism. He documents three stages through which the discourse on fetishism has passed. First, circa the 15th century, Portuguese colonialist merchants, struggling to make sense of the seemingly perverse nature of economic value among Western African peoples, fell upon the term ‘feitiço’—a term that derives from the Latin facticium, originally meaning artificial but later developed to mean witchcraft (Gamman and Makinen, 1994). In this sense, fetishism was at its very inauguration a mode of valuation or, more precisely, a mode of devaluation necessary to continuing social and economic relationships between radically different cultures.
Long before fetishism became a technical term within the social sciences and the humanities, then, it had already functioned as a fall-back position for those who could not make sense of what they thought to be senseless. If the West Africans that colonial merchants met did not comprehend the supposedly inherent qualities of gold and other such precious items to the extent that they would willingly relinquish them for mere trinkets, then it was they who had a problem. As Pietz puts it: The alienness of African culture, in particular its resistance to ‘rational’ trade relations, was explained in terms of the African’s supposed irrational propensity to personify material (and especially European technological) objects, thereby revealing a false understanding of natural causality … The idea of the fetish originated in a mercantile intercultural space created by the ongoing trade relations between cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible. (1987: 23–24)
The Eurocentrism implicit in the early development of fetishism—tied as it was to the march of European trade and European reason—has subsequently become a standard concern within anthropology. As Graeber (2005) points out, just as feitiço became a resource through which the Europeans made sense of what to them seemed senseless, so too it is likely that the natives they encountered were similarly bemused by their encounter with what for them must also have been alterity. But the key point, from an organizational perspective, is that fetishism developed as a concept to make sense of the meeting between very different social systems that were brought together through trade. As Pietz explains, the fetish ‘not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems’ (1985: 7).
Once the freshly-named fetish was encountered in practice, between the 16th and 18th centuries a variety of Enlightenment thinkers began to theorize it—ushering in a second stage in the development of the concept. Drawing on descriptions of fetishism in the travel writings of colonialist merchants, philosophers moved beyond a broadly Christian theological discussion of the nature of idolatry and witchcraft towards an appreciation of how material objects can possess social value and human-like powers. They saw that objects could possess human qualities precisely because they were granted such qualities by fetishists who failed to grasp the true order of things. According to Gamman and Makinen it is this aspect of feitico that endured as fetishism entered the English language. They explain that ‘[b]y the nineteenth century the term “fetishism” had entered popular language and was being used more generally by writers to refer to anything reverenced without due reason’ (1994: 15 emphasis added).
Finally, from around the 19th century to the present day, the discourse on fetishism disseminated more broadly still, coming to serve as a foundation upon which many classic writings within the humanities and the social sciences are based. As such, it is now a term used by social scientists to understand economies, consumption practices and organizations. Even in academic life we see the identification of the fetishism of research methods (Mills, 1959; Wastell, 1996), concepts (Knights and Willmott, 1989) and, most recently, journal list fetishism (Fellman, 1995; Mingers and Willmott, 2010; Willmott, 2011). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that a Theory, Culture and Society editorial posited fetishism and reification as the two classical poles through which the interaction between subjects and objects has been theorized (Pels et al., 2002).
Among these later uses of the concept, two dominant approaches have emerged. First, building on an early article entitled ‘Theft of Wood’ (1842), Marx employed the concept in his critique of political economics. Perhaps the most famous example here is an early section in Capital Volume 1 (1976) describing the concept of commodity fetishism. Second, building on Krafft Ebing’s use of the term to understand obsession, fetishism became widely used as a way of making sense of sexual activity thanks to the work of Sigmund Freud. Let us now turn to the specificities and similarities between these two understandings of fetishism before demonstrating the status of each within organizational life and organizational research.
Marx’s fetish
Within the section of Capital Volume 1 entitled ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ Marx uses fetishism to name a particular displacement of attention onto the mode of circulation that occurs when we conceal the mode of production (1976: 163–177). He labels this commodity fetishism. For Marx, the emergence of the capitalist mode of production is synonymous with this form of fetishism. Capitalism depends on hiding concrete human labour within the commodity form such that subjects can relate to objects as if they existed in and on their own terms. Marx’s, we might say, is a fetishism of organizations in this sense. Commodity fetishism marks a process through which the capitalist system of production hides the very nature of production from us—allowing us to act on the basis of a ‘fantastic form of a relation between things’ at the expense of acting on ‘the definite social relation between men themselves’ (Marx, 1976: 176). Marx explains: to find an analogy [for this concealment] we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (1976: 165)
Commodity fetishism is not only necessary for capital it is also productive. It allows us to continue to consume in spite of the realities of production. But, on a more abstract level than that of commodities, it is the nature of our relationship to interest-bearing capital that represents the connections and mystifications of commodity fetishism ‘in the most flagrant form’ (Marx, 1981: 516). Here, we relate to money, itself an abstraction from the use value and exchange value of labour that underpins the value of all commodities as if it were a value-creating force all on its own. On this point Marx tells us: In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form it no longer bears any marks of its origin … While interest is simply one part of the profit, i.e. the surplus-value, extorted from the worker by the functioning capitalist, it now appears conversely as if interest is the specific fruit of capital, the original thing. (1981: 516)
So unlike earlier epochs, where the commodity form’s ‘fetish character is still relatively easy to penetrate’ (Marx, 1976: 176), fetishism becomes obtuse and universal in the capitalist epoch. It is extended and integrated throughout our social relations and has developed into ‘a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Marx, 1976: 163). Consequently, one of the criteria for moving beyond the capitalist epoch is that the ‘whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds’ them must vanish (Marx, 1976: 169). We must no longer fetishize what Cooper and Burrell (1988) call the organization of production but must uncover production of organization by recognizing the sensual human labour that lies at their foundations—including the sexual relations that are all too easy to overlook (Burrell, 1984). Unfortunately, this has proved easier to imagine than put into practice. We might believe we can escape the grasp of commodity fetishism yet we routinely demonstrate ourselves to be nothing but commodity fetishists (Žižek, 2008). As Fleming and Spicer put it, ‘the enlightened consumer knows that the pair of Nikes they purchase is made under sweatshop conditions, but in the last instance act as if they did not know this’ (2005: 187).
For Marx fetishism is, therefore, to be understood by looking beyond the individual subject. This has led to problems for subsequent researchers who have searched for ways to explain the psychology of fetishism without reducing it to an individualized experience of false consciousness (Baudrillard, 1981; Billig, 1999; Cluley and Dunne, 2012). The existential trials and tribulations of the isolated individual are, of course, not Marx’s real interest in his analysis of capitalism. As Lukács (1971: 47) puts it ‘the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them’. Commodity fetishism is a problem to the extent that it names a situation where human subjects engage with non-human objects as if they were subjects, thereby pushing to the background the very possibility of an analysis of the labouring human subjects that produced commodity objects in the first place. But it is a fetishism that is created by capitalism itself. Not by individuals.
Freud’s fetish
In contrast to Marx, who sets out his concept of fetishism early in his work (Balibar, 1994), Freud’s concept of fetishism evolves throughout his writings (Mitchell, 1974). It emerges primarily in his texts on sexuality but it is also present in work on religion and idolatry in which Freud extrapolates his early observations of sexual development onto a broader, socio-cultural terrain. Put simply, fetishisms of various guises preoccupied Freud throughout his career. So an exposition of a Freudian fetish requires us to trace his development of the term.
Early in his clinical career Freud noted that many of his patients focused on a sexual object that was seemingly useless for sexual satisfaction—often going so far as to ignore the ultimate aim of their sexual drives in their attempts to acquire that object. In these instances, ‘the normal sexual object’ would be ‘replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim’ (Freud, 2001a: 153). The shoe, for example, would become an object of sexual desire in the place of the one who wore it. Freud explains: What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen). (2001a: 153)
This seeming misplacement of sexual energy, or libido, fascinated Freud. As he puts it: ‘no other variation of the sexual instinct that borders on the pathological can lay so much claim to our interest as this one, such is the peculiarity of the phenomena to which it gives rise’ (2001a: 153). He made sense of such behaviours initially through an idea of fetishism inherited from the second stage of the concept outlined by Pietz. These behaviours should, he argued, be ‘likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied’ (2001a: 153). In this regard, Freud had first-hand experience of fetishism. ‘Anyone who goes to the Freud museum is immediately struck’, Phillips (1993: 117) writes, ‘by Freud’s collection of antiquities, and particularly, perhaps, by the forest of figurines from various cultures, on Freud’s desk’.
In keeping with his early sexual theories, Freud thought it was common for our choice of fetish object to be determined by childhood experiences which shape ‘a symbolic connection of thought’ linking the fetish to the original sexual aim (2001a: 155). The foot fetishist, for example, may have turned away from a prohibited glimpse of his mother’s genitals only to see her foot—with the desires attached to the former being concentrated on the latter in order to escape external and internal punishments from the parents and super-ego respectively. Freud contended that in such cases, where we can easily trace these chains of association back to their original sexual aims, fetishes do ‘not govern the choice of object exclusively’ but rather leave ‘room for a greater or lesser amount of normal sexual behaviour’ (2001). In pathological cases of fetishism, in contrast, the object onto which libido is displaced comes to replace it outright (Freud, 2001a). In these extreme cases, the fetishized object takes the place of the original sexual aim in its chain of association. This makes it almost impossible to trace the fetish back to an original incident. The result being that the fetishist becomes locked in their chain of association—constantly heightening desires they can never satisfy.
Freud (2001b: 203) came to realize that most of us have at least ‘a mere hint’ of some kind of fetish and that, more often than not, they do not become pathological. They may still appear to be self-defeating as they encourage us to lust after something other than the true object of our desires but, by establishing a fetish, we can heighten our desires and make those desires attainable. As Freud (2001c: 154) puts it: ‘What other men have to woo and make exertion for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all’.
Accordingly, Freud came to see that individual development does not, on its own, provide a sufficient explanation of fetishism. He came to focus, instead, on understanding the psychodynamic processes that allow a fetish object to emerge. In this sense, he came to explain fetishism through idealization, disavowal and repression. To put these in simple terms, the process of idealization involves amplifying positive features of an object to the point where a new image emerges that bears little resemblance to reality; the process of disavowal involves a refusal to accept a traumatic feature of reality; while the essence of repression, as Freud (2001d: 147) puts it, ‘lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’. In fetishism these psychodynamic processes act simultaneously on the same object such that we come to overvalue an aspect of an object by denying and ultimately despising another aspect of the very same thing. That is to say, we come to idealize the fetish, the qualities of which we have made distinct from the original object of our sexual energy through some traumatic event which we deny. As Freud puts it: the objects to which men give most preference, their ideals, proceed from the same perceptions and experiences as the objects which they most abhor, and that they were originally only distinguished from one another through slight modifications. Indeed, as we found in tracing the origin of the fetish, it is possible for the original instinctual representative to be split in two, one part undergoing repression, while the remainder, precisely on account of this intimate connection, undergoes idealization. (2001d: 150)
Freud, therefore, comes to present fetishism not simply as a sexual phenomenon but as an epistemological perspective where our desires force us to ignore what we know. ‘It must not’, he (2001b: 203) emphasizes, ‘be thought that fetishism presents an exceptional case’. Instead, he (2001b: 204) tells us: ‘Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality’. Fetishism is, in this sense, a response by the individual to a reality that they cannot accept. It is not the case that fetishists lack intelligence or knowledge—as Marx has it. Rather, they augment what they know with what they want. Sexual fetishism, unlike commodity fetishism, is a concept based on overvaluation not undervaluation.
Fetishizing the fetish
There is an ongoing attempt to integrate Marx’s and Freud’s accounts of fetishism. As Miklitsch (1998: 25) puts it, the concept marks a ‘conceptual switch-point’ between Marx’s political economy and Freud’s concept of individual motivations. Certainly there are enough similarities between the two concepts. Fetishism is the name given by both theorists to a subjective connection to an object that conceals something more profound and primordial. Both theorists derive their concepts of fetishism from a religious analogy. Both theorists give a central role to history, whether personal or social, in their discussion of the causes and cures of fetishism.
As a result of these similarities, a rich tradition of research has worked towards a unified theory of fetishism. Inspired by the Frankfurt School and post-Freudian psychoanalysis such as the work of Lacan, there have been attempts to add a psychological understanding of fetishism to Marx’s account and attempts to reframe Freud’s description of sexual fetishism as a symptom of political economic relations. However, there is little consensus on how successful these attempts at integration have been. If anything, the majority opinion seems to be that we should treat Marx’s and Freud’s as individual concepts that refer to distinct social and psychological processes emerging historically out of a single social practice (Baudrillard, 1981; Gamman and Makinen, 1994; Miklitsch, 1998; Mioyasaki, 2002; Schiermer, 2011). Žižek (2008: 50), for instance, maintains a distinction between Marx as the theorist of social relations and Freud as the theorist of individual pathologies, arguing that ‘in Marxism a fetish conceals the positive network of social relations, whereas in Freud a fetish conceals the lack (‘castration’) around which the symbolic network is articulated’.
Nevertheless, in separating these concepts of fetishism, we must be sensitive to links between them. Indeed, Pietz shows us that both concepts have developed from a single practice. Yet, there is a tendency in some areas of research to place these concepts in direct opposition—as if we have to reject one concept in order to accept the other. In contemporary anthropology, for instance, we see Freud’s fetishism frequently passed over in favour of Marx’s. Here, Hornborg (2001: 492) neglects a review of psychoanalytic discussions of fetishism because, ‘[a]lthough they make intriguing reading’, whenever such readings are engaged, he argues, ‘the result is often a more diffuse and aestheticized engagement with the notion of fetishism’.
Organization research demonstrates a similar tendency. In Böhm and Batta’s recent analysis of consumption, for example, we are told that in Freud’s view fetishism ‘can simply be seen as a problem and a perversion … [that] operates as a sexual category’ (2010: 351–352). They argue that Freud’s concept has been rescued by critical theorists who ‘have sought to read Freud and Marx together in their attempt to critique the historical emergence of capitalist culture and subjectivity’ (2010: 350). These theorists have, according to Böhm and Batta, used Freud’s concept ‘in a far more affirmative way’ than Freud himself did (2010: 350). Similarly, Fotaki et al. turn to Marx’s concept of fetishism in order to justify passing through Freud’s psychoanalysis of fetishism on their way to adopting a Lacanian perspective. They tell us that Marx’s interpretation of fetishism offers the earliest analysis of ‘capitalism with the imaginary’ (2010: 642). This move through Freud to Lacan—passing at Marx—has been continued more recently by Müller (2012).
But this move works to the detriment of our understanding of life in organizations. It de-eroticises organizations and portrays organizational actors as, on the one hand, fools following fantasies, hopelessly grasping for what they lack and, on the other hand, as idiots who do not see what is in front of them—namely, the human foundations of organizations. In short, by turning away from the psychodynamics that allow apparently non-sexual objects to take over sexual aims, organizational scholars themselves have desexualized organizations. Focusing on the fetishism of organizations, they emphasize the organizational origins of fetishes at the expense of analysing the subjective relations between people, objects and organizations. As we will see further below, in the analysis of journal list fetishism, for instance, organizational scholars have tended to focus on the organizations that produce this fetish. Yet, they have not yet fully accounted for the investments individuals make in their fetishes. In other words, they have not yet exposed the fetishisms that individuals experience in organizations.
This is, perhaps, unsurprising given that even in the study of sexuality in organizations the agenda has long since turned away from Freud. In the article which inspires this special issue, for example, Burrell argues that ‘a less Freudian tack is probably necessary when we are faced with the problem of why desexualisation in the capitalist labour process takes place’ (1984: 107). To which I would answer that Freud’s concept of fetishism, in particular, helps us to recognize the prevalence of sexuality within the apparently desexualized relations in the capitalist labour process. It helps us to understand why organizational actors chase seemingly pointless targets above all else, why they idealize their leaders while acknowledging their limitations and why they invest their workspaces with sexual energy. With this in mind, the remainder of the article explores how organizations can produce fetishisms by expanding Freud’s model of sexual fetishism into organizations.
Non-sexual, sexual fetishism in organizational life
Despite the preference in organizational research to unpick the fetishism of organizations through commodity fetishism, work organizations undoubtedly set the scene for much sexual fetishism. If we start from the simple premise that sexual fetishism refers to instances when a subject over-values an object such that it comes to attract their interest, energies and efforts then many organized behaviours can be classed as sexual fetishisms. Indeed, while the standard Freudian account tells us to look into the individual histories of fetishists, developments in the psychoanalysis of organizations show us that organizations are more than capable of recreating the earliest mental structures out of which these experiences take their determinant form. As Stein (2003, 2007) observes, organizations can stand in for the infamous Oedipal relations of early childhood and can recreate states of narcissism typical of our early lives. Here, work organizations can draw on a number of powerful techniques, such as leadership and cultural management, to shape individuals ideals and norms—allowing them in turn to unleash individuals’ ids, shape their egos and stand in for their super-egos. So it seems fair to suggest that organizations are capable of providing an environment in which sexual fetishisms can emerge in a way that is detached from an individual’s personal history.
Yet, what marks behaviours as sexual fetishes even more precisely is that the fetishist reveals a libidinally-structured pleasure regarding the attainment of the object. That is to say, the attainment of the object of their desire is equated through conscious and unconscious representations with sexual gratification. It is no surprise, from the perspective of Freud’s concept of fetishism, then, that we hear traders equate their deals with sexual conquest or, as we will see below, academics equate the joy of a top-ranked journal publication with sex. Think, for example, of Lewis’ vivid accounts of his experiences as a financial trader surrounded by big swinging dicks who equate deals with raping their clients (Lewis, 1989: 52). These are fetishisms in organizations.
In The Secretary (2002) we see perhaps the most brazen and obviously sexual illustrations of such fetishes. In this movie, a young woman is recruited as a secretary by a lawyer. Their relationship soon takes on strong sadomasochistic tones as envelopes, pens and typing-errors become charged with sexual energy to the point where the secretary makes intentional mistakes, wanting to be punished by her boss. It is not long before these sexual undertones to their relationship become openly-acknowledged. Within this new arrangement, more objects become fetishized and S/M paraphernalia becomes part of the office furniture. Everyday objects become exceptional. Pain becomes mixed with pleasure and power relations between the two become confused.
In this regard, Brewis and Linstead (2000) argue that fetishism is a key component of the sadomasochistic organization. They explain: in the deployment of fetishes in S/M specifically, the fetish speaks to the Bottom of the Top; it ‘acts as the vehicle for the essence of the Superior’ (Sellers 1992: 69), and represents the mastery that they exercise during the encounter. Indeed, because the Bottom’s only relationship with the Top is one of humiliation and submission, because they are not permitted to relate to their tormentor in any other way within the encounter, fetishes are often central to S/M because they displace desire from its original object. (2000: 130–131)
In other words, one type of organized fetish occurs when those with power in an organization, not an unproblematic category admittedly, seek to exert their dominance over those under them. They do this by forcing them to displace their desires onto a new object. Techniques such as target-driven management and performance-related pay are just some of the mechanisms through which this can be achieved. Seen from the perspective of the Top, or those with power, forcing a fetish object on others reconfirms their dominance over those beneath them. This is especially the case when the fetish objects are useless in terms of the organization’s or the individual’s goals—just as the sadist confirms their dominance by forcing the masochist to fetishize an object that is otherwise useless to attaining sexual satisfaction. But while those without power might be forced to displace their desires, they can also use these organizational techniques to their advantage. The sadist is not the only one who enjoys a sadomasochistic encounter even if, on the surface, the masochist seems to be in pain. Brewis and Linstead’s conception is particularly useful here, then, as it emphasizes that individual fetishists do not have a simple relation with their fetishes. They can be dominated by them. They can ostensibly fear and hate them. Simultaneously, though, they may find strange pleasures in them.
So we can begin to appreciate how organizations, rather than our personal history, conspire to produce fetishes among their members and we can begin to appreciate the ‘complex and perverse’ sexual pleasures that fetishes facilitate in organizations (Willmott, 2011: 435). In what follows this model of fetishism in organizations will be used to demonstrate the complexities of fetishized pleasure in organizations using the fetishism of journal lists. I do this, not only because I suffer from this fetishism myself, but because there are a number of confessional accounts of the experiences of this fetish by others which are striking for their subtle and not-so-subtle sexual undertones.
Returning to journal list fetishism
Willmott (2011) tells us that university managers confirm their position at the Top by forcing academics to take journal ranking lists as fetish objects. In the UK, in particular, this is facilitated by the widespread use the Association of Business Studies’ ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide among university administrators. This list ‘provides guides to the range, subject matter and relative quality of journals in which business and management and economics academics might publish the results of their research’ (www.associationofbusinessschools.org/node/1000257). For Willmott (2011), such lists appeal to university administrators as instruments ‘for predicting and controlling the flow of scholarship’ that allow them to deploy a range of management techniques including human resource management, payment by publication and research audits (such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, the Excellence in Research for Australia mechanism and the Performance-Based Research Fund in New Zealand, for example). As a result, the use of journal lists such as the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide is often seen simply as a process of control. Here, Willmott (2011: 434) describes list fetishism is a ‘form of scholarly subjection’.
But journal list fetishism is so much more. Academics might complain about their tormentors but when we look at accounts by individual researchers we see evidence of hidden pleasures in journal list fetishism. In fact, these accounts illustrate that academics know only too well how these lists are produced and what administrators do with them. Through these accounts, they reveal themselves to be sexual fetishists who gain pleasure from their torment and from rallying against their tormentors rather than commodity fetishists who have turned away from the organizational roots of lists. Accepting this perspective on fetishism is, though, much more uncomfortable for us as academics than identifying the arbitrary nature of lists or the types of managerial control they facilitate because it means that we must recognize our active role in our fetishes. It forces to accept that list fetishism is not simply something that is done to us but is something we do to ourselves.
For instance, just as Freud tells us that fetishists can attain easily what others have to struggle for, organization researchers acknowledge that journal list fetishism can bring material rewards (Macdonald and Kam, 2011). That is to say, while academics might be encouraged to idealize journal lists through management practices, these practices are backed up with tangible benefits. Academics who publish their research in top ranked journals are promised accelerated promotion, improved terms and conditions, mobility, bonuses and increases in pay. As Cooke explains: ‘I changed jobs, and was promoted, moments before the last RAE. I know my colleagues in the department wanted me for the work I had done, not for its potential RAE score. But it certainly helped’ (2011: 3). Indeed, even when academics claim that they have not set out to publish their work in top ranked journals, they still note the rewards offered to them. Parker (2004: 50), for example, describes ‘[t]he joy of crafting words into things that I want to say’. He continues: The intervening administration that is required to get the words from my computer to the library bores me. Checking proofs, indexes, biographical sketches, covers, signing copyright release forms. It is the writing, the very writing, that I need. A strange addiction, but quite a functional one for a child of the Research Assessment Exercise—one that has brought me plaudits and promotion, but rather accidentally. (2004: 50)
It is, however, not only the material rewards on offer to academics when they publish their work in top-ranking journals that provides the list fetishist with pleasure. The very process of producing top-ranking publications can be pleasurable. Indeed, even though Parker claims that the process of turning his writing into a publication bores him, Willmott (2011) tells us that the need for compliance and constraint, not to mention the drawn out nature of the publication process, only serves to heighten the pleasure afforded by journal list fetishism. In this regard, Willmott (2011) equates journal list fetishism with ‘fetishised acts of autoeroticism’ where ‘a ligature is applied to the throat as a means of enhancing sexual pleasure’. In the case of journal list fetishism, though, it is individual researchers who take pleasure from the self-bondage and self-torture of wrestling with a manuscript to render it compliant with the form of scholarship required by a targeted journal (or when preparing a manuscript for re-submission following the lashing of referee reports) … The highly ranked journal is like a shoe into which our scholarly activity is painfully, yet pleasurably, ‘horned’. (2011: 435)
Clearly, these pleasures are both attractive and repellent—as Mingers and Willmott reveal when they describe the ‘price to be paid’ to attain the journal list fetish. This price includes a ‘cowed compliance with referee demands that the author assesses to be irrelevant or detrimental to his or her research’ that may, in turn, ‘induce feelings of self-loathing and guilt’ (2010: 7). The list fetishist they describe is, accordingly, someone who knows the futility of their fetish but cannot break the cycle of desire and hate in which they find themselves. They have idealized the journal list, disavowed their role in their fetish and repressed the pleasures they receive on the way to attaining their fetishized object. The list fetishist, therefore, can attain the fetish object but they can never overcome the fetish itself. With each new top-ranked journal publication, researchers become more desperate for the next. Rewards heighten demands (Cooke, 2011). The fetish itself ‘perversely exacerbates what it seeks to relieve’ (Mingers and Willmott, 2010: 7).
Indeed, in the same way that Freud distinguishes pathological fetishists as those who allow their fetish object to take over their desires completely, the journal list fetishist no longer wants what would satisfy them even though they are not satisfied by what they want. Mingers and Willmott explain: ‘The gratification provided by the journal “hit” is temporary and its effects are bitter-sweet. Like the addict, thoughts immediately turn to how the next “hit” is to be obtained’ (2010: 7). The result is that both successful and unsuccessful list fetishist have, in Minger’s and Willmott’s eyes, become list maniacs—their ‘conversations increasingly turn upon journal rankings and “hits” rather than the substance and merit of scholarly work’ (2010: 7). Thanks to the fetishists’ desire for top-ranking publication, then, both those who have successfully attained top-ranking publications and those who have not seek the hit of a top-ranked publication with equal passion.
So, while some critics of journal lists have emphasized the extent to which they are imposed on academics as fetish objects, reading accounts of journal list fetishism by leading organizational researchers through a Freudian concept of fetishism begins to show us that academics themselves participate in their fetishes in a number of ways. They may claim to despise journal lists—occasionally choosing to do so in the pages of top ranked journals—but in so doing they reveal some of the pleasures they receive in pursuit of their fetish objects. They are only too aware of the social structures that produce lists and list fetishism. This is not enough to see off their fetish.
Perhaps the real problem with journal list fetishism revealed in these accounts is, then, that the academics, themselves, want to step away from their fetish but cannot convince themselves to do so. They do not want to say the safe word for fear of never again achieving the pleasure of their fetish. As Cooke puts it, using sexualized imagery: ‘University X, it is rumoured requires a GPA of 3.75, another 3.5. That these numbers seem small as penis-sizes may explain why there is some reversion to a more macho un-averaged total: “you gotta have at least a fourteen to be there”, or “even with a twelve you are not going to get in”’ (2011: 5). Yet, he says, ‘As I enter my mid-50s, meaningless REF scoring isn’t turning me on as much as it did. It’s taking me longer to reach my peak, and I am not sure if I will get there in time, if at all’ (2011: 3 emphasis added).
Discussion: fetishism in and of organization
If Freudian psychoanalysis has one indisputable truth it is that sexuality lies at the heart of many activities—even those which, on the surface, appear to be completely unrelated to anything sexual. To put this in Freud’s terms, many activities, if not all, are powered by and structured by the libido. In this sense, Freud’s psychoanalysis has much in common with claims by organization theorists that beneath the surface of apparently desexualized organizational rationalities sexuality looms large (e.g. Brewis and Linstead, 2000, 2007; Burrell, 1984; Long, 2008). So we might think that Freud’s work is a good place to look to develop the understanding of sexuality in organizations. Fetishism is a key concept in this regard for both Freudian psychoanalysis and organizational researchers.
Yet within organization studies there has been a trend to turn away from exploring the sexuality of organizational fetishisms. Organizational researchers have tended to focus, instead, on exploring the fetishism of organizations—primarily through a model of fetishism based on Marx’s commodity fetishism. This is a fetishism that works through undervaluing the production of the fetish object. As a result, analysis of the fetishism of organization tends to concentrate on revealing the organizations that produce and valorize particular objects that are hidden through the fetish. But this model of fetishism ignores the active role of fetishists in organizations. That is to say, it overlooks the pleasures that fetishists get from their fetish objects. In this regard, the article has illustrated how a psychoanalytic model of fetishism can reveal the role of organizations in producing fetishes and the complex and perverse pleasures that bind the organizational fetishist to their fetish. The fetishisms in organizations that Freud’s work helps us to focus on are simultaneously supported by an overvaluation of an object and an undervaluation of an aim.
It is worth reflecting, in closing, on some of the criticisms of Freud’s work on sexuality. Freud is routinely accused of taking culturally-specific sexual values as natural phenomenon and, in this sense, his account of fetishism could be described as normalizing heterosexual object relations. His explanation of how a fetish is formed, for instance, centres on the Oedipal relations of young boys to their mothers. In this regard, it is notable that the descriptions of journal list fetishism explored above come from male academics. We might justifiably wonder, then, whether Freud’s account struggles to account for sexuality beyond male heterosexuality.
However, I think there is a way to rescue Freud from this accusation. Appignaseci and Forrester (1992) have conducted meticulous analysis of the importance of what they call ‘Freud’s women’ in the development of Freud’s thought. So, while Freud’s published explanations of his ideas tended to focus on male heterosexual sexuality, analysis shows that those ideas were certainly founded on his experiences analysing, living and working with women. Perhaps more importantly, though, Mitchell (1974) argues in her feminist reassessment of Freud’s work that if we focus on the sexual objects that Freud discusses we miss the point of his analysis. It is worth quoting Mitchell at length here: Everyone knows that Freud ‘discovered’ what he admitted every nursemaid already knew: the sexuality of children. What is far less popular, even today, is the implication of this … I do not mean that we won’t acknowledge that every little three-year-old is a sex maniac but, simply the implications not for the child but for the nature of sexuality as such. Despite Freud’s work, the temptation is still to see sexuality as interpersonal sexual relationship, and sexual phantasies or auto-eroticism as perverse. Thus in some ways it has been far easier for homosexuality to be accepted than, say, fetishism. Freud’s theory of sexuality is completely different. Instead of accepting the notion of sexuality as a complete, so to speak ready-made thing in itself which could then diverge, he found that ‘normal’ sexuality itself assumed its form only as it travelled over a long and tortuous path, maybe eventually, and even then only precariously, establishing itself … There is no nostalgic normality, nor (implicit in such a notion) any childhood bliss when all is as it should be. On the contrary, in childhood all is diverse or perverse; unification and ‘normality’ are the effort we must make on our entry into human society. Freud had no temptation to idealize the origins with which he was concerned. (1974: 16–17)
In other words, Freud’s account of sexuality, particularly that contained in his work on fetishism, encourages us to see sexuality in all manner of places. Importantly, this form of relating to objects is not an exception for Freud but the form of our sexual relations from the very start. The exception is, rather, the organization of the diverse into the normal. A Freudian account of fetishism in organizations should not, then, led us to conclude that all relations are sexual or that all attachments within an organization are fetishes. Instead, it tells us that while there are limitless opportunities to develop fetishes in organizations there must be psychodynamic processes in place that support the idealization, disavowal and repressions of particular objects. When this happens, powerful energies can be released that motivated members of organizations to pursue their organized fetishes. But, as in the case of journal list fetishism, these energies are not easy to control and can damage both individual members of organizations and organizations themselves.