Monstrous reanimation: Rethinking organizational death in the UK financial services sector

Abstract

This article presents a new perspective for analysing organizational death through the concept of reanimation. Mobilizing recent discussions of the monstrous in organization theory, we draw on the figure of the reanimated monster to analyse an apparent case of organizational dying in the UK financial services sector. Through this, we explore how organizations may neither live nor die, but instead constitute a continual process of reanimation in which organizational spaces and the materials, bodies and narratives surrounding them are recycled, reintegrated and reused to maintain the appearance of the immortal organization. However, reanimation is not merely the clean and efficient synthesis of old and new. There is an unsettling consequence to living and working within the reanimated organization and it is here that the article considers the value of the monstrous for challenging and rethinking established categories of continuity, change, death, life and loss in contemporary working life.

Keywords:

• global financial crisis
• hedge fund
• monstrous
• organizational death
• reanimation
• renewal

Notes

1. Our three-part analytical framework echoes the three parts that made up the monstrous chimera of ancient Greek mythology; an androgynous creature that was part lion, part snake and part goat. We refer to these motifs as ‘chimerical’ in the sense that all three (individually and together) provide a means of revealing and analysing the monstrous elements that contribute to the production of ‘ordinary’ organizational life in this setting.