Organization: On the Theory and Practice of Excess

Abstract

Can organization theory truly grasp excess, or is this a constant paradoxical other of organization, a permanently elusive remainder? As a phenomenon might it mark out the contours of a configuration that points to an aporia of organization that scholarship and research in organization has yet to confront? In posing these questions we note that excess has proven notoriously tricky to handle through conventional modes of analytical scholarship, and has thus often been ignored when discussing contemporary economy. However, excess has much to teach about organization. In order to respond to this challenge the article discusses the possibilities and problems of theorizing excess and presents/exhibits an argument for developing the theory of general economy in order to open up and extend the persistent restricted economy of organization studies.

Key words:

• Excess
• Theory
• Organization
• General Economy
• Bataille

Notes

1. A number of readers and texts have with varying success attempted to provide an exposition and glossary of Bataille's major ideas (Richardson, 1994; Gill, 1995; Noys, 2000).

2. Michael Rosen's 1985 and 1988 papers are exceptional and exemplary of the kind of ethnographic sensibility able to capture and delineate those complex and overlayered ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967) features of everyday life for which the slightest disturbance can set off tremors and repercussions seemingly way out of scale and proportion to the initial trigger‐event. Rosen unearths a dimension of organization in which the fragility and what we might call—following the architectural innovations of Buckminster Fuller—the ‘tensegrity’ of social relations are made apparent.

3. Actor‐Network Theory has produced a more convincing and robust challenge to organization analysis as a mode of empirical enquiry, but even here the work of Law (1994), Latour (1987), Callon (1986) seems to offer a quasi‐naturalistic approach to organization and its representation that is unable to escape or justify the self‐grounding tautologies of knowledge production.

4. Variously used as a surreptitious weapon of ‘skin battles’ in low‐intensity warfare amongst management executives and, as has been more popularly reported, skillfully deployed to sabotage computer hard‐drives.

5. See Vaudeville (1999) on the folly of structures and the existence of architecture as borderline, critical state of imminent collapse.