Purpose – Health care organizations often experience difficulty in aligning competing and changing demands, tasks and other organizational conditions in a consistent way, so that they uniformly influence employee outcomes in desired directions. The purpose of this paper is to theorize about...

Purpose – This paper aims to present evidence for regarding reflexive practice as the crux of patient safety in tertiary hospitals. Reflexive practice buttresses safety because it is the precondition for flexible systematization – that is, the process that involves frontline clinicians in...

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was imbued with a vision that apprehended social milieu as dialectic. Those who wish to adopt a dialectical orientation to their work as agents of and for change need to appreciate that such an orientation is likely to engender certain psychodynamics...

While the literature has emphasized the literal and the narrative within organizations, this article will consider the visual and the imaginal. Organizations are known and experienced through images, and these images must be considered if organizational culture is to be understood or changed. We...

Purpose – To conceptualize and theorize dialogue's diagnostic as well as generative functions for strategic innovation and organizational change. Design/methodology/approach – Conceptual development with case illustration. Findings – Strategic innovation requires shifts in existing mental...

Purpose – The purpose of this conceptual paper is to discuss the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis for thinking on organizational functioning and organizational change. Design/methodology/approach – First, the authors discuss basic Lacanian ideas with regard to the notion of the...

Purpose – This paper has three purposes. The first is to introduce the concept of fantasy, based on Lacanian pyschoanlysis, in order to link theoretically the role of narrative and affect in organizational strategies of control. The second is to use this concept to illuminate the fantasmatic...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to current discussions on the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in organizational change. Specifically, It argues that critiques of Lacan's work must be acknowledged and incorporated into these discussions. To date, there remains a silence surrounding...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the resistance to change in the organizational contexts where a soon‐to‐be‐implemented change initiative infringes upon freedoms of the employees. Specifically, the role of affect was explored within the framework of psychological...