Manufacturing the Past: Loss and Absence in Organizational Change
通过分析一家澳大利亚制造子公司变革中的员工谈话，研究组织变革中“失落”的不同含义，包括对过去的遗憾、对未来的解脱等，并探讨失落与抵抗的关系。
This paper describes different conceptions of the past presented in a retrospect ive analysis of organizational change. One day in 1993, an Australian subsidi ary of a United States manufacturing organization introduced changes includ ing product-based production teams, a three-shift factory operation, and employee redundancy packages. Eighteen months later, the teams were dis solved. In this paper, talk about change is interpreted through the concept of loss; loss as regret for what has been in the past, return to the past and loss of what might have been, loss as relief to move on to what can be in the future, and loss as release from constraints of the past. It is suggested that analysis of loss and absence can increase the complexity of representations of emotion in situations of organizational change, and that there are additional senses of loss which can supplement those associated with death and mourning. The association between loss and resistance is discussed, and a comparison is made between 'loss of' as a retrospective analytical frame and 'resistance to' as more prospective and modernist in orientation.