Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma

This paper uses psychoanalytic ideas to develop a theory of organizational miasma, a concept that describes a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual – that afflicts all who work in certain organizations that undergo sudden and traumatic transformations. Miasma is offered not as another organizational metaphor, a prism through which to view particular organizations. Instead, I delineate the fundamental...