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Editorial

The Revenge of Gratuitousness on Utilitarianism

An Investigation Into the Causes and Consequences of a Collective Repression

Pasquale Gagliardi

Catholic University of Milan, Italy

This essay seeks to demonstrate that the spread of utilitarian rationalism within developed Western societies has had two crucial consequences: (a) gratuitousness and expressiveness, as irrepressible human needs, have been crushed "at the door" of utilitarian organizations but then have surreptitiously re-entered through the window, camouflaging themselves in forms that render them difficult to recognize and enable them to evade the mechanisms of social censorship that protect the image of organizations as the uncontested domain of instrumental rationality, and (b) the expert knowledge produced about organizations since the beginning of the last century has for almost 80 years ignored the expressive dimension of organizational life. From this point of view, the scientific community of organizational scholars has displayed an astonishing sort of collective repression. The forms taken by this repression and the expedients used to reduce the cognitive dissonance inevitably provoked by evidence of what has been repressed are examined.

Key Words: gratuitousness • utilitarianism • organizational culture • organizational knowledge

Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 4, 309-315 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1056492605280425
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P. Gagliardi
The Collective Repression of `Pathos' in Organization Studies
Organization, May 1, 2007; 14(3): 331 - 338.
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