In 2011, the world learned of the death of the iconic Steve Jobs. He left behind a real empire, strongly marked with his imprint. Illness had forced him to gradually withdraw from the company, but his influence remained extremely strong and his absence palpable. Three years later, in 2014, Yukari Kane published a book on Apple titled “The Haunted Empire”. According to this former journalist from Wall Street Journal, the figure of the founder was still omnipresent in the company.
Tim Cook, the current and very rational CEO, declared in 2018 to a journalist from Wired that it was impossible for him to settle in Jobs’ office after his death. No one else would have tried it. Even today, the office is intact: armchairs, bookcase, annotated whiteboard.
Apple CEO testified:
“You can still feel his presence there […] people go to the cemetery to think of someone […] I go to his office. “
Tim Cook reveals here a tendency to mystical astonishment and raises our question: How can the influence of a deceased be reflected in a company? And more generally, what concrete effects can an absent actor have on an organization? These are the questions we sought to answer in a article academic published in the French management review.
Ghosts exist
To answer these questions, we must start by taking a step aside from the very rational approaches of organizations. Because the case of Apple is not exceptional and we all know these situations where an absent person retains an influence on the daily life of a company. We have therefore arrived at a somewhat counter-intuitive first observation: ghosts do exist and do indeed populate organizations.
Of course, we are not talking here about the floating and translucent forms, covered with a white sheet. What we call organizational ghosts correspond to actors and figures who, although physically absent, have concrete manifestations and impacts on the life of organizations. In doing so, we are part of an increasingly important social science trend over the past twenty years: the spectral turn.
Let us therefore recognize that our daily lives, both organizational and social, are not limited to material interactions and collaborations, between physically present actors. The past and history, ours as well as those of our company, often remain present, even haunting, in our daily lives. It happens that an organizational actor is manifested precisely by his absence: an empty office, a whispered anecdote… like a ghost haunting the corridors of the organization.
We have identified two main types of ghosts in the social sciences: epistemic ghosts and ethical ghosts.
The two types of ghosts
Very early on, psychoanalysts were confronted with patients haunted by ghosts who kept coming back. In their beautiful book published in 1987, Bark and kernel, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok called ghost “this work in the unconscious of the shameful secret of another”.
In psychoanalysis, we will therefore speak of a ghost, a foreign figure who keeps coming back and who is the bearer of a secret. And to be cured, it will be necessary to succeed in welcoming the latter, to get him out of his crypt: to decrypt him. Accepting his revelation then allows “the ejection of this bizarre foreign body”. Since you have to convert your secret into knowledge, we say that the ghost is epistemic.
The second figure comes from the one who largely dominates the spectral turn today: the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his work Marx Specters, published in 1993, Derrida refutes the idea of the phantom as an epistemic object:
“It is something that we do not know, precisely, and we do not know if precisely it is, if it exists […]. We don’t know: not out of ignorance but because this non-object […] is not a matter of knowledge. “
Bswise/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Instead, he proposes an ethics of the spectrum, the meeting of which would bind us to our values and our history, but also to others. It is then necessary to greet and receive spectral encounters, “to let oneself live inside, that is to say haunted by a foreign guest”. It is therefore especially not a question of chasing ghosts, but of welcoming the ambiguous and disturbing figure of the specter.
No Shakespearean mystic, therefore, no ghost of King Hamlet, no specter of Banquo, nor above all sheets that float or spirits that strike. More modestly, we seek here to better reflect the concrete effects of these large absentees who still haunt their businesses. The concepts of epistemic ghosts and ethical specters are there to help us better understand what we observe and feel in the daily life of organizations – that is to say, a reading grid.
The specter of Christian Dior
If we observe for example the case of Dior fashion house, we realize that the premises of the company are constantly haunted – like those of Apple with Steve Jobs.
The documentary Dior and Me by Frédéric Tcheng released in 2015, allows us to see these figures by following the employees who speak, for example, regularly about Christian Dior. His ghost there is often inspiring and funny, but it can also be overwhelming at times. So we witness a scene, one evening of preparation for the parade, where the seamstresses affectionately call him “Cricri” before bursting out laughing – while wondering what he would have thought of the collection they are preparing.
At another time, we witness the dismay of Raf Simons, then new artistic director, in front of the weight that the legacy of such a figure constitutes – to the point that he stops reading the autobiography of the creator so much he obsesses him. . Here the specter of Christian Dior is reminded of Raf Simons, influencing him in his current and future creative work.
At other times, the same figure of Christian Dior is tinged with traditions, even conservatism, and then appears as a ghost embodying the past of the house and influencing the aesthetic choices of designers, almost 60 years after his death!
But the house is not only haunted by Christian Dior … the documentary thus unfolds the anecdotes around the different ghosts, up to more discreet figures, but also more traumatic. Everyone in the company remembers the scandal of xenophobic statements by John Galliano… yet the words about him are disguised and indirect, at the limit sometimes whispered, muffled, but never sustained aloud.
Understand the presence of absentees
Beyond these few anecdotes about Dior, anyone who takes the time to think about it will be able to find ghostly equivalents in their business. Like the little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense who is capable of seeing the dead (the famous “I see dead people”, “I see dead people”), we wish here to encourage theorists and practitioners of organizations to understand the presence and influence of those who are absent.
Better understanding ghostly figures requires welcoming them in order to meet them better, to manage to respond to them or to get rid of them. It will therefore be a question above all of not ignoring them, of not denying their presence, because we would then deprive ourselves of their source of inspiration, of the challenges they throw at us, and of the anchoring that they allow in the world. history and culture of the organization. Being haunted by Christian Dior is ultimately a sign that you are really part of the house …
Philosopher Gayatari Spivak spoke of learning to dance with ghosts while describing the Native American ritual of ghostdance, by which the members of a tribe try to relate to their history and their ancestors through a danced ritual. In this vein, we affirm that each practice, each decision in an organization can constitute a potential form of summons of ghosts, and therefore an opportunity to be part of its history… the better to leave its own mark.
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