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DOI: 10.1177/13505084070761492007; 14; 351Organization

Stephen Linstead and Joanna BrewisPassion, Knowledge and Motivation: Ontologies of Desire

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Volume 14(3): 351371ISSN 13505084

Copyright 2007 SAGE(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi

and Singapore)

Passion, Knowledge and Motivation:Ontologies of Desire

Stephen LinsteadUniversity of York, UK

Joanna BrewisUniversity of Leicester, UK

Abstract. In this paper we address some neglected ontological issuesregarding the ideas of passion and knowledge in the contemporary Westerncontext. We argue that passion as a concept can be understood in two mainways. The prevalent interpretation in organization studies is teleological,

that of a powerful, purposive motivation to achieve an end result. Thesecond is an ontological understanding of the nature of desire, which initself is double-sided. Using the ideas of Foucault and Bataille, we suggestdesire can be read as lack but also/alternatively as a free-flowing creativeforce operating behind the quest for knowledge. Through the power effectsof discourses like knowledge management and motivation theory, thisflow of desire is curtailed in its ability to make meaning through non-knowledge as well as knowledge. This entails that formless, unpredictabledesire is discursively condensed into functional motivation, whilst at thesame time the protean, curious urge to connect to the externality of the world

becomes structured into the instrumental, conservative management ofknowledge. We reflect here on both of these discursive trajectories, as wellas on some of their implications.Key words. desire; discourse; knowledge;management; motivation; ontology; passion

DOI: 10.1177/1350508407076149 http://org.sagepub.com

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Organization 14(3)Articles

Introduction: Etymologies of Passion and Desire

The title of this Special Issue might seem at first sight paradoxicalafterall isnt passion about emotion and knowledge about reason, which weare accustomed to considering as opposites? In what follows we take this

question seriously, exploring the meaning of passion, its relation to desireand the ways in which these concepts are connected. We then consider con-temporary approaches to knowledge and its management, and relate these tothe very different approaches to desire that have emerged in philosophicalwork. We do this with particular reference to the concept of motivation, andthe work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille. But before our discus-sion can begin, it is necessary to engage in some etymological explorationto clarify two of our key terms; passion and desire.

The etymological origins of the contemporary English word passionlie in the Latinpatiore, meaning to bear or to suffer, andpassio, meaning

suffering (Hpfl and Linstead, 1993). It is also related to the idea of thepassive, such that one definition offered by the Merriam-Webster OnlineDictionary(accessed 30 August 2006) is the state or capacity of being actedon by external agents or forces. Merriam-Webstergoes on to suggest thatpassion represents an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or con-viction. Literally, then, passion is something that is neither the propertyof nor controlled by the bearerinstead it is imposed upon them, whetherwe understand it as an enthusiasm or preoccupation that cannot be shakenoff or in terms of the terrible suffering that was the Passion of Christ.Passion is certainly not a wholly pleasant concept. It may involve pain

and, in its more obsessive forms, can consume, displace, even destroy theselfand/or othersin the pursuit of something external or transcendent,a sacrifice that gives access to the sacred. The apparent mass suicide of900-plus Peoples Temple members at Jonestown in November 1978, forexample, was attributed to their passionately held conviction that theywould subsequently be transported to another planet for a life of eternalecstasy. IRA Volunteer Bobby Sands self-destructive passion led to his65 day hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, and hiseventual death in May 1981. We can also consider kamikaze pilots andAl Qaeeda suicide bomberswho, of course, take as many others with

them as possiblein this context. Certain types of passion may thereforerequire the ultimate sacrifice.

Passion is also connected to the concept of desire. This connection is notby any means trivialindeed they are inseparable. The etymology of desireoriginates in the Latin desiderare; de + sidu meaning heavenly body orstar (as in sidereal,meaning relating to stars or constellations). Desire isclearly aspirantMerriam-Websterdefinitions include to long or hope for,to express a wish forand also has the intransitive meaning of to have orfeel desire rather than a yearning for anything specific. Other sources makereference to an object of desire or deep interest. Certainly this last sense

coheres with our theme of the passion for knowledge, but the pursuit ofknowledge also involves being in the grip of powerful forces, and entails

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Passion, Knowledge and Motivation: Ontologies of DesireStephen Linstead and Joanna Brewis

suffering. As we have seen, passion may be creative or destructive, andbecause of its dark side is always potentially dangerous. This dark sidedemands organizationit must be identified and regulated if the dangersto social life are to be minimized. Sexual passion in particular has long

engendered a requirement that it be controlled. Burrells (1984: 103110)tour de force review of the roots of Western organizational desexualizationextends back to the emergence of the notion of obscenity in the 15th centuryagainst a wider contemporaneous backdrop of the civilizing of sex, andfurther to the edict of celibacy for monks and nuns as handed down bythe medieval Catholic Church. Importantly, moreover, passion alwaysstands in relation to otherness. It is a passionforsomething or someone.It is therefore in its intransitive sense that desire differs most significantlyfrom passion, whilst simultaneously being connectedand it is throughthis connection that we wish to explore the concepts ontologically as well

as etymologically.Western thought also tends to treat passion in relation to the concept ofdesirecertainly this was the case for Plato, for Aristotle, for Augustineand for most continental philosophy since Hegel. Aristotle uses the gen-eral term orexis to indicate desire, but its specific sense is the naturalhuman desire to know. This desire allies itself to practical reason in orderto be worked out, and it causes humans to reach out for something orsomeoneindeed one who does not reach out, or has no desire, is anorexic.Aristotle distinguishes three sub-forms of desireappetite (epithymia),passion (thymos) and will (boulsis).Epithymia usually indicates a desire

for something, although also implies lust for a person; thymosmeaningpassioncarries the sense of heart, courage or spirit in relation tolife and strong feeling. Boulsis however is always thought through and,although its meanings are wishing and willing, it is also associated withbouleuomaito deliberate or take counsel.

In this paper, whilst recognizing that there are differences, we willtherefore use the term desire to subsume that of passion with passionbroadly indicating a focused, powerful emotion, whereas desire standsfor something more general and intransitive. Indeed rather than arguingin traditional Platonic fashion that desire signals lack, we suggestin

extendingFoucaults commentary on sexualitythat such readings can beunderstood as the power effects of prevailing discourse. As an alternative,we offer an interpretation of desire, of which we use Bataille as a key ex-emplar, as a flowing and shapeless creative/destructive urge.1

This amorphous urge, we contend, lies beneath our basic curiosity aboutand willingness to engage with the world. As such it underpins the pur-suit of knowledge about that worldas Aristotle would argue. But at thesame time its experimental and non-purposive character explains whyfeeling, intuition, gut instinct, emotion, play and chance are also importantdimensions of our ability to experience the worldand therefore why we

act on the basis of things we do not and can never know for sure. The re-conceptualization of desire as flow therefore allows for non-knowledge,



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the passion for not knowing (Bataille, 2001: 196), whereby we are drawnto things around us even when they seem at best ambivalent or counter-productive, and at worst threaten to overwhelm or imperil us.

These phenomena give our existence meaning beyond that which is

easily communicated in writing, verbally or even semiotically, and provideus with wisdom beyond knowledgeour dimly sensed and rarely voicedsensibility that in the final analysis we will always perish, just as doesall living matter on Earth. The knowledge that death is inevitable cannotbe the knowledge ofdeath, as that must always remain incommunicable.Thus the ultimate knowledge remains a non-knowledge, which Batailleassociates with other abject phenomenathose which, likewise, can beknown but not known ofand thus carry within them the taint of death. Todesire to know what is beyond life is inevitably to desire ones own death.Similarly, any object-oriented desire desires its own death in the quest to

be satisfied. This deathly taint, as we go on to suggest in our substantiveanalysis (see From passion to motivation), may explain the discursive chan-nelling of desire into desire-as-lack, and by turns into the future-orientedconcept of motivation. The concept of meaningeven in the sense of ameaningful lifelikewise turns into a surrogate, a narrow and inauthenticsubstitute that we can only associate with outcomes, with accumulation,with personal and/or organizational advantage (Sievers, 1986). Motivationthus comes to stand in for both desire and meaning.

Knowledge, like passion or desire, also brings us in relation to otherness.It is the product, as we have already suggested above, of the simple, desire-

fuelled curiosity that in the first instance reaches out to the otherness ofthe world just as a child might grab for a brightly coloured toy. Knowledge,then, is a means for making sense of and coping withperhaps evenresolvingexternality and difference. The more we know about thematerial or phenomenological worlds of other people, the more we canlocate them in relation to our own so that, at the very least, we are able toact in relation to them without personal risk. This entails that knowledgelays the foundations for social community and simultaneously increasesour individual freedom and personal sovereigntybut also adds to ourability to control and dominate others. Thus, as is also the case with desire,

social rules for the possession and transfer of knowledge tend to developin seeking to ensure the maintenance of human stability and progress.Indeed it hardly needs to be remarked that social systems depend on

degrees and levels of secrecy to function, regardless of how primitive oradvanced they are (Luhmann, 1995). One instance is Western legislationsuch as the UKs Freedom of Information Act (2000), which establishesthe categories of data that state organizations must provide if a memberof the public submits a request, but at the same time includes a lengthy list oftypes of knowledge which are not covered. Knowledge cannot freely beshared without risk for, just as the possession of knowledge may convey

power, it also carries with it vulnerabilityand the sharing of knowledgerenders one especially vulnerable. Shareable knowledge therefore needs



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to be manipulatedand its use and movement regulatedby the powerful,who seek to constrain methods of its acquisition whilst elaborating theirown. The social regulation of knowledge for the maintenance of humanstability and progress is therefore very much embedded withinand

central to the continuation ofthe status quo.This leads us to the claim that what we know as knowledge is for themost part another surrogatethis time for the organic power that Nietzscherecognized (and his interpreters distorted) in will-to-power, and the sortof knowledge that is always in relation to its other, non-knowledge; alwaysopen to its own deep disconfirmation; and always compelled by curiosityabout and experimentation on the variegated world-out-there. Indeed thedarker, wilder sides of both passion and knowledge are rendered invis-ible as a result of these processes of discursive regulation and some of themore intractable ontological issues are swept under the epistemological

carpet.Our argument will now proceed as follows. First we explore the channel-ling of knowledge, beginning with the key organization studies exemplar ofknowledge management. We then examine the process by which passionand desire become motivation, drawing on Foucault and critiquing motiv-ation theory. Thirdly we explore an alternative formulation of desireinformed by our reading of Bataille, before drawing some conclusionsas to how we might fruitfully interrogate the passion-power-knowledgerelation in future.

According to Gherardi (2000: 213) the dominant view of knowledge

management rests on the assumption that it is relatively distortion-freeor lossless:

The reification of knowledge has grown more overt with the objectifiedtransferable commodity envisaged by the knowledge management ap-proach, which treats knowledge as practically synonymous with informationcreated, disseminated and embedded in products, services and systems The transfer of knowledge [in this view of the world], moreover, may beaccomplished without distortion: to transfer is not to transform.

Our treatment of a sample of the relevant literature suggests this represen-tation is perhaps something of a straw manthat many accounts of know-

ledge management distinguish between knowledge and information, aswell as emphasizing that it is extremely difficult to effect straightforwardknowledge transfer. Still, the knowledge management discourse undoubtedlybears all the hallmarks of the social regulation to which we have referredabove. In other words, we agree with Contu and Willmott (2003) that eventhe more intellectually sophisticated analyses (e.g. Brown and Duguid,1991) can be understood as conservative, as contributing to the reproductionof corporate Situation Normal. What we add to their argumentation is ouruse of Foucaultand his genealogical period in particularto suggestthat the discourse of knowledge management generates the functionalist

conviction that knowledge is a managerial commodity.



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Our excursus through Foucaults middle period is thus undertaken inorder to argue that there are inevitably opportunity costs to the commodi-fication of knowledge in organizations, and it is these opportunity costs thatthe knowledge management discourse seems largely to disregard. Indeed,

such a preference for particular routes through the knowledge jungle istypical of organization studies more generally, according to ten Bos (2004),who makes a similar anti-hodological2 argument in criticizing the obsessivestudy of organizational pathways. Linear models of organizational change,hierarchies of authority, traditional notions of career and modern notions ofpurposeful networking and the ambitious accumulation of social capital allillustrate how the metaphor of the journey as progress from A to B pulls usback from wanderings of thought and practice and ignores the potentiallyfertile and exciting ground that lies off-road (Linstead and Pullen, 2006;ten Bos, 2005).

We then proceed to examine our second trajectorythe process by whichpassion or desire becomes motivation. Here we argue that motivationtheory is ontologically rooted in the conceptualization of desire-as-lack,although this is rarely if ever acknowledged in contemporary renderingsof motivation. On the one hand this makes the concept of motivation diffi-cult critically to unlock because the idea that desire is always lack is sothoroughly embedded within it. But the particular way in which the desire-as-lack thesis has been taken up by this body of thought is also profoundlyone-sided. Motivation is typically depicted in relentlessly positive terms,such that it has to do with self-completion/-enhancement/-fulfilment and

not self-annihilation or disappearance into the other that is lacking. Thereis certainly no reference in the existing theory to the death drive, and sexwhere mentioned, as by Maslow, is rendered as not much more than abiological itch that needs to be scratched. And, once scratched, we moveonwards and upwards to seek safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization(Boje and Rosile, 2006: 72, n5).

But again there is more to it. Extending Foucault to suggest that thedesire-as-lack thesis is in itself a power effect of the modern discourse ofsexuality, we go on to propose a different reading of desire altogetherasunruly, chaotic flow. Our inspiration here is Batailles thesis of the general

economy. This asserts that the central human dilemma is notreplenishment,accumulation or the filling of gaps, but instead squandering the excessiveamounts of desire (/passion/energy) available to us. Read through Bataille,motivation theory in fact ceases to make any sense at all. But what is alsocentral to our argument is the melancholy that runs through his work, thesense in which our preoccupation with lack, with securing what is missing,with motive, purpose and instrumentality, means that we are always chas-ing after something we can never attain. It is as if life is always takingplace elsewhere.

In sum, our intention is to tell a series of what Sawicki (1994) calls

cautionary talesto tease out the implications of contemporary organ-ization studies renderings of knowledge and passion. Our central claim is



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that we cannot understand the passion for knowledgewhatever form ittakeswithout reflecting on the ontological question of desire. It is alsoworth noting that, whilst Foucaults argumentation has become increasinglysignificant in organization studies, the work of Bataille is much less well

known, and considers certain ontological issues upon which Foucault be-stows less attention. The question of desire is perhaps the most importantof these, and it is a secondary contribution of this paper to bring a focus ondesire into the contemporary discussion of power/knowledge in the analysisof organization [though see also Munro (2005) for a similar consideration].Indeed given that Foucault reads desire only as a power effect as opposedto a primary force, for us drawing on Bataille in addressing the ontology ofdesire provides the necessary basis for taking the analysis of the passion-power-knowledge nexus forward in organization studies.3

Knowledge and its ManagementThere is an undeniableand persistentpassion for knowledge in organ-ization studies, as manifest in what Gherardi (2000: 212) calls the welter ofpublications on the subject from the 1970s onwards. One key preoccupa-tion is the extent to which tacit knowledge can be externalizedrenderedexplicit and thus transferable to others (Leadbeter, 2000; Nonaka, 1995;Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Polanyi, 1966)and a related problematic,as summarized by Brown and Duguid (2001), is the imperative to movetacit best practice around within organizations while at the same time

preventing it from leaking beyondorganizational borders such that it isimitable. However, Brown and Duguid also argue that knowledge sticksfor other reasons than its tacitnessnot least of which are unequal powerrelations, which recalls our earlier point about the intersections betweenknowledge and vulnerability.

Another oft-rehearsed claim is that knowledge is more than data or infor-mation, that it is not a static commodity which can be captured and passedon in any straightforward way. For Fahey and Prusak (1998: 269), for ex-ample, Knowledge is about imbuing data and information with decision-and action-relevant meaning, so information becomes knowledgeonly

when it is used in the service of the organizational bottom line. McDermott(1999: 105106) agrees that knowing something involves being able toutilize information in the most appropriate, context-specific way. Here thenwe see warnings against anthropomorphizing organizational knowledgerepositories as if these inanimate systems can themselves know, as well asa rejection of the assumption that stories that support learning-in-workingand innovation [can] be simply uprooted and repackaged for circulationwithout becoming prey to exactly those problems that beset abstractedcanonical accounts (Brown and Duguid, 1991: 54)irrelevance, lack ofcontext sensitivity, incompleteness and so on.

McDermott (1999: 108109) also emphasizes the role of the knowledgecommunity in suggesting that we do not acquire knowledge on our own,



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but instead are socialized into a territory already occupied by others.Here, alongside many other knowledge management commentators, heinvokes Lave and Wengers (1991) concept of communities-of-practice,and more particularly: (i) its emphasis on becoming an insider rather

than simply receiving explicit, formal expert knowledge (Brown andDuguid, 1991: 48); and (ii) the argument that such communities originateorganically, such that any attempt to manage knowledge in organizationsneeds to respect this. Relatedly, McDermott (1999: 104) and Fahey andPrusak (1998) counsel against over-reliance on technology and formalsystems in organizational knowledge dissemination.

What stands out for us from this literature, then, is the following: know-ledge involves both knowing thatand knowing how; effective knowledgemanagement is supported by but not reducible to data capture/dissemin-ation systems, which need to accommodate changes in the knowledge

stock; knowledge transfer is best facilitated by hands-on practice andface to face communication; and knowledge managers also require asensitivity to organizational realpolitik. This is the basis of our suggestionthat Gherardis rendering of the knowledge management field, quotedabove, is something of a straw man.

But what is also clear is that, in line with wider modern Western dis-courses of progress, rationality and means-ends thinking, knowledgehere is understood as a tool or a commoditywithin the knowledgeof knowledge management, knowledge is therefore thinkable only inhighly circumscribed and functionalist ways. Perhaps ironically in the

light of Gherardis earlier-cited comments, the notion that knowledge ismore than just information actually underscores this instrumentalismin the corollary claim that knowing thatis pretty useless without knowinghow. Purpose, use value, is all. Here the use value of knowledge is itselfone-dimensionalbeing to do entirely with the bottom line, adding value,harnessing informal, extant organizational processes so as to maximizecorporate return.

In order to theorize this discourse of knowledge management andits construction of knowledge as something to be managed in the serviceof organizational objectives, we now turn to Foucault. His work, as noted,

will be familiar to readers of this journal, but we provide a short exegesishere nonetheless in order to clarify how his ideas connect to our argument.Foucault (1982) claims that human enquiry throughout history has dealtwith two central questionswho we are and how we should live. He alsoasserts that the answers generated are specific to the episteme in oper-ation at the time; the sociohistorically located set of assumptions regardingthe relationship between things in the world and our knowledge of thosethings. The prevailing episteme therefore establishes how these things canbe known (Foucault, 1970). So it is not possible to say anythingat all at anytimewhat can be said (i.e. what is accepted as true or valid) varies acrossepochs and cultures.



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Neither does Foucault see movement between one episteme and anotheras teleological. Instead he regards such shifts as breaks with establishedways ofknowingand nothing more (Foucault, 1986: 54). Thus there isno such thing as enduring or universal knowledge: it is always a crea-

ture of its time and place. Moreover, Foucault (1980: 194) goes on tosuggest that, as certain forms of knowledge become accepted as truth(despitetheir historical or cultural specificity), institutions, architecturalarrangements, regulations, laws [and] administrative measures grow uparound these scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality,philanthropy etc.. In other words, specific knowledges form the basis forthe emergence of discoursessets of interlocking relationships, policies,symbols, material artefacts, practices and procedures which underpin andperpetuate them.

The other important aspect of Foucaults argumentation is that it rejects

the modernist notion that we have to be free to knowhe has no truckwith the contemporary Western epistemic opposition between powerand knowledge. Instead he writes these two variables as power/knowledge,as an inextricable couplet in that prevailing discourses produce the wayin which we think about ourselves and the world around us, and thus arepowerful (Foucault, 1980: 131). In other words, how we talk and writeabout what it is to be human structures what we are, do and thinkwecircumscribe what we are capable of becoming by knowing ourselves andothers. The power effects of discourse are allthat we know or can knowof ourselves and the world-out-there: we are in fact lived embodiments of

discursive regimes (Foucault, 1982: 213).Power, then, does not inevitably obscure or warp what we know, as in themodernist account. Instead Foucault (1977: 194) instructs us that powerproduces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. Sothe effects of power/knowledge regimes both enable andexcludetheyrender us able to act on the basis of a particular way of relating to theworld, but also simultaneously delimit our possibilities. Returning tothe discourse of knowledge management, this specific regime has estab-lished a set of parameters around the concept of knowledge, and at the sametime excluded other worlds of possibility (Cals and Smircich, 1988: 206)

such that the only form of organizational knowledge worth managing is thatwith corporate utility. So knowledge management consists precisely of thesocial regulation of knowledge transfer to consolidate the organizationalstatus quo. As Contu and Willmott (2003: 289, 293) indicate in theircritique of Brown and Duguid (1991), the latters emphasis is on designingtraining and innovation programmes which enable continuous learningto be engendered and work performance to be enhanced increas[ing]employees capability of addressing technological and market changes.

It is also worth pointing out that this utilitarian channelling of knowledgeevokes for us similar renderings of phenomena such as social relations,

values and norms, sexuality, aesthetics, spirituality and emotion, all ofwhich have been taken up in the organization studies canon as potentially



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relevant to the bottom line if regulated in the appropriate ways. Criticalmanagement studies has also had much to say on these renderingswhichinclude corporate culture change programmes, emotional intelligence andfunky workplace redesignin terms of their air-brushing out of any

threat to organizational profitability and the mechanical, hyperreal rep-resentations which result (see for example Bell and Taylor, 2004; Burrell,1992; Fineman, 2004; Hancock, 2005; Ray, 1986; Sinclair, 1995; Warren,2005a, 2005b; Warren and Fineman, forthcoming; Willmott, 1993).

In sum, then, as knowledge becomes epistemologically sanitized underknowledge management regimes, it assumes the objective qualities of acommodity. What counts as knowledge enhances the three Es of efficiency,effectiveness and economy, so that the work arounds of the employeelooking to fulfil their quota faster and render their shift easier as a result,say, can be appropriated in the name of shareholder value. At the same

time the subjective dimensions of power, those that create and shape itsepistemological status as a form of subjectification and delimit the waysin which we relate to knowledge, are suppressed. It therefore becomesdifficult to see what the alternatives are to knowledge-as-organizational-commodity, or indeed that there are alternatives.

Hence Foucaults key message, for us, is that the discourses which cur-rently structure our lives narrow the range of our possibilities in ways wemight not even register. These regimes are worthy of interrogation pre-cisely because they are just thatcontextual, arbitrary and constructed.As he remarks,

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,which is not exactly the same thing as bad. If everything is dangerous, thenwe always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but toa hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault, 1986: 343)

We might therefore ask what is lost in the commodification processesdescribed abovewhilst being aware of the potential for inviting a furtherrefinement of the commodification process to make good the gap, thusreplicating the very channelling we have argued against. But other waysof thinking about organizational processesand organization itselfarecertainly being marginalized in knowledge management economies, andit is in the nature of such economies that this should be so. In the secondhalf of the paper we move from Foucault to Bataille to explore an ontologyof desire that illuminates similar problematics around the discursiveproduction of the concept of motivation.

From Passion to Motivation

In this section we develop our understanding of passion as an approximatesynonym for desire in proposing an ontological reading which suggests thatdesire can be understood either as based on a lack of someone or something

or as a non-instrumental flow of energy. What this two-sided reading enables



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us to do in the first instance is argue that desire understood through theformer lens is always purposeful, and more particularly future-oriented.It turns upon addingto the present, so as to enhance what-is-yet-to-come,and is associated with an ontology of scarcity or absence of unity.

In fact the conceptualization of desire as lack has a long history: it isprecisely the drive to reunite and to replenish which Plato (1994) discussesin his thesis of the androgyne, the human compulsion to seek ones missinggender complement, to bring together male and female halves into awhole. Hegel (1977) subsequently draws upon these ideas to suggest thathuman consciousness inevitably demands that one identifies oneself asone selfand not an other(another). Thus our very individuality is alsoalways a lackof othernessand freedom to be ourselves means that thereis an inescapable discontinuity between different individuals, differentsubjects, different self-consciousnesses. Hegel suggests that desire is

therefore the desire for continuitywith or recognition from those around us.He writes that Negativity, in other words, [is] the integrity of determination(Hegel, cited in Bataille, 1985: 171emphasis removed)such thatnegativity (lack) is what drives us onwards, what makes us determined ordetermines us and the course of our actions. Just as one seeks recognitionfrom the other (continuity), so does one become more aware of preciselyhow one is oneself and notother, monadic, distinct and therefore lacking(discontinuity). This conceptualization of desire as lack re-emerges inFreud and his identification of the two animating forces of the humanconditionEros (light, positivity, life) and Thanatos (dark, negativity,

death)as well as in the structuralist modification of his work by Lacanwhere the primary lack is the lack of language (see note 3).

A profound tension haunts this reading of desire, deriving from theontological conflict between self-identity and the compulsion to unitewith the other, to lose oneself in the other. Indeed as Linstead (2005: 29)has already suggested, Desiring that which we are not means risking lossof control, loss of self, perhaps loss of being, and so is always tinged withdread. Moreover, this desire is also object-drivenit is desire forsomeoneor something that propels us into the future. At the same time it representsan ontological burden to be carried, a nagging sense of incompleteness or

a feeling of loss; an imposition, as we suggested earlier in our discussionofpatiore as one of the etymological roots of the term passion.

Foucault, however, argues that desire-as-lack is not a primary existentialforce. In terms of sexual desire at least, he suggests that this conceptual-ization has been established by the discourse of sexualityas a key aspect ofthe human condition. Foucault (1979: 154) refers, for example, to the wayin which the modern idea of sex allows an artificial bringing togetherof parts of the body, bodily functions, behaviours and feelings under onediscursive sign. Here there is an explicit recognition of our materiality andof the ways in which our bodies react under certain circumstances, but thecorollary is Foucaults rejection of the modern truth of these experiences



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as sex, something innate in human beings which can be expressed in moreor less healthy waysthat is to say, directed at more or less appropriateothers. This being the case, the question becomes one of isolating the pointat which these disparate elements discursively combine to become sex,

and identifying the implications. Further, if we extrapolate from this toreturn to our discussion of desire more generally, we can suggest that pre-vailing discourse creates the idea of a lack which is then fastened upon bypost-Hegelian social and post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought.

In both accepting and extending Foucaults claims, the next move wewish to make is to suggest that this discursively powerful, long-establishedreading of desire-as-lack also underpins contemporary conceptualizationsof motivationthose routinely taught in business schools, appearing inmainstream organizational behaviour textbooks and forming the basisof many contemporary management techniques. For us therefore motiv-

ation does not exist a priori: rather it is a mask or surrogate for a discursiveprocess. The understanding of desire as always having a metaphorical eyeon the future, on some ideal state of unity or plenitude, is, fairly obviously,the basis for the idea that we humans are motivated to direct ourselves atsome kind of eventual purpose. Whether this goal is to work smart, hardand fast, or to minimize effort and maximize reward, our actions are always,apparently, intended to achieve an end result.

Indeed, as we and others have already argued, motivation as a conceptin organization theory and practice developed against a 20th century back-drop of Taylorisms far-reaching effects on job design; improving standards

of living and concomitantly increased employee expectations; and highemployment levels during the 1960s in particular, such that changingjobs in a quest for more satisfaction was straightforward. Indeed Sievers(1986: 338339) argues that:

Motivation only became an issuefor management and organisationtheories as well as for the organisation of work itselfwhen meaning waseither lost or disappeared from work motivation theories have becomesurrogates for the search for meaning.

In other words, discourses around motivation appear when work no longerfulfils or satisfieswhen there is, we could say, a lack.

This ontological infrastructure of desire-as-lack is particularly visiblein content theories, where the result of motivation is the satisfaction ofuniversal human needs (Alderfer, 1972; Herzberg, 1966; Herzberg et al.1959; Maslow, 1943, 1954; McClelland, 1961; McClelland and Burnham,1976). Indeed another name for this body of thinking is needs-deficiencytheory. Nonetheless, in process theorieswhich on the face of it aremore cognitivist in their sensibilities and thus make greater room fordifferencethe accent is still on seeking beneficial outcomes. Whetherunderstood in terms of a restoration of equity, an achievement of goals orthe attainment of a personally valent reward (Adams, 1963; Locke, 1968;

Porter and Lawler, 1968; Vroom, 1964), these outcomes motivate because



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they are in the first instance absent. According to Adams, equity does notmotivatebut inequity (the lackof equity) does. Likewise, a goal alreadyachieved (Locke) or a reward attained (Porter and Lawler; Vroom) wouldseemingly not spur an employee on to further efforts.

What we are suggesting here is that motivation as it tends to be under-stood in organization theory and practice is in fact a surrogate for desire, atleast when conceived of as lack. To be sure, prevailing conceptualizationsof motivation tend not to acknowledge this theoretical legacyas Westwood(2006: 38) has it,

although the western motivation discourse has its genesis in the pleasureprinciple and therefore in desire, desire is actually an almost totallyneglected construct within subsequent theory development and is studi-ously avoided.

But the emphasis here is nonetheless on motivation set againstabsenceor paucity and directed at fulfilment, achievement or restoration. Again,as with knowledge management, we can therefore see how the discourseof motivation sits against a wider discursive backdrop of modern Westerninstrumentalism.

Furthermore, the failure to acknowledge a specific ontology of desire(-as-lack) as what lies beneath motivation in the bulk of established theorymakes it difficult to open up the very concept itself for critical scrutiny.Indeed the

idea of motivation itself is somewhat stultifying discursively imbued

through and through with the assumptions of content, process andreinforcement theory, such that its invocation makes it difficult to think

beyond the idea that individuals are motivated by some form of internalneed-deficiency or external stimulus [or] a rational calculation of theoutcomes of their behaviour. (Brewis et al., 2006: 19)

Even when we unearth their ontological commitments, there is an im-portant occlusion in these popular readings of motivation. This is theoverwhelming sense in which motivation is apositive force for the goodleading to a filling up or completionas opposed to any sense in whichour (passion/ desire/) motivation is actually to lose ourselves, to disappear

into Hegelian continuity, to die both metaphorically and perhaps alsoliterally (Westwood, 2006), as clearly present in the philosophical treat-ments of desire-as-lack discussed above and our argumentation concerningpassions self-destructive potential. Motivation stands then, in ways whichare largely unheeded, for something which is much more ambiguous thanexamination of its surrogate would imply.

But prevalent understandings of motivation occlude more than just thefact that the desire-as-lack thesis is characterized by shades of darknessas well as light. Indeed, if we accept that desire-as-lack is itself a powereffect, and thus that motivation is a power effect of a power effect, we canextend our understanding of desire by consulting Bataille. Bataille outlines



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a very different ontology of desire, one which is a good deal more wild andcreative, and one which, importantly, has been distilled through variousforms of discursive regulation so as to produce the surrogate or mask whichwe know as motivation.

Batailles theory of general economy conceives of desire, not as drivenby lack, but as purposeless, protean, endless. Indeed desire here, which healternatively renders as energy, originates from the sun and binds togetherall life on earth. As Bataille (1985: 7) explains in a characteristically poeticpassage,

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide.

From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon,comes the polymorphic and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element.

The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in theform of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

We might progress this to suggest that the plant is then eaten by a cow. Thisanimal produces faeces which fertilize the growth of more vegetation. Inaddition, the cow generates milk to suckle its young, and this milk may alsobe extracted for the nourishment of human beings. Similarly, elsewhere inBatailles (1991: 23; 1997: 256) oeuvre we see references to the play oflivingmatter in general and the desire that relates to the total movement of life.

The birth of any living creature therefore represents only a temporary breakfrom this ongoing circuit of desireone that unfailingly ends in death, in itsrestoration to the power of nature (Bataille, 1997: 243). Bataille suggests,moreover, that the life force of desire is always available in excess because,although living organisms utilize energy to subsist and to grow, they cannotexpand unhindered by the physical limits of the spherical earth: yet the suncontinues to shine, such that there is always energy to spare. Thus, insteadof being preoccupied with fulfilment, production and accumulation, weshould in fact recognize that our key social dilemma is expenditure, dis-posal, excretionthe most extreme or radical form of which is death,

because in dying we make room for others (Bataille, 1997: 246).As well as this alternative rendering of desire-as-flow, we can draw

on Bataille for a potential explanation for the discursive strength of thedesire-as-lack thesis, and more generally perhaps for the wider Westernpreoccupation with utility and instrumentality. While we as humans areno more and no less than the other organisms that populate the biosphere,given that we are all tied together by the same immanent circuit of energyand we, like these other organisms, will inevitably die, consciousness ofour impending deathwhich other organisms do not shareterrifies us tothe extent that we spend our lives trying to stave off our demise. The human

project is therefore one of endlessly building a future, moving forwardin productive and acquisitive activities, anticipating the authentic being



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which [we] never [are] in the present time (Bataille, 1997: 244) because,if we have a future, death is deferredat least pro tem.

But even in this future-oriented, apparently lack-driven world, we arecontinually tormented at the most instinctive level of our being by the

accursed sharethe excess energy (/desire/passion) which must somehowbe spent. And so, from time to time and despite the social taboo thathaunts these behaviourswasteful, according to the prevailing utilitarianperspective where accumulation is all, as they arewe give in to the urgeto get drunk, to sob or laugh hysterically, to gorge ourselves with food, todance wildly or to have uninhibited sex:

Erotic conduct is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the op-posite of getting. If we follow the dictates of reason and try to acquire allkinds of goods, we work in order to try to increase the sum of our possessionsand our knowledge, we use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our

status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when thefever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly drawon our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squanderconsiderable resources to no real purpose. Pleasure is so close to ruinouswaste Anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder.(Bataille, 1986: 170)

Indeed for Bataille pleasure is puny unless it also invokes the shadow ofdeath. Here Hegels dialectic of life and death, of discontinuity and con-tinuity, is expanded into a consideration of ecstasy as necessarily tingedwith the threat of self-annihilation.

Motivation theory, and the management practice with which it interacts,can therefore be deconstructed as follows. Its premise that our behaviouris always directed at that-which-will-be represents the importance that thefuture has for us whilst also serving as proof that we have a future. Thisemphasis on behaviour as purposeful seems to form part of our project ofconvincing ourselves that we are above and beyond the unthinking massof animal and plant life, the better to forget our inescapable death. InBataille we can also see the aforementioned but largely unacknowledgedmelancholy of the surrogate motivation writ large. Witness his suggestion,for example, that Man is always more or less in a state of anguish, because

he is always in a state of anticipation, an anticipation that must be calledanticipation of oneself (Bataille, 1997: 316, emphasis added).

As we suggested earlier, a life driven by motivation, by this inauthenticdiscursive substitute for passion/desire, is a life that is always being livedelsewhere, at some future point, when we are in receipt of all possible valuedrewards, where equity reigns, where there are no more goals to achieve,where (job) satisfaction is total. Our present is inevitably anguished becauseit is by definition deficient when compared to this unattainable future. Onthe other hand, motivation as a concept, with its tripartite structure ofdirection, effort and persistence, is not supportable by reference to the

ontology of desire-as-flow. Moreover, given that it functions as a discursivesurrogate for passion, understood here as desire, this forgetting creates a



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double occlusion which renders the concept of motivation anodyne at bestand dehumanizing at worst. Indeed Bataille (1997: 259) argues that

Everything that justifies our behaviour needs to be re-examined andoverturned [such thought] is the subordination of the heart, of passion,

to incomplete economic calculations. Humanity is letting itself be led theway a child submits to a professor; a feeling of poverty paralyses it. But thosegeneral interests that it alleges are valid to the extent that fear prevails, orenergy is lacking. They make sense only in the short view that obtains inofficial discourse; but energy abounds and fear doesnt stop anything.

Indeed he refers to the project of work and its building for the future asservile and hatefulbecause it does not allow us ever to luxuriate inwhat we have producedand posits instead the possibility of an existencewhere we live for the moment. Importantly, he also avers that we canchoose how to waste the excess which is available to us, choosing a more

acceptable loss (such as those described above) over, say, warwhichreconnects him to Aristotles bouleuomai and Foucaults later work onethics, truth and power (Bataille, 1991: 24, 31, 46).

Conclusion: Exploring the Desire for Knowing?

Lets do a double takeif everything is dangerous, then we always havesomething to do. In this paper we are trying to take Foucault at his wordandnot to confine his arguments to the realm of epistemology alonetopursue issues of power and knowledge into areas that he didnt concentrate

on, perhaps because he didnt consider them dangerous enough at thetime. From our more limited perspective, given the burgeoning of work onknowledge management and to a lesser extent the organizations positionwithin the knowledge society, there is little that we could consider moredangerous to the future of organization studies than the continued neg-lect of ontology and desire as we embrace the contradictions and possibil-ities of the 21st century.

To accept Batailles claim that the free flow of desire is intrinsic to beinghuman, and not just an outcome of discourse or other systems that pos-ition us as social and psychological subjects and motivate us to act in

politically and economically acceptable ways supportive of the latestmutation of the status quo into its virtual successor, is not quite toshake the practice of organizing to its foundations. Indeed organizationis founded on precisely this understanding, whether implicit or overt:certainly Taylorism, for example, had a clear idea of what its other rep-resented. Mainstream organization theory, however, has tended to suppressthis appreciation in favour of a more normative view consistent withmanagement and organization as a form of science and a functional practicefollowing from that. Critical management studies, on the other hand,has arguably concentrated on the exposure of and forms of resistance to

control techniques rather than addressing their ontological aspectsor itsunderstanding of ontology has been framed in terms of a more restricted



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realist account than we are proposing here. As a result, neither can ade-quately deal with the unexpected, with surprise, with the subversioninherent in the everyday living of lives, with ordinary creative processesand the continual emergence of novelty (Chia and King, 1998) and with

the fact that we routinely accept that, whilst we perpetually say more thanwe know, we know more than we can ever say.Bringing together ontological concerns derived from Bataille with an

epistemological critique based on Foucault does, we believe, offer a fruitfulway forward for a better understanding of motivation, knowledge processesand their organization. Which is, of course, all to do with that which wedont know and what we desire.

Notes

We are extremely grateful to the three anonymous Organization reviewers fortheir detailed and constructive criticism of the original version of this paper, aswell as to Mike Bresnen for his help with sources.

1 As our abstract suggests, there are two very broad traditions in thinking aboutdesire. One via Plato and Aristotle is picked up and significantly developed byHegel, and extended by Freud and Lacan. This we call the desire-as-lack thesis.The other, influenced by readings of Hegel by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille,Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari inter alia is the desire-as-flowthesis. For the second thread Batailles response to Kojve is pivotal and exertsan influence on all subsequent authorsDerrida, Foucault and particularly

Deleuze and Guattari. As befits one of philosophys more significant concepts,the arguments are many and the differences subtle, and there is no room for usto convey them all here. However, interested readers can find them exploredfurther in Brewis and Linstead (2000: 17483; 196203); OShea (2002); Linstead(2005); Styhre (2006); Thanem (2006); and, in a more strictly philosophical vein,Butler (1999).

2 From the Greek hodos, meaning road or way.3 A brief summary of the differences between some of the thinkers we mention

in this paper is perhaps in order. Batailles reading of Nietzsche against Hegelleads him to read desire as a primary force, one that is mediated by culture andcommunication. Lacans reading of Kojve, against Freud, leads him to position

desire as a lack, but one that is created by language in the unconscious. Forhim the unconscious is structured like a language and is the ground where selfand other are constituted. Freuds father, in Lacan, becomes the name of theFathera more adaptable concept. Foucaults reading of Nietzsche and Batailleleads him to an awareness of death, sacrifice and the importance of prohibitionbut, as we have said, he shares with Lacan a view that desire is a language effect,though for Foucaultwhose criticisms of Freud are legionthis is achievedin discourse where language, power and knowledge intersect. Deleuze andGuattari share with Bataille the view that desire is primary, rejecting its concep-tualization as lack, and see symbolic conjunctions such as language acting toform various assemblages that they call desiring-machines. Through these the

rhizomatic flow of desire is temporarily caught, channelled and focusedwhichis different from Batailles cultural reading.



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Stephen Linstead is Professor of Critical Management and Organization Theory at the

University of York, and Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico,Albuquerque. His research interests involve various approaches to dissolvingthe boundaries between the arts and organization studies in theory, method andpractice, including the playful. Nevertheless he has this nagging feeling that hislife may be filled with rather too many activities and too few passions, of whichDIY is definitely amongst the former. Address: The York Management School,University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. [email: [email protected]]

Joanna Brewis is Reader in Management at the University of Leicester. When notresearching the intersections between the body, sexuality, identity and processesof organizing, or teaching research methodology, or running the BA ManagementStudies programme, she likes to buy shoes, watch football, dance to cheesy anthemsand read chick lit. But not necessarily all at the same time. Address: ManagementCentre, University of Leicester, Ken Edwards Building, University Road, LeicesterLE1 7RH, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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