[Sci-tech-public] REMINDER: STS Circle, February 4 - Elizabeth Lunbeck (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Elizabeth Lunbeck
Vanderbilt/Harvard, History of Science

on
Horrible Bosses: Analyzing Workplace Dysfunction

Monday, February 4
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Today, January 30.

Abstract: The dysfunctional workplace, ruled by the controlling, manipulative, and abusive  boss, is a staple of our popular culture as well as the object of sustained investigation by scholars in a variety of disciplines.  The misery occasioned by bullying bosses is all over the internet, and observers have long documented the cost of the same to companies, organizations, and economies.  Yet the workplace continues  to serve as a site for the expression of aggression and casual brutality despite our ever-more-refined characterologies and interventional strategies.  In this paper, I examine one dimension of this recalcitrant issue, focusing on a fundamental ambivalence about the leader’s character as sketched by psychologists and other students of management and leadership.  In this literature, the leader’s charisma, creativity, and even authoritarianism are deemed essential but also of a piece with the callousness, paranoia, and destructiveness that bring organizations to ruin.  This ambivalence finds support in the wider culture, which celebrates a risk-taking grandiosity in leaders that is at odds with calls for supporting employees’ autonomy and recognizing their competencies.


Biography:Elizabeth Lunbeck is Nelson Tyrone, Jr Professor of History and Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University.  This semester (spring 2013) she is Visiting Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, offering a graduate course on psychoanalysis.  Lunbeck is a historian of the human sciences, specializing in  psychiatry and psychoanalysis, intellectual and cultural history, and gender and sexuality.  Her books include The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (1994), Family Romance, Family Secrets:  Case Notes from an American Psychoanalysis (2003), with Bennett Simon, and a number of edited volumes, among them Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases and Exemplary Narratives (2007), co-edited with Angela Creager and Norton Wise, and, with Lorraine Daston, Histories of Scientific Observation (2011).  Harvard University Press will publish The Americanization of Narcissism in fall 2013.  Lunbeck is co-director, with Emily Martin and Louis Sass, of The Psy-ences Project, a regional seminar encompassing the “psy” disciplines established in 2003.




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