Lessons for organization studies and management from the realm of art

The critical theory scholar Herbert Marcuse (1955/1998) put forward the concept of “The Great Refusal”, initially, in his work Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Marcuse raised the concept in the context of the manner in which forms of limitation upon freedom become sedimented in the unconscious such that we are encouraged “to forget what can be” (1955/1998, p. 149, italics is original emphasis) and numbed to the possibility of radical critique. Marcuse was drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s meta-psychology to illustrate how different forms of repression and domination are reproduced both over and within the individual. As will be noted in this paper, it was in such a context that Marcuse was to view repression as both a psychological and political phenomenon (see Carr, 1989). In his very cogent explanation of how forms of repression become reproduced within the individual’s unconscious and how the individual in turn becomes unwittingly a willing participant in the continuation of their own servitude, Marcuse was to argue, in dialectical fashion, that the most powerful seeds of struggle for freedom from forms of domination are within the system that is being refused