One of the foremost thinkers of ideology is the French Philosopher Louis Althusser. He expounded on his ideas of ideology in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” which condenses his book On the Reproduction of Capitalism. I will look at both of those works in this newsletter. The fundamental question that Althusser was trying to

We will return to exploring more aspects of ideology in future newsletters, but this week, I want to focus on the idea of disavowal. Whether the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Hellene and now Milton or the news of another tech company laying off thousands of workers, we are regularly confronted with what the Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Real.

In the last newsletter, we discussed culture and how often, when leaders talk about creating culture, they are really advancing an ideology. Here, we pivot slightly and detour through the thinker Pierre Bourdieu. While his work never uses the term ideology, he helps position how the individual backgrounds and collective behaviors function to form what he calls habitus and doxa.

Culture is a constant topic of discussion on LinkedIn and in organizations in general. We will critically examine a recent book on Culture (The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle) and use it to see how our current views of culture are wrong and how people talk about cultural change. They are trying to shape the ideology. The book begins with

Optimism is everywhere, from thought/cult leaders on LinkedIn (one even used optimism in the name of his company) to organizational values. But what if optimism wasn’t the benefit it was set out to be? What if there was an alternative? Hope. On the surface, hope and optimism may seem similar, but they are pretty different. First, it is crucial to