Death and the City

The unpredictability of working life and the absence of lifetime institutions forces us to confront our occupational mortality. Death & the City provides an intimate bedside portrait of an organization destined to death.This book offers an analysis of an organization close to death and presents a framework to apply psychoanalytic thought to future organizational endings. It draws on an extended empirical study in the heart of the City of London, post the global financial crisis, as it faces closure.Using classic psychoanalytic theory endings at work are explored through an examination of the death drive, mourning & melancholia. Anyone dealing with organizational finality will gain a fresh insight into the experience of working in a condemned environment. Consultants working with organizations facing closure, merger or downsizing will find relevance here as well as academics or practitioners with an interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory beyond the consulting room.The subject of death is analysed encouraging an engagement with loss which features so strongly in working life. Paradoxically that engagement can create greater opportunity for life and for aliveness.