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Silence has long been recognized as constitutive of organizational dynamics. A large body of research has shown that employees frequently withhold concerns, criticisms, ideas, and warnings even when such communication would be valuable to collective learning or organizational adaptation (Morrison and Milliken, 2000; Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin, 2003; Morrison, 2014, 2023). Related literatures on psychological safety, workplace ostracism, and incivility have demonstrated that what remains unsaid in organizations is shaped by hierarchy, fear, futility, exclusion, and the uneven distribution of acknowledgment (Edmondson, 1999; Detert and Burris, 2007; Detert and Edmondson, 2011; Cortina, Magley, Williams and Langhout, 2001; Ferris, Brown, Berry and Lian, 2008). Critical leadership studies has further insisted that authority and voice are inseparable from power, asymmetry, and the organization of visibility and compliance (Collinson, 2012, 2014; Fleming & Spicer, 2014).
Yet this literature has typically privileged the standpoint of the one who is silent or silenced. The principal questions have concerned why employees refrain from speaking, how climates of silence emerge, and what harms are suffered when voice is inhibited. These are indispensable questions. Still, they do not exhaust the problem. They leave relatively underdeveloped a different issue: what happens when silencing becomes an ordinary managerial strategy, not merely a contextual effect of hierarchy or a residue of authoritarianism, but a historically coherent way of governing organizational relations?
The present article addresses that question by advancing a stronger claim. It argues that a significant part of contemporary managerial silencing is better understood not simply as a residue of the discourse of the Master, but as a privileged strategy under Lacan's discourse of the capitalist. The point is not that top-down command has disappeared. Hierarchy, prohibition, and directive authority remain centr