Critical reflections on the good, the bad and the ugly of organisation leadership: the case of Wal‐Mart

This paper explores the impacts Wal‐Mart's operations have on community culture. However, through the application of the psychodynamics of mirroring and a thorough version of dialectical analysis, we can see that community culture turns on itself to mirror what Wal‐Mart wants that culture to be. As such, community culture has little or no power or even desire to counter Wal‐Mart's negative affects and the result is an unfinished dialectic. The unfinished dialectic parallels the rudimentary concept of dialectics as being only thesis, anti‐thesis and synthesis, where synthesis is assumed to be, generally, a positive outcome, for everyone involved. As the investigation into Wal‐Mart continues, we see that there are negative outcomes on community culture as well as on Wal‐Mart leadership that require negation but are not negated. With that which fulfils our desires, we allow ourselves to become enraptured by only positive images or the perceived ‘good’ of something or someone when it is too difficult to unravel ambivalence and ambiguity of the mutual causality of opposites inherent in relationships.