EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

“Hide and Seek”: Severance, an ideal-typical speculative fiction for thinking about secrecy and divulgation

"Hide and Seek": Severance, une fiction spéculative idéaltypique pour penser le secret et la divulgation

Malo Artur ()
Additional contact information
Malo Artur: DRM MOST - DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In Severance, employees have their professional and personal memories separated by a microchip, creating two dissociated identities: "innies" and "outies." Through the lens of this science-fiction series as an ideal-typical framework, this article examines the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure, drawing notably on the work of Costas and Grey (2014; 2016). A qualitative analysis of the first season demonstrates how, through a speculative thought experiment, Severance highlights the fragility of formal organizational secrecy mechanisms when confronted with the overlapping of social and informal dimensions. The article also proposes an original actantial model to conceptualize divulgation, distinguishing the roles of discloser, audience, disclosed, and verifier, thereby offering a new conceptual tool to analyze contemporary organizational challenges and real-world phenomena.

Keywords: Secrecy; Science-fiction; Series; Severance; Divulgation; Série; Secret (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in 35e conférence de l'AIMS. Design, mutations organisationnelles et territoires, AIMS, Jun 2026, Saint-Étienne, France

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05660925

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2026-06-23
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05660925