The TV Series Severance as Speculative Organizational Critique: Control, Consent, and Identity at Work

Abstract

The Apple TV+ series Severance (2022–present) offers a dystopian portrayal of workplace life that intensifies real-world dynamics of control, boundary management, and identity regulation. This paper analyzes Severance as a speculative case study in organizational theory, treating the show’s fictional world as a site for conceptual reflection. Drawing on critical management studies and labor process theory, we examine how mechanisms of control, the regulation of work–life boundaries, and the fragmentation of autonomy and subjectivity are depicted in extreme form. We argue that fiction—particularly speculative satire—can serve as a tool of theoretical production, not merely illustration. Rather than restating familiar critiques, Severance allows us to see workplace norms with renewed clarity, surfacing the moral and psychological consequences of surveillance, coercion, and instrumentalized consent. A methodological note outlines our interpretive approach to narrative fiction, and a discussion of implications situates the analysis within broader debates about organizational ethics, resilience, and critique.

1. Introduction

The Apple TV+ series Severance (2022–present) presents a haunting workplace vision with unsettling resonance for contemporary organizational life (Aliev, 2023; Çakır, 2025; Isacoff & Dawes, 2024). In the world of Lumon Industries, employees undergo a surgical “severance” procedure that splits their consciousness into two distinct selves: one that exists only at work (the “innie”) and another that experiences life outside (the “outie”). Neither has access to the other’s memories. This radical division of identity is presented as a productivity-enhancing innovation—but it functions as a totalizing form of control, one that dramatizes the ethical and emotional costs of modern employment regimes.

This paper analyzes Severance as a speculative case study in organizational theory. Our goal is not to offer a comprehensive media critique or cultural reading of the show, but rather to use its fictional exaggerations as conceptual tools. Previous work has treated narrative fiction as a mode of theorizing (Cohen, 1998; Czarniawska & Rhodes, 2006; Sisti et al., 2022). Fictional narratives—from the satirical mundanity of The Office to the speculative anxieties of Black Mirror—have been used to probe the emotional and ethical contours of organizational life (e.g., Bell, 2008; Birthisel & Martin, 2013; Panayiotou, 2011). This paper extends that tradition by analyzing Severance as a dystopian thought experiment that both clarifies and critiques prevailing organizational logics.

To guide our analysis, we focus on three interrelated domains: mechanisms of control and surveillance; the management of work–life boundaries; and the construction of employee autonomy and identity. Although corporate ethics is deeply embedded in these dynamics, we treat it as a cross-cutting concern rather than a standalone category, consistent with reviewer suggestions to streamline and clarify conceptual focus. These themes reflect longstanding concerns in organizational studies, but Severance enables a rethinking of their limits and consequences through speculative dramatization.

We ask: What can dystopian fiction reveal about the structures and assumptions that shape organizational life? How might Severance challenge prevailing norms around consent, autonomy, and ethical employment? By speculative organizational critique, we refer to the use of fiction not merely as metaphor but as a generative lens that reframes familiar dynamics through narrative estrangement and conceptual exaggeration.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, we offer a brief methodological framing that explains our interpretive approach to narrative fiction as a site of organizational theorizing. We then outline the relevant theoretical foundations for analyzing control, boundaries, and autonomy. Our main analysis examines how these dynamics are portrayed within Lumon Industries, drawing on specific scenes and character arcs. We conclude by reflecting on the role of fiction in organizational critique, highlighting the contributions—and limitations—of using speculative satire as a conceptual resource.

2. Methodological Framing: Fiction as Speculative Case Study

This paper employs an interpretive, concept-driven approach to analyze Severance (Apple TV+, 2022–present) as a speculative organizational case study. Rather than treating the series as empirical data, we draw on traditions in cultural analysis, critical management studies, and speculative methods to explore how fiction functions as a site of theoretical insight. This aligns with recent work in organizational theory and media studies that emphasizes the value of narrative, allegory, and exaggeration for exposing latent assumptions and power dynamics in organizational life (Cohen, 1998; Czarniawska & Rhodes, 2006; Flisfeder, 2022). Aliev (2023), for instance, offers a visual-cultural reading of Severance, emphasizing how the show aestheticizes erasure and control. While our focus is organizational and conceptual, Aliev’s analysis supports our claim that the series functions as both narrative critique and speculative intervention.

We focused exclusively on Season 1 of Severance, which offers a coherent and self-contained narrative arc (See Appendix A for a brief background about the main characters). We conducted multiple viewings of all nine episodes of Season 1 to explore how narrative structure, character development, and organizational mechanisms are constructed and revealed within the fictional world of Lumon Industries. Recurring motifs and scenes—such as the break room, the Waffle Party, or Helly’s attempted resignation—were analyzed in relation to core organizational concepts including control, identity, boundary regulation, and resistance.

Rather than coding or quantifying content, we approached Severance as a narrative artifact capable of speculative critique. That is, we used the show’s dystopian exaggeration of workplace norms as a lens to question, defamiliarize, and reconceptualize real-world managerial logics. This mode of inquiry draws inspiration from speculative epistemologies in anthropology and science fiction studies, where fictional futures or imagined conditions are used to illuminate and challenge present structures (e.g., Haraway, 2016; Suvin, 1979).

To support analytic clarity, we structured our interpretation around three interrelated domains of organizational theory: (1) mechanisms of control and surveillance, (2) the management of work–life boundaries, and (3) the construction of autonomy and identity. These themes were selected based on their relevance to both the organizational literature and the narrative world of Severance, rather than through formal hypothesis-testing or thematic coding.

Throughout the analysis, we oscillate between treating Severance as (1) a cultural artifact that critiques managerial ideologies and (2) a speculative organizational case that embodies extreme versions of real workplace dynamics. This dual lens enables a richer engagement with fiction—not only as a mirror but as a generative site of organizational theorizing. Rather than aiming for narrative completeness, we selected moments that condensed key organizational dynamics in symbolically rich ways, enabling theoretical elaboration through heightened narrative form.

3. Theoretical Framework: Control, Boundaries, and the Shaping of the Self

This section outlines three interrelated domains that inform our analysis of Severance: organizational control and surveillance, the management of work–life boundaries, and the construction of autonomy and identity in the workplace. These domains were derived inductively through close viewing of Season 1, selected for their recurring narrative prominence and theoretical resonance across episodes. While analytically distinct, these domains are deeply intertwined. Ethical questions—especially around consent, coercion, and dignity—cut across all three, shaping how we interpret the stakes of each dynamic within the fictional world of Lumon Industries.

3.1. Organizational Control and Surveillance

Control lies at the heart of organizational design. Classic frameworks distinguish between bureaucratic, technological, normative, and output-based mechanisms of control (Barker, 1993; Ouchi, 1979). More recent literature highlights the rise of concertive control, in which teams internalize managerial values and enforce them through peer dynamics (Barker, 1993), and affective control, which shapes how workers feel and express emotion in the workplace (Wharton, 2009).

Recent debates have emphasized that workplace surveillance is no longer limited to monitoring behavior, but increasingly involves shaping it through algorithmic feedback, biometric data, and behavioral nudging (Ball, 2022; Kayas, 2023; Kayas et al., 2025). These systems do more than observe—they prescribe norms, trigger interventions, and recalibrate how workers emotionally present themselves.

Surveillance intensifies these dynamics, operating through both visible and invisible monitoring technologies (Ball, 2010, 2022; Lloyd, 2022). In contemporary workplaces, biometric tools, productivity software, and algorithmic oversight create systems of discipline that extend beyond physical presence (Ajunwa, 2023; Ajunwa et al., 2017; Mettler, 2024). These systems not only track outputs but shape behavior, identity, and even perceived loyalty through predictive models and risk scoring. Ajunwa (2023) highlights how such practices increasingly bypass consent, rendering workers legible to employers while stripping them of informational agency. These developments echo Foucault’s panopticon and underpin the logic of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019, 2023).

The ethical implications of these systems are profound (Kritikos, 2023; West & Bowman, 2016). Even when framed as tools for safety or efficiency, surveillance often erodes trust, undermines autonomy, and blurs the line between work and personal life (Martin & Freeman, 2003). Organizations may present control as care, but this can mask asymmetrical power and invite coercive conformity. The language of optimization, care, and productivity conceals deeper asymmetries of control. Control is now enacted through a blend of visibility and invisibility: workers may be continuously observed, yet unaware of how that data is used to guide, sort, or discipline them.

3.2. Work–Life Boundaries and Their Violations

Work–life boundaries are no longer spatially or temporally stable. In a post-digital era marked by constant connectivity, the segmentation of work and life has become both more difficult and more ideologically fraught (Genner, 2024). Boundary theory distinguishes between segmentation (strict separation) and integration (fluid blending), each with its psychological and practical trade-offs (Nippert-Eng, 2008; Sirgy & Lee, 2018).

Organizations increasingly promote integration under the rhetoric of authenticity or flexibility—”bring your whole self to work”—but this can serve managerial interests by drawing deeper emotional and cognitive investment from employees (Collier, 2023; Eustace, 2025). Even segmentation strategies may be exploited: by compartmentalizing responsibility or framing disconnection as a perk, companies can externalize the emotional and ethical costs of labor onto the worker.

Recent scholarship has moved beyond the balance/integration dichotomy to interrogate boundaries as sites of power and ideological negotiation. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare many of these contradictions, as employees struggled to maintain coherence in blurred or collapsed boundaries (Adisa et al., 2022; Cho, 2020). Flexible work arrangements and digital tools have not only collapsed temporal and spatial distinctions between work and non-work but have also altered the terms by which those boundaries are drawn. Instead of being stable preferences, boundaries are now understood as dynamic, relational, and often shaped by institutional expectations of responsiveness and emotional availability. Questions of who gets to set boundaries—and who pays the cost for porous ones—have become central to contemporary debates (Adisa et al., 2022; Karjalainen, 2023).

In fictional form, Severance literalizes segmentation to an extreme degree, inviting reflection on what is gained or lost when work and life are radically split.

3.3. Autonomy, Identity, and the Shaping of the Worker

In capitalist employment regimes, autonomy is often positioned as a workplace value, even as organizational structures constrain the very conditions for meaningful self-determination. This tension is reflected in mainstream organizational theory, where autonomy is framed as a cornerstone of ethical and motivational frameworks.

Classic job design models emphasize autonomy as the capacity to make decisions about one’s tasks and schedule (Hackman & Oldham, 1976), while self-determination theory links autonomy to psychological well-being and intrinsic motivation (Deci et al., 2017; Deci & Ryan, 2000).

Yet autonomy is rarely absolute. Organizations shape how workers see themselves—what Alvesson and Willmott (2002) call “identity regulation.” Through culture, symbolism, and routine, employees internalize roles, values, and expectations that structure their sense of self. Emotional labor, scripted behaviors, and branding rituals all function as tools of subjectification (Casey, 1999; Hochschild, 1983).

These practices raise ethical concerns when identity construction becomes coercive or dehumanizing. Consent is not simply a checkbox—it must be informed, ongoing, and reversible. When workers are denied voice, exit, or recognition, autonomy becomes hollow. From a Marxist lens, such conditions represent not just a lack of freedom but alienation: a separation from one’s labor, self, and fellow workers (Musto, 2010; Shantz et al., 2014). The severed workplace intensifies this contradiction: workers are made to appear autonomous while being engineered for compliance.

Emerging research has reframed autonomy as a relational and contextually fragile condition—less about independence than about agency within systems of constraint. Organizational identity is increasingly recognized as something produced through branded rituals, emotional labor, and algorithmic feedback loops. Autonomy, in this light, involves the ability to navigate visibility, to retain voice, and to withdraw when necessary. This raises new questions about how organizations structure not only what workers do but also who they are allowed to become—and what forms of dissent or self-definition remain possible.

In Severance, this dynamic is rendered starkly literal: the worker self is created, controlled, and discarded at the employer’s discretion. This invites reflection on contemporary employment conditions where contracts are technically voluntary but structurally coercive, and where personal identity is increasingly shaped by institutional logics.

While these three domains—control, boundaries, and identity—are well established in the organizational literature, their speculative treatment in Severance brings new dimensions to light. The following section analyzes how these concepts are enacted in the show’s fictional world, revealing both theoretical insights and ethical tensions.

4. Analysis of Severance: Organizational Themes and Insights

The world of Severance presents an exaggerated but disturbingly recognizable portrait of organizational life. Through Lumon Industries, the show literalizes and magnifies workplace practices around control, boundary enforcement, and identity construction. Drawing on the theoretical domains outlined above, this section analyzes how Severance dramatizes these dynamics, emphasizing their ethical stakes and structural implications.

4.1. Control and Surveillance in Lumon Industries

Lumon Industries is defined by its comprehensive architecture of control. The severance procedure itself is a masterstroke of behavioral engineering: by splitting consciousness, it creates workers who exist only to serve organizational ends. Within the severed workspace, surveillance is total. The camera systems installed in every corridor, the code detectors embedded in computers, and the sterile architectural layout serve both functional and symbolic purposes—communicating to the innies that they are never unobserved.

One of the most vivid examples of coercive discipline in Severance is the “break room,” to which Helly is sent early in Season 1 after defying the company’s expectations. The process is stark and unsettling: the employee is isolated in a sterile white room and required to repeatedly deliver a prewritten apology. A supervisor, observing from a distance, determines whether the performance meets the company’s standards of contrition. As Helly cycles through the mandated statement, her escalating distress reveals the hollow ritual at the heart of the exercise—an enforced display of remorse designed more to assert control than to correct behavior. The scene exemplifies how emotional conformity is imposed under the guise of therapeutic intervention. These contradictions—discipline as care, punishment as therapy, reward as infantilization—highlight how organizational control operates through paradox as much as power.

Lumon also gamifies compliance through absurd incentives. When the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team reaches a productivity target, they are awarded a “waffle party,” a surreal celebration that includes a solitary employee eating waffles while being watched by masked dancers in costume. The scene is both comical and unsettling. Dylan, the team’s most reward-motivated member, shows initial enthusiasm—but the hollowness of the ritual underscores how meaning has been replaced with manufactured spectacle. Other rewards, like caricature drawings and finger traps, parody the infantilizing nature of “fun workplace” cultures that trade real autonomy for cheap gratification.

Yet even under pervasive control, resistance flickers. Dylan hoards rewards not out of loyalty but out of competitiveness. Irving, whose devotion to Lumon is sincere, begins secretly painting scenes from the “outside world” that he could not have consciously seen—suggesting a subconscious breach in his conditioning. These cracks reveal a core insight: surveillance may constrain action, but it cannot fully erase subjectivity or dissent.

4.2. Work–Life Boundaries and the Fiction of Separation

Severance enforces the most extreme form of segmentation imaginable: a literal split between work and life selves. The “innie” experiences a closed loop of labor, devoid of rest, memory, or choice. As far as the innie is concerned, they awaken in the office, work all day, and then blink back into consciousness the next morning—never experiencing a lunch break, a commute, or a weekend. The “outie,” by contrast, lives free from the burdens of work—but at the cost of erasing the very person who performs it. This division is presented by Lumon as liberation, but the viewer is left with a stark question: liberation for whom?

The ethical absurdity becomes clear in Helly’s storyline. After waking up as a severed worker, Helly immediately resists the system. She tries to escape, writes desperate notes to her outie, and ultimately attempts suicide by hanging herself in the elevator. The outie’s response? A video message delivers a chilling reminder to Helly from her outie, making clear that her existence as an employee is seen as something less than fully human. The underlying corporate logic is stark: the worker may serve a function but remains expendable—present in the workplace yet stripped of legal and moral recognition.

Even the promise of separation proves illusory. Dylan is activated outside of work hours via Lumon’s “overtime contingency”—a secret override protocol that allows supervisors to awaken the innie during off-hours. Dylan is horrified to realize that his outie has a child—a fact he never knew. This moment underscores how even strict boundaries can be violated when it suits the organization. Just as many contemporary workers find themselves answering emails or taking calls during personal time, Lumon’s technology reveals that control does not stop at the office door.

Helly’s story and Dylan’s revelation show that, in contexts of extreme asymmetry, neither segmentation nor integration reliably protects autonomy. Severance pushes boundary theory to its limits, revealing that both extremes—total separation and total blending—can become instruments of oppression. These extremes reflect the structural pressures of late capitalism, where work is increasingly designed to extract not just labor, but presence, identity, and emotion—often in ways that mask coercion as choice.

4.3. Autonomy, Identity, and the Manufactured Self

The severed workers are neurologically partitioned selves, constructed through institutional design to fulfill workplace roles. They have no access to memories, relationships, or experiences beyond the workplace. Their language, rituals, and even emotions are shaped by Lumon’s tightly scripted environment.

This is most clearly illustrated through Irving, the team’s most devout employee. He treats the Kier Eagan handbook—a quasi-religious text filled with aphorisms—as sacred scripture. His desk is pristine, his walk rigid, and his speech often echoes corporate slogans. Yet beneath this facade, Irving begins having visions—black paint bleeding through white walls, a subconscious expression of repression and dissonance. He secretly explores other departments, risking punishment. His journey shows how even those most indoctrinated may experience internal rupture.

Dylan, in contrast, is a more comic figure: brash, reward-driven, and self-congratulatory. But when he learns he has a son, he risks everything to trigger the “overtime” protocol and let the other innies awaken outside work. This selfless act, performed by the character previously obsessed with waffle parties, reveals the deep ethical hunger for connection and recognition beyond the boundaries imposed by Lumon.

Mark, the team leader, offers a subtler case. As an outie, Mark is grieving the loss of his wife. He chooses severance to escape his pain, believing that forgetting work might help him heal. But the innie Mark becomes a melancholic and compliant drone—stripped of memory, but not of emotion. Mark’s gradual awakening—triggered by Helly’s resistance and the discovery of a mysterious map—reflects how identity is never entirely programmable. He is haunted by something he cannot name.

Helly’s narrative brings this tension to a climax. Her repeated pleas to leave, her rebellion, and her climactic public outburst—where she exposes Lumon during a corporate gala—exemplify the ethical horror of treating people as tools. Her outburst is more than a plea for acknowledgment; it stands as a direct critique of institutional structures that suppress individual autonomy under the guise of operational efficiency.

To synthesize the analytic insights developed across the preceding sections,

Table 1. Organizational concepts and their dramatization in Severance.

Organizational Concept	Real-World Practice	Fictional Exaggeration in Severance	Key Insight
Surveillance & Control	Monitoring software, peer norms, affective management	Code detectors, break room apologies, waffle parties	Control is normalized through emotional manipulation and pseudo-rewards, raising ethical concerns about autonomy and dignity.
Work–Life Boundaries	Remote work, “right to disconnect”, boundary rhetoric	Consciousness split into “innie” and “outie”	Extreme segmentation dehumanizes the worker self; neither balance nor autonomy is possible without consent and reversibility.
Autonomy & Identity	Job design, role-based identity, employee engagement	Employees operate without memory or ongoing consent	Autonomy is hollow without voice or exit; identity is shaped through coercion, raising questions about personhood and ethical employment.

summarizes how Severance fictionalizes core organizational concepts. The table is intended not as a standalone summary, but as a conceptual synthesis that highlights tensions, paradoxes, and ethical distortions surfaced through the detailed narrative analysis above. By juxtaposing real-world practices with their exaggerated representations in the series, the table highlights how speculative fiction serves as a lens for rethinking workplace dynamics, particularly in relation to surveillance, autonomy, and ethical control.

The preceding analysis has shown how Severance renders key organizational dynamics—surveillance, segmentation, and subjectification—in heightened and often disturbing form. These dramatizations not only reflect real workplace logic but push it to speculative extremes. In what follows, we reflect on the broader implications of these fictional distortions for organization theory and ethical inquiry.

5. Discussion

The power of Severance lies not merely in its resemblance to real organizational dynamics, but in its capacity to estrange them—rendering familiar practices strange, excessive, and ethically charged. This is the hallmark of speculative critique. Rather than serving only as an allegory for existing problems, Severance acts as a conceptual amplifier, exaggerating structures of control, surveillance, and alienation until their logics become visible and morally undeniable.

This section reflects on what speculative fiction contributes to organization studies, how it reorients debates about ethics and autonomy, and what it reveals about the ideological flexibility of managerial norms.

5.1. From Mirror to Lens: Fiction as Theoretical Production

Fiction has long been used in organization studies as a pedagogical or illustrative tool (Bell, 2008; Cohen, 1998). However, its capacity as a site of theory production remains underdeveloped. Rather than simply mirroring organizational life, speculative fiction like Severance enables what Czarniawska and Rhodes (2006) term “strong plots”—narratives that unsettle common sense and illuminate taken-for-granted structures. Similarly, Sisti et al. (2022) argue that speculative bioethics narratives can provoke critical reflection by presenting moral dilemmas in heightened form.

Our reading of Severance follows this trajectory, treating the series not as metaphor but as speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016)—a narrative device that distorts reality to provoke new understandings. The severance procedure, while fictional, makes real debates around informed consent, control, and alienation radically thinkable. It dramatizes what critical management scholars often describe abstractly: the erosion of autonomy under managerial rationality (Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Jackall, 1988).

In this way, fiction joins other speculative practices such as scenario building (De Jouvenel, 2000), counterfactual modeling (Ferguson, 2008), and imaginative ethnography (Tsing, 2015), all of which attempt to push theory beyond empirical constraint in order to think through organizational futures, contingencies, or breakdowns. Scholars in science and technology studies have shown how speculative design and storytelling are not simply imaginative exercises—they are modes of critique that open new epistemic space.

The function of speculative fiction, then, is not to predict but to reframe—to pose new questions, reveal assumptions, and model structural consequences. We describe this epistemic shift as a form of estranged cognition—a process in which fictional exaggeration defamiliarizes the taken-for-granted structures of organizational life. This concept draws on the notion of cognitive estrangement in science fiction studies (Suvin, 1979), where imagined worlds enable critical reflection on social reality. Our approach is also informed by speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016), speculative anthropology (Pandian, 2019; Tsing, 2015), and popular culture studies in organization theory (Czarniawska & Rhodes, 2006), all of which treat fiction as a site of theoretical production rather than mere illustration.

Fiction does not simply represent organizations; it intervenes in how they are imagined, evaluated, and contested. Rather than treating fiction as secondary to empirical observation, we use it to provoke insight through distortion—surfacing tensions and possibilities that remain opaque under conventional organizational analysis. Severance, in this sense, operates as a mode of estranged cognition. It does not merely mirror organizational life—it amplifies its underlying tensions, surfaces contradictions, and makes ethical distortions newly visible.

5.2. Ethical Discomfort as Insight

Severance achieves its impact through discomfort. It foregrounds the ethical incoherence of systems that profess autonomy and wellness while engineering dependency and silence. This discomfort aligns with the work of scholars who critique “happiness ideologies” in organizations (Jegathesan et al., 2022; Stambach, 2023) and the packaging of control as flexibility (Collier, 2023).

Crucially, the show reveals how even positive organizational concepts—balance, wellness, culture—can be repurposed as tools of control. This echoes critiques of performative ethics in corporate settings (Stevens, 2008), where moral language serves as camouflage for asymmetrical power. Lumon’s rituals of care—handbook recitations, wellness sessions, and the break room—demonstrate how organizations can aestheticize domination in the name of values.

This kind of storytelling unsettles the viewer, prompting them to question practices that might otherwise seem normal and acceptable. Just as speculative anthropology uses fictional or future scenarios to examine political and moral possibility (Pandian, 2019), Severance uses absurdity and excess to show how ethical compromise can be built into organizational design.

Rather than highlighting ethical breakdowns, Severance exposes what happens when organizations function perfectly according to their internal logic. The result is not failure but hyper-efficiency, stripped of dignity.

5.3. Rethinking Boundaries and Autonomy

The series pushes boundary theory (Nippert-Eng, 2008) to its speculative extreme, portraying segmentation not as psychological preference but as neurological surgery. This literalization allows us to see that boundaries are not neutral structures—they are enforced, transgressed, and laden with moral meaning. Calls to integrate or segment are often managerial strategies disguised as individual choices (Adisa et al., 2022; Eustace, 2025).

The same applies to autonomy. Mainstream models often frame autonomy in motivational terms (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Hackman & Oldham, 1976), but Severance challenges the institutional conditions that make real autonomy impossible. The innies cannot refuse, dissent, or resign. Their apparent consent is structured by asymmetry—a point long recognized in labor process theory (Burawoy, 1979; Musto, 2010). Consent, here, is not free—it is a proxy, granted by an outie who never suffers the consequences.

This resonates with feminist and posthuman critiques of autonomy that emphasize interdependence, situated agency, and the politics of voice (Braidotti, 2016; Mol, 2008). Rather than asking whether a worker is free, Severance asks: who gets to define the self, and under what conditions can that self speak? The series dramatizes not just alienation but the institutional production of ethical opacity—where suffering becomes invisible by design.

5.4. Collective Resistance and Fragile Solidarity

Despite its bleakness, Severance stages a narrative of emergent resistance. The Macrodata Refinement team slowly discovers its shared predicament, forming bonds that enable subversion. This reflects insights from labor process theory and critical management studies, which view resistance not as the opposite of control, but as its dialectical partner (Hassard et al., 2001; Thompson & Ackroyd, 1995).

The characters’ acts of resistance—painting, smuggling, and secret meetings—are not coordinated uprisings but moments of moral awakening. These are consistent with newer studies of workplace organizing under algorithmic surveillance (Vallas et al., 2022), where resistance takes subtle, relational, and affective forms.

In this sense, Severance also aligns with speculative utopian thinking—not because it offers solutions, but because it models cracks in the system. Utopia is found in glimpses, interruptions, and resistant gestures (Muñoz, 2019). The series reminds us that critique alone is insufficient; what matters is the cultivation of small solidarities that defy totalization.

Helly’s outburst, Dylan’s intervention, Irving’s journey: each reveals how even tightly governed environments cannot fully extinguish subjectivity. In this way, Severance does not merely diagnose power—it affirms the possibility of refusal.

These moments of defiance—however limited—also gesture toward a form of organizational resilience that is not based on institutional strength, but on relational endurance and ethical refusal (Tengblad & Oudhuis, 2018). Even within highly monitored environments, the impulse to resist, connect, and reclaim personhood reveals the human capacity to adapt meaningfully, not just functionally.

5.5. Comparative Fictions and Speculative Typologies

While this paper centers on Severance, the use of fiction in organizational critique spans a wide spectrum of narrative genres, including dystopian speculation, workplace satire, absurdist comedy, and techno-futurist allegory. Fictional representations of work and organizations have long served to illuminate cultural anxieties about labor, control, and identity. Yet different genres highlight different organizational logics: dystopias exaggerate coercion and surveillance; satires expose the banal absurdities of everyday work life; utopias and absurdist texts imagine ruptures in the status quo that can be generative or destabilizing.

Table 2. Fictional organizations as sites of organizational critique.

Fictional Work	Depicted Organization	Core Themes	Use in Organization Theory
Severance (Apple TV+)	Lumon Industries	Surveillance, autonomy, identity, resistance	Dystopian lens on consent and ethical boundaries
The Office (BBC/NBC)	Wernham Hogg/Dunder Mifflin	Banality, performativity, emotional labor	Satirical critique of culture, affective labor, and HR management
Black Mirror (“Nosedive”)	Social rating bureaucracy	Gamification, emotional self-regulation	Critique of affective control and digital performance norms
Gattaca	Genetic meritocracy	Selection, surveillance, determinism	Critique of meritocratic control and workplace stratification
Sorry to Bother You	WorryFree Corp	Exploitation, race, posthuman labor	Absurdist critique of neoliberal labor and managerial ideology

situates Severance alongside other fictional portrayals of organizations to demonstrate how these distinct narrative forms foreground specific organizational concerns—such as meritocracy, affective labor, algorithmic governance, or institutional inertia. By assembling this typology, we aim to position Severance not as an outlier but as part of a broader lineage of fictional experiments that engage with managerial power, consent, and ethical complexity.

This typology also reinforces our central argument: fiction should not be treated merely as illustrative commentary, but as a speculative apparatus that invites organizational scholars to rethink entrenched concepts. These fictional worlds enable forms of conceptual inquiry that would be difficult to stage empirically, offering stylized, concentrated representations of work and institutional life that provoke fresh theoretical insights. In this sense, Severance is not just one example among many—it is a vivid participant in an evolving tradition of speculative organizational thought. This aligns with, for example, Aliev’s (2023) interpretation of Severance as a visual critique of erasure and control—an aesthetic intervention that complements our organizational reading and reinforces the show’s capacity to operate across both narrative and conceptual registers.

6. Conclusions

Severance offers a darkly imaginative yet analytically fruitful depiction of contemporary organizational life. By dramatizing the consequences of extreme surveillance, identity fragmentation, and engineered consent, the series compels viewers to reexamine familiar structures of control and autonomy with renewed ethical urgency. Though the severance procedure itself is fictional, the dilemmas it illuminates—around boundaries, voice, personhood, and solidarity—are disturbingly real (Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Musto, 2010).

This paper has argued that Severance is not merely cultural commentary or allegory. It is a form of speculative organizational critique—a narrative intervention that exaggerates workplace norms in order to surface contradictions and challenge legitimacy. Through close interpretive analysis, we have shown how the series reconfigures theoretical concerns in organizational control (Ball, 2010; Barker, 1993), boundary management (Nippert-Eng, 2008), and autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 2000), while embedding ethical critique into its speculative worldbuilding.

Beyond its substantive insights, this study advances a methodological claim: that fiction can serve not only as an object of analysis but as a mode of theorizing. As Czarniawska and Rhodes (2006) argue, fiction and popular culture offer “strong plots” that illuminate hidden assumptions in organizational life. Haraway’s (2016) notion of “speculative fabulation” helps us see how fictional exaggeration can generate new organizational questions and conceptual provocations. In this light, Severance acts less as a mirror and more as a lens—transforming theory through narrative.

At the same time, the use of fiction comes with limitations. Fiction often trades nuance for clarity, risk for drama (Sisti et al., 2022). Hyperbole can obscure ambivalence; dystopia may overdetermine critique. Fictional organizations are stylized and incomplete. To that end, future research might pursue comparative fictional analysis (See Appendix B), drawing on works such as Black Mirror, The Office, or Gattaca to explore not only dystopian failure but also comedic disruption, speculative resilience, and organizational hope (Bell, 2008).

While the show offers a dystopian vision of organizational life, it also invites reflection on the micro-foundations of resilience—those moments of care, solidarity, and moral awareness that persist even under conditions of extreme control (Tengblad & Oudhuis, 2018). As a form of estranged cognition, Severance allows us to rethink not just what organizations do, but how they shape who we are—and how those effects might otherwise remain unnoticed in real-world contexts.

This paper contributes to a growing strand of research that sees fiction not as escapism but as an epistemic resource. In an era where work is increasingly digital, surveilled, and affectively managed (Wharton, 2009; Zuboff, 2019), speculative fiction allows scholars to rethink the ethics, boundaries, and futures of organizational life. Severance asks not just how organizations shape behavior, but how they shape selves. In doing so, it invites us to ask not only what kind of workplaces we inhabit—but what kind of people we are becoming within them.

As organizations continue to experiment with identity technologies, algorithmic control, and emotional labor regimes, speculative fiction may prove increasingly vital—not just as critique, but as a generative space for imagining alternative futures of work.