Introduction

Organisational consultants, including some who have been informed by the Group Relations tradition, often think about organisations in a simplified way as if all organisations are pretty much the same irrespective of whether, for example, they are public, private or not-for-profit. In my experience this tendency is not so pronounced in the work of those engaged in research into organisational life. In the field of  public administration in particular there is a clear appreciation of some of the unique characteristics of organisational life in the public sphere. I will argue that there are very good grounds for both researchers and consultants to preserve the distinction between private and public. In the course of my argument I will examine the political nature of organisations within the public sphere, explore the undeveloped concept of `social anxiety’ by linking it to wider social themes of alienation and ambivalence and, finally, draw out some of the implications of all this for the practice of consultancy.

The value of bureaucracy

It has become fashionable to think of bureaucracy as an outmoded, inflexible, inefficient and unresponsive form of organisation. Indeed, back in the 1980’s, I was heavily involved in criticising the public services in the UK from precisely this perspective (Hambleton & Hoggett 1984; Hoggett & Hambleton 1987; Burns, Hambleton & Hoggett 1994). However the mounting neo-Liberal critique of bureaucracy which has been responsible for waves of privatisation and marketisation in Western Europe, and the enfeebling of government capabilities in many developing and former Soviet bloc societies, chucks the baby out with the bathwater. For the original Weberian meaning of bureaucracy, as a particular (and therefore unique) kind of moral institution, has become largely lost (Du Gay, 2000). I want to build upon some of Du Gay’s arguments about public bureaucracy’s particular purpose – what is it about the requirements for effective government in contemporary society that make bureaucracy necessary? I will argue that government and the state apparatus that supports it has, among other things, two unique characteristics. It is the site for the continuous contestation of public purposes and it is an essential means of containing of social anxieties. Such characteristics, and there are others [i] which are equally important although not the focus of this paper, serve to remind us that government, and the public sector which supports it, is primarily a site for the enactment of particular kinds of social relations rather than a site for the delivery of goods and services. To reduce it to the latter is to commodify such relationships, to strip them of their moral and ethical meaning and potential, meaning which is inherent to the very concept of `citizen’ but marginal to the concept of `consumer’.

Within the neo-Liberal discourse of government public bureaucracy, as a particular and necessary form of organisation with its own unique purposes, has no place. Viewed from this position a public bureaucracy is simply a bureaucracy which happens to be in a public space; public/private, its all the same, bureaucracy is basically an outmoded way of organising things.  In contrast I will argue that far from being a problem, public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitome of a what Weber called substantive [ii] rather than instrumental rationality; the one place perhaps where questions of technique (`what works’) and questions of value stand a chance of being integrated.

Bureaucracy as contested space

Many aspects of the discourse of management – for instance such terms as management by objectives, strategic goals, primary task, organisational mission – betray a view of `the organisation’ which is relatively unproblemmatic. There is a corresponding conviction that such things can eventually be discerned once conflicts, misunderstandings and random noise have been overcome by the judicial application of the consultant’s clarifying and containing capabilities.  In contrast, I propose we consider the fact that public organisations are intimately concerned with the governance of societies in which value conflicts are inherent and irresolvable. Take, for example, liberty, equality and fraternity, the three guiding principles of western democracies since the storming of the Bastille. As MacIntyre (1985) points out, these values are incommensurable; for example, before long, as you push for equality you rub up against liberty (particularly economic freedom). Or take the principle of universalism, the fair and impartial treatment of all, a key principle of the Enlightenment as far back as Kant. We realise now that the impartial treatment of individuals may happily accompany discrimination towards groups (Williams 1989) as when, for example, a `universal’ education service, by excluding denominational schools, denies Muslim children the education they need.

The tension between universalism and particularism is inherrent and irresolvable (Thompson & Hoggett, 1996) but, as such, it is just one instance of the conflictual nature of public purpose. A radically pluralist position argues for the existence of a set of core human values (such as liberty and equality) which cannot be wholly reconciled with one another. Conventional liberal political theory both recognises such plurality and obscures it. It obscures it via a rationality which assumes that, through processes of argumentation, a common will or higher truth will eventually emerge so long as people are capable of being non-partisan and judge solely from the viewpoint of reason. In practice this has led liberal political philosophers to be skeptical of the value of impassioned argument. In opposing such an approach Chantal Mouffe (1993) insists that `politics in a modern democracy must accept division and conflict as unavoidable, and the reconciliation of rival claims and conflicting interests can only be partial and provisional’ (p.113). This `agonistic’ concept of politics as struggle is also present in the work of Hanah Arendt. Speaking of Arendt, Bonnie Honig notes `she theorises a practice that is disruptive, agonsitic, and, most importanly, never over’ (Honig, 1993, p. 9).

To return to my argument, the commitment to universalism as embodied in the ethic of impartiality cannot be sustained given the strength of particularisms in an increasingly plural society. The problem for the public official is precisely that s/he must be both a universalist and a particularist at the same time. For a similar reason there are other value contradictions which the public official is required to enact every day. Perhaps the most crucial of these concerns the inherent tension between individualism and utilitarianism, that is, the needs of the particular person or case on the one hand versus the claims of the greatest good for the greatest number on the other. And, lurking behind but fueling such contradictions, lies a perhaps still more pervasive incommensurability, one which has been articulated in recent years in terms of the contrast between an ethic of care and an ethic of justice. On the one hand a compassionate concern for the individual and his or her plight, and on the other a realisation that whatever the merits of this particular case the public official also has a responsibility towards all those potentially equally worthy cases whose claims, because not immediately and physically present, can only be brought to mind abstractly.   

Conflict, impassioned and ongoing, is a vital dimension of public life. But, and this is crucial for our thinking about public bureaucracies, it also follows that the public sphere (which includes the organised apparatus of government) is the necessary embodiment of such conflictual purposes. And whilst different political projects emphasise different values, those that they suppress inevitably return to haunt the political system, typically returning at the level at which policy is implemented. As Lipsky noted, `a typical mechanism for legislative conflict resolution is to pass on intractable conflicts for resolution (or continued irresolution) at the administrative level’ (Lipsky, 1980 p.41). As a consequence it is often at the level of `operations’ that unresolved value conflicts are most sharply enacted, public officials and local representatives finding themselves `living out’ rather than `acting upon’ the contradictions of the complex and diverse society in which they live.

Lipsky uses the term `street level bureaucrat’ to refer to the army of public officials – police officers, teachers, nurses, health inspectors, benefit administrators, magistrates, planning officers, etc – whose task it is to operate in this environment. At the heart of their work is the exercise of judgement and the use of discretion in the application of policies to particular cases, or the implementation of policies where there are no precedents, or the operationalisation of rule-governed systems in full knowledge that no system can ever provide guidance for every eventuality.  Thus, in contrast to the ideal of impartiality, in reality `there is often considerable disagreement about what street level bureaucrats should primarily do’ (Lipsky, p.46). Among the dilemmas of the street level bureaucrat Lipsky listed the conflict between `client-centered goals’ and `social engineering goals’ (Lipsky, p.43) and between `the norm of individual client orientation’ and the `needs for mass processing’ (p.44). Moreover, as Hill (1983) once noted, discretion is also enhanced because `policy makers are far from clear what they really want’ (p.89) [iii] .

Getting rid of bureaucracy or getting rid of politics?

So called `public sector’ reform programmes have been a feature of western-type democracies for nearly two decades and are now widely exported to developing countries as part of IMF inspired structural reform packages. Perhaps the central principle guiding such programmes concerns the separation of policy from execution and purchasing from provision (Hoggett 1996). The role of government is to make policy and fund (purchase) services and programmes, its role is not (or not necessarily) to deliver such services. For this purpose a new generation of `provider organisations’ has emerged, including private and not-for-profit organisations, who are tied to government through contractual and partnership agreements.

This 'dogma' (Stewart 1996) of separating policy from execution has been rigorously challenged by advocates of democratisation. Each level of government (including the very local) needs to be able to make decisions about policy, strategy and operations which are appropriate for that level. In reality, policy issues exist at all levels, even the management of a swimming pool poses complex policy questions ‑ are there reserved sessions for older users or for Asian women, how much time should be allocated to club use as opposed to general use, etc.? To term these 'detail' as if somehow they were unrelated to questions of public values and purposes is to mislead. The management of a swimming pool, a park, a health centre, a hospital, a school, etc. involves complex value questions. These everyday questions of politics are elided by managerialist discourses which frame such questions purely in business terms (so questions of value become interred in the swimming pool's business plan). The problem is that by adopting this particular set of managerialist approaches neo-Liberal influenced governments have permitted 'a widespread practice of the administration of services to develop that destroys the very idea that the providing organisations could be matters of public concern' (Hirst 1997, p.108).

The so-called attack on bureaucracy has also had a profound impact upon the language that is used by professionals and managers in such organisations. In recent research I examined the rise of `strategy speak’ within public and `quasi-public’ organisations, construing it as a specifically instrumental discourse concerned with courses of action which are a `means towards the organisation’s survival and/or growth’ (Greer & Hoggett, 1999). As a consequence of the policy-execution split, the autonomy of public organisations becomes reconfigured in terms of the space to devise their own means of implementing government policy by acting strategically within their own quasi-markets. Like any organisation in the private sector, questions of value, which might otherwise have found expression in locally articulated policy, become suppressed by the over-riding need to avoid failure and ensure survival in an environment preoccupied with short term performativity. In contrast to this concerted attempt to depoliticise the public sector, value pluralism requires effective government to welcome rather than fear conflict. It requires recognition that value conflicts run right throughout the public realm, particularly at the operational level where it finds expression in the `dilemmatic space’ of the public official.

Government and social anxiety

The idea that institutions such as the health or education service have an unconscious or implicit purpose has been a tenet of psychoanalytically informed perspectives on organisational life for over forty years. Central to this view is the idea that such institutions, besides performing their ostensible functions (health care, education, etc.) also deal constantly with fundamental human anxieties (Obholzer 1994). The origin of the concept lies in Jacques (1953) early application of Klein’s work to the study of organisations, particularly Klein’s notions of depressive and psychotic anxiety (Klein 1948, 1952 ). Nuanced accounts of the origin of such anxieties is provided by different authors. For Jaques (1953) anxiety was inherent to group life, a means by which group members were unconsciously able to place part of their deep inner lives outside themselves. Menzies Lyth (1960) focused upon the way in which particular kinds of work, work such as nursing, created anxiety by reconnecting the adult worker with early childhood anxieties concerning sex and death. Obholzer (1994) stresses the social nature of anxiety and the way in which anxieties located within society as a whole `get into’ such institutions.

I do not feel that public institutions are unique in containing unconscious aspects of citizens’ emotional lives, nor that anxiety is the only affect involved. Recently, for example, writers have drawn attention to the impact of envy (Stein    ) and hope (Cummins 2002). However I do feel that such institutions and the apparatus of government as a whole play a vital role in `containing’ undigested affective conflicts within citizens’ lives and I also feel that anxiety seems to be the most powerful of these affects. But the concept of `social anxiety’ remains largely untheorised and this is a great shame as, for instance, it means that this way of thinking has not been adopted by writers, researchers or policy makers outside the psychoanalytic milieu in the fields of public or social policy. 

I suggest that if the concept is to gain wider social application then it is not enough to point out that such anxieties are rooted in a set of core development conflicts which we first negotiate in infancy, we need to connect such existential anxieties to the everyday life of adult society understood in its historical and cultural specificity. In this spirit I would suggest we consider the concept of `social anxiety’ as something which refers to the anxiety that the western citizen has about a range of intimate fates which could befall him or her - as we say, `there but for the grace of god go I’. These intimate fates exist as tangible fears which connect to primitive anxieties, existential in form (Klein’s persecutory and depressive anxieties), and in this way become loaded with affect which is potentially unbearable. I list the following: fear of death, fear of physical and mental degeneration, fear of pain and sudden incapacity (Menzies Lyth 1960); fear of madness (Bott Spillius 1990); fear of enduring and chronic mental turmoil; fear of indigence and destitution; fear of violation of bodily integrity as a consequence of violent attack or rape (Williams 2000); fear of helplessness and loneliness; fear of failure (Sennett 1998). I could go on. Clearly we can see how the intensity, if not the initial basis, of many such fears is influenced by our culture, a culture in flight from dependency and the acceptance of human limits (Lash 1978). As a consequence of the conjoining of the cultural and the existential we find ourselves unable to think easily about such fates, and find it difficult to talk about them openly even to trusted intimates.

However, the fears I listed above have one thing in common, in each the self is constituted as innocent victim, usually the victim either of fate, misfortune or the depredations of others. But there is another set of social anxieties which arise because of our knowledge of that part of the self (including our own) which is not innocent and virtuous but which is potentially destructive or perverse. These social anxieties draw from the reservoir of guilt and shame upon which civilization depends for its survival (Freud 1930). Again the self is presented with a range of outcomes which are also pretty unthinkable – for example, the loss of self control involved in violence towards one’s child or partner, surrender to addiction or perversion, wishing evil to others - but this time the self is potentially the culpable agent rather than innocent object.

But, and here is the particular twist that psychoanalysis provides us, to the extent that we cannot individually and collectively contain such fears we externalise them into the other. `I fear’ becomes `I am frightened of’, the danger within becomes the danger without (Hoggett 1992) – the mad, the bad, the sad, the old, the sick, the vulnerable, the failures, and so on, receive not just our compassion but also our fear, contempt and hatred.

So social anxieties are complex in form. They originate in our undeveloped capacity to contain what is strange within us – the mad, destructive, perverse, vulnerable, helpless and frightened parts of the self. We alienate ourselves from these dimensions of our subjectivity by locating them in the other, so that what is strange within us becomes the stranger outside of us (Benjamin 1998) . This is the basis of our ambivalence towards the subjects of welfare – the old, the sick, the bad, etc. We both identify with them and refuse to recognise ourselves in them. As subjects of welfare ourselves - when we visit our doctor because of anxiety about a nagging internal pain, or when, as an elderly person, we are no longer able to look after ourselves and we look to the social services official for help – we suffer the anxiety which accompanies all such experiences of helplessness and we look to the other to meet both our material and psychological needs. But when constituted as citizen and taxpayer the self so easily sees the `subject of welfare’ as the stranger, somebody else’s problem, somebody towards whom the invulnerable self is capable of callous indifference. 

Government and ambivalence

Many years ago Claus Offe (1984) spoke of the contradictions of the welfare state, that since its inception the welfare state had to meet both the requirements of capital and the requirements of labour. On the one hand it stood as the crowning achievement of the labour movement but on the other hand it played a key role in sustaining the post-war economic system. In recent years this contradiction has become ever more acute as social policy appears to have become increasingly subordinate to the imperative of producing a fit and educated labour force ready to take its place in the newly flexibilised global marketplace (Levitas 1999). But I’m pointing to something different to Offe for I’m suggesting that the state, and particularly the welfare state, is founded upon ambivalence and it is because of this ambivalence that the struggle to defend, let alone extend, this form of government and citizenship has been so difficult.  How does this ambivalence find expression?

To the extent that the `subject of welfare’ is constituted as someone `other’ to ourselves, part of the foundation underlying social solidarity is destroyed. As Baldwin (1990) noted, what fosters solidarity is a common experience of vulnerability, ` a sense of community is encouraged, most simply, in the face of universally shared risk’ (p.34). In contrast, in the UK at least, for several decades this notion of `shared fate’ has been eclipsed by a collusion between governments and citizens which says `they’ (ie. the government) must do something about this – child sexual abuse, the neglect of people with chronic mental health problems, the old and alone, the containment of uncontained children, etc. The systemic and relational dimensions of such social problems become obscured. Public officials get caught up in the bad faith which surrounds such issues, a bad faith which, for instance, wills the ends without willing the means, professes compassion but appears quite unconcerned by the pitiful wages of the army of care workers (from home care assistants to hospital porters) upon which the system depends.

For professionally trained public officials this bad faith is manifest in a different fashion. In his classic study of `street level bureaucracies’ Lipsky (1980,  p.29) noted that public professionals typically could not fulfill their mandated responsibilities because of the caseloads that they carried. In twenty years of consulting to and researching public sector workers in the UK I would say that Lipsky’s observations are more relevant now than they were even in his day. Repeated recent surveys, for example, of local doctors in the UK have revealed that the reason why one third seriously contemplate leaving the profession is because of impossible workloads rather than inadequate remuneration.

Containing social anxiety in public organisations

The concept of social anxiety draws attention to the existence of relatively enduring collective sentiments in society. This idea has only recently been taken up in the social sciences, for example, in Raymond Williams’ notion of `structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977) and in James Jasper’s notion of `abiding affects’ (Jasper 1998). As I have intimated, the concept of social anxiety draws our attention to something which is partly existential, anxiety about the fate of self and intimates, and partly cultural, a consequence of the intense ambivalence of western democracies towards vulnerability, destructiveness and dependency.

Following Menzies Lyth’s pioneering studies (2002) a considerable body of work has now been built up which largely focuses upon the way in which public organisations deal with social anxieties and other collective sentiments (see for example Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). Much of this work focuses upon the impact of splitting processes and other mechanisms of defence on the internal life of welfare organisations. But splitting processes also attack the actual patterns of interdependency which constitute a welfare society – splitting self as funder of welfare (taxpayer) from self as user of welfare; self as user of welfare from `other’ as provider of welfare.

Several of the social defence mechanisms that Menzies Lyth outlined find an echo in Lipsky’s work. Distancing and depersonalisation, for example, were also used by many of Lipsky’s respondents and this was often linked to labelling processes (Menzies Lyth uses the term `categorization’). In a study a colleague and I undertook on the housing allocations process (Jeffers & Hoggett 1995) we found similar labelling processes at work in terms of distinctions drawn between `demanding’ applicants and others. Such categories strip users of public services of some of their humanity and many officials are acutely aware of their own involvement in such processes, processes which nevertheless help to protect them against the `assaults on the ego which the structure of street level work normally delivers’ (Lipsky, p.152).

To the extent that governments collude with the self-alienation of their citizens they take on themselves a series of impossible tasks (such as the protection of vulnerable people from abuse) in which failure is inevitable. The collusion is based upon an implicit contract, one with echoes of the `contract of mutual indifference’ that Norman Geras has described (Geras 1998). Through this contract government derives some of its legitimacy by not confronting citizens with issues they would prefer not to think about (eg. citizen’s contempt for their own vulnerability, a contempt which fuels a willingness to exploit or neglect vulnerable others, of which child or elder abuse is just one manifestation). As a consequence of such failures of political leadership (Alford 1994) the hapless public official becomes the whipping horse, the one who can be blamed for things that neither citizens nor governments will properly address.

To summarise, ambivalence is an inherent dimension of the social relations of welfare and, to the extent that this remains culturally unaccepted and unassimilated, we become alienated from the shadow side of our shared subjectivity. One of the functions of public bureaucracies is to `contain’ these disowned aspects of our subjectivity. This occurs literally and concretely in the physical institutions that many children and elderly people end up in, and symbolically and psychologically through the projected social anxieties that become part of the emotional labour of health workers, teachers, probation officers  and other street level bureaucrats. So long as this contract of mutual indifference prevails the form of containment offered by welfare bureaucracies will be predominantly parasitic – the social imagination of citizens and governments will remain impoverished and unsupported street level bureaucrats will continue to face high levels of stress.    

The ethical bureaucrat

Honig draws on the work of the moral philosopher Bernard Williams (1973, 1981) who is keenly aware of the incommensurable nature of human values. Things just don’t fit together as we would like them to, values rub up against each other, the moral agent has to live with conflicts that cannot easily be resolved and simply have to be lived with. You have to end up disappointing someone. Williams argues that in such situations there is often no right thing to do, the best that we can do is `act for the best’ (Williams 1973, p.173). I think this is exemplified by the working lives of public officials and corresponds to what Lipsky described as `the assaults on the ego which the structure of street level work normally delivers’.

There are two categories of dilemma which correspond to my two characterisations of government – as the embodiment of an inherently conflictual and an inherently alienated public. In the first, the public official seeks to act impartially (`acting for the best’) in the face of competing claims (care versus justice, the individual case versus the greater good, consistency versus responsiveness, and so on). Susan Mendus (2000) notes that we are in the terrain not just of pluralism but also of the impossibility of harmonious reconciliation in which the agent is not exempt from the authority of the claim they choose to neglect. As she puts it, such situations are characterized by `pluralism, plus conflict, plus loss’ (Mendus 2000, p.117). For public officials it is loss which is experienced as failure. It is as if they internalise the flaws and faults of reality and make them their own thereby taking on responsibility for what is irreconcilable in their world.   

The second category of dilemma is the consequence of ambivalence, and specifically the inability of the other to contain their own ambivalence. Michael Feldman (1989) suggests that where X deals with ambivalence by projecting it into Y the consequence is that Y is put in a `no win’ or `damned if I do and damned if I don’t’ situation. Social workers, trapped between the rights of the family and the needs of the child, know such situations only too well.

In contrast, then, to the heroic view of many contemporary writers on management (a group Du Gay (2000) refers to as the `new charismatics’), a view which stresses change-embracing, go-for-it, visionary types, the view of the public official and manager that I have outlined is in the best traditions of tragedy. The merit of such a view, I would argue, is that it deals with reality rather than make-believe. I do not believe it is pessimistic. If only we could abandon the chimerical pursuit of `excellence’ or `total quality’ we could focus our energies on creating systems of welfare and governance which were `good enough’ (Williams 2000) – something we are presently far from achieving, either in Britain or elsewhere.

I couldn’t put it better than a doctoral student of mine who is also a senior public manager:

I have seen ethical responsibility as being closely associated with the public service ethos. There is a persistent argument that, accompanying the role of the public services manager are duties of care about facts and proper process, duties of balance in argument, and duties of balance in advice. I have understood in my working life that the manager gives expression to the ethos through dealing with people in terms of care, diligence, courtesy and integrity. The public service ethos is best perceived through the quality of these face to face relationships, through processes as much as results. (Watts 2003)

Revisiting the concept of `primary task’: consulting to public organisations

I have long had a problem with the concept of the primary task. This concept has enjoyed a powerful hold on the imagination of the Group Relations tradition which emerged from the work of the Tavistock Insititute in the 1950’s. Yet it draws strongly upon classical functionalist approaches to systems theory which have been abandoned long ago in organisational research. A functionalist perspective conceives of any particular system as having its own goals or needs — typically some combination of equilibrium, adaptation and survival. But organisations per se do not have needs, nor goals or primary tasks for that matter; to believe that they do is simply to buy in to the dominant definition of what a particular organisation is all about, a definition which is the outcome of particular relations of power.

As the first section of this paper argued, this is particularly true for public organisations, whether they are housing associations, children's homes or primary care teams. Anyone who spends even a short time in such organisations cannot but be struck by the different views of the aims of the organisation. Its not just that the views of professionals will often differ to those of managers, service users and their advocates, nor even that many differences of view will exist within the ranks of the professionals themselves but those who have the formal authority to define policy (politicians, senior civil servants, inspectors and regulators, academics) constantly change their views as well. Within the public sphere definitions of purpose are constantly and necessarily contested, and, as Obholzer (2003) has recently suggested, it therefore makes more sense to speak of the contested primary task.

To say that in human service organisations questions concerning tasks, priorities, objectives, etc. are constantly contested is to say no more than that within such organisations questions of value are primary. I disagree strongly with the view, expressed recently for example by Chapman (2003), that the primary task is `relatively value-free’. Moreover, the centrality of questions of value is also an expression of the connectedness of such organisations to society through their concern for the birth, development, security, control, sickness and death of its citizens. In the face of this complexity the notion of "a primary task" can seem not only simplistic but potentially destructive. Indeed, as I’ve suggested in the discussion of ambivalence in the second part of this paper, one of the roles of public organisations is to take on impossible tasks. Contrary to the belief that the primary task is the task the organisation must perform if the organisation is to survive, if we follow the logic of the `impossible task’ we begin to realise that it is in the nature of some public organisations that they will be seen to fail, indeed it is necessary for them to fail if governments and citizens are to sustain their own sense of inner security.

The concept of primary task can also lead us to a dangerous blurring of the distinction, crucial to human service organisations, between survival and development (Armstrong, 1996). When an organisation's capacity for development is at risk what we mean is that its capacity to exist as a place with value is now in doubt. We speak, more perceptively than we know, of workers becoming de-moralised, i.e., of losing a sense of value. These are the stakes that have been played for over the last two decades in the British welfare state.

There were many things wrong with the old welfare state, not the least the way in which it disempowered the recipients of its services and programmes. But despite its faults it was at least able to keep in mind something of the complexity of the subjects that it dealt with. Compare, for example, the multi-dimensionality of the idea of "the patient" with the uni-dimensional concept of "the consumer", a "part-object" to the institution as Armstrong (1996) puts it. It is an old phrase now but worth remembering — markets tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing. In my experience the root of the crises which have affected many welfare service organisations over the last decade can be described as the abandonment of development for survival, something experienced by many staff in terms of the feeling that their organisation no longer stands for the values and principles which originally attracted them to it.

We must make an additional distinction paralleling the one above, namely the distinction between task and purpose, means and ends. As I see it the concept of purpose is one saturated with value, i.e. with a sense of what is good and bad, right and wrong for me/my organisation to be doing. I would argue that if a group or organisation is to provide a facilitating environment for development to occur it must have a sense of purpose. I have in mind an agreement which is temporary and understood as such by all parties who subscribe to it. They are also necessarily ambiguous otherwise agreement could never be reached. The point is that parties accept this ambiguity or lack of consistency for it is this which provides each with the possibility of infusing the organisation's purpose with personal meaning and it is this which provides the creative space for further development and continuing dialogue, a theme picked up in Obholzer's "Afterword" to The Unconscious at Work (Obholzer 1994). Such temporary definitions of purpose are therefore fictions (Hoggett 2000) which serve to bind the group together and contain differences without crushing them.

Such fictions are necessary illusions which enable the organisation to traverse the transitional space between the `what is’ and the `what might be’. They therefore provide a means of sustaining direction and commitment for organisations operating in the fundamentally contested realm of public life. A group or organisation with a strong sense of purpose has an inner confidence which is to be contrasted with the noisy declamations of those who, having lost all sense of purpose long ago, adopt the lapel-badge approach to values by bedecking themselves with Mission Statements, Chartermarks, Investors in People awards and so on. In this way values themselves become reduced to an element of strategy, something an organisation uses to position itself in the marketplace.

If we are to abandon the idea of the primary task, seeing it instead as something which can be asserted by those with the necessary authority in relatively non-complex environments, then it follows that consultants to human service organisations cannot easily make judgements about behaviour which is "off-task" and irrational in some way. Moreover there is a danger that irrationality is only seen in its negative and destructive guise. Bion's `basic assumptions’ also fuel Work Group activity (Bion 1961); magic, omnipotence, illusion and splitting can and are frequently put to constructive use in organisations. The creative uses of irrationality are as important as the destructive ones.

So, if we strip away the device of the primary task what equipment is the consultant left with to navigate the unconscious currents of the organisation's psyche? How does the consultant get a sense of "what's going on here?" Just occasionally, I would suggest, the consultant learns from what people say, perhaps particularly from those whose powerlessness has until now denied them a voice with which to speak. But words are fickle things designed, as Bion noted, as much for the purpose of dissimulation as communication. Thus the usefulness of imagery and many consultants nowadays use imagery (pictures, sculptures, dreams, etc.) and the process of free-associating to imagery as a means of taking organisational participants beyond words. Ultimately however the consultant must rely on her own experience of the emotional life of the group or organisation. As an outsider, the consultant dips into the emotional medium of the organisation, this is a medium in which organisational participants are so immersed that they have almost no cognizance of its existence. As Armstrong (1995) notes, a crucial aspect of this medium is what might be called the `primary process’ of the of the human service organisation — i.e., the emotional work it unconsciously performs for the rest of society — keeping death at bay, managing vulnerability, containing madness or violence, and so on. To tune into this medium the consultant must be able to use the equivalent of the counter-transference and become aware of the feelings and sensations which they become recipients of as they work with the group or organisation. But openness to such experience is only part of the story, sense must then be made of it. How is this to be done? A number of contemporary models of organisational research, particularly those inspired by feminist methodologies, give emphasis to interactive approaches to sense-making which recognize the plurality of meanings which, within complex organisations, a shared experience can obtain. As Armstrong (1996) notes, "I do not see dreams as containers of meaning - a puzzle to be solved once and for all; but rather as containers for meaning; available narratives through which we negotiate and seek formulation for the emotional experiences we register."

Effective consultancy requires a double reflexivity, to one's own emotional experience of the collective organisational unconscious and to the nature of one's agency within the dynamic field of forces at play in any organisational setting. Whilst mainstream social science is conversant with the latter it is still largely ignorant of the former. If the Group Relations perspective is to emerge from the margins into the mainstream it must begin to demonstrate a much stronger appreciation of the interpenetration of the realm of the emotions and unconscious and the realm of power and politics.

To summarise, for public organisations the search for an organisation’s primary task is both misleading and fruitless.  Such organisations have multiple tasks which are often in contradiction, they are certainly beset by conflicting notions of what they should be doing and, far from task achievement being necessary for survival, for some organisations it is important that they fail in order to maintain their contested legitimacy.