|
Susan Long (Ph.D) Professor in Organisation Dynamics
|
|||
|
Introduction Familiarity often causes the same things to be liked and disliked: and thus it sometimes happens that the customs, behaviour, ceremonies and ways of life approved at one period of time grow to be looked down on, and those which were once looked down on come to be approved. So we can see clearly enough that usage is more effective than reason in introducing new things among us and wiping out the old. (Castiglione, 1528, in an introduction to ‘The Book of the Courtier’) Recently, a prison officer told me he did not want to get in bed with a child molester. This is a sentiment most probably shared by all of us here, but not necessarily at the forefront of our daily consciousness. Why was it for him? What did he mean? I was told this during an interview that was part of a research project I am currently undertaking in collaboration with the public corrections enterprise. In a climate of increased privatisation and competition, the public system is having to move itself from a monopoly position in dealing with offenders, to a totally revised corporate position. Now the system must prove - to the Commissioner’s office - that through economic efficiencies and improved outcomes, it is a viable player in the field of containing and dealing with criminal offence. One can only begin to imagine what such a change brings: cuts to staffing and finding a ‘competitive edge’ are two examples. In the language of the system, one thing this means is that the ‘incidents’ which might cause disruption, which require massive staff input when they erupt into riots or major disturbances, and which draw negative public interest in the system must be minimised. To do this, attention must be given early to initial causes of incidents so that small problems do not escalate into unmanageable anger and frustration. Most importantly, an attitudinal change toward offenders is occurring. The old policy of, "lock ‘em up and don’t talk to them", no longer holds. Certainly not as the official line, and, despite many misgivings over the past 5 years, most staff have come to see that a more humane approach has many payoffs in the conduct of a now more liveable institution. To return to the officer I started with, however, it is often a ‘big ask’ of relatively untrained staff that they take on the new approach through taking up a new case management role with prisoners. But this is where the organisation is headed. Many Correctional Officers are now required to manage a prisoner through his sentence, regularly meeting with him to assess his needs - both offense related and institutionally and personally related - and to suggest programs for him to do whilst in prison, or to monitor his programs whilst on community based orders. (It should be noted that most community corrections staff have traditionally had far more education and training in the case management and counselling role.) Hence the feeling, expressed by this officer. He felt that he didn’t want to be one who had to get close to sex offenders. It is hard to take on board the advice of St. Paul - to love the offender and revile the offence - especially when you’ve had no real professional training, you operate in a system where trust is very hard won and is fragile in the extreme, and you have small children of your own. The point I want to make here, is that the staff within the system, over the past few years, have been required to take on massive change. The major task that they have to do looks to be quite different. How it is operationalised at every level - from the commissioners office, through general managers (govenors), to security officers and case mangers (warders) down to the offender (crims), means that people have to look differently to the way they do things; the way they think about their work; the way they deal with the emotional experiences that are stirred in them; and, the way they know themselves in role. ‘You have to know the line that you can’t let them cross in you’, and, ‘ you’ve got to get into their mind without them getting into yours’ was the way two officers put it. This is a complex task. The Task Over recent years it has become popular, and perhaps increasingly necessary, to point out that the task is just one aspect to be considered in thinking about the organisations’ work, productivity or other outputs. Leaders are exhorted:
All these logically seem to come prior to the task. They are the very stuff of future direction, strategic change and development. It makes sense first to know: who you are as an organisation; what are the risks being taken? what is the environment? what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? What is the enterprise with which you want to engage? However, such a logical process of thinking through these issues is often employed well after the organisation or enterprise already has a strong life of its own - whether in action or imagination. Before such reflections occur, the organisation most often has an existence and a task idea is present in that existence. Let me here explore the nature and meaning of ‘organisation’ in order to reach the importance of the task. By ‘organisation’, I mean that process by which
How can we think about organisation of the subjectivities in groups? I am proposing that the first division of psychic organisation is that between subject and predicate. All human cultures and languages reflect this. The subject and the predicate emerge together. ‘I’ become, at the same moment as the coming into being of my action and my objects. As Winnicott says, the mother needs a baby (to be a mother) as much as the baby needs a mother. [The internal process of creating the subject/ object distinction is at the basis of the British object relations psycho-analytic theorists.] However, subject and object are not passive. The verb, the ‘doing word’, links them. [This is the case whether or not the lingustic syntactic structure places the verb before or after the object ]. Mother and baby ‘are’. They exist; they are in relationship. One can say, they are engaged. It is through what Winnicott terms the ‘holding’ of the baby that the normal maturational processes can emerge and the baby can begin to make its own actions rather than simply its own movements. This reflects what the existentialists called ‘authenticity of being’, that is, becoming the author of one actions which have intentionality and organisation, rather than finding oneself engaged in random acts. The ‘doing’ often seems enough - at least for a well formed sentence; or for a baby who needs to initiate its own holding. ‘I am’ or ‘I run’, despite their narcissism, are perfectly lingustically and culturally acceptable. The subject can be object to himself. But, this may be at a cost: the cost being the disengagement of ‘doing’ (ie, acting) from ‘being’ (ie., the co-engagement of self and other) so that instrumentality becomes an end in itself, rather than a creative link between subject and object (Hoggett, 1992; Sievers, 1994). The creative link, however, is in the organised or purposive act. The joining of object and subject by the verb, that is, the action, may be further explored. Developmental psychologists have theories where action is central. Piaget’s theory, for example, is of cognition and knowledge as emergent from and through action. He says, A primary service which developmental psychology can perform in the study of elementary relationships between the subject and the object of knowledge is to deliver us from the stubborn and fatal illusion that all knowledge comes from ‘sensations’........In fact, the point of departure for all knowledge is not to be found in sensations or even perceptions - mere indications whose symbolism is necessarily related to a meaning - but in actions (1972, p74) His theory proposes that it is through actions that we come to build mental schemata that are in continuous adaptive interaction with those objects -physical or mental- that are (reciprocally)the result of such schemata. (Apart from his extensive observations of children and their perceptuo-motor-cognitive development, he cites the work of people like Kohler, who experimented with people wearing glasses that reversed vision through 180 degrees. With appropriate movement and perceptual feedback, within a week they were moving freely, riding bicycles and ‘seeing’ the world normally). The object of knowledge in Piaget, is not so far from the transitional object in Winnicott (1971). The biologist Maturana has a similar view of knowledge creation through action. He argues that action is at the basis of experience and hence of knowing. Psycho-analytic theories also see action as central and as a foundation for thinking. Freud saw thought and action as intricately linked. In primary process thinking [the first psy. system] the model is of a reflex; a way of getting rid of unpleasant perceptions. The wish, say to get rid of hunger, impels an hallucinatory memory of past satisfaction. ‘Doing’ is transformed into a process of hallucination. In secondary process thinking the model is purposive where thought and motor actions occur to bring about a change in the world to enable the satisfaction, in reality, of a wish (Freud, 1900). This is the famous reality principle. However, Freud went beyond the presence of the object and the presence of its engagement, to consider its absence. He contended that it is through engagement with the absence of the object, that a thinking self emerges. The object can be engaged through thinking about it in its absence, and this is increasingly satisfactory as we mature and as we elaborate our thoughts. One of his famous descriptions about absence is in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (pp.8-11). Here he describes a game played by his grandson at about age 18 months. This game is referred to as the ‘fort’ ‘da’ game (in English the ‘gone’ ‘here’ game). Freud noticed that the child, whilst being a good boy and not protesting when his loved mother left, would play a game of throwing away a toy, saying ‘gone’. When the toy was a cotton reel, he was able to pull it back saying ‘here’. Freud interprets this primarily as a repetition of a painful situation, sometimes with its joyful resolution (the return), and also involving an attempt at active mastery of that situation. Important for my argument here is the emphasis on action. The painful situation is first received passively and later turned to an active solution: in this case the active development of a symbol that can be manipulated. This involves a mastery of absense using thought. Bion’s theory of thinking developed this. He regarded thinking as a transformation or series of transformations made possible by the organisation of boundaries within the mind. Such boundaries (such as the alpha and beta screens) are basic mechanisms for dealing with, and transforming, thoughts. These thoughts can be primitive ‘proto-mental’ phenomena right through to complex scientific theories or mathematical theorems, with many other forms between. The thoughts are social phenomena, and the individual must develop a mind in order to think the thoughts. That is, an organised mind must be developed for the task of thinking and hence linking to the social world. Melanie Klein’s theorising also takes Freud’s idea of the absence further, with a focus on the persecutory nature of the object’s absence; only she places the dynamic as beginning before the object is whole. She talks of part-objects. Here, engagement with the absent (part-object) breast involves projection of hostile impulses, which, in phantasy, return to persecute. Winnicott also deals with the absent object, but his focus is on the capacity of the infant to find transitional objects which represent both the absent object and have a life of their own. The paradox inherent in the transitional object is its emergence. Did the baby create it through his action, or was it present to be discovered in action? Important to my argument here, is that Winnicott demonstrates that an action, as well as being at the foundation of the transitional object, may itself be a transitional phenomenon; thumb sucking or cheek stroking, for example. Moreover, it is from the joint creation of subject and predicate (baby and mother and their acts together) that the subjects’ capacity to create emerges. I won’t here argue the relative importances of libidinal, aggressive or even mimetic engagements with the object. They are all mentioned in Freud and developed differentially by later thinkers. What is important is the centrality of the link, which is active, and paradoxically psychologically significant in its linking of the subject with an absence. The present object (to the thinking subject) is no object at all - at least not until it’s absence makes its presence thinkable. (This is a bit like the fish not being able to think about the water it swims in.) The subject is predicated upon an absence. [Lacanian psycho-analytic theory pays much attention to this notion]. It is an absence that is potentially a presence; a presence that is potentially an absence. Absence might signify then, (i) never having been: not conceived, perhaps not allowed to be; (ii) having been lost: a hole or a gap in meaning or relatedness, perhaps lost through repression; or (iii) removed for the time being, but with hope of return. These three significations correspond in psycho-analytic theory to disavowel (a psychotic mechanism); repression (a neurotic mechanism) and the capacity to think (a creative capacity). Working with Absense What each of the abovementioned theorists do is offer us a discussion of the different ways humans operate in coming to terms with absence: viz,
I will return to this idea of the absent object later. Once fundamentally organised, both subject and predicate are further elaborated and further linked. Linguistically this is represented by the adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, articles and conjunctions. The organisation of the subject, the object and the action becomes increasingly complex. Subjectivity, actions and objects become diverse, nuances are discovered and differences perceived. What does all this inform us about the task? The task is in the doing. Work organisations begin with a task or several tasks: whether these are acts or also transformations into thinking tasks, emotional tasks, motivational tasks etc. Somebody or bodies decide to do something; not randomly, but in an organised and purposive way. In fact task ‘doers’ or task roles, come into being at the same time as the task does. Work might be seen as an elaboration of the initial conceptualisation and experience of task and role. Reasons for the creation of new tasks are legion: because there is a need? because it looks interesting? because it looks like a good investment? because the person involved always wanted to? it’s what their father did? Each ‘because’ is a fundamental elaboration of organisation, ie, the ‘doing’ that is involved in the first organisation of subject / predicate. Each is perhaps a transformation of a wish or a desire, or indeed a rationalisation. To take what was said earlier about the absence of the object into the organisational context, we might say that thoughtfulness about the task ( that is, the ‘doing’ that is part of the predicate) also occurs in its absence. When the task is not proceeding but is obstructed for some reason, a re-think is required.2 Another way of looking at this might be that the current ‘present’ task is always an approximation of the ‘absent’ task: that is, the task yet to be discovered. Alternatively, absence, when felt to be persecutory, may give rise to intolerable anxiety so that thoughtfulness is not possible. Further engagement may be rejected, or, as Bion puts it, ejected. Take the example of prisons. A prison is organised to incarcerate and reform offenders. While the task was fulfilled, especially in less enlightened times when brute force was successful although the prisoner’s existence was inhumanely miserable, it wasn’t much thought about at a broader social level. Within a changing society, expectations change in all its institutions. It was the riots and fires in the Jika Jika maximum security division of Pentridge prison in Melbourne in the 80’s that challenged the way the ‘corrections’ task was being handled. In the absence of successful task engagement, or in the presence of a persecuting task, the then office of corrections had to think of new ways of operating. At that time, what was termed unit management was brought in. This required a much closer interaction of staff and offender, and a better method for understanding offender issues and problems before they became intolerable. Unit management began to treat prisoners in a more humane fashion as regarded them more as having human needs that could be listened to and dealt with. For some prison officers, the absence of the old task - ie, ‘lock them up and only talk to them if you’re giving an order’ - was intolerable and itself experienced as persecutory. This made it difficult for them to take on the new way of doing things. Interestingly, some of these people admit that unit management, and possibly case management of individuals, when it does operate, are successful insofar as they do reduce ‘incidents’. Nonetheless, they still experience the absence of the task as they knew it as persecutory. Such a persecution leads to the comforting defense of ‘harking back to the good old days’. But this wears thin when one really knows that the old days weren’t that good. Moreover, such an absence is not simply a loss of what was. More disturbingly, it may be an absence of what might have been - the preterite present tense - meaning an expectation in the past of a future that never occurred: a future that is now present yet presents us with a vacuum; an absense. Such an absense might be found in hopes for careers that might have been under the old system - careers that one might have felt confident in - but which no longer exist as a career. Were they lost or did they never exist? Might they return? By not exploring such absence, the hopes for futures that might have been become signified by others as ‘organisational resistance’. Meaning, worth and value, are elaborations of the task. I don’t mean by this that they are not fundamental, nor that they are not inherent in the task. To suck the breast inherently embodies a desire for life, a valuing of the connection with the actual breast that produces real milk and a meaning for the relation to be established between mother and baby. To establish prisons for the task of reducing offensive, criminal behaviours, embodies values of punishment, revenge, disconnection of the criminal from society at large, and the further establishment of the meaning of crime. But just as a baby may come to suck greedily, aggressively or contentedly, and a mother may come to give her breast lovingly, or in pain, or resentfully; so a prison may incarcerate people humanely or cruelly; with rehabilitative or punitive aims or some mixture of both. Moreover, the organisation of baby/mother may be with breast or bottle; the organisation of containing criminal offense may be with prison, or community order or by some other means. What becomes important in the understanding of organisation, for those of us who want to understand and who want to organise better, is the nature of the task and the values, meaning and worth that emanate from task. This has been a long way of saying that one discovers the values and ‘missions’ one has not in some idealistic vacuum, nor even in a strategic mapping of the total environment, however useful this may be for other purposes. They come through a careful process of discovering the task.1 This then provides the bedrock from which change can build. One can then do something differently. It’s quite a pragmatic view. First look at what you do, then how you do it, and then reflect on the implications within it. What I am suggesting, though, is not a naieve realism or empiricism. Discovery of the task is also a discovery of the complex system within which it occurs. So in looking at what it is you do, you must also look at how you take up and negotiate roles, boundaries and authorities. Moreover, understanding must move beyond the individual to group, organisational and institutional levels. The thoughts ideas and boundaries we deal with arise from this level of the social, but we think as individuals, albeit individuals under influence. How then can we have access to an understanding of the social? I suggest through the institution-in-experience. The Institution-in-Experience Armstrong (1995) developed the idea of the institution-in-the-mind. This refers to the idea that one has of the institution of which one is a member. It is a particulary useful concept when working with people in what is termed ‘Organisational Role Analysis’ or ORA (Reed, 1976; Quine & Hutton 1992). ORA enables a role holder to examine how he or she ‘finds, makes and takes’ an organisational role. It is a method where, in working with a consultant, the role holder is able to explore the dynamics of their particular work role within their particular work organisation. This requires an exploration of how the role holder experiences his or her organisation. How they take up their role is consciously and unconsciously predicated on how the organisation is viewed, how one believes others act within it, which emotional dynamics are taken up on behalf of the organisation by the role encumbent and so on. Armstrong talks of how the organisation dynamics are in rather than of the role holder. With a colleague, I have coined the term institution-in-experience (Long & Newton, 1997) to denote these broad emotional as well as cognitive aspects of the concept. We are interested in exploring the instituion-in-experience for role holders. For the current paper, I am concerned with ways in which organisation members engage their work group tasks and have access to their social as well as individual meanings, because this lies at the basis of their capacity to change. They do this, I argue, through accessing the institution-in-experience. To aid my exploration of this, I will draw on Lacan’s distinction between three different registers of experience - the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Identification with task (which is psychologically at the basis of engagement with task; Freud, 1921; Long, 1992) operates both through the Symbolic field, that is through what the institution represents unconsciously to society as a whole, and through the Imaginary field, that is, through the psycho-dynamics of direct experience. Those aspects of task that are not symbolised, either consciously or unconsciously are registered through the Real. At the Symbolic level, task, roles and authorities within the penal system reflect the intent of society to carry out punishment and retribution. They may also to demonstrate the impulse in society to aid in processes of reparation, healing and forgiveness. These are the interdictory and remissive forms linked to the Law (Rieff, 1966). This Symbolic registration of experience may be accessed through attendance to inner psychic experience, (ie. to what is in us, including our emotional relatedness to others) which includes ways of attending to the unconscious - what Bion (1970) termed non-sensuous experience. However, it is the emotional relationships of people within these systems, how they perceive and interact with each other, within the constraints of that total institutionalisation that is a prison, that provides the institution-in-direct-experience at the Imaginary level. Task, role and authority all contribute to the identity of any member of the work system. One has a work identity, and hence an engagement with task that is both part of the unconscious symbolic system, and of the conscious system of work relationships. Opportunities to access and think about experiences at each of these levels is crucial for organisational change. I will give an example from the project. In the project, the work is with a changing task. Prison Officers are required now not to think only of security, but to work with prisoners as case managers, helping offenders through programs and support, to find new and constructive ways of dealing with their lives in prison, and hopefully outside. This is difficult to do in a situation where trust is necessarily low, and extremely difficult for those officers who were trained in the older philosophy of ‘lock them up and don’t talk to them’. The interpersonal dynamics surrounding these changes require new attitudes and skills from staff. Treating prisoners as individuals with needs has had its payoffs, particularly in terms of easier institution management and lower suicide statistics (compared with the private prisons which seemingly do not emphasise prisoner needs, but work off a strong profit motive). But, as one prison officer said, ‘locking people up is an inherently aggressive act’. At the Symbolic level, the task must always involve retribution and punishment on behalf of society, or certainly it must involve a resolution of the need to exact this. One thing that is strongly evident in the culture of prisons is an ambivalence about the exact nature of the crime, at least at the official organisational level. The philosophy is to treat all prisoners the same. In mainstream prisons, those convicted of traffic offenses share the same conditions as those convicted of armed robbery or murder. Many prison officers do not want to ‘officially’ know the nature of the crime or its specifics: ‘a crim is a crim’, although notorious crimes are well known at an informal level. Broadly speaking, the generic nature of the crime is recognised in sentencing and in the placement of prisoners at specialised facilities, eg, drug, sex or mainstream offense. Specific details of the crime are recorded and kept within strict bounds: (i) in a part of the individual management plan file that is separately stored and more difficult to access by prison officers (due partly to the need to have some comments that cannot be accessed by the prisoner under the freedom of information laws); and, (ii) in therapy sessions that are necessarily conducted in privacy with professional therapists. Those aspects of the crime that would invoke personalised judgements and responses, such as would lead to conjecture about the motive involved, the degree to which the perpetrator was remorseful or unmoved or the victim innocent or implicated, are hidden. Those aspects belong to the authority of the judge and the courts, not to those in the prison system, except through conjecture. The institutions responsible for judgement and punishment are separated. The wish of custodial staff is to retain professional distance. Once sentenced and placed, however, progression through prison depends very much on behaviour within the institution. Prisoners get ratings which allow them to progress to the open farms, to billets that are relatively priveledged, or to parole depending on their good behaviour and willingness to comply with programs. It is the prisoner who is judged in the jail, not the crime that brought him there. (Foucault, 1979, describes how, over the past two centuries, a focus on the transgression and the public admission of guilt has shifted increasingly to a focus on the delinquent person and the institutionalisation of discipline and reform). One wonders whether an institutional reminder of the exact nature of the crime might stimulate personal retribution by prison personnel or other prisoners. To keep it hidden is a defense against such a possibility. Most likely, this is a reasonable defense. What it means, however, is that the impulse to private retribution, held in check socially, becomes part of the unconscious emotional life of the prison. It becomes part of the unconscious institution-in-experience. In the project, the researchers were aware that they each seemed to carry a different emotional response to the research experience. One felt paranoid fears, another sick revulsion and the third a kind of fascinated voyerism. I checked these feelings out with one of the Govenors, who confirmed that these were feelings that the system had evoked in him over time. I believe these feelings belong to the crime rather than independently to the criminal. Perhaps thay belong to the crime/criminal conjunction. However, the modern attitude of therapeutics and rehabilitation separates the crime from the criminal. ‘Hate the sins, not the sinner’ is the hallmark of this attitude; an attitude that is linked to the remissive aspects of the new testament and has developed in Western culture most strongly since the nineteenth century. Humanistic as this is, in an attempt to institutionally separate the person from the crime, the feelings of institutional members toward the crime are institutionally repressed and re-emerge in generalised experience. But there is little emotional support for staff exposed to such experience. Such support is far beyond any training in new skills, and there is precious little of that anyway. The system acts as if such feelings do not exist. Officially they are absent feelings. Without ways for staff to explore such dynamics, even the staff with new attitudes towards prisoners must respond to their unconscious as well as their conscious hostilities with mimetically escalating violence (Girard, 1977). This could result in anger, depression or an attack on the task - all of which are in evidence despite enormous good will. The prison system, on the one hand, when organised along para-military lines, is a fight flight organisation in search of an enemy. Because it is not the military, there are no legitimate enemies, only scapegoats. On the other hand, when organised along therapeutic rehabilitative lines, the prison becomes a dependency organisation. Only the staff aren’t gods and must deal with their own personalised responses to the task. When seduced into being ‘little gods’ they are even more vulnerable to the role of unconsciously taking on the retributive and remissive aspects symbolically linked to the task. It seems imperative to me that people in the system have support in understanding those experiences that arise within them in response to their engagement of task. Treating the crims as individuals (old task absence; new task presence) brings with it the anxiety that established differences might become dissolved. Having crossed the boundary into illegal activities, and having been convicted, a prisoner forfeits his rights to evade or deflect every sort of enquiry into his behaviour. Hence, sometimes even the most ordinary of behaviours becomes the hallmark of his status as an offender. For example, the desire to present himself in the best light to authorities who have the power to decide his fate is seen as deceptive and scheming - ‘he does offense related programs just to get early parole rather than to improve himself’ - whereas with officers such behaviour might be seen as quite ordinary; say, doing a management program in the hope of gaining promotion. Whereas with the former the motives of the prisoner are questionable, with the latter, the efficiency of the educational program might be questioned should training outcomes not be achieved. In reality, both prisoner and officer may each be prompted by both the need to impress and the desire to gain personal skills. That the prisoners motives are more in doubt relates to his status as offender, and the need of the system to mark out his difference. This should not be romaticised. There is a real difference between officer and prisoner. One has broken the law. However, it is this difference that should inform the task, not a manufactured difference about human nature and motivations pertaining to stereotypes. Only when the people within the system are able to engage the task through an examination of what is present and what is absent in it, can they bring focus to those role differences that are essential. Ending How task is negotiated and engaged from the experience of each role provides a key to understanding the organisation. This negotiation and engagement may be healthy and creative. One may discover a thinking or transitional process. It may also be dysfunctional and destructive of work and those who do it, particularly when the persecutory aspects of the absent task, the task that might have been, the lost or repressed task become overwhelming because they cannot be addressed. An example of these alternatives might be found in what many see as the problem of communication in modern organisations. I find that many senior managers believe that if they are clear in their communications, and if they use multiple channels of communication - memos, meetings, e-mails, newsletters - then there should be no problems. They are frustrated and amazed when they still are faced with what they see as communication breakdown. They feel persecuted by the absense of communication which they experience as an absent object. The model they have in their minds is one of a pre-conceived message or information that simply has to be passed on (an information technology construction). But communication involves not simply the crossing of a boundary, but also its renegotiation. Another model of communication considers that through engagement, different subjects and different organisational roles, will generate new information. The information, in this model, is not pre-conceived but latent. It emerges as the roles engage across the boundaries that are collectively imagined between them. One has to be available to be surprised, even when one is the major messenger. This model requires a form of communication that tolerates the absense of a message in order for something else to emerge. How does all this help those who are caught in that creative elaboration of the task which might be at the basis of healthy organisational change? How can what I have said help the prison officer I spoke of at the beginning of this paper? As subjects taking up organisational roles, we are predicated upon what we do. As with a good psycho-analysis, a close look into the detail of our actions, thoughts and feelings in engaging the task, helps us to emerge value, meaning and worth. Having done this work on the task, the officer in charge might well decide to request a transfer away from the sex offender unit and his manager might see wisdom in this. Alternately, the officer might discover what might creatively be in the new task and move toward preparing himself to engage it. What might be possible emerges from a closer understanding of what is, coupled with a healthy respect for what is absent. Having done work on better understanding the task, organisations are better placed to know where their current worth will lead them in the future. Importantly, part of this work is exploring what might have been ; ie.,examining those expectations in the past of a future that never occurred, and dealing with the loss that this incurs in the here and now. Too often the anxieties, persecutions and losses surrounding what might have been go unexplored and people who internalise what might have been as part of their institution-in-experience are classed as resistors to change and villified by management. This returns us to the notion of absence because, it seems to me, understanding the task lies in the shift between its absent and present aspects, just as perception lies in the shift between stimulus configurations rather than in the stimulus per se. As I have argued, an absence may shift to being present in persecutory or creatively stimulating ways. Notes 1. Andrew Cooper in Psychoanalysis and the politics of organisational theory, Journal of Social Work Practice, Vol.10, No. 2, 1996 pp 137-145 argues that psychoanalytic theories of organisations - basically those from an object relations perspective - tend toward reductionism and often fail to take the social institutional dimension into account. He cites Menzies-Lyth, the early work of Eliot Jaques and Zagier Roberts as examples. Although the passages that he quotes seem, at face value to support his contention, I don’t think he has looked closely enough at the implications of the work of Bion or Lacan, the former who certainly gave the impetus to the work of those he does cite. Both Bion and Lacan address the social level of discourse in their theories: Bion through the idea of the basic assumption group, the operation of the establishment, and the primacy of ‘thoughts’ over thinking; Lacan through his registers of experience with the predominance of the Symbolic. Both theorists are quick to point out the origins of their work in specific Freudian formulations. 2. It might be useful to think of this idea of absence in another way. The quality movement in organisations began with ideas of deviations from product quality, and the establishment of a process whereby deviations could be detected as they occurred and thus adjustments could be made before the final product appeared. We could say that the absence of the object, or the absence of successfully doing (a task), alerts us to think, just as a deviation alerts us to pay attention. Too great an absence creates anxiety and interferes with thinking, just as too great a deviation may not be able to be corrected. 3. Thinking of Freud’s idea of absence, and its development by later analytic theorists leads me to look at the following correspondencies References Armstrong, D. (1995) ‘The Analytic Object in Organizational Work’ Paper delivered at the Symposium of the International Society for the Psycho-analytic study of organisations, London, June, 1995. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis , London, 1974. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis , London, 1974. Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis , London, 1974. Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Hoggett. P. (1992) Partisans in an Uncertain World: The psychoanalysis of engagement Free Association Books, London. Long, S.D. (1992) A Structural Analysis of Small Groups Routledge, N.Y. Long, S & Newton, J. (1997a) ‘Educating the Gut: socio-emotional aspects of the learning organisation’ The Journal of Management Development, Vol 16, No. 4 pp. 284-301. Long, S & Newton, J. (1997b) ‘Deepening the Collaboration: collaborative action research in a government organisation’ Paper delivered at the Symposium of the International Society for the Psycho-analytic study of organisations, Philadelphia, June 1997. Piaget, J.(1972) Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge Penguin University Books, Suffolk. Quine, C. and Hutton, J. (1992) Finding, Making and Taking the Role of Head : A Grubb Institute perspective on mentoring for headteachers The Grubb Institute, London. Rieff, P. (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic Penguin, Harmondsworth. Reed, B. (1976) ‘Organisational Role Analysis’ in C. Cooper (ed.) Developing Social Skills in Managers: advances in group training. MacMillan, London. Sievers, B. (1994) Work, Death and Life Itself: essays on management and organization. De Gruyter, Berlin. Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality
Tavistock Publications, London. |
|||
 |
|||