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| Lisl Klein Bayswater Institute London |
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Introduction After a good many years of moving somewhat pragmatically between social scientific and psychoanalytic understanding in working with organisations, I am grateful to ISPSO for providing a framework in which one may explore these connections without the urgency and pressure that are always present when one is in the field. The first time I attended your conference I found that, free from the pressures of giving a paper, or of having to organise anything, it was a marvellous opportunity to let the mind wander over matters that have kept me interested and intrigued for many years, but that I have often not taken the time to really unpick in detail. That is the origin of this paper. At the same time, I will need to remain grounded in empirical work, not only because I think it is important to do so, but mainly because I am not capable of doing anything else. It is probably tautological to say that the psychoanalytic
study of organisations brings together two frames of reference: psychoanalysis
and the study of organisations. And yet it very much needs to be said,
because a good deal of material one sees under this heading appears
to assume that there is only one framework. In this paper I want to
differentiate between the two, explore some of the links between them
and at the same time also note in what ways they differ. Some relevant concepts and their use So what are some of the psychodynamic concepts which I have found useful in working with organisations, and how may they be used? I was not joking three years ago when I said that really internalising a concept and turning it into use is a slow process, and that I can handle about one per year. It is the same with research results in the social sciences. You cannot take a finding developed in situation A and slap it onto situation B. If you internalise the principle of the finding - for instance that control systems have predictable behavioural consequences -what comes out in situation B and may be immensely useful may superficially look quite different from what happened in situation A. Above all, it is unlikely to involve the use of formulae. Beware of formulaic phrases, they have not gone through the long and often difficult process of internalising and turning into use. Splitting The first psychoanalytic concept that preoccupied me in this conscious and explicit way in the mid-eighties was splitting. Splitting, as you know, is a process of psychic economy whereby we simplify a complex situation for ourselves by attributing all its 'x' characteristics to one of a pair, and all its 'y' characteristics to the other. The goodies are all-good and wear white hats, and the baddies are all-bad and wear black hats. A stunning and, with hindsight, stunningly obvious revelation to which this concept leads is that it explains the sociotechnical problem; by this I mean the unsolved problem of getting sociotechnical work institutionalised: Clearly, all work systems have technical, human and social aspects and these are interdependent. It has simply been easier, more psychically economic, to perceive them in separate configurations. Not only do technologists have difficulty in including the social element in their professional thinking, social scientists have difficulty in including the technical element in theirs: very few social scientists have been willing actually to engage with technology and its design and development instead of generalising or philosophising about it from a separate - or split - position. For, secondly and perhaps even more importantly, the splitting has become deeply institutionalised. It pervades the education system, research, the funding of research, career structures, professional institutions, the literature. Engineers read what engineers have written, social scientists read what social scientists have written. When a social scientist publishes a paper in an engineering journal, it reaches neither database. This analysis is elaborated in a paper on the Collaboration between Social Scientists and Engineers (Klein, 1989). And, of course, this interdependence between technical
and social aspects applies not only at the output end of design processes,
that is for the consequences of design, to which professionals working
with sociotechnical ideas have given most attention. It also applies
at the input end, i.e. among design teams and the organisations which
employ them. In 1986 an opportunity to further such integration presented itself. I was invited to give evidence to a Committee of the European Parliament, and included in this evidence a suggestion which should go some way towards dealing with the splitting: it was that technologists applying for development grants should be required, as part of their grant applications, to say what effects they expected their project to have on a number of human and organisational categories. Not that one would expect such predictions to be accurate, but technologists would be forced to give thought to these matters and that, in turn, might feed back into the education system where the splitting had its roots. Some of the MEPs liked this idea. They modified the categories to include some others which they considered important, and in November 1986 the Parliament passed a resolution stating that:
I really thought that something important had been
achieved! I was particularly pleased at having demonstrated, or so I
thought, that all this was not mere empire-building on the part of the
social sciences. For in such a framework an explicit contribution from
the social sciences would become redundant. Transference This one took years. Some of you may have read elsewhere about how I finally got some glimmer of it (Klein and Eason, 1991). My own analysis, I have to say, did not teach me much about it. I knew theoretically that it was about transferring feelings developed in relation to one object onto another, in particular onto the analyst; but I had not seen the relevance or usefulness of this in relation to working with organisations. Then, one day, I was talking through a report on a project with Harold Bridger. It was a difficult project, in which I seemed to have become something of a tennis ball being batted between very tough and intransigent management and trade union parties. Harold said: "Read this through again and ask yourself, what are they doing to you that they can't do to each other?" Aha, I thought, it's not only people transferring feelings onto you, it's actually doing something to you. This was news. Not long after this, I was involved in a 'seeding contract', an arrangement with the U.K.'s National Economic Development Office under which firms in a particular industrial sector wanting to explore questions of job satisfaction and job design could have four days of a consultant's time funded. If this led to further work, they would have to take on the further costs themselves. In one such firm, an initial meeting was held with a group consisting of the managing director, staff from the production engineering and personnel functions, line management, supervisors and two shop stewards. My presentation about job design was received courteously enough, but without enthusiasm. Then the managing director said: "You know, what I would really like to have an outsider do is find out why we were late on the market with [a particular product]. What is it about our organisation that made us miss the Christmas market last season?" I believe strongly that it is important to start from 'where the clients are' and agreed to look at this problem, provided that the NEDO-funded study could be carried out as well, and a programme was formulated. I would spend a week interviewing people who had been involved in the development of 'Product X', the material would be analysed during the weekend, and a feedback meeting would be held on the following Monday morning. A feedback meeting on the job design work would then be held on the Monday afternoon. Interviews were held with about fifteen people involved in the marketing, design, technical development, production engineering and manufacture of Product X, and two group discussions were held with operators assembling it. This yielded a lot of material, and the weekend which was spent trying to organise and understand the material and preparing to report on it was filled with a growing sense of pressure and anxiety. Eventually, I managed to step back from the by now really panicky situation, and ask myself some questions: "What are they doing to you, that you are spending Sunday, your so-called free time, trying to deal with this impossible task? Knowing that you have taken on more than can possibly be handled in the time? Eating margarine sandwiches because you haven't allowed time to buy and cook food? Knowing that the report is likely to be poor in quality because there just isn't time to do it properly? Nobody forced you to schedule it this way." And the answer came - "They have turned you into a mini-version of themselves! This is what they do. This is what happened to Product X, and it is already beginning to happen to next year's product. You have absorbed and internalised the culture to such an extent that you are not analysing what happened to Product X, you are living it!" It was this experience and understanding that formed the basis of the report back to the company the next day, margarine sandwiches and all. It formed the framework around which the organisation of Product X was then discussed. The meeting was completely successful and established a credibility which also carried over onto the job design activity. Countertransference This was a topic to which I had not so far paid much attention. Then, at the same ISPSO conference that I have mentioned, there was a paper about it that set my mind exploring. Not long after that paper, someone made a discussion contribution about OD, on the lines of what about our values in all this, what about our commitment to changing and democratising organisations? And lightning struck, as it must have struck Archimedes, when he jumped out of the tub, shouting "Eureka!". I need to explain that, ever since I first heard about OD, I have been very uncomfortable about it. I joined Esso Petroleum Co. in the U.K. in 1965 as Social Sciences Adviser because a feeling was spreading in industry at that time, after a very fruitful period of industrial sociological and psychological research, that the social sciences had something to contribute. The types of contribution were potentially many and varied, and it was this that I joined the company to explore (Klein, 1976). I had never heard of OD. I thought the task of a social scientist in an organisation was to use whatever concepts and methods he or she had available to try and understand what was happening, and to work with the organisation on the issues that were encountered. It is a fundamentally different frame of reference from starting out with a clear view of how they ought to behave and working to change them in that direction. When I later discovered the existence of OD, I thought it very strange for some consultant or group of consultants to call themselves 'change agents' when, firstly, every single member of an organisation contributes to its development and/or change, and secondly, change is not necessarily what is most needed at any particular time. If change is needed, there needs to be a good deal of diagnosis and collaborative work before you can be confident about what kind of change and in what direction. This uneasy relationship with much of what goes on under the heading of OD has continued ever since, and perhaps reached its peak when I heard an OD practitioner talk about his 'hit-list for paradigm change'. Bagged seventeen last Tuesday. And then the lightning struck: OD must be something to do with countertransference. How else can one explain this urge, this drive, this missionary zeal to change other people and their organisations? Even elegant statements about single-loop and double-loop learning are often simply statements about turning bad guys into good guys. And we have all come across instances of programmes of 'democratic management' or 'participative job design' being introduced in ways which are themselves highly authoritarian and in contradiction to the values being espoused. How else can this be explained except as an urgent effort to effect 'out there' what cannot be managed 'in here'? I rather expect the sky to fall in at this stage, but it is good to understand the reason for my own unease at last. Of course, I don't get it about everything that happens under the heading of OD - but somehow you can smell the difference. Projective identification 1993 was a good year, because I think I got a glimmer of a second concept. During the summer, not long after your conference, I was hospitalised for a time. Through a string of circumstances with which I won't bore you, I landed in the private sector of the health care system in Britain, though I am a passionate supporter of the public National Health Service. I felt very guilty and uncomfortable about this. Outside my room in the hospital was a small enclave where the cleaning staff met every morning for an intense period of talk before moving off to work. One could hear clearly from the tone of the discussion that they were angry, but not what they were angry about. I was convinced that their anger and resentment were directed at privileged patients who bypassed the NHS in general, and me, the new one, in particular. What business was it of theirs, I wondered, angry in turn, and what did they know of the circumstances? It was several days before some remnant of sanity persuaded me that they were probably not all that interested in me anyway. It turned out that, like everyone else in the world, they were angry about their work schedules. I think this was projective identification. Transitional dynamics In this case, practice preceded theory. When I learned about the use made of Winnicott's ideas about transitional objects and their relevance in everyday life (Winnicott, 1971), I felt a bit like the character in Molière who discovered that he had been talking prose all his life. I believe that many, if not most, social science practitioners are talking this kind of prose already. Ken Eason and I made a collection of case studies in applied social science (op. cit.). What most of the professionals in these cases were doing, whatever discipline they came from, was devising or helping to devise transitional systems of one kind or another. These might be simulations, pilot exercises, workshops, learning events, negotiating procedures, or whatever. The value of the concept itself in this case lies in checking out whether the method that is being developed has the requisite characteristics that will in fact enable it to facilitate transition. Clients, too, devise transitional systems. We have been working with a hospital engaged in implementing an integrated computerised information system. They hit on the idea of inventing a fictitious patient, to whom all kinds of terrible things happen, in order to see the implications for different departments and their information needs. When poor old Henry falls out of bed and breaks a leg, what are the consequences for the pharmacy, for pathology, for bed occupancy planning, etc.? Three times so far they have convened meetings of representatives from all departments in order to talk through a scenario of poor old Henry's misfortunes, relating it to some current policy initiative. Most recently, they used him to see what implications his misadventures would have for their contracts with users, since we now have a complex system of purchaser/supplier contracting in the National Health Service. Question: Is there value in solemnly announcing to the client that Henry is a transitional object? This brings me to consider the other side of the coin.
The role of evidence First, the study of organisations is just that: study. This implies a value about taking evidence seriously. Intuitions are valuable, but they need to be checked out. The most fruitful intuitions are those which help to make sense of data which is or can be made accessible to the organisation. It may be a new and different kind of sense, and the consultant's frame of reference which produces this new kind of sense is the contribution which he or she brings. It may be the result of rearranging data in an unexpected way. But wild interpretations, which cannot be related to evidence and whose function is merely to startle, seem to me an inappropriate exploitation of transference. Individuals and collectives Second, there is a need to look carefully at the differences between individuals and collectives. I would like to explore this in terms of three examples or situations: a) Individuals learn, and we know something about the mechanisms by which they do it. Collectives as such do not learn, however seductive the metaphor is. It is just too anthropomorphic. (Once again the sky will probably fall in.) Organisations appear to be learning as entities if individuals within them stay, and in that case we can say something about how such learning may be helped or hindered. But where individuals leave, the learning of those individuals is lost to the organisation. If the learning is is institutionalised in some procedure or rule, the value to the organisation may be preserved, but new individuals will have less opportunity to learn. It is a continuing dilemma, and represents one of the big differences between the social and the natural sciences: in the natural sciences, learning becomes institutionalised in accepted knowledge and in artefacts. In the social sciences, there are no artefacts and, partly because of this, bodies of 'knowledge' are vulnerable to the desire of every new generation to explore. Or, as the late Sir Charles Goodeve so neatly put it, "The natural sciences have developed by people standing on each other's shoulders. In the social sciences they stand on each other's faces." b) The second example concerns transference, how it is generated and how it is used. The transference that develops during an individual analysis can be used as data because the analyst is not supplying any other kind of data about himself. Therefore, feelings and attitudes which the patient develops must arise from within the patient. This was the model with which Elliot Jaques entered the Glacier Metal Company (Jaques, 1951). It implies social distance of the kind which is maintained in a personal analysis. When I entered Esso, it was with the conviction that the necessary social distance cannot be maintained in a full-time job for eight hours a day. That was one reason why there needed to be found some other, more 'ordinary' way of relating to the clients. A second reason for seeking a more ordinary mode of operation was that the use of social science could not otherwise become widespread. There is therefore a strict limit to what you can do with transference phenomena. Mainly, if you spot anything of that kind, you can use it to inform your own learning and behaviour. It may also, as in the example given earlier, generate some hypotheses about the organisation's culture. However, what I did not realise at that time, and still find hard to come to terms with, is the problem of maintaining a position of ordinariness or non-mystification, in cultures that get a frisson from mystique and find a prima donna performance more exciting than institutionalised good practice. The issue is one of professional authority. I am not above envying the impact made by people who announce with confidence "this is how it is". All I am able to say is "this is how I have arrived at thinking it is like this". I don't apologise for this, but dynamically it carries less authority and is less likely to go down in history. But to me it seems more real, and in the end reality is what matters. There is a subset of this issue around the problem of language: as professionals we may fall into the lose/lose situation of being accused either of talking jargon or of only talking common sense. Hugh Murray and I once ran a course on sociotechnical design for a company. In my introductory talk I spoke of the need for design strategies that leave options open, and all round the table heads nodded in agreement. Later, Hugh gave a talk which included a reference to minimum critical specification. In the coffee break, people complained about the use of jargon and being blinded with science. But they remembered 'minimum critical specification', while 'leaving options open' was simply too easy to agree with and forget. c) The third example where care is needed in distinguishing between an individual and a collective is in the interpretation of phenomena. Let us take as an instance the well-known interpretation of social systems as a defence against anxiety. For an individual, defences against anxiety are motivated but unconscious mechanisms. Is that what they are when we appear to observe them in social institutions? There is an alternative way of looking at it. Ever since the sociologist Robert Merton differentiated between manifest and latent functions, social scientists have found this a most useful distinction to make (Merton, 1949). For once, a sociological concept was as immediately and directly useful to practitioners as it was to theorists. It is easy to explain to clients the latent as well as the manifest functions of some institutional arrangement; but that does not necessarily imply purpose. If some social arrangements have the effect of
limiting anxiety for the members of an institution, does that mean that
they have been put in place as an unconscious defence, that is in some
unconscious, purposive way? Or is the limiting of anxiety their latent
function, that is, have they survived because by chance they turned
out to have valuable functions apart from the manifest ones for which
they were set up? In that case we would need to take a Darwinian rather
than a Freudian view - the survival of the most useful. It seems to
me that the only way to decide which view to take in any particular
case is to look in detail at its history and circumstances. In discussing
this with an eminent and very dear colleague, the example that came
to her mind was that a latent function of the British monarchy is to
increase Kodak sales. I suppose one might track some unconscious purposive
chain, but it would be difficult. Third, there is the relevance of context. I understand that some psychoanalysts now pay more attention to contextual factors in the patient's life than used to be the case. Whatever the technical issues involved in that, when it comes to working with organisations, contextual aspects cannot be omitted. At the very least, the model you have in your head when working with an individual or a group in an organisation needs to include something of the other individuals and departments, the products, the technologies, the markets, the geography, the legal framework, the history. More likely, the work itself needs to encompass these aspects. Otherwise you are not working with the organisation, but with an individual or a group which happen to be in an organisation. We are here back to the distinction between an individual and a collective - a collective simply does not have an inner life that is unconnected with tasks and circumstances. Conclusions This paper has been somewhat personal, and this is congruent with what I have said about professional authority. It is unavoidable. Ideas and concepts do not come out of thin air, they come from the interplay of field experience and data on the one hand, the minds of the people working with those data, and the institutional arrangements around that. It therefore becomes necessary to give some context to the history of ideas and concepts, i.e. how they arose. This also gives the reader or listener greater freedom to accept or reject. The question arises whether these attempts to differentiate are worthwhile, and whether the differences matter anyway. But if we want to take further the use of psychoanalytic concepts and the part they can play in organisational design, development and consultancy, then yes, it does matter to be precise. As I indicated at the beginning, and have come to believe more strongly in the course of developing the paper, this field will not make any real progress until we acknowledge that it contains two frames of reference, not one. |
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Klein, L. A Social Scientist in Industry. London: Gower Press 1976. Klein, L. On the Collaboration between Social Scientists and Engineers. In Designing Human-Centred Technology: A Cross-Disciplinary Project in Computer-Aided Manufacturing. H. H. Rosenbrock (ed.) London, Springer-Verlag, 1989. Klein, L. and K. Eason. Putting Social Science to Work; the Ground between Theory and Use wxplored through Case Studies in Organisations. Cambridge, The University Press, 1991. Jaques, E. The Changing Culture of a Factory. London, Tavistock Publications, 1951. Merton, R.K. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1949. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London, Tavistock Publications, 1971.
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