The Psychosocial and Organization Studies

Affect at Work

Marianna Fotaki, K. Kenny

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137347855
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

Leading authors within organization studies and also from broader social science disciplines present the state of the art in the rapidly developing field of psychosocial approaches to organization studies and critical management studies.

1

Introduction

Kate Kenny and Marianna Fotaki

Our focus on the psychosocial represents a new departure for organization studies. While the discipline has a long history of drawing on related areas including psychoanalysis, a psychosocial perspective further enhances our understanding of organizations, for example, by highlighting how aspects of psychic life and the unconscious can relate to wider social, political and organizational contexts. On this view, the ‘inner world’ of the subject cannot be understood without taking into account how they experience the wider social environment, while these experiences, in turn, are understood to be shaped by the psychic life of the subject (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000: 4). Issues of affect and emotion are seen to occupy a central role in these processes. A psychosocial perspective enables an interesting and valuable perspective on organizations because it considers desiring human beings, in all their contradictions, as embedded in the social structures that define them in important ways (Brown and Stenner, 2009; Frosh, 2010; Frosh and Baraitser, 2008; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Hoggett, 2001). At present this field of research endeavour is still very young although publications such as the Journal of Psycho-Social Studies; Free Associations; Subjectivity; Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society; and particularly Organisational and Social Dynamics, have explored how the psychosocial and organization might intersect. To date, however, there have been few if any edited collections that adopt this perspective.

In The Psychosocial in Organization Studies: Affect at Work, we bring together studies by leading authors from a variety of different workplace settings and theoretical frames. In doing so, the text represents a conversation between different theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches to this topic. We hope that this conversation will continue, and we look forward to future developments in the emerging field of psychosocial approaches in management and organization studies.

Studying organizations from a psychosocial perspective

Psychosocial perspectives draw on the notion of a dynamic unconscious from psychoanalysis, combining this insight with considerations of broader social and political contexts offered by diverse fields including sociology, political studies, anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, feminism, postcolonial studies and queer theory. Psychosocial approaches are among the more sophisticated means available for theorizing subjectivity and identity today (Frosh, 2010), and they are currently being developed in the fields of critical psychology (Hollway, 2011; Parker, 2010), sociology and critical social theory (Froggett and Hollway, 2010; Lapping, 2007; Roseneil and Frosh, 2012), criminology (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007), and psychosocial approaches to welfare (Froggett, 2002; Hoggett, 2000, 2009; Hunter, 2010, 2012; Taylor, 2011). Psychosocial studies encompass divergent perspectives, with some scholars emphasizing a discursive approach (Wetherell, 2008), while others prefer to draw on relational ideas (Frosh, 2010; Glynos, 2010; Walkerdine, 2008). However, certain central tenets are shared; authors are generally concerned with questions of how subjectivity engages with broader social and political forces and how psychic processes contribute to their reproduction and alteration. In addition, psychosocial authors go beyond fields such as psychoanalysis and psychology, by considering how and where concepts from these disciplines can be used in the observation of social settings and where they should not (Frosh, 2010; Parker, 2005). A focus on wider social and political discourses also means that psychosocial approaches avoid the individualizing, subject-centred perspective for which other disciplines are often criticized (Frosh, 2010).

Psychosocial perspectives propose interesting provocations and opportunities for organization studies (Ford, 2010; Glynos, 2010), particularly in relation to theorizing identification, emotion, desire and agency. While it is a diverse field encompassing discursive psychology, Deleuzian philosophy, and phenomenology (Frosh, 2010: 217), the development of psychosocial studies has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. The use of psychoanalytic theory to explore group dynamics and behavioural norms in organizations has a long tradition of rich and diverse contributions (Fotaki, Long and Schwartz, 2012). Melanie Klein’s object relations theory – linking the adult’s ability to achieve integration or to adopt a dysfunctional inner concept of self to early life experiences (Klein, 1952, 1959) –spawned imaginative adaptations to organizational analysis and consulting in the 1950s and 1960s (Bion, 1961; Jacques, 1951; Menzies, 1960), not least through the work of the Tavistock clinic. This work was later extended to explore the hidden dynamics and dysfunctional aspects of leadership by authors such as Abraham Zaleznik (1977, 1989), Manfred Kets de Vries and Danny Miller (1984); Manfred Kets de Vries (1993, 1996), and later Yiannis Gabriel (1999), Mark Stein (2007a) and Michael Maccoby (2003, 2007a, 2007b). Other psychoanalytic contributions to management have dealt with issues such as motivation at work (Sievers, 1986); the use of anti-social behaviour in the protection of organizations (Schwartz, 1987, 1993); defensive configurations (Hirschhorn, 1988, 1997; Krantz and Gilmore, 1990); organizational perversion and greed (Long, 2008; Stein, 2000, 2007b); and the tyranny of consumerism (Long, 1999). In recent years, there has been a burgeoning interest in, and an enthusiastic uptake of, Jacques Lacan’s ideas by organization management scholars (Organization, 2010; Organization Studies, 2012). In contrast to previous approaches, such works position issues of power and the social embeddedness of the subject at the centre of inquiry (Harding, 2007). Linking psychoanalysis to discourses of power and social issues in this way overcomes the often-apolitical nature of psychoanalytical-inspired interventions.

Although psychosocial approaches are at present lesser known within organization studies, a number of works can broadly be considered to adopt this perspective in order to investigate a variety of issues including organizational identity and change (Driver, 2009a, 2009b), public policy failure (Fotaki, 2010a), sexualized abjection and gender (Fotaki and Harding, 2013; Phillips and Rippin, 2010), the neverending desire for surplus profit (Cremin, 2010), attachments to organizations (Kenny, 2010, 2012) and the incubation of the financial crisis of 2008 (Long and Sievers 2012; Stein, 2011). These studies employ diverse psychosocial perspectives. Moreover, the approach has recently been applied to central topics within international management; for example, sexuality in academia (Fotaki, 2010b), the usefulness of disappointment in organizations (Clancy, Vince and Gabriel, 2011) and the role of emotions in learning (Gilmore and Anderson, 2011; Voronov and Vince, 2012).

The psychosocial and affect

In this book, we specifically focus on the concept of affect. In this, we note the influence of the so-called ‘affective turn’. within social and political theory of late (Grossberg, 2010; Lapping, 2010; Massumi, 2002), on the field of psychosocial studies. The concept of affect has, however, been used in a number of ways within psychosocial studies. What scholars share is the view that affect can help us to understand the ways in which subjects relate to influential norms and discourses, along with the idea that affect is something that exists between bodies, neither individual nor social. In this way, affect radically problematizes the traditional inside-out dichotomy in relation to the subject (Ahmed, 2010; Brennan, 2004). Even given these shared perspectives, precise interpretations and understandings of affect tend to vary.

For more ‘relationally’ oriented scholars, positioning within discourse takes place through processes of identification. As an example, the Lacanian insight that desire for recognition within the symbolic fuels an ongoing quest for new and more promising affective identifications has been influential (Butler, 1997; Hook, 2007). Under this view, although we may not be aware of our compulsion to do so, we tend to psychically ‘invest’ in particular symbolic elements (Parker, 2005: 106; Stavrakakis, 2010), and these investments operate through affective processes. As Butler notes, we hold ‘passionate attachments’ to particular forms of power, and scholars interested in exploring this in more depth may focus on displays of passion (Butler, 1997, 2004; see also Benjamin, 1988; 1998; Hook, 2007), while Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras (2006: 148) discuss how affect provides a ‘force’ that fuels the ‘form’ of peoples’ attachments to national identities. This perspective on affect informs a number of the contributions to this book. Somewhat contrasting with this approach, a second strand turns to a less psychically grounded perspective on affect (Blackman, 2008; Clough, 2006). Viewing the above ‘relational’ approach as too focused on the internal workings of the subject and its emotional displays, this latter strand sees affect as something of a visceral force, or a vector, that operates between bodies (Frank and Sedgwick, 2006). These differing approaches to affect notwithstanding, for some authors, it is not necessary to ‘choose sides’ and commit to a specific definition of the concept (Berlant, 2011; Probyn, 2010). Under this view, affects can be discerned from patterns emerging in the observation of social life. Here, the focus is on what affects appear to do, and what they can tell us about the ways in which our bodies come to be disturbed. The concern here is with the style of presentation – the nuanced ways in which affects occurring at the present moment, in specific situations, can be brought to the fore.

By engaging with these ideas on the psychosocial and affect, our book offers a space for conversations within and between management and organization studies, psychosocial studies and related disciplines. It enables cross-fertilization between different theories and traditions drawn upon by scholars working in this area, both within and outside management and organization studies. Its aim is, therefore, both to provide an introduction to the field for those new to this area and also to offer a more detailed ‘research companion’ for those already familiar with this area.

Introducing the chapters

The collection of work presented here adds to existing scholarship on the psychosocial and organization studies in a number of ways. In the various chapters, authors weave core psychoanalytical and psychosocial concepts with central debates in the field of management and organizations, highlighting issues of affect, emotions and power. Psychosocial understandings help to illuminate diverse organizational settings including medical hospitals (Harding and Lee) and penal institutions (Sievers), along with enhancing theoretical understandings of topics such as workplace resistance (Dashtipour), organizational ethnographic methodologies (Kenny and Gilmore), and organizational creativity (Komporozos-Athanasiou and Fotaki). In many of the contributions included here, developments from neighbouring social science fields are brought to bear on organization studies and critical management studies, specifically. These include feminism and queer theory (Harding and Lee), ‘socioanalysis’ (Sievers), narrative studies (Gabriel) and critical social theory (Stavrakakis).

As noted above, this book takes an explicit focus on the concept of affect, and each chapter highlights the role of affect in organizational and intersubjective interactions. Importantly, however, each does so in a different way. There is no single and overarching interpretation of the concept, for reasons given above. For Glynos et al., for example, a study of fantasy and mourning can help us to understand the affective dimension of organizational life, particularly the delivery of services to older people that forms the focus of their chapter. These authors draw on Lacan, finding the centrality of affect via his notion of jouissance (enjoyment) in his work, to be helpful for understanding the rooting of identification in wider discursive networks. In a similar vein, Dashtipour takes a Lacanian perspective to show how work itself is an affective phenomenon, bound up in experiences of suffering. Diverging from these viewpoints, Gabriel integrates ideas from Freud to emphasize the importance of affect in understanding the role of stories and storytelling in contemporary organizations. Adopting yet another interpretation of affect, Kenny and Gilmore highlight its centrality to their proposed new method of approaching organizational ethnographies. The affects they discuss are ak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: Ian Parker on the psychosocial, psychoanalysis and critical psychology, in conversation with Marianna Fotaki
• 1 Introduction
• Section I The Psychosocial in Organizations: Theoretical Ideas
• Section II Researching the Psychosocial in Organizations: Methodological Issues
• Section III The Application of Psychosocial Approaches to Understanding Organizations
• Index