The Surface of Organizational Boundaries: A View from Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory

Abstract

Organizational life contains many influences. Among these are its many divisions, sections, departments, professions and groups. The presence of these constituent parts of an organization directs attention to the points at which they connect to each other. Contemporary discussion of the relationship of these parts is confined to exploring organizational boundaries that contain a conceptual concreteness that belies their ultimate experiential significance. We suggest that the notion of boundary may be extended to explore their sensate surfaces that contain primitive, pre-verbal, pre-symbolic, and pre-subjective characteristics. Human beings experience the world as surface-to-surface contact where tactile sensation reveals hardness or softness, warmth or cold, pattern and shape, and most of all a sense at the point of surface-to-surface contact of containment. We suggest that it is within the autistic-contiguous mode of experience that the sensation of organizational boundaries is located and with it the ultimate psychological meaning of organizational structure. K E Y W O R D S autistic-contiguous organizational boundaries paranoid-schizoid silos surfacesIn our studies of the workplace we discover that people's experiences in organizations have a rhythm, a shape and a feel. As members and consultants move from one organizational culture to another, and from one subsystem culture to another they come into contact with different organizational 3 1 Human Relations

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