by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD I am writing this blog to clarify the implications of the distinction between the small-s symbolic and the big-S Symbolic which is present in a number of previous blogs: Difficulties…
Category: discourse
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD Yiannis Gabriel has written a paper on psychoanalysis and organisation studies.[1] He usefully distinguishes two epochs: A first epoch, defined by the practice of clinicians ‘psychoanalysing organisations’ through the metaphor…
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD The plus-one process starts with the narrating of an originating situation[1], taken by the speaker to present some kind of challenge. The process generates three metaphors that point towards…
There has been a thread running on the ISPSO listserve, triggered originally by the recent tragic events at Charlie in Paris. I have found this ISPSO thread impossible to read as a dialogue, now with…
The theory of the enterprise developed based on a largely static and ‘closed’ ontology. This meant that the top management of such an enterprise was assumed to be committed to a form of mental model…
Bion uses the notion of a “matrix of thought which lies within the confines of the basic group, but not within the confines of the individual.”[1],p79 It is this matrix of thought with which the…
The previous blog examined how the process of symbol formation could be read using a 4-term relation between subject, ego, object-signifier and signified-object. In this translation, the ego was a particular organisation of object-relating. It…
Consider the timespan of discretion within which a person takes up a role. The discretion can be expressed in terms of a span of complexity – the complexity being the scope of the circular linkages…
David Armstrong, in his 2012 Eric Miller Annual Memorial Lecture entitled ‘Terms of Engagement: Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Tavistock Enterprise’, spoke about what seemed to him most disturbing and challenging within the wider social…
Lacan describes how the discourse of Capitalism is formulated in relation to the discourse of the Master in Lacan-in-Italy, Milan. it involves inverting its relation between agency and truth as follows: This same inversion can…