Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

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Human Relations

DOI: 10.1177/00187267060627312006; 59; 175Human Relations

Paul HoggettConflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

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Conflict, ambivalence, and the contestedpurpose of public organizations

Paul Hoggett

A B S TRA C T This article argues that public organizations are inherently more

complex than private ones. Their complexity derives from two

sources. The public sphere is the site for the continuous contesta-

tion of public purposes and this means that questions regarding

values and policies saturate all public organizations, particularly at the

point of delivery. Second, because government partly acts as the

receptacle for the alienated subjectivity of citizens, public organiz-

ations have to contain much of what is disowned by the society in

which they are situated. It follows that the fate of the public official,

sometimes referred to as the ‘street-level bureaucrat’, is to have to

contain the unresolved (and often partially suppressed) value

conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Such a perspective has

implications for all of those who, in their different roles, seek to bring

about change or development in public organizations. Psychoanalytic

approaches to organizational consultation have not adequately

understood the contested nature of public organizations and some

key aspects of this approach, such as the concept of the organiz-

ation’s primary task, need to be reconsidered.

KE YW ORD S ambivalence primary task social anxieties value pluralism

Introduction

The question whether education, health, transport, energy and other utilities

and services are best delivered by the public or the private sector is a debate

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DOI: 10.1177/0018726706062731

Volume 59(2): 175–194

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which has raged for over two decades now. Much of this debate has necess-

arily been couched in terms of quality and efficiency but this has tended to

obscure the dual character of the public sector, not just as a means of delivery

but also as an element of societal self-governance. This article focuses upon

the nature of the work of public service professionals and the organizations

to which they belong. I will argue that it is the dual character of public

organizations, including all those not-for-profit and quasi-autonomous

organizations which rely heavily or totally upon public funding, which

provides them with their distinctive and complex nature. In particular, I will

argue that this complexity derives from two sources which are surprisingly

little discussed within the disciplines of public management and adminis-

tration. First, there is the complexity of governance within pluralist societiesin which differences of culture, faith, lifestyle and values proliferate, differ-

ences which place public organizations at the intersection of conflicting needs

and alternative definitions of the common good. Second, in addition to these

reality based conflicts, it is the task of government to have to deal with the

projections of its citizens. This means that public organizations are also

engaged in the management of social anxieties and other collective senti-

ments which are partly conscious and partly unconscious. These anxieties

ultimately express concerns about the survival of oneself, one’s family or

one’s group. Understanding these two sources of complexity enables us tograsp the different nature of the challenges facing managers, professionals,

consultants and change agents working in the public sector as opposed to

the private sector.

The value of bureaucracy

It has become fashionable to think of bureaucracy as an outmoded, inflex-ible, inefficient and unresponsive form of organization rather than the

unique and necessary form that public organizations must assume given

their complexity. Consequently the neoliberal critique of bureaucracy which

has been responsible for waves of privatization and marketization in

Western Europe, and the enfeebling of government capabilities in many

developing and former Soviet bloc societies, has thrown the baby out with

the bathwater. The original Weberian meaning of bureaucracy, as a particu-

lar (and therefore unique) kind of moral institution, has become largely lost

(Du Gay, 2000, 2005). I want to build upon some of Du Gay’s argumentsabout public bureaucracy’s particular purpose – what is it about the re-

quirements for effective government in contemporary society that make

bureaucracy necessary?

Human Relations 59(2)1 7 6




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My focus in this article is the public sphere of government. But this

immediately gets us into definitional problems because even within western

democracies the nature of this sphere differs. Moreover as the boundaries

between public, private and what is variously referred to as community,

associational or social sectors become increasingly blurred the very notion

of government itself gives way to the more fashionable concept of ‘govern-

ance’. There is no easy way of bringing conceptual clarity to this field – the

public spheres of government in Stockholm and Miami are dramatically

different. Suffice it is to say that my primary focus here is upon the working

lives of those professionals and officials who are employed by organizations

having primarily a public purpose – so this does not include all teachers or

all nurses, not even in Sweden.I wish to argue that such organizations have, among other things, two

unique characteristics. They are the site for the continuous contestation of

such public purposes and a receptacle for containing social anxieties. Such

characteristics, and there are others such as social regulation which are

equally important although not the focus of this article, serve to remind us

that government, and the public sphere which supports it, is as much a site

for the enactment of particular kinds of social relations as it is a site for the

delivery of goods and services. To reduce it only to the latter is to commod-

ify such relationships, to strip them of their moral and ethical meaning andpotential, meaning which is inherent to the very concept of ‘citizen’ but

marginal to the concept of ‘consumer’.

Neoliberalism as a radical market discourse first emerged strongly

within the Thatcher/Reagan era and has spearheaded programmes for the

modernization of government which have involved denationalization,

contracting out and other forms of marketization, the introduction of forms

of internal competition and so on (Hood, 1991; Le Grand & Bartlett, 1993;

Kikert, 1995). Seen from this perspective, public bureaucracy as a particularand necessary form of organization with its own unique purposes, has no

place. Bureaucracies (whether public or private) are seen simply as outmoded

and inefficient ways of organizing things. In contrast I will argue that far

from being a problem, public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitome

of what Weber called substantive rationality (where ethical, aesthetic and

spiritual considerations are not split off from technical ones) rather than

instrumental rationality. As such it is perhaps the one place where questions

of technique (‘what works’) and questions of value stand a chance of being

integrated.In reality there are many kinds of public bureaucracies, some are highly

decentralized and some involve extended forms of citizen participation. What

they have in common is that they are funded primarily out of public revenues

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations 1 7 7




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and governed according to publicly agreed policies. This constitutes their

being as, in Weber’s terms, a particular kind of moral institution in which

principles of impartiality and fairness are paramount. But, as we shall see,

what constitutes impartiality and what constitutes fairness is always and

necessarily publicly contested.

Bureaucracy as contested space

Many aspects of the discourse of management – for instance, such terms as

management by objectives, strategic goals, primary task, organizational

mission – portray a view of ‘the organization’ which is relatively consensual.In contrast, it is proposed here that we consider that public organizations

are intimately concerned with the governance of societies in which value

conflicts are inherent and irresolvable. Take, for example, liberty, equality

and fraternity, the three guiding principles of western democracies since the

storming of the Bastille. As MacIntyre (1985) points out, these values are

incommensurable; for example, before long, as you push for equality you

rub up against liberty (particularly economic freedom). Or take the principle

of universalism, the fair and impartial treatment of all, a key principle of the

Enlightenment as far back as Kant. We realize now that the impartial treat-ment of individuals may happily accompany discrimination towards groups

(Williams, 1989) as when, for example, a ‘universal’ education service, by

excluding some kinds of denominational school, denies Muslim children the

education they need.

The tension between universalism and particularism is inherent and

irresolvable (Thompson & Hoggett, 1996) but, as such, it is just one instance

of the conflictual nature of public purpose. Radical pluralists argue that we

live in an increasingly diverse society and that much of this diversity is incom-mensurable. Chantal Mouffe (1993) insists that ‘politics in a modern democ-

racy must accept division and conflict as unavoidable, and the reconciliation

of rival claims and conflicting interests can only be partial and provisional’

(p. 113).

To return to my argument, the commitment to universalism as

embodied in the ethic of impartiality cannot be sustained given the strength

of particularisms in an increasingly plural society. The problem for the public

official is precisely that s/he must be both a universalist and a particularist

at the same time. For a similar reason there are other value contradictionswhich the public official is required to enact every day. For example, one

which has been articulated in recent years concerns the tension between an

ethic of care and an ethic of justice (Mendus, 2000). On the one hand a





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compassionate concern for the individual and his or her plight, and on the

other a realization that whatever the merits of this particular case the public

official also has a responsibility towards all those potentially equally worthy

cases whose claims, because not immediately and physically present, can only

be brought to mind abstractly.

Conflict, impassioned and ongoing, is a vital dimension of public life.

But, and this is crucial for our thinking about public bureaucracies, it also

follows that the public sphere (which includes the organized apparatus of

government) is the necessary embodiment of such conflictual purposes. And

whilst different political projects emphasize different values, those that they

suppress inevitably return to haunt the political system, typically returning

at the level at which policy is implemented. As Lipsky noted, ‘a typical mech-anism for legislative conflict resolution is to pass on intractable conflicts for

resolution (or continued irresolution) at the administrative level’ (Lipsky,

1980: 41). As a consequence it is often at the level of ‘operations’ that unre-

solved value conflicts are most sharply enacted, public officials and local

representatives finding themselves ‘living out’ rather than ‘acting upon’ the

contradictions of the complex and diverse society in which they live.

Lipsky uses the term ‘street level bureaucrat’ to refer to the army of

public officials – police officers, teachers, nurses, health inspectors, benefit

administrators, magistrates, planning officers, etc. – whose task it is tooperate in this environment. At the heart of their work is the exercise of

judgement and the use of discretion in the application of policies to particu-

lar cases, or the implementation of policies where there are no precedents,

or the operationalization of rule-governed systems in full knowledge that no

system can ever provide guidance for every eventuality. Thus, in contrast to

the ideal of impartiality, in reality ‘there is often considerable disagreement

about what street level bureaucrats should primarily do’ (Lipsky, 1980: 46).

Thus the very concept of impartiality is subject to contestation. In theUnited Kingdom at this very moment there is a heated debate about whether

students from state schools wishing to enter university should be asked to

achieve the same entry grades as students from fee-paying private schools.

In the past the two groups were treated in the same way. Was this impar-

tiality or discrimination? Because, as Lipsky noted, the potential demand for

free public goods is always potentially unlimited, public professionals are

nearly always involved in rationing decisions based upon the publicly agreed

policies of the time. A university admissions tutor may disagree with the

policies s/he must implement but it is part of the ethos of the office that thedecisions that are made should be unaffected by personal ties, inducements

or their own political beliefs. In reality, as we have seen, this is impossible

to do without the exercise of discretion and the use of individual judgement.





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It is no wonder then that Lipsky entitled his formative study ‘Street-level

bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service’.

Government and social anxiety

The idea that institutions such as the health or education service have an

unconscious or implicit purpose has been a tenet of psychoanalytically

informed perspectives on organizational life for over 40 years. Central to this

view is the idea that such institutions, besides performing their ostensible

functions (health care, education, etc.) also deal constantly with fundamental

human anxieties (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). I do not feel that public insti-tutions are unique in being a receptacle for unconscious aspects of citizens’

emotional lives, nor that anxiety is the only affect involved. Recently, for

example, writers have drawn attention to the impact of envy (Stein, 1997)

and hope (Cummins, 2002). However, I do feel that such institutions, and

the apparatus of government as a whole, play a vital role in ‘containing’ some

of the troubling feelings which characterize citizens’ lives and that anxiety

seems to be the most powerful of these. But the concept of ‘social anxiety’

remains largely untheorized and this is a great shame as, for instance, it

means that the systemic and psychoanalytic way of thinking which deploysthis kind of concept has not been adopted by researchers or policy-makers

in the broader field of public or social policy. So, why is anxiety such a

powerful affect? To answer this question we need to consider three different

dimensions of anxiety – ontological, cultural/historical and contingent.

At the ontological level there are good grounds to believe that anxiety

is a fundamental aspect of our being. In their different ways Existentialism

and Psychoanalysis have given anxiety this status, and within psychoanalysis

Kleinian thought gives it a particularly privileged position by linking it to ourfear of our own destructiveness. Here Klein draws a distinction between

psychotic anxiety and depressive anxiety (Klein, 1948, 1952). Psychotic

anxiety refers to the experience of breakdown and disintegration in which the

survival of the psyche is at stake. Whilst Klein’s focus is upon the individual,

such survival anxiety can also be experienced by the group at times of organiz-

ational or social crisis (Lawrence & Armstrong, 1998). Depressive anxiety,

on the other hand, refers to destructive attacks towards those on whom we

depend, at first towards those (typically the mother) who nurture us and who

inevitably frustrate and ‘fail’ us. In this sense it resonates with Freud’s obser-vations on the ambivalent role of guilt in the civilizing process (Freud, 1930).

Jaques (1953) was the first to apply Klein’s work to the study of

organizations. For Jaques anxiety was inherent to group life, a means by





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which group members were unconsciously able to place part of their deep

inner lives outside themselves. In this way Jaques drew attention to the role

that the group (and, by implication, organizations, communities and govern-

ments) played in providing a receptacle for anxieties that individuals were

unable to contain within themselves – a kind of displacement of affect from

the internal to the external world. It will be remembered that Freud once

spoke of the ‘great reservoir of libido’ – it could be useful to think, in a

similar way, of a great reservoir of anxiety that society then gets to work

upon.

Klein also indicates the way in which this primitive and formative

anxiety is first dealt with by the infant so that the danger within becomes a

danger without; in this way a nameless dread becomes a tangible fear. Fearfixes something which otherwise is free-floating, now it can be given a name,

now it has an object (Hoggett, 2000). So Klein develops a picture of the

human condition in which we escape from internal anxieties by projecting

them into external figures. In this way we become alienated from ourselves

and the emerging personality becomes fractured (subject to splitting) and

lacking in integration. This process can be mitigated if the individual acquires

the internal resources to contain the worst of her/his own anxiety. The

strength of the individual’s life force and loving impulses are important here,

as is the existence of what Winnicott called ‘a facilitating environment’(Winnicott, 1965), an environment which includes the institutions of both

the private (i.e. family) and public (i.e. civil society and government) spheres.

As this capacity to tolerate anxiety is built up so the individual is able to

reintegrate into the personality what had been previously alienated (Steiner,

1996). But the process is never complete and the human subject never

becomes unitary or whole, there is always a reservoir of anxiety ready to

latch onto new objects of fear.

The nature of these fears however will be culturally and historicallyrelative. For example, Christopher Lash (1978) and others have made a

persuasive case that western type democracies such as Britain and the USA

are narcissistic cultures which are in flight from dependency and the accep-

tance of human limits. Death, ageing, physical degeneration and incapacity,

madness, helplessness and loneliness confront us as incomprehensible forces

but the difficulty our culture has in facing these ‘facts of life’ is not one that

all societies have faced at all times. Indeed, the social arrangements of any

given society produce their own difficulties as Sennett has recently noted with

regard to fear of failure (Sennett, 1998). Some have argued that anxiety isinherent to the project of modernity itself, a project which ‘frees’ people from

the anchorings of tradition, family and community and thereby forces upon

them ultimate responsibility for the choices they make (Bauman, 1993). This





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links to the idea, first put forward by Raymond Williams, that whole eras or

epochs, such as the period between the two world wars, may be character-

ized by particular ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977).

So far we have considered anxiety as something both inherent to our

being and a cultural product, but this reservoir also provides the basis for

more ephemeral manifestations of social anxiety, forms which have been

grasped within the sociological imagination in terms of ‘moral panics’

(Glasser, 1999). Typically these are more ephemeral forms of collective

anxiety ‘whipped up’ by the mass media and by political elites. The effect

once more is to give something indefinable and intangible a specific object –

paedophiles, refugees, and so on.

‘Social anxiety’ therefore refers both to those relatively abiding andmore contingent fears which are either culturally embedded or politically

mediated. What then of defences against such anxieties? We have already

considered how Klein sees these operating at the individual level but they

will also operate at the institutional and societal levels. At the institutional

level, Menzies Lyth (1960) focused upon the way in which particular kinds

of work, work such as nursing, created anxiety by reconnecting the adult

worker with early childhood anxieties concerning sex and death. Her

analysis of the organization of nursing then explored the ‘social defences’

against anxiety which found expression in the structure and culture of theteaching hospital that she examined. Following Menzies Lyth’s pioneering

studies (2002) a considerable body of work has now been developed which

largely focuses upon the way in which public organizations deal with social

anxieties and other collective sentiments (see for example, Obholzer &

Roberts, 1994). Much of this work focuses upon the impact of splitting

processes and other mechanisms of defence on the internal life of welfare

organizations.

Several of the social defence mechanisms that Menzies Lyth outlinedfind an echo in Lipsky’s work on ‘street level bureaucracy’ (Lipsky, 1980).

Distancing and depersonalization, for example, were also used by many of

Lipsky’s respondents and this was often linked to labelling processes

(Menzies Lyth uses the term ‘categorization’). In a recent study on the

housing allocations process (Jeffers & Hoggett, 1998) a similar labelling

process was found to be at work in terms of distinctions drawn between

‘demanding’ applicants and others. Such categories strip users of public

services of some of their humanity and many officials are acutely aware of

their own involvement in such processes, processes which nevertheless helpto protect them against the ‘assaults on the ego which the structure of street

level work normally delivers’ (Lipsky, 1980: 152).





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Citizens, governments and ambivalence

What, then, of societal defences against anxiety? As we have seen, to the extent

that we cannot individually and collectively contain anxieties we externalizethem into the other. Indefinable anxiety becomes a tangible fear, the danger

within becomes the danger without. It follows, that in the context of welfare

societies, the mad, the bad, the sad, the old, the sick, the vulnerable, the

failures, and so on, receive not just our compassion but also our fear, contempt

and hatred. This is the terrain of the ‘moral panics’ referred to earlier. To give

recent examples from the UK, these have included sudden and intense collec-

tive fears about schizophrenic killers at loose beyond the control of psychi-

atric services, unruly young children who terrorize housing estates andepidemics of depression in teenagers. Typically these panics lead to sudden and

unthought-through policy interventions (often of a largely symbolic form so

that government can sustain the appearance of doing something) which

professionals in the field have to implement despite their reservations.

Citizens therefore project onto government all that they cannot contain

within themselves. It follows that part of the authority invested in govern-

ment is citizens’ own disowned authority. Here is an example from research

I am presently undertaking.1 A youth worker who had dedicated over 20

years of his life to work with young people on a poor public housing estatedescribes the process by which local residents became aware that there was

a drug problem in the area, an issue that he had been working on without

support from local parents for several years. Speaking of his first meeting

with angry residents he noted,

and they came and first of all they shouted at me. And I had this strange

meeting with them, about 15 women, where they were all very angry

. . . and it just sort of taught me how just people have to be angrybecause, I mean I don’t see myself as a particularly powerful figure of

authority, but to them, the only way they could say these things was

actually to be angry.

He continued,

I was hauled before a meeting of about 80 people, and they just sort

of lashed into me as being this fucking middle class wanker who liked

arts and didn’t fucking understand things and heroin users everywhereand I’d been the youth worker and, you know, what the hell was I

doing about it . . . It was very difficult those meetings, I had somebody





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standing up and shouting at me about how appalling I was with kids,

and her kids were the two most difficult kids we had here at the time,

and I couldn’t say ‘But . . . these two have been doing these things, and

I have had to go around your house several times’.

As a public official this man was aware that part of his role was to accept

the angry projections of these local residents and to survive them without

retaliation. This he did and he noted that sometimes angry residents would

approach him at the end of the meeting to ask him if he was alright. And

because he survived these attacks he gained their respect and from this basis

he was able to work with local people to help them set up a range of initia-

tives to tackle the problem – one of his most angry critics is now one of hismost trusted members of staff.

Here then we can see the process whereby a local community begins

to reclaim its own authority, no longer seeing drug users and dealers as

somebody else’s problem, somebody towards whom they could express

callous indifference. To the extent that troubled children or adults are seen

as someone ‘other’ to ourselves, part of the foundation underlying social

solidarity is destroyed. As Baldwin (1990) noted, what fosters solidarity is a

common experience of vulnerability, ‘a sense of community is encouraged,

most simply, in the face of universally shared risk’ (p. 34). In contrast, in theUK at least, for several decades this notion of ‘shared fate’ has been eclipsed

by a collusion between governments and citizens which says ‘they’ (i.e. the

government) must do something about this – child sexual abuse, the neglect

of people with chronic mental health problems, the old and alone, the

containment of uncontained children, etc. The systemic and relational dimen-

sions of such social problems become obscured. Public officials get caught

up in the bad faith which surrounds such issues, a bad faith which, for

instance, wills the ends without willing the means.So splitting processes also attack the actual patterns of interdependency

which constitute a welfare society – splitting self as funder of public services

(taxpayer) from self as user of these services; self as service user from ‘other’

as service provider. The public sector is founded upon ambivalence and it is

because of this ambivalence that the struggle to defend, let alone extend, this

form of government and citizenship has been so difficult.

To the extent that governments collude with the self-alienation of their

citizens they take on themselves a series of impossible tasks (such as the

protection of vulnerable people from abuse) in which failure is inevitable.The collusion is based upon an implicit contract, one with echoes of the

‘contract of mutual indifference’ that Norman Geras has described (Geras,

1998). Through this contract government derives some of its legitimacy by

not confronting citizens with issues they would prefer not to think about





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(e.g. citizens’ contempt for their own vulnerability, a contempt which fuels

a willingness to exploit or neglect vulnerable others, of which child or elder

abuse is just one manifestation). As a consequence of such failures of politi-

cal leadership (Alford, 1994) the hapless public official becomes the

whipping horse, the one who can be blamed for things that neither citizens

nor governments will properly address.

To summarize, ambivalence is an inherent dimension of the social

relations of welfare and, to the extent that this remains culturally unaccepted

and unassimilated, we become alienated from the shadow side of our shared

subjectivity. One of the functions of public bureaucracies is to ‘contain’ these

disowned aspects of our subjectivity. This occurs literally and concretely in

the physical institutions that many children and elderly people end up in, andsymbolically and psychologically through the projected social anxieties that

become part of the emotional labour of health workers, teachers, probation

officers and other street-level bureaucrats.

The issue is: how are these things to be contained? So long as this

contract of mutual indifference is maintained the potential exists for public

officials to abuse the authority which is projected into them so that the

weakness of the citizen becomes the power of government. According to

Bion, ‘the link between one mind and another that leads to destruction of

both is the lie’ (1970: 104). Such collusion offers a parasitic form of contain-ment which leads to the impoverishment of both citizens and government.

In contrast, an encounter which leads to the mutual enrichment of both

parties requires a commitment to truth and therefore an acknowledgement

by each party of that which they might otherwise disavow. The image of the

virtuous citizen faced with an indifferent or interfering government is as

much a lie as the image of responsible and altruistic government. Only by

recognizing the bad within the good is it possible for an encounter which is

realistic and relatively free from the myopia of wholly individualistic (citizengood, government bad) or collectivistic (citizen bad, government good)

ideologies. For public officials, like the youth worker in our study, this means

accepting the dilemmas and paradoxes of the job whilst retaining a sense of

one’s own authority. In this way citizens can clear a path through their own

projections and then really make use of what is available (in Winnicott’s,

1971, terms, this is the journey from ‘object relating’ or relating by identifi-

cations to ‘object usage’).

The ethical bureaucrat

My argument has been that it is the fate of the public official, broadly

conceived to include all those whose job involves some degree of discretion





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within the welfare state, to have to contain the unresolved (and at times

suppressed) value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Far from the

picture of the rule-bound bureaucrat who slavishly follows procedure, the

public official lives out the contradictions of the complex and diverse society

in which s/he lives on a day-to-day basis and, as a consequence, is pulled this

way and that in what Bonnie Honig calls ‘dilemmatic space’ (Honig, 1996).

Honig draws on the work of the moral philosopher Bernard Williams

(1973, 1981) who is keenly aware of the incommensurable nature of human

values. Things just don’t fit together as we would like them to, values rub

up against each other, the moral agent has to live with conflicts that cannot

easily be resolved and simply have to be lived with. You have to end up

disappointing someone. Williams argues that in such situations there is oftenno right thing to do, all we can do is ‘act for the best’ (Williams, 1973: 173).

This is exemplified by the working lives of public officials and corresponds

to what Lipsky described as ‘the assaults on the ego which the structure of

street level work normally delivers’ (1980: 152).

There are two categories of dilemma which correspond to my two

characterizations of government – as the embodiment of an inherently

conflictual and an inherently alienated public. In the first, the public official

seeks to act impartially (‘acting for the best’) in the face of competing claims

(care versus justice, the individual case versus the greater good, consistencyversus responsiveness, and so on). Susan Mendus (2000) notes that we are

in the terrain not just of pluralism but also of the impossibility of harmonious

reconciliation in which the agent is not exempt from the authority of the

claim they choose to neglect. As she puts it, such situations are characterized

by ‘pluralism, plus conflict, plus loss’ (Mendus, 2000: 117). For public

officials it is loss which is experienced as failure. It is as if they internalize

the flaws and faults of reality and make them their own thereby taking on

responsibility for what is irreconcilable in their world.The second category of dilemma is the consequence of ambivalence,

and specifically the inability of the other to contain their own ambivalence.

Michael Feldman (1989) suggests that where X deals with ambivalence by

projecting it into Y the consequence is that Y is put in a ‘no win’ or ‘damned

if I do and damned if I don’t’ situation. Social workers, trapped between the

rights of the family and the needs of the child, know such situations only too

well.

In contrast, then, to the heroic view of many contemporary writers on

management (a group Du Gay, 2000, refers to as the ‘new charismatics’), aview which stresses change-embracing, go-for-it, visionary types, the view of

the public official and manager offered here is in the best traditions of

tragedy. The merit of such a view is that it deals with reality rather than





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make-believe. It is not pessimistic. If only we could abandon the chimerical

pursuit of ‘excellence’ or ‘total quality’ we could focus our energies on

creating systems of welfare and governance which were ‘good enough’

(Williams, 2000) – something we are presently far from achieving, either in

Britain or elsewhere.

I couldn’t put it better than a doctoral student of mine who is also a

senior public manager:

I have seen ethical responsibility as being closely associated with the

public service ethos. There is a persistent argument that accompanying

the role of the public services manager are duties of care about facts

and proper process, duties of balance in argument, and duties of balance in advice. I have understood in my working life that the

manager gives expression to the ethos through dealing with people in

terms of care, diligence, courtesy and integrity. The public service ethos

is best perceived through the quality of these face to face relationships,

through processes as much as results.

(Watts, personal communication, 2003)

Consulting to public organizations: Revisiting the concept of

‘primary task’

To recapitulate, in contrast to private, for-profit organizations, organizations

of the public sphere perform a number of functions which link them directly

to the ethical and emotional lives of citizens. This adds to their complexity

as unique moral institutions where questions of technical efficacy (‘what

works’) can be integrated with value questions. It follows that to work as a

manager, consultant or change agent in such organizations one needs toolsand capacities which can meet the challenge of this complexity.

The concept of an organization’s ‘primary task’ has enjoyed a powerful

hold on the imagination of consultants working within the Group Relations

tradition which emerged from the work of the Tavistock Insititute in the

1950s. Yet the concept draws strongly upon classical functionalist approaches

to systems theory which have been abandoned long ago in organizational

research. A functionalist perspective conceives of any particular system as

having its own goals or needs – typically some combination of equilibrium,

adaptation and survival. But organizations per se do not have needs, nor goalsor primary tasks for that matter; to believe that they do is simply to buy in

to the dominant definition of what a particular organization is all about, a

definition which is the outcome of particular relations of power.





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As the first section of this article argued, this is particularly true for

public organizations, whether they are housing associations, children’s

homes or primary care teams. Anyone who spends even a short time in such

organizations cannot but be struck by the different views of the aims of the

organization. It’s not just that the views of professionals will often differ to

those of managers, service users and their advocates, nor even that many

differences of view will exist within the ranks of the professionals them-

selves but those who have the formal authority to define policy (politicians,

senior civil servants, inspectors and regulators, academics) constantly

change their views as well. Within the public sphere definitions of purpose

are constantly and necessarily contested, and, as Obholzer (2003) has

recently suggested, it therefore makes more sense to speak of the contested primary task. Indeed, referring back to the first part of this article, it makes

more sense to ask the members of a team or organization what are the

primary dilemmas that they face and how can they negotiate a way forward

through these dilemmas. In doing so we take the actual work of the organiz-

ation, and its need to do this work efficiently and effectively, more seriously

than if we fall back on some simple (and value loaded) idea that, for

example, the primary task of the hospital is to care for the patients within

its walls. Such simple nostrums actually demean the complexity of the tasks

facing members of these organizations.To say that in human service organizations questions concerning tasks,

priorities, objectives, etc. are constantly contested is to say that within such

organizations questions of value are primary. I disagree strongly with the

view, expressed recently for example by Chapman (2003), that the primary

task is ‘relatively value-free’. In the face of this complexity the notion of ‘a

primary task’ can seem not only simplistic but potentially destructive. Indeed,

as I’ve suggested in the discussion of ambivalence in the second part of this

article, one of the roles of public organizations sometimes is to take onimpossible tasks. Contrary to the belief that the primary task is the task the

organization must perform if the organization is to survive, if we follow the

logic of the ‘impossible task’ we begin to realize that it is in the nature of

some public organizations that they will be seen to fail, indeed it is necess-

ary for them to fail if governments and citizens are to sustain their own sense

of inner security.

Organizational survival and organizational development

The concept of primary task can also lead us to a dangerous blurring of the

distinction, crucial to human service organizations, between survival and

development (Armstrong, 1999). Within the private sector the market is the





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ultimate arbitrator of organizational survival, if there is no market for an

organization’s product then it will not survive even if its product has

considerable value to society. Conversely, if there is a market for the product

then the organization will survive even if that product, like tobacco or junk

food, is destructive of value in society. The same does not hold for public

organizations, they only have legitimacy to the extent that what they do has

public value. Within the public sector, therefore, it is not organizational

survival per se that matters, it is the survival of the organization’s public

value that counts. This was indicated clearly in recent research undertaken

by Steele and her colleagues. They found that whereas private sector

managers ranked ‘the prosperity of their organization’ as their primary goal,

public sector managers cited their desire to ‘benefit the community’ (Steele,1999). For managers and staff in public organizations it is this wider purpose

which is the basis for their commitment and if that sense of wider purpose

is destroyed then their commitment is undermined no matter how successful

their organization (hospital, school, etc.) is in business terms.

For public organizations the crucial question is not what it must do to

survive but what it must do to survive with value, that is, as a place which

can contribute to the development of the ethical and moral capacities of the

communities that it serves. When an organization’s capacity for development

is at risk what we mean is that its capacity to exist as a place with value isnow in doubt. We speak, more perceptively than we know, of workers

becoming de-moralized, that is, of losing a sense of value. These are the stakes

that have been played for over the last two decades in the British welfare state.

There were many things wrong with the old welfare state, not the least

the way in which it disempowered the recipients of its services and

programmes. But despite its faults it was at least able to keep in mind some-

thing of the complexity of the subjects that it dealt with. Compare, for

example, the multidimensionality of the idea of ‘the patient’ with the uni-dimensional concept of ‘the consumer’, a ‘part-object’ to the institution as

Armstrong (1999) put it. It is an old phrase now but worth remembering –

markets tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing. The root

of the crises which have affected many organizations in the public sphere

over the last decade can be described as the abandonment of development

for survival or short-term performativity, something experienced by many

staff in terms of the feeling that their organization no longer stands for the

values and principles which originally attracted them to it.

We must make an additional distinction paralleling the one above,namely the distinction between task and purpose, means and ends. The

concept of purpose is one saturated with value, that is, with a sense of

what is good and bad, right and wrong for me/my organization to be doing.

If a group or organization is to provide a facilitating environment for





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development to occur it must have a sense of purpose. I have in mind an

agreement which is temporary and understood as such by all parties who

subscribe to it. This purpose is necessarily ambiguous otherwise agreement

could never be reached. The point is that parties accept this ambiguity or

lack of consistency for it is this which provides each with the possibility of

infusing the organization’s purpose with personal meaning and it is this

which provides the creative space for further development and continuing

dialogue, a theme picked up in Obholzer’s ‘Afterword’ to The unconscious

at work (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). Such temporary definitions of purpose

are therefore fictions (Hoggett, 2000) which serve to bind the group together

and contain differences without crushing them. Such fictions are necessary

illusions in Winnicott’s sense, illusions which enable the organization totraverse the transitional space between the ‘what is’ and the ‘what might be’.

They therefore provide a means of sustaining direction and commitment for

organizations operating in the fundamentally contested realm of public life.

A group or organization with a strong sense of purpose has an inner con-

fidence which is to be contrasted with the noisy declamations of those who,

having lost all sense of purpose long ago, adopt the lapel-badge approach to

values by bedecking themselves with Mission Statements, Chartermarks,

Investors in People awards and so on. In this way values themselves become

reduced to an element of strategy, something an organization uses to positionitself in the marketplace (Greer & Hoggett, 1999).

If we are to abandon the idea of there being a primary task in complex

public organizations then it follows that consultants to human service

organizations cannot easily make judgements about behaviour which is ‘off-

task’ and irrational in some way. Moreover, there is a danger that

irrationality is only seen in its negative and destructive guise. Bion’s ‘basic

assumptions’ also fuel Work Group activity (Bion, 1961); magic, omni-

potence, illusion and splitting can and are frequently put to constructive usein organizations. The creative uses of irrationality are as important as the

destructive ones. What can be observed and confronted are those situations

in which members of an organization behave in ways which counter the

organization’s agreed purpose, where such agreement has been reached.

Sensing and making sense

So, if we strip away the device of the primary task what equipment is theconsultant left with to navigate the unconscious currents of the organization’s

psyche? How does the consultant get a sense of ‘what’s going on here?’ Some-

times the consultant learns from what people say, perhaps particularly from

those whose powerlessness has until now denied them a voice with which to





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speak. But words are fickle things designed, as Bion noted, as much for the

purpose of dissimulation as communication. Thus the usefulness of imagery

and many consultants nowadays use imagery (pictures, sculptures, dreams,

etc.) and the process of free-associating to imagery as a means of taking

organizational participants beyond discourse. The consultant can also resort

to her own experience of the emotional life of the group or organization. As

an outsider, the consultant dips into the emotional medium of the organiz-

ation, this is a medium in which organizational participants are so immersed

that they have almost no cognizance of its existence. As Armstrong (2004)

notes, a crucial aspect of this medium is what might be called the ‘primary

process’ of the public organization – that is, the emotional work it uncon-

sciously performs for the rest of society – keeping death at bay, managingvulnerability, containing madness or violence, and so on. To tune into this

medium the consultant must be able to use the equivalent of the counter-trans-

ference and become aware of the feelings and sensations which they become

recipients of as they work with the group or organization.

But openness to such experience is only part of the story, sense must

then be made of it. How is this to be done? There is a danger that consult-

ants and researchers inspired by psychoanalytic perspectives come to rely so

much upon their subjective experience and their own interpretation of this

that they can become guilty of a kind of ‘wild analysis’, one which patholo-gizes the organization whilst leaving the consultant/researcher on a moral

‘high horse’. To guard against this it is vital that interpretation, the process

of sense-making, is shared with the subject of analysis and/or with a super-

visor or peer group (Skogstad, 2004). A number of contemporary models of

organizational research, particularly those inspired by feminist method-

ologies, give emphasis to interactive approaches to sense-making which

recognize the plurality of meanings which, within complex organizations, a

shared experience can obtain. As Armstrong (1999: 151) notes, ‘I do not seedreams as containers of meaning – a puzzle to be solved once and for all;

but rather as containers for meaning; available narratives through which we

negotiate and seek formulation for the emotional experiences we register.’

The consultant therefore seeks to engender dialogues in which different

meanings can be shared, knowing full well that no ‘higher truth’ will necess-

arily emerge or, if it does, knowing that the certainty that it briefly offers will

soon be submerged.

A double reflexivity

Effective consultancy requires a double reflexivity, to one’s own emotional

experience of the collective organizational unconscious and to the nature of





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one’s agency within the dynamic field of forces at play in any organizational

setting. Whilst mainstream social science is conversant with the latter it is

still largely ignorant of the former. If the Group Relations perspective is to

emerge from the margins into the mainstream it must begin to demonstrate

a much stronger appreciation of the interpenetration of the realm of the

emotions and unconscious and the realm of power and politics.

To summarize, for public organizations the search for an organization’s

primary task is both misleading and fruitless. Such organizations have

multiple tasks which are often in contradiction; they are certainly beset by

conflicting notions of what they should be doing and, far from task achieve-

ment being necessary for survival, for some organizations, paradoxically, it

is important that they fail in order to maintain their contested legitimacy byserving the public’s unresolved ambivalence.

Working in, leading, managing and consulting to public organizations

presents a set of challenges which are specific to the public nature of such

organizations. Yet dominant models of work, leadership, management and

consulting draw upon perspectives and experiences developed within for-

profit organizations. Organizations are not all the same. Within the public

sphere working life is akin to a dilemmatic space in which leaders need to

draw upon tragic rather than heroic models of agency and consultants need

to be aware both of the hidden emotional dimension of the group’s workand the continually contested nature of the group’s task.

Note

1 This is an ESRC-funded research project called ‘Negotiating Ethical Dilemmas inContested Communities’, reference number RES-000-23-0127.

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Paul Hoggett (BA) is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre

for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and has a longstanding interest in

the role of unconscious and affective forces in organizational and politi-

cal life and is co-editor of the journal Organizational and Social Dynamics.

He has over 20 years’ experience researching welfare change and the

politics of community life for funders such as the ESRC, the Home Office

and the European Foundation. His books include Partisans in an uncertain

world (Free Association Books, 1992) and Emotional life and the politics of

welfare (Macmillan, 2000).

[E-mail: [email protected]]

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Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations