This is a study of the social character of managers and staff at the U.S. ACTION Agency. The context of the study was a joint union-management work improvement program that took place in the U.S. ACTION Agency from 1977-80. The author, with others from the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, was contracted by ACTION, to be a third-party researcher-consultant for the program. The methods of this study include in-depth interviews with 30 people, both managers and staff. The instrument for these interviews was an >interpretive questionnaire< originally developed by Erich FROMM to elicit both ethnographic and characterological information. Additional data were gathered through dialogues with individuals and office groups, and through participant observation. The findings of this study include a typology of five social character types at ACTION headquarters: sociable idealists, craftsman-idealists, political idealists, technical administrators and diplomat-administrators. The study discusses their adaptations to the organization of work, and how people of different social character types interact with each other around the work tasks, both productively and unproductively. This research demonstrates the importance of understanding local meanings, values, and motivations when planning organizational change. It is an example of using social character theory and participant research as significant methods for achieving such understanding.The theoretical framework for interpretation is Erich FROMM's theory of social character as adapted by Michael Maccoby for use in organizational change projects. FROMM's theory develops a typology of shared character syndromes functionally related to the socioeconomic and cultural environment; Maccoby develops empirical typologies of adaptations to work in each work setting, conceptualized and named through >participant research< with the people studied. Participant research creates new knowledge that can stimulate and support change in the workplace.
Response to review
(2001)
Elise, in her own erudite and engaging way, addresses the question, >Why won't he really talk to me-< Underpinning her core argument, Elise posits that a >masculine sense of self is felt to be dependent on an impermeable psychic boundary that is not to be penetrated.< In coining male impenetrability as the >citadel complex,< however, Elise introduces a lexicon of battle, polarization, and defense. And it is around this arena of her argument that Wrye raises most of her questions. First, Wrye questions if Elise's conceptualization of a penetrating nipple forcing >Unlawful Entry< into the vulnerable young male psyche reflects the lived, body-based experience of nursing mothers and babies. She also raises the question of whether Elise is describing normal >good-enough< or pathological mothering and fathering? Is she talking about a psychoanalytic model that emphasizes the biological differences between the sexes as opposed to the particular dynamics of the nursing couple? Does Elise's model privilege more binary gender-identity models than models of gender pluralities? Wrye suggests that the paper might actually have been developed as three smaller theoretical papers with more clinical >flesh< on each of the three strands: (a) the forces of bodily development on the male psyche (b) its role in the establishment of gender identity and (c) the >law of the father< in the course of separation-individuation.
Reply to Orange
(2001)
This. Reply elucidates the ideas originally presented in >Countertransference: Our New Royal Road to the Unconscious< (PD 9/3, 1999) in acknowledgment of Irwin Hirsch's commentary (this issue). It refutes Hirsch's erroneous conception that my paper suggested that the personality of the analyst could be extricated from the interactional matrix of the psychoanalytic relationship and that persons could be separated from their minds. By drawing these false dichotomies, Hirsch only polemicizes rather than clarifies the complex relationship existing between an analyst's subjectivity and his or her personality.