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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.
Leben und Werk Erich Fromms
(2001)
In Martin Stanton's 1990 monograph Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention , one of six exegetical chapters was titled >Teratoma<, using Ferenczi's own word for malformations of (psychic) development. Since then, there has been a tendency in the larger Ferenczi literature to use >teratoma< as a metaphor, leading to the creation of many odd readings and contexts for this very specific, medical, anatomic term. When Stanton becomes expansive in viewing the teratoma as a >transitional object< which >negotiates a relationship between the growth of ideal-ego ideas in oneself and the outside 'influence' of inner systems of thought< (p. 176), he is entering the play-space that opened between Ferenczi and Groddeck during the 20s as Ferenczi's relationship with Freud became increasingly constricted. What this misses is that Ferenczi was a physician, as was Groddeck. For all their fanciful explorations of mind and body relatedness, for both Ferenczi and Groddeck there would be a shared background of certain basic terminology. In that medical terminology, >teratoma< refers to variable numbers of primordial germ cells in the embryo, which in the course of development become displaced, sequestered and grotesquely overgrown; they can never become the tissues they were meant to be. Their potential is forever squandered. >Monsters< they may be; >doubles< they may seem; but they are utterly non-viable. In his metaphorical application of the term >teratoma< to the natural history of (psychic) trauma, Ferenczi proposes a biological and psychological isomorphism that is both clinically illuminating and intuitively prophetic of the course of treatment of trauma, which he was discovering. Clinical and literary material are used to explore the gap between the anatomic teratoma and the psychic teratoma.