Fitzpatrick, Robert (2024) Holding the vanishing organisation: Can an 'agile' work environment facilitate emotional containment? Professional Doctorate thesis, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust / University of East London. Full text available

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Abstract

Over recent decades, ‘lean’, ‘activity based’ and ‘agile’ working environments characterised by a non-proprietorial use of space and resources, networked communication, and porosity between experience in public, private and organisational contexts have proliferated within organisations. As this transformation of the physical territory for office work has taken place, the concept of the ‘vanishing organisation’ was proposed (Cooper and Dartington, 2004; Cooper and Lousada, 2005) to provide an account of how in a networked society, established mechanisms for sustaining emotional containment in organisations, through the maintenance of concrete and symbolic boundaries, appear to no longer function or even exist. The research explores the extent to which the contemporary workplace might be supportive of or deleterious to emotional containment in organisations and its implications for theory, practice and research within the systems psychodynamic approach to consulting. Social photo matrix focus groups were convened at four organisations which deployed elements of ‘lean’, ‘activity based’ or ‘agile’ workplace design to record narratives of the felt experience of place at work, with further data gathered from detailed case notes covering the researcher’s engagement with each organisation and personal reflexivity, in part drawing upon their personal memory of place in a transient institutional, organisational and domestic context as a military child. In-case analysis was carried out using a grounded theory exercise where social photo matrix transcript text was used to develop axial codes which for each workplace abductively invoked Freud’s exclamation in the Aetiology of Hysteria of “saxa loquuntur!” [the stones speak] (Freud, 1896), as well as its manifestation of ‘murality’ (Cox, 1995; Adshead, 2019), a concept developed within forensic psychotherapy to refer to the experience of an instrumentally derived and beneficial experience of ‘wallness’ realised through the pairing of a bounded perimeter with an emotionally containing organisational and institutional culture. This exercise generated rich and emotionally evocative data for each site relating to the felt experience of place, as well as tentative indications of the manifestation of patterns of emotional attachment (Bowlby, 1969; Ainsworth et al., 1978), basic assumption function (Bion, 1962) and ‘commensal’, ‘symbiotic’ and ‘parasitic’ forms of containment (Bion, 1970). Further cross-case analysis of the gathered grounded theory axial codes helped develop the hypothesis that rather than instrumentally facilitating emotional containment, the workplaces served to both reflect the particular forms and levels of containment arising within each organisation’s already-existing culture, and in certain circumstances, to reinforce them.

Item Type:	Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Additional Information:	A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of East London in collaboration with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust for the Professional Doctorate in Consultation and the Organisation
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Professional Doctorate in Consultation and the Organisation, D10D
Subjects:	Groups & Organisations > Groups/Institutions/Organisations Groups & Organisations > Organisational Development Psychological Therapies, Psychiatry, Counselling > Consultation
Department/People:	Adult and Forensic Services Research
URI:	https://repository.tavistockandportman.ac.uk/id/eprint/2938

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