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2006 59: 175Human RelationsPaul Hoggett

Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

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Conflict, ambivalence, and the contestedpurpose of public organizationsPaul Hoggett

A B S T R AC 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.

K E Y WO R D S ambivalence � primary task � social anxieties � value pluralism

Introduction

The question whether education, health, transport, energy and other utilitiesand services are best delivered by the public or the private sector is a debate

1 7 5

Human Relations

DOI: 10.1177/0018726706062731

Volume 59(2): 175–194

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The Tavistock Institute ®

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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 toobscure the dual character of the public sector, not just as a means of deliverybut also as an element of societal self-governance. This article focuses uponthe nature of the work of public service professionals and the organizationsto which they belong. I will argue that it is the dual character of publicorganizations, including all those not-for-profit and quasi-autonomousorganizations which rely heavily or totally upon public funding, whichprovides them with their distinctive and complex nature. In particular, I willargue that this complexity derives from two sources which are surprisinglylittle 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 needsand alternative definitions of the common good. Second, in addition to thesereality based conflicts, it is the task of government to have to deal with theprojections of its citizens. This means that public organizations are alsoengaged in the management of social anxieties and other collective senti-ments which are partly conscious and partly unconscious. These anxietiesultimately express concerns about the survival of oneself, one’s family orone’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 tothe 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 theunique and necessary form that public organizations must assume giventheir complexity. Consequently the neoliberal critique of bureaucracy whichhas been responsible for waves of privatization and marketization inWestern Europe, and the enfeebling of government capabilities in manydeveloping and former Soviet bloc societies, has thrown the baby out withthe 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 makebureaucracy necessary?

Human Relations 59(2)1 7 6



My focus in this article is the public sphere of government. But thisimmediately gets us into definitional problems because even within westerndemocracies the nature of this sphere differs. Moreover as the boundariesbetween public, private and what is variously referred to as community,associational or social sectors become increasingly blurred the very notionof government itself gives way to the more fashionable concept of ‘govern-ance’. There is no easy way of bringing conceptual clarity to this field – thepublic spheres of government in Stockholm and Miami are dramaticallydifferent. Suffice it is to say that my primary focus here is upon the workinglives of those professionals and officials who are employed by organizationshaving primarily a public purpose – so this does not include all teachers orall nurses, not even in Sweden.

I wish to argue that such organizations have, among other things, twounique characteristics. They are the site for the continuous contestation ofsuch public purposes and a receptacle for containing social anxieties. Suchcharacteristics, and there are others such as social regulation which areequally important although not the focus of this article, serve to remind usthat government, and the public sphere which supports it, is as much a sitefor the enactment of particular kinds of social relations as it is a site for thedelivery 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’ butmarginal to the concept of ‘consumer’.

Neoliberalism as a radical market discourse first emerged stronglywithin the Thatcher/Reagan era and has spearheaded programmes for themodernization of government which have involved denationalization,contracting out and other forms of marketization, the introduction of formsof 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 noplace. Bureaucracies (whether public or private) are seen simply as outmodedand inefficient ways of organizing things. In contrast I will argue that farfrom being a problem, public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitomeof what Weber called substantive rationality (where ethical, aesthetic andspiritual considerations are not split off from technical ones) rather thaninstrumental rationality. As such it is perhaps the one place where questionsof technique (‘what works’) and questions of value stand a chance of beingintegrated.

In reality there are many kinds of public bureaucracies, some are highlydecentralized and some involve extended forms of citizen participation. Whatthey have in common is that they are funded primarily out of public revenues

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations 1 7 7



and governed according to publicly agreed policies. This constitutes theirbeing as, in Weber’s terms, a particular kind of moral institution in whichprinciples of impartiality and fairness are paramount. But, as we shall see,what constitutes impartiality and what constitutes fairness is always andnecessarily publicly contested.

Bureaucracy as contested space

Many aspects of the discourse of management – for instance, such terms asmanagement by objectives, strategic goals, primary task, organizationalmission – portray a view of ‘the organization’ which is relatively consensual.In contrast, it is proposed here that we consider that public organizationsare intimately concerned with the governance of societies in which valueconflicts are inherent and irresolvable. Take, for example, liberty, equalityand fraternity, the three guiding principles of western democracies since thestorming of the Bastille. As MacIntyre (1985) points out, these values areincommensurable; for example, before long, as you push for equality yourub up against liberty (particularly economic freedom). Or take the principleof universalism, the fair and impartial treatment of all, a key principle of theEnlightenment 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, byexcluding some kinds of denominational school, denies Muslim children theeducation they need.

The tension between universalism and particularism is inherent andirresolvable (Thompson & Hoggett, 1996) but, as such, it is just one instanceof the conflictual nature of public purpose. Radical pluralists argue that welive 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 reconciliationof rival claims and conflicting interests can only be partial and provisional’(p. 113).

To return to my argument, the commitment to universalism asembodied in the ethic of impartiality cannot be sustained given the strengthof particularisms in an increasingly plural society. The problem for the publicofficial is precisely that s/he must be both a universalist and a particularistat the same time. For a similar reason there are other value contradictionswhich the public official is required to enact every day. For example, onewhich has been articulated in recent years concerns the tension between anethic of care and an ethic of justice (Mendus, 2000). On the one hand a




compassionate concern for the individual and his or her plight, and on theother a realization that whatever the merits of this particular case the publicofficial also has a responsibility towards all those potentially equally worthycases whose claims, because not immediately and physically present, can onlybe 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 alsofollows that the public sphere (which includes the organized apparatus ofgovernment) is the necessary embodiment of such conflictual purposes. Andwhilst different political projects emphasize different values, those that theysuppress inevitably return to haunt the political system, typically returningat the level at which policy is implemented. As Lipsky noted, ‘a typical mech-anism for legislative conflict resolution is to pass on intractable conflicts forresolution (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 localrepresentatives finding themselves ‘living out’ rather than ‘acting upon’ thecontradictions of the complex and diverse society in which they live.

Lipsky uses the term ‘street level bureaucrat’ to refer to the army ofpublic officials – police officers, teachers, nurses, health inspectors, benefitadministrators, magistrates, planning officers, etc. – whose task it is tooperate in this environment. At the heart of their work is the exercise ofjudgement 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 nosystem can ever provide guidance for every eventuality. Thus, in contrast tothe ideal of impartiality, in reality ‘there is often considerable disagreementabout 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 whetherstudents from state schools wishing to enter university should be asked toachieve 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 forfree public goods is always potentially unlimited, public professionals arenearly always involved in rationing decisions based upon the publicly agreedpolicies of the time. A university admissions tutor may disagree with thepolicies 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, inducementsor their own political beliefs. In reality, as we have seen, this is impossibleto do without the exercise of discretion and the use of individual judgement.




It is no wonder then that Lipsky entitled his formative study ‘Street-levelbureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service’.

Government and social anxiety

The idea that institutions such as the health or education service have anunconscious or implicit purpose has been a tenet of psychoanalyticallyinformed perspectives on organizational life for over 40 years. Central to thisview is the idea that such institutions, besides performing their ostensiblefunctions (health care, education, etc.) also deal constantly with fundamentalhuman 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, forexample, writers have drawn attention to the impact of envy (Stein, 1997)and hope (Cummins, 2002). However, I do feel that such institutions, andthe apparatus of government as a whole, play a vital role in ‘containing’ someof the troubling feelings which characterize citizens’ lives and that anxietyseems 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, itmeans that the systemic and psychoanalytic way of thinking which deploysthis kind of concept has not been adopted by researchers or policy-makersin the broader field of public or social policy. So, why is anxiety such apowerful affect? To answer this question we need to consider three differentdimensions of anxiety – ontological, cultural/historical and contingent.

At the ontological level there are good grounds to believe that anxietyis a fundamental aspect of our being. In their different ways Existentialismand Psychoanalysis have given anxiety this status, and within psychoanalysisKleinian thought gives it a particularly privileged position by linking it to ourfear of our own destructiveness. Here Klein draws a distinction betweenpsychotic anxiety and depressive anxiety (Klein, 1948, 1952). Psychoticanxiety refers to the experience of breakdown and disintegration in which thesurvival 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 wedepend, at first towards those (typically the mother) who nurture us and whoinevitably 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 oforganizations. For Jaques anxiety was inherent to group life, a means by




which group members were unconsciously able to place part of their deepinner lives outside themselves. In this way Jaques drew attention to the rolethat the group (and, by implication, organizations, communities and govern-ments) played in providing a receptacle for anxieties that individuals wereunable to contain within themselves – a kind of displacement of affect fromthe internal to the external world. It will be remembered that Freud oncespoke of the ‘great reservoir of libido’ – it could be useful to think, in asimilar way, of a great reservoir of anxiety that society then gets to workupon.

Klein also indicates the way in which this primitive and formativeanxiety is first dealt with by the infant so that the danger within becomes adanger 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 thehuman condition in which we escape from internal anxieties by projectingthem into external figures. In this way we become alienated from ourselvesand the emerging personality becomes fractured (subject to splitting) andlacking in integration. This process can be mitigated if the individual acquiresthe internal resources to contain the worst of her/his own anxiety. Thestrength 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 boththe 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 toreintegrate into the personality what had been previously alienated (Steiner,1996). But the process is never complete and the human subject neverbecomes unitary or whole, there is always a reservoir of anxiety ready tolatch 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 apersuasive case that western type democracies such as Britain and the USAare 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 forcesbut the difficulty our culture has in facing these ‘facts of life’ is not one thatall societies have faced at all times. Indeed, the social arrangements of anygiven society produce their own difficulties as Sennett has recently noted withregard to fear of failure (Sennett, 1998). Some have argued that anxiety isinherent to the project of modernity itself, a project which ‘frees’ people fromthe anchorings of tradition, family and community and thereby forces uponthem ultimate responsibility for the choices they make (Bauman, 1993). This




links to the idea, first put forward by Raymond Williams, that whole eras orepochs, 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 ourbeing and a cultural product, but this reservoir also provides the basis formore ephemeral manifestations of social anxiety, forms which have beengrasped within the sociological imagination in terms of ‘moral panics’(Glasser, 1999). Typically these are more ephemeral forms of collectiveanxiety ‘whipped up’ by the mass media and by political elites. The effectonce 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 politicallymediated. What then of defences against such anxieties? We have alreadyconsidered how Klein sees these operating at the individual level but theywill also operate at the institutional and societal levels. At the institutionallevel, Menzies Lyth (1960) focused upon the way in which particular kindsof work, work such as nursing, created anxiety by reconnecting the adultworker with early childhood anxieties concerning sex and death. Heranalysis 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 pioneeringstudies (2002) a considerable body of work has now been developed whichlargely focuses upon the way in which public organizations deal with socialanxieties and other collective sentiments (see for example, Obholzer &Roberts, 1994). Much of this work focuses upon the impact of splittingprocesses and other mechanisms of defence on the internal life of welfareorganizations.

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 ofLipsky’s respondents and this was often linked to labelling processes(Menzies Lyth uses the term ‘categorization’). In a recent study on thehousing allocations process (Jeffers & Hoggett, 1998) a similar labellingprocess was found to be at work in terms of distinctions drawn between‘demanding’ applicants and others. Such categories strip users of publicservices of some of their humanity and many officials are acutely aware oftheir own involvement in such processes, processes which nevertheless helpto protect them against the ‘assaults on the ego which the structure of streetlevel work normally delivers’ (Lipsky, 1980: 152).




Citizens, governments and ambivalence

What, then, of societal defences against anxiety? As we have seen, to the extentthat we cannot individually and collectively contain anxieties we externalizethem into the other. Indefinable anxiety becomes a tangible fear, the dangerwithin becomes the danger without. It follows, that in the context of welfaresocieties, the mad, the bad, the sad, the old, the sick, the vulnerable, thefailures, and so on, receive not just our compassion but also our fear, contemptand hatred. This is the terrain of the ‘moral panics’ referred to earlier. To giverecent 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 andunthought-through policy interventions (often of a largely symbolic form sothat government can sustain the appearance of doing something) whichprofessionals in the field have to implement despite their reservations.

Citizens therefore project onto government all that they cannot containwithin themselves. It follows that part of the authority invested in govern-ment is citizens’ own disowned authority. Here is an example from researchI am presently undertaking.1 A youth worker who had dedicated over 20years of his life to work with young people on a poor public housing estatedescribes the process by which local residents became aware that there wasa drug problem in the area, an issue that he had been working on withoutsupport from local parents for several years. Speaking of his first meetingwith angry residents he noted,

and they came and first of all they shouted at me. And I had this strangemeeting 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 ofauthority, but to them, the only way they could say these things wasactually to be angry.

He continued,

I was hauled before a meeting of about 80 people, and they just sortof lashed into me as being this fucking middle class wanker who likedarts and didn’t fucking understand things and heroin users everywhereand I’d been the youth worker and, you know, what the hell was Idoing about it . . . It was very difficult those meetings, I had somebody




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, andI have had to go around your house several times’.

As a public official this man was aware that part of his role was to acceptthe angry projections of these local residents and to survive them withoutretaliation. This he did and he noted that sometimes angry residents wouldapproach him at the end of the meeting to ask him if he was alright. Andbecause he survived these attacks he gained their respect and from this basishe 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 beginsto reclaim its own authority, no longer seeing drug users and dealers assomebody else’s problem, somebody towards whom they could expresscallous indifference. To the extent that troubled children or adults are seenas someone ‘other’ to ourselves, part of the foundation underlying socialsolidarity is destroyed. As Baldwin (1990) noted, what fosters solidarity is acommon 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 eclipsedby a collusion between governments and citizens which says ‘they’ (i.e. thegovernment) must do something about this – child sexual abuse, the neglectof people with chronic mental health problems, the old and alone, thecontainment of uncontained children, etc. The systemic and relational dimen-sions of such social problems become obscured. Public officials get caughtup in the bad faith which surrounds such issues, a bad faith which, forinstance, wills the ends without willing the means.

So splitting processes also attack the actual patterns of interdependencywhich 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 isbecause of this ambivalence that the struggle to defend, let alone extend, thisform of government and citizenship has been so difficult.

To the extent that governments collude with the self-alienation of theircitizens they take on themselves a series of impossible tasks (such as theprotection 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 bynot confronting citizens with issues they would prefer not to think about




(e.g. citizens’ contempt for their own vulnerability, a contempt which fuelsa willingness to exploit or neglect vulnerable others, of which child or elderabuse is just one manifestation). As a consequence of such failures of politi-cal leadership (Alford, 1994) the hapless public official becomes thewhipping horse, the one who can be blamed for things that neither citizensnor governments will properly address.

To summarize, ambivalence is an inherent dimension of the socialrelations of welfare and, to the extent that this remains culturally unacceptedand unassimilated, we become alienated from the shadow side of our sharedsubjectivity. One of the functions of public bureaucracies is to ‘contain’ thesedisowned aspects of our subjectivity. This occurs literally and concretely inthe physical institutions that many children and elderly people end up in, andsymbolically and psychologically through the projected social anxieties thatbecome part of the emotional labour of health workers, teachers, probationofficers and other street-level bureaucrats.

The issue is: how are these things to be contained? So long as thiscontract of mutual indifference is maintained the potential exists for publicofficials to abuse the authority which is projected into them so that theweakness of the citizen becomes the power of government. According toBion, ‘the link between one mind and another that leads to destruction ofboth 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 bothparties requires a commitment to truth and therefore an acknowledgementby each party of that which they might otherwise disavow. The image of thevirtuous citizen faced with an indifferent or interfering government is asmuch a lie as the image of responsible and altruistic government. Only byrecognizing the bad within the good is it possible for an encounter which isrealistic 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 meansaccepting the dilemmas and paradoxes of the job whilst retaining a sense ofone’s own authority. In this way citizens can clear a path through their ownprojections 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, broadlyconceived to include all those whose job involves some degree of discretion




within the welfare state, to have to contain the unresolved (and at timessuppressed) value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Far from thepicture of the rule-bound bureaucrat who slavishly follows procedure, thepublic official lives out the contradictions of the complex and diverse societyin which s/he lives on a day-to-day basis and, as a consequence, is pulled thisway 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 humanvalues. Things just don’t fit together as we would like them to, values rubup against each other, the moral agent has to live with conflicts that cannoteasily be resolved and simply have to be lived with. You have to end updisappointing 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 correspondsto what Lipsky described as ‘the assaults on the ego which the structure ofstreet level work normally delivers’ (1980: 152).

There are two categories of dilemma which correspond to my twocharacterizations of government – as the embodiment of an inherentlyconflictual and an inherently alienated public. In the first, the public officialseeks 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 arein the terrain not just of pluralism but also of the impossibility of harmoniousreconciliation in which the agent is not exempt from the authority of theclaim they choose to neglect. As she puts it, such situations are characterizedby ‘pluralism, plus conflict, plus loss’ (Mendus, 2000: 117). For publicofficials it is loss which is experienced as failure. It is as if they internalizethe flaws and faults of reality and make them their own thereby taking onresponsibility 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 byprojecting it into Y the consequence is that Y is put in a ‘no win’ or ‘damnedif I do and damned if I don’t’ situation. Social workers, trapped between therights of the family and the needs of the child, know such situations only toowell.

In contrast, then, to the heroic view of many contemporary writers onmanagement (a group Du Gay, 2000, refers to as the ‘new charismatics’), aview which stresses change-embracing, go-for-it, visionary types, the view ofthe public official and manager offered here is in the best traditions oftragedy. The merit of such a view is that it deals with reality rather than




make-believe. It is not pessimistic. If only we could abandon the chimericalpursuit of ‘excellence’ or ‘total quality’ we could focus our energies oncreating systems of welfare and governance which were ‘good enough’(Williams, 2000) – something we are presently far from achieving, either inBritain or elsewhere.

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

I have seen ethical responsibility as being closely associated with thepublic service ethos. There is a persistent argument that accompanyingthe role of the public services manager are duties of care about factsand proper process, duties of balance in argument, and duties ofbalance in advice. I have understood in my working life that themanager gives expression to the ethos through dealing with people interms of care, diligence, courtesy and integrity. The public service ethosis 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, organizationsof the public sphere perform a number of functions which link them directlyto the ethical and emotional lives of citizens. This adds to their complexityas unique moral institutions where questions of technical efficacy (‘whatworks’) can be integrated with value questions. It follows that to work as amanager, 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 powerfulhold on the imagination of consultants working within the Group Relationstradition which emerged from the work of the Tavistock Insititute in the1950s. Yet the concept draws strongly upon classical functionalist approachesto systems theory which have been abandoned long ago in organizationalresearch. A functionalist perspective conceives of any particular system ashaving 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 into the dominant definition of what a particular organization is all about, adefinition which is the outcome of particular relations of power.




As the first section of this article argued, this is particularly true forpublic organizations, whether they are housing associations, children’shomes or primary care teams. Anyone who spends even a short time in suchorganizations cannot but be struck by the different views of the aims of theorganization. It’s not just that the views of professionals will often differ tothose of managers, service users and their advocates, nor even that manydifferences 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) constantlychange their views as well. Within the public sphere definitions of purposeare constantly and necessarily contested, and, as Obholzer (2003) hasrecently suggested, it therefore makes more sense to speak of the contestedprimary task. Indeed, referring back to the first part of this article, it makesmore sense to ask the members of a team or organization what are theprimary dilemmas that they face and how can they negotiate a way forwardthrough 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 seriouslythan if we fall back on some simple (and value loaded) idea that, forexample, the primary task of the hospital is to care for the patients withinits walls. Such simple nostrums actually demean the complexity of the tasksfacing 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 suchorganizations questions of value are primary. I disagree strongly with theview, expressed recently for example by Chapman (2003), that the primarytask is ‘relatively value-free’. In the face of this complexity the notion of ‘aprimary task’ can seem not only simplistic but potentially destructive. Indeed,as I’ve suggested in the discussion of ambivalence in the second part of thisarticle, one of the roles of public organizations sometimes is to take onimpossible tasks. Contrary to the belief that the primary task is the task theorganization must perform if the organization is to survive, if we follow thelogic of the ‘impossible task’ we begin to realize that it is in the nature ofsome 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 senseof inner security.

Organizational survival and organizational development

The concept of primary task can also lead us to a dangerous blurring of thedistinction, crucial to human service organizations, between survival anddevelopment (Armstrong, 1999). Within the private sector the market is the




ultimate arbitrator of organizational survival, if there is no market for anorganization’s product then it will not survive even if its product hasconsiderable value to society. Conversely, if there is a market for the productthen the organization will survive even if that product, like tobacco or junkfood, is destructive of value in society. The same does not hold for publicorganizations, they only have legitimacy to the extent that what they do haspublic value. Within the public sector, therefore, it is not organizationalsurvival per se that matters, it is the survival of the organization’s publicvalue that counts. This was indicated clearly in recent research undertakenby Steele and her colleagues. They found that whereas private sectormanagers 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 purposewhich is the basis for their commitment and if that sense of wider purposeis destroyed then their commitment is undermined no matter how successfultheir organization (hospital, school, etc.) is in business terms.

For public organizations the crucial question is not what it must do tosurvive but what it must do to survive with value, that is, as a place whichcan contribute to the development of the ethical and moral capacities of thecommunities that it serves. When an organization’s capacity for developmentis 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 workersbecoming de-moralized, that is, of losing a sense of value. These are the stakesthat 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 leastthe way in which it disempowered the recipients of its services andprogrammes. 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, forexample, the multidimensionality of the idea of ‘the patient’ with the uni-dimensional concept of ‘the consumer’, a ‘part-object’ to the institution asArmstrong (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 rootof the crises which have affected many organizations in the public sphereover the last decade can be described as the abandonment of developmentfor survival or short-term performativity, something experienced by manystaff in terms of the feeling that their organization no longer stands for thevalues 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. Theconcept 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




development to occur it must have a sense of purpose. I have in mind anagreement which is temporary and understood as such by all parties whosubscribe to it. This purpose is necessarily ambiguous otherwise agreementcould never be reached. The point is that parties accept this ambiguity orlack of consistency for it is this which provides each with the possibility ofinfusing the organization’s purpose with personal meaning and it is thiswhich provides the creative space for further development and continuingdialogue, a theme picked up in Obholzer’s ‘Afterword’ to The unconsciousat work (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). Such temporary definitions of purposeare therefore fictions (Hoggett, 2000) which serve to bind the group togetherand contain differences without crushing them. Such fictions are necessaryillusions 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 fororganizations 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 tovalues by bedecking themselves with Mission Statements, Chartermarks,Investors in People awards and so on. In this way values themselves becomereduced 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 complexpublic organizations then it follows that consultants to human serviceorganizations cannot easily make judgements about behaviour which is ‘off-task’ and irrational in some way. Moreover, there is a danger thatirrationality is only seen in its negative and destructive guise. Bion’s ‘basicassumptions’ 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 thedestructive ones. What can be observed and confronted are those situationsin which members of an organization behave in ways which counter theorganization’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’spsyche? How does the consultant get a sense of ‘what’s going on here?’ Some-times the consultant learns from what people say, perhaps particularly fromthose whose powerlessness has until now denied them a voice with which to




speak. But words are fickle things designed, as Bion noted, as much for thepurpose of dissimulation as communication. Thus the usefulness of imageryand many consultants nowadays use imagery (pictures, sculptures, dreams,etc.) and the process of free-associating to imagery as a means of takingorganizational participants beyond discourse. The consultant can also resortto her own experience of the emotional life of the group or organization. Asan outsider, the consultant dips into the emotional medium of the organiz-ation, this is a medium in which organizational participants are so immersedthat they have almost no cognizance of its existence. As Armstrong (2004)notes, a crucial aspect of this medium is what might be called the ‘primaryprocess’ 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 thismedium the consultant must be able to use the equivalent of the counter-trans-ference and become aware of the feelings and sensations which they becomerecipients of as they work with the group or organization.

But openness to such experience is only part of the story, sense mustthen 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 somuch upon their subjective experience and their own interpretation of thisthat 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 processof 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 oforganizational research, particularly those inspired by feminist method-ologies, give emphasis to interactive approaches to sense-making whichrecognize the plurality of meanings which, within complex organizations, ashared 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 wenegotiate and seek formulation for the emotional experiences we register.’The consultant therefore seeks to engender dialogues in which differentmeanings 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 willsoon be submerged.

A double reflexivity

Effective consultancy requires a double reflexivity, to one’s own emotionalexperience of the collective organizational unconscious and to the nature of




one’s agency within the dynamic field of forces at play in any organizationalsetting. Whilst mainstream social science is conversant with the latter it isstill largely ignorant of the former. If the Group Relations perspective is toemerge from the margins into the mainstream it must begin to demonstratea much stronger appreciation of the interpenetration of the realm of theemotions and unconscious and the realm of power and politics.

To summarize, for public organizations the search for an organization’sprimary task is both misleading and fruitless. Such organizations havemultiple tasks which are often in contradiction; they are certainly beset byconflicting notions of what they should be doing and, far from task achieve-ment being necessary for survival, for some organizations, paradoxically, itis 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 organizationspresents a set of challenges which are specific to the public nature of suchorganizations. Yet dominant models of work, leadership, management andconsulting draw upon perspectives and experiences developed within for-profit organizations. Organizations are not all the same. Within the publicsphere working life is akin to a dilemmatic space in which leaders need todraw upon tragic rather than heroic models of agency and consultants needto 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 Centrefor Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England,Bristol.He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and has a longstanding interest inthe 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 thepolitics of community life for funders such as the ESRC, the Home Officeand the European Foundation. His books include Partisans in an uncertainworld (Free Association Books, 1992) and Emotional life and the politics ofwelfare (Macmillan, 2000).[E-mail: [email protected]]



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