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Poweract and Organizational Work: Gérard Mendel's Socio-psychoanalysis

Toulouse Business School 20, boulevard Lascrosses BP7010 31068 Toulouse, Cedex 7 France., g.arnaud{at}esc-toulouse.fr

One of the principal merits of Gérard Mendel's socio-psychoanalysis lies in the fact that it strives to understand how organizational reality influences individual psychic reality, including in its unconscious dimension. A collective practice, it aims to study how actors, in the framework of their daily professional activity, and organized into specific groups (homogeneous in terms of profession), reflect by themselves on the forces that impact their personality. The working hypothesis of socio-psychoanalysis is that the hold of organizations on individuals is such that the latter have very little power over their acts of work; whence the negative psychological effects with their harmful socio-economic consequences. For Mendel, it seems necessary to intervene right from the beginning of the socio-psychoanalytic process in the dimension of the organization of work. The intervention methodology adopted is that of an institutional system whose function is to counter, as much as possible, the pathogenic effects of the organization of work by neutralizing the hierarchical, technical, social and organizational divisions that run through it, in order to trigger a `movement of appropriation of the act' (poweract). Thus, when the conditions are in place for individuals to exercise real power over their productive acts, then pleasure, creativity, motivation, participation and a sense of responsibility may all develop in them. In so doing, the system endeavours not only to act on the concrete reality of work, but also to enable certain psychosocial changes in the personality.

Key Words: power • organizational psychodynamics • psychoanalysis • intervention

Organization Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, 409-428 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840607076010


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