ISPSO AM 2024 Conference

Keynote - Dr. Stan Gold
THE STERILE ORGANISATION
Friday 5 July 2024
11.00am-12.15pm EEST

Building on Freud's original conception that the conflict was between the wish for instinctive freedom and the contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression, British Philosopher Sir Isiah Berlin, in his book 'Four Essays on Liberty' {i969), cast the conflict in terms of positive and negative Liberty or Freedom.
A minimal understanding of these basic processes, active in all societal groups, may be helpful in taking further our understanding of our own.
All Organizations should be open to discovery and transformation by encountering reality. We must accept the multi-dimensional and indeterminate nature of reality, truth not only seen as hypothetical, but contingent upon the stance of the agent seeking it. However, most organisations have the capacity to broaden the scope of their own structure to include a regular scrutiny of their institutional life, including its conflicts.
Intra-organizational change may, at times, become necessary and inevitable. The question is how may this be effected without altering meaning and without undermining motivation for those who have, often as pioneers, developed and sustained the Organization? The obvious dangers include disaffection and economic or status loss and the disillusionment that accompanies them. The creative potential of the Organization may then be replaced by internal competitiveness, mutual contempt and envy, the work group replaced by less productive group processes, (1), and the results sterility. The Sterile Organization, scientifically, politically, organizationally, risking nothing produces nothing of value. If the only remedy is to update the question of meaning to the pinnacle of a cause, an ideology, then the situation becomes a battle to defend or destroy the focus. In such circumstances it is easy to become confused as to whether one is inspired or misled and a cause, an ideology, can like a boa constrictor, swallow a whole life or a previoosly viable Organization, in a single gulp.
What about respect and equality and their antitheses jealousy and envy? It may be that envy is the disease of poverty (Main 1975). Democracy, even in its appropriate political applications may substantially become a mechanism for defending against envy. That is, the idea that not only do we have equal rights, but also, we are all the same. In acceding to the demands which allow us to belong to a civilized society, we may give up our basically instinctual wishes. This however, is contingent upon others also being deprived of them. This move to equality, the avowed ethic of equal opportunity, may tend only to produce at best, a form of pathological democracy, and at worst a lack of real meaning and motivation. Sterility.