The Psychodynamics of Toxic Organizations: Applied Poems, Stories and Analysis

Applied poetry is a powerful tool for understanding workplace experience, especially in toxic organizations. It evokes senses, metaphors, and images that conventional social science narratives cannot articulate. By combining applied poetry with complementary psychodynamic theories, this book offers a unique and valuable way of accessing workplace experience and understanding lives at work. It widens and deepens the scope of organizational research, providing a new contribution to organizational studies, leadership, and consulting efforts.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 282 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Understanding the experience at work, particularly in toxic organizations, is a multifaceted endeavor that requires the engagement of all senses. Applied poetry holds its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. At its finest, poetry can encapsulate complex ideas and emotions in relatively few words, metaphors, and images, surpassing the length and complexity of conventional social science narratives. Where poetry often leaves room for the listener or reader's imagination to fill in the gaps, narrative seeks to provide explicit explanations, elaborations, and completeness. Where poetry offers a broad mental canvas for the listener or reader to interpret and personalize, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories provide a unique and valuable lens through which to explore workplace experience, offering insights into the lives of individuals within these environments.

Incorporating complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, serves as a means of accounting for the findings and experiences encountered, particularly in understanding the unconscious motivations and resonances evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers. These transferences from past life experiences into the present are the critical data upon which we work in the realm of psychoanalysis. These data constitute the essence of psychoanalysis. This book expands and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other scholars, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience, and the stories behind the poetry, alongside the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, constitutes a novel and distinct contribution to the field of organizational studies.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367507435