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This book is written as a kind of position paper by Seth Allcorn, a very experienced consultant, manager, and academic in the field of organizational development and change. He describes it as having its ‘origins in the school of hard knocks’ (p. vii) and presents twenty-five years' worth of insights that consistently apply to most organizations, managers, employees, and organizational consultations. His viewpoint throughout is informed by psychoanalytic theory.
The book has a ‘compound perspective’, like the compound eye of a fly, composed of different perspectives on organizational dynamics. After an introduction, there are twelve chapters, each of which introduces a particular perspective. Examples are ‘Organizational resistance to change’, ‘Leadership pathology’, ‘Cultures of organizational violence’ and ‘Mysticism in the workplace’. These chapters are followed by a chapter that pulls them together in the form of a practical framework for organizational diagnosis and intervention. The last chapter, ‘The final analysis: the compound eye's world view’, attempts to summarize ‘why our encounter with the workplace may be deficient, frustrating or even threatening’ (p. 227). Allcorn makes it clear that what he hopes to achieve by writing the book is to help readers understand and work with the complexity of humanity in the workplace.
This book will be an enjoyable and thought-provoking read for students of organizational development who are looking for a consistently applied psychoanalytic framework of thinking to most aspects of organizational life. It will be best suited to those who are already familiar with this approach, as some of the theory is too complex for the average reader and there are not enough examples of how the thinking can be applied to organizational life. Therefore, the book is