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This book is interesting in many ways. In my view it opens up possibilities for mutual inspiration and exchange between the psychosocial movement in the UK and psychoanalytically inspired organisation studies in a wider sense. The psychosocial movement in the UK waves the political/critical flag intensely and seems to prefer to some extent Lacan before Klein and discourse theory before open systems theory.
A central point of attention is the concept of affect and the so-called “affective turn”. The turn to affect comes after, or follows in some way, the “linguistic turn” that has been one aspect of the post-structuralist movement:
The concept of affect has, however, been used in a number of ways within psychosocial studies. What scholars share is the view that affect can help us
Page 286to understand the ways in which subjects relate to influential norms and discourses along with the idea that affect is something that exists between bodies neither individual nor social. In this way, affect radically problematizes the traditional inside out dichotomy in relation to the subject. (p. 21)
From a psychodynamic point of view this turn to affect is very welcome even if the definitions are vague and one could say more mysterious than precise. It is typical for this movement to state negative definitions, to tell what something is not: “neither individual nor social”. Part of the way affect is conceptualised here is in line with the idea that dreams can be seen as something that moves around between people, but can only be expressed through a single individual, similar to the thinking process in social dreaming (Lawrence, 2005). It is also in accordance with the thinking around the Australian Socioanalysis Journal's concept “the associative unconscious” and the group analytic social-unconscious. One could also mention David Armstrong's paper from 2000 “Emotions in organizations. Disturbance or intelligence.” (Armstrong, 2005), where a way to deal with emotions in organisations as “in