This PDW aims to develop participants' capacity to use the systems psychodynamic approach in their research. After several decades at the margins of organization studies, this scholarly approach is resurging. Unsettling changes in the relations between individuals and institutions, and the reported emergence of a 'new world of work,' seem to have made the systems psychodynamic approach useful again, perhaps more useful than ever. Using it to cast light on the unconscious dimensions of novel or problematic features of organizations, organizing, and the organized, scholars have published their work in top American and European journals (e.g. Anicich, 2022; Ashforth & Reingen, 2014; Fotaki, 2013; Fotaki & Hyde, 2015; Handy & Rowlands, 2017; Kahn, 2022; Kenny, 2010; Kenny et al., 2020; Maitlis, 2022; Padavic et al., 2020; Petriglieri & Peshkam, 2022; Petriglieri et al., 2018, 2019; Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2020; Prasad, 2014; Stein, 2011, 2013, 2021; Vince, 2019). We hope to help many others do the same.
Part 1: The workshop will begin with a keynote and a panel open to all Academy attendees. These will explore why and when this approach is valuable, and how leading scholars employ it in their work.
Part 2: In this part, which requires pre-registration, we will work with participants in small groups, helping them apply the approach in their current research. Specifically, facilitators will help participants interrogate the systemic unconscious dynamics that may be at play in the planning, fieldwork, data analysis, and / or writing up of a specific research project.
To register for part 2, please email a brief (up to 500 word) summary of a qualitative research project that you are currently invested in, or that you wish to pursue, that you suspect has some unconscious dimensions to it, to Jennifer.petriglieri@insead.edu. These summaries will orient the facilitators and other participants to the experience or topic which the attendee wants help to work on. Some pointers for your summary: 1. Describe, in no more than a sentence or two, a project you are doing, or would like to do, that you believe could be enriched by addressing unconscious elements. 2. Describe, if you can, what you think those unconscious dimensions are. For example: a. What might be happening outside of people's conscious awareness that, if you were able to have access to it, would give you greater insight into the phenomenon you are studying? b. What needs, fears, desires, or anxieties do you think people might be experiencing that are too disturbing for them to acknowledge-even to themselves? c. What processes, at the group or organizational level, might be covertly driving the phenomenon you are interested in-that is, operating beneath the surface, without people being consciously aware of them? 3. Consider any emotional reactions you have noticed in yourself as you have been working on this project. How might they inform the study you are doing?
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Sally Maitlis
Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership
Said Business School,
Oxford University
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