Conflict, Ambivalence, and The Contested Purpose of Public Organizations

Human Relations
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Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

Paul Hoggett
Human Relations 2006; 59; 175
DOI: 10.1177/0018726706062731
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2006 The Tavistock Institute. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Human Relations
DOI: 10.1177/0018726706062731
Volume 59(2): 175194
Copyright 2006
The Tavistock Institute
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested

purpose of public organizations
Paul Hoggett
A B S T R AC T
This article argues that public organizations are inherently more

complex than private ones. Their complexity derives from two
sources. The public sphere is the site for the continuous contestation of public purposes and this means that questions regarding
values and policies saturate all public organizations, particularly at the
point of delivery. Second, because government partly acts as the
receptacle for the alienated subjectivity of citizens, public organizations have to contain much of what is disowned by the society in
which they are situated. It follows that the fate of the public official,
sometimes referred to as the street-level bureaucrat, is to have to
contain the unresolved (and often partially suppressed) value
conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Such a perspective has
implications for all of those who, in their different roles, seek to bring
about change or development in public organizations. Psychoanalytic
approaches to organizational consultation have not adequately
understood the contested nature of public organizations and some
key aspects of this approach, such as the concept of the organizations primary task, need to be reconsidered.
K E Y WO R D S
ambivalence primary task social anxieties value pluralism
Introduction
The question whether education, health, transport, energy and other utilities
and services are best delivered by the public or the private sector is a debate
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Human Relations 59(2)
which has raged for over two decades now. Much of this debate has necessarily been couched in terms of quality and efficiency but this has tended to
obscure the dual character of the public sector, not just as a means of delivery
but also as an element of societal self-governance. This article focuses upon
the nature of the work of public service professionals and the organizations
to which they belong. I will argue that it is the dual character of public
organizations, including all those not-for-profit and quasi-autonomous
organizations which rely heavily or totally upon public funding, which
provides them with their distinctive and complex nature. In particular, I will
argue that this complexity derives from two sources which are surprisingly
little discussed within the disciplines of public management and administration. First, there is the complexity of governance within pluralist societies
in which differences of culture, faith, lifestyle and values proliferate, differences which place public organizations at the intersection of conflicting needs
and alternative definitions of the common good. Second, in addition to these
reality based conflicts, it is the task of government to have to deal with the
projections of its citizens. This means that public organizations are also
engaged in the management of social anxieties and other collective sentiments which are partly conscious and partly unconscious. These anxieties
ultimately express concerns about the survival of oneself, ones family or
ones group. Understanding these two sources of complexity enables us to
grasp the different nature of the challenges facing managers, professionals,
consultants and change agents working in the public sector as opposed to
the private sector.
The value of bureaucracy

It has become fashionable to think of bureaucracy as an outmoded, inflexible, inefficient and unresponsive form of organization rather than the
unique and necessary form that public organizations must assume given
their complexity. Consequently the neoliberal critique of bureaucracy which
has been responsible for waves of privatization and marketization in
Western Europe, and the enfeebling of government capabilities in many
developing and former Soviet bloc societies, has thrown the baby out with
the bathwater. The original Weberian meaning of bureaucracy, as a particular (and therefore unique) kind of moral institution, has become largely lost
(Du Gay, 2000, 2005). I want to build upon some of Du Gays arguments
about public bureaucracys particular purpose what is it about the requirements for effective government in contemporary society that make
bureaucracy necessary?

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations
My focus in this article is the public sphere of government. But this

immediately gets us into definitional problems because even within western
democracies the nature of this sphere differs. Moreover as the boundaries
between public, private and what is variously referred to as community,
associational or social sectors become increasingly blurred the very notion
of government itself gives way to the more fashionable concept of governance. There is no easy way of bringing conceptual clarity to this field the
public spheres of government in Stockholm and Miami are dramatically
different. Suffice it is to say that my primary focus here is upon the working
lives of those professionals and officials who are employed by organizations
having primarily a public purpose so this does not include all teachers or
all nurses, not even in Sweden.
I wish to argue that such organizations have, among other things, two
unique characteristics. They are the site for the continuous contestation of
such public purposes and a receptacle for containing social anxieties. Such
characteristics, and there are others such as social regulation which are
equally important although not the focus of this article, serve to remind us
that government, and the public sphere which supports it, is as much a site
for the enactment of particular kinds of social relations as it is a site for the
delivery of goods and services. To reduce it only to the latter is to commodify such relationships, to strip them of their moral and ethical meaning and
potential, meaning which is inherent to the very concept of citizen but
marginal to the concept of consumer.
Neoliberalism as a radical market discourse first emerged strongly
within the Thatcher/Reagan era and has spearheaded programmes for the
modernization of government which have involved denationalization,
contracting out and other forms of marketization, the introduction of forms
of internal competition and so on (Hood, 1991; Le Grand & Bartlett, 1993;
Kikert, 1995). Seen from this perspective, public bureaucracy as a particular
and necessary form of organization with its own unique purposes, has no
place. Bureaucracies (whether public or private) are seen simply as outmoded
and inefficient ways of organizing things. In contrast I will argue that far
from being a problem, public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitome
of what Weber called substantive rationality (where ethical, aesthetic and
spiritual considerations are not split off from technical ones) rather than
instrumental rationality. As such it is perhaps the one place where questions
of technique (what works) and questions of value stand a chance of being
integrated.
In reality there are many kinds of public bureaucracies, some are highly
decentralized and some involve extended forms of citizen participation. What
they have in common is that they are funded primarily out of public revenues

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and governed according to publicly agreed policies. This constitutes their

being as, in Webers terms, a particular kind of moral institution in which
principles of impartiality and fairness are paramount. But, as we shall see,
what constitutes impartiality and what constitutes fairness is always and
necessarily publicly contested.
Bureaucracy as contested space

Many aspects of the discourse of management for instance, such terms as
management by objectives, strategic goals, primary task, organizational
mission portray a view of the organization which is relatively consensual.
In contrast, it is proposed here that we consider that public organizations
are intimately concerned with the governance of societies in which value
conflicts are inherent and irresolvable. Take, for example, liberty, equality
and fraternity, the three guiding principles of western democracies since the
storming of the Bastille. As MacIntyre (1985) points out, these values are
incommensurable; for example, before long, as you push for equality you
rub up against liberty (particularly economic freedom). Or take the principle
of universalism, the fair and impartial treatment of all, a key principle of the
Enlightenment as far back as Kant. We realize now that the impartial treatment of individuals may happily accompany discrimination towards groups
(Williams, 1989) as when, for example, a universal education service, by
excluding some kinds of denominational school, denies Muslim children the
education they need.
The tension between universalism and particularism is inherent and
irresolvable (Thompson & Hoggett, 1996) but, as such, it is just one instance
of the conflictual nature of public purpose. Radical pluralists argue that we
live in an increasingly diverse society and that much of this diversity is incommensurable. Chantal Mouffe (1993) insists that politics in a modern democracy must accept division and conflict as unavoidable, and the reconciliation
of rival claims and conflicting interests can only be partial and provisional
(p. 113).
To return to my argument, the commitment to universalism as
embodied in the ethic of impartiality cannot be sustained given the strength
of particularisms in an increasingly plural society. The problem for the public
official is precisely that s/he must be both a universalist and a particularist
at the same time. For a similar reason there are other value contradictions
which the public official is required to enact every day. For example, one
which has been articulated in recent years concerns the tension between an
ethic of care and an ethic of justice (Mendus, 2000). On the one hand a

compassionate concern for the individual and his or her plight, and on the
other a realization that whatever the merits of this particular case the public
official also has a responsibility towards all those potentially equally worthy
cases whose claims, because not immediately and physically present, can only
be brought to mind abstractly.
Conflict, impassioned and ongoing, is a vital dimension of public life.
But, and this is crucial for our thinking about public bureaucracies, it also
follows that the public sphere (which includes the organized apparatus of
government) is the necessary embodiment of such conflictual purposes. And
whilst different political projects emphasize different values, those that they
suppress inevitably return to haunt the political system, typically returning
at the level at which policy is implemented. As Lipsky noted, a typical mechanism for legislative conflict resolution is to pass on intractable conflicts for
resolution (or continued irresolution) at the administrative level (Lipsky,
1980: 41). As a consequence it is often at the level of operations that unresolved value conflicts are most sharply enacted, public officials and local
representatives finding themselves living out rather than acting upon the
contradictions of the complex and diverse society in which they live.
Lipsky uses the term street level bureaucrat to refer to the army of
public officials police officers, teachers, nurses, health inspectors, benefit
administrators, magistrates, planning officers, etc. whose task it is to
operate in this environment. At the heart of their work is the exercise of
judgement and the use of discretion in the application of policies to particular cases, or the implementation of policies where there are no precedents,
or the operationalization of rule-governed systems in full knowledge that no
system can ever provide guidance for every eventuality. Thus, in contrast to
the ideal of impartiality, in reality there is often considerable disagreement
about what street level bureaucrats should primarily do (Lipsky, 1980: 46).
Thus the very concept of impartiality is subject to contestation. In the
United Kingdom at this very moment there is a heated debate about whether
students from state schools wishing to enter university should be asked to
achieve the same entry grades as students from fee-paying private schools.
In the past the two groups were treated in the same way. Was this impartiality or discrimination? Because, as Lipsky noted, the potential demand for
free public goods is always potentially unlimited, public professionals are
nearly always involved in rationing decisions based upon the publicly agreed
policies of the time. A university admissions tutor may disagree with the
policies s/he must implement but it is part of the ethos of the office that the
decisions that are made should be unaffected by personal ties, inducements
or their own political beliefs. In reality, as we have seen, this is impossible
to do without the exercise of discretion and the use of individual judgement.

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It is no wonder then that Lipsky entitled his formative study Street-level

bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service.
Government and social anxiety

The idea that institutions such as the health or education service have an
unconscious or implicit purpose has been a tenet of psychoanalytically
informed perspectives on organizational life for over 40 years. Central to this
view is the idea that such institutions, besides performing their ostensible
functions (health care, education, etc.) also deal constantly with fundamental
human anxieties (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). I do not feel that public institutions are unique in being a receptacle for unconscious aspects of citizens
emotional lives, nor that anxiety is the only affect involved. Recently, for
example, writers have drawn attention to the impact of envy (Stein, 1997)
and hope (Cummins, 2002). However, I do feel that such institutions, and
the apparatus of government as a whole, play a vital role in containing some
of the troubling feelings which characterize citizens lives and that anxiety
seems to be the most powerful of these. But the concept of social anxiety
remains largely untheorized and this is a great shame as, for instance, it
means that the systemic and psychoanalytic way of thinking which deploys
this kind of concept has not been adopted by researchers or policy-makers
in the broader field of public or social policy. So, why is anxiety such a
powerful affect? To answer this question we need to consider three different
dimensions of anxiety ontological, cultural/historical and contingent.
At the ontological level there are good grounds to believe that anxiety
is a fundamental aspect of our being. In their different ways Existentialism
and Psychoanalysis have given anxiety this status, and within psychoanalysis
Kleinian thought gives it a particularly privileged position by linking it to our
fear of our own destructiveness. Here Klein draws a distinction between
psychotic anxiety and depressive anxiety (Klein, 1948, 1952). Psychotic
anxiety refers to the experience of breakdown and disintegration in which the
survival of the psyche is at stake. Whilst Kleins focus is upon the individual,
such survival anxiety can also be experienced by the group at times of organizational or social crisis (Lawrence & Armstrong, 1998). Depressive anxiety,
on the other hand, refers to destructive attacks towards those on whom we
depend, at first towards those (typically the mother) who nurture us and who
inevitably frustrate and fail us. In this sense it resonates with Freuds observations on the ambivalent role of guilt in the civilizing process (Freud, 1930).
Jaques (1953) was the first to apply Kleins work to the study of
organizations. For Jaques anxiety was inherent to group life, a means by

which group members were unconsciously able to place part of their deep
inner lives outside themselves. In this way Jaques drew attention to the role
that the group (and, by implication, organizations, communities and governments) played in providing a receptacle for anxieties that individuals were
unable to contain within themselves a kind of displacement of affect from
the internal to the external world. It will be remembered that Freud once
spoke of the great reservoir of libido it could be useful to think, in a
similar way, of a great reservoir of anxiety that society then gets to work
upon.
Klein also indicates the way in which this primitive and formative
anxiety is first dealt with by the infant so that the danger within becomes a
danger without; in this way a nameless dread becomes a tangible fear. Fear
fixes something which otherwise is free-floating, now it can be given a name,
now it has an object (Hoggett, 2000). So Klein develops a picture of the
human condition in which we escape from internal anxieties by projecting
them into external figures. In this way we become alienated from ourselves
and the emerging personality becomes fractured (subject to splitting) and
lacking in integration. This process can be mitigated if the individual acquires
the internal resources to contain the worst of her/his own anxiety. The
strength of the individuals life force and loving impulses are important here,
as is the existence of what Winnicott called a facilitating environment
(Winnicott, 1965), an environment which includes the institutions of both
the private (i.e. family) and public (i.e. civil society and government) spheres.
As this capacity to tolerate anxiety is built up so the individual is able to
reintegrate into the personality what had been previously alienated (Steiner,
1996). But the process is never complete and the human subject never
becomes unitary or whole, there is always a reservoir of anxiety ready to
latch onto new objects of fear.
The nature of these fears however will be culturally and historically
relative. For example, Christopher Lash (1978) and others have made a
persuasive case that western type democracies such as Britain and the USA
are narcissistic cultures which are in flight from dependency and the acceptance of human limits. Death, ageing, physical degeneration and incapacity,
madness, helplessness and loneliness confront us as incomprehensible forces
but the difficulty our culture has in facing these facts of life is not one that
all societies have faced at all times. Indeed, the social arrangements of any
given society produce their own difficulties as Sennett has recently noted with
regard to fear of failure (Sennett, 1998). Some have argued that anxiety is
inherent to the project of modernity itself, a project which frees people from
the anchorings of tradition, family and community and thereby forces upon
them ultimate responsibility for the choices they make (Bauman, 1993). This

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links to the idea, first put forward by Raymond Williams, that whole eras or
epochs, such as the period between the two world wars, may be characterized by particular structures of feeling (Williams, 1977).
So far we have considered anxiety as something both inherent to our
being and a cultural product, but this reservoir also provides the basis for
more ephemeral manifestations of social anxiety, forms which have been
grasped within the sociological imagination in terms of moral panics
(Glasser, 1999). Typically these are more ephemeral forms of collective
anxiety whipped up by the mass media and by political elites. The effect
once more is to give something indefinable and intangible a specific object
paedophiles, refugees, and so on.
Social anxiety therefore refers both to those relatively abiding and
more contingent fears which are either culturally embedded or politically
mediated. What then of defences against such anxieties? We have already
considered how Klein sees these operating at the individual level but they
will also operate at the institutional and societal levels. At the institutional
level, Menzies Lyth (1960) focused upon the way in which particular kinds
of work, work such as nursing, created anxiety by reconnecting the adult
worker with early childhood anxieties concerning sex and death. Her
analysis of the organization of nursing then explored the social defences
against anxiety which found expression in the structure and culture of the
teaching hospital that she examined. Following Menzies Lyths pioneering
studies (2002) a considerable body of work has now been developed which
largely focuses upon the way in which public organizations deal with social
anxieties and other collective sentiments (see for example, Obholzer &
Roberts, 1994). Much of this work focuses upon the impact of splitting
processes and other mechanisms of defence on the internal life of welfare
organizations.
Several of the social defence mechanisms that Menzies Lyth outlined
find an echo in Lipskys work on street level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980).
Distancing and depersonalization, for example, were also used by many of
Lipskys respondents and this was often linked to labelling processes
(Menzies Lyth uses the term categorization). In a recent study on the
housing allocations process (Jeffers & Hoggett, 1998) a similar labelling
process was found to be at work in terms of distinctions drawn between
demanding applicants and others. Such categories strip users of public
services of some of their humanity and many officials are acutely aware of
their own involvement in such processes, processes which nevertheless help
to protect them against the assaults on the ego which the structure of street
level work normally delivers (Lipsky, 1980: 152).

Citizens, governments and ambivalence

What, then, of societal defences against anxiety? As we have seen, to the extent
that we cannot individually and collectively contain anxieties we externalize
them into the other. Indefinable anxiety becomes a tangible fear, the danger
within becomes the danger without. It follows, that in the context of welfare
societies, the mad, the bad, the sad, the old, the sick, the vulnerable, the
failures, and so on, receive not just our compassion but also our fear, contempt
and hatred. This is the terrain of the moral panics referred to earlier. To give
recent examples from the UK, these have included sudden and intense collective fears about schizophrenic killers at loose beyond the control of psychiatric services, unruly young children who terrorize housing estates and
epidemics of depression in teenagers. Typically these panics lead to sudden and
unthought-through policy interventions (often of a largely symbolic form so
that government can sustain the appearance of doing something) which
professionals in the field have to implement despite their reservations.
Citizens therefore project onto government all that they cannot contain
within themselves. It follows that part of the authority invested in government is citizens own disowned authority. Here is an example from research
I am presently undertaking.1 A youth worker who had dedicated over 20
years of his life to work with young people on a poor public housing estate
describes the process by which local residents became aware that there was
a drug problem in the area, an issue that he had been working on without
support from local parents for several years. Speaking of his first meeting
with angry residents he noted,
and they came and first of all they shouted at me. And I had this strange
meeting with them, about 15 women, where they were all very angry
. . . and it just sort of taught me how just people have to be angry
because, I mean I dont see myself as a particularly powerful figure of
authority, but to them, the only way they could say these things was
actually to be angry.
He continued,
I was hauled before a meeting of about 80 people, and they just sort
of lashed into me as being this fucking middle class wanker who liked
arts and didnt fucking understand things and heroin users everywhere
and Id been the youth worker and, you know, what the hell was I
doing about it . . . It was very difficult those meetings, I had somebody

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standing up and shouting at me about how appalling I was with kids,

and her kids were the two most difficult kids we had here at the time,
and I couldnt say But . . . these two have been doing these things, and
I have had to go around your house several times.
As a public official this man was aware that part of his role was to accept
the angry projections of these local residents and to survive them without
retaliation. This he did and he noted that sometimes angry residents would
approach him at the end of the meeting to ask him if he was alright. And
because he survived these attacks he gained their respect and from this basis
he was able to work with local people to help them set up a range of initiatives to tackle the problem one of his most angry critics is now one of his
most trusted members of staff.
Here then we can see the process whereby a local community begins
to reclaim its own authority, no longer seeing drug users and dealers as
somebody elses problem, somebody towards whom they could express
callous indifference. To the extent that troubled children or adults are seen
as someone other to ourselves, part of the foundation underlying social
solidarity is destroyed. As Baldwin (1990) noted, what fosters solidarity is a
common experience of vulnerability, a sense of community is encouraged,
most simply, in the face of universally shared risk (p. 34). In contrast, in the
UK at least, for several decades this notion of shared fate has been eclipsed
by a collusion between governments and citizens which says they (i.e. the
government) must do something about this child sexual abuse, the neglect
of people with chronic mental health problems, the old and alone, the
containment of uncontained children, etc. The systemic and relational dimensions of such social problems become obscured. Public officials get caught
up in the bad faith which surrounds such issues, a bad faith which, for
instance, wills the ends without willing the means.
So splitting processes also attack the actual patterns of interdependency
which constitute a welfare society splitting self as funder of public services
(taxpayer) from self as user of these services; self as service user from other
as service provider. The public sector is founded upon ambivalence and it is
because of this ambivalence that the struggle to defend, let alone extend, this
form of government and citizenship has been so difficult.
To the extent that governments collude with the self-alienation of their
citizens they take on themselves a series of impossible tasks (such as the
protection of vulnerable people from abuse) in which failure is inevitable.
The collusion is based upon an implicit contract, one with echoes of the
contract of mutual indifference that Norman Geras has described (Geras,
1998). Through this contract government derives some of its legitimacy by
not confronting citizens with issues they would prefer not to think about
(e.g. citizens contempt for their own vulnerability, a contempt which fuels
a willingness to exploit or neglect vulnerable others, of which child or elder
abuse is just one manifestation). As a consequence of such failures of political leadership (Alford, 1994) the hapless public official becomes the
whipping horse, the one who can be blamed for things that neither citizens
nor governments will properly address.
To summarize, ambivalence is an inherent dimension of the social
relations of welfare and, to the extent that this remains culturally unaccepted
and unassimilated, we become alienated from the shadow side of our shared
subjectivity. One of the functions of public bureaucracies is to contain these
disowned aspects of our subjectivity. This occurs literally and concretely in
the physical institutions that many children and elderly people end up in, and
symbolically and psychologically through the projected social anxieties that
become part of the emotional labour of health workers, teachers, probation
officers and other street-level bureaucrats.
The issue is: how are these things to be contained? So long as this
contract of mutual indifference is maintained the potential exists for public
officials to abuse the authority which is projected into them so that the
weakness of the citizen becomes the power of government. According to
Bion, the link between one mind and another that leads to destruction of
both is the lie (1970: 104). Such collusion offers a parasitic form of containment which leads to the impoverishment of both citizens and government.
In contrast, an encounter which leads to the mutual enrichment of both
parties requires a commitment to truth and therefore an acknowledgement
by each party of that which they might otherwise disavow. The image of the
virtuous citizen faced with an indifferent or interfering government is as
much a lie as the image of responsible and altruistic government. Only by
recognizing the bad within the good is it possible for an encounter which is
realistic and relatively free from the myopia of wholly individualistic (citizen
good, government bad) or collectivistic (citizen bad, government good)
ideologies. For public officials, like the youth worker in our study, this means
accepting the dilemmas and paradoxes of the job whilst retaining a sense of
ones own authority. In this way citizens can clear a path through their own
projections and then really make use of what is available (in Winnicotts,
1971, terms, this is the journey from object relating or relating by identifications to object usage).
The ethical bureaucrat

My argument has been that it is the fate of the public official, broadly
conceived to include all those whose job involves some degree of discretion
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within the welfare state, to have to contain the unresolved (and at times
suppressed) value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Far from the
picture of the rule-bound bureaucrat who slavishly follows procedure, the
public official lives out the contradictions of the complex and diverse society
in which s/he lives on a day-to-day basis and, as a consequence, is pulled this
way and that in what Bonnie Honig calls dilemmatic space (Honig, 1996).
Honig draws on the work of the moral philosopher Bernard Williams
(1973, 1981) who is keenly aware of the incommensurable nature of human
values. Things just dont fit together as we would like them to, values rub
up against each other, the moral agent has to live with conflicts that cannot
easily be resolved and simply have to be lived with. You have to end up
disappointing someone. Williams argues that in such situations there is often
no right thing to do, all we can do is act for the best (Williams, 1973: 173).
This is exemplified by the working lives of public officials and corresponds
to what Lipsky described as the assaults on the ego which the structure of
street level work normally delivers (1980: 152).
There are two categories of dilemma which correspond to my two
characterizations of government as the embodiment of an inherently
conflictual and an inherently alienated public. In the first, the public official
seeks to act impartially (acting for the best) in the face of competing claims
(care versus justice, the individual case versus the greater good, consistency
versus responsiveness, and so on). Susan Mendus (2000) notes that we are
in the terrain not just of pluralism but also of the impossibility of harmonious
reconciliation in which the agent is not exempt from the authority of the
claim they choose to neglect. As she puts it, such situations are characterized
by pluralism, plus conflict, plus loss (Mendus, 2000: 117). For public
officials it is loss which is experienced as failure. It is as if they internalize
the flaws and faults of reality and make them their own thereby taking on
responsibility for what is irreconcilable in their world.
The second category of dilemma is the consequence of ambivalence,
and specifically the inability of the other to contain their own ambivalence.
Michael Feldman (1989) suggests that where X deals with ambivalence by
projecting it into Y the consequence is that Y is put in a no win or damned
if I do and damned if I dont situation. Social workers, trapped between the
rights of the family and the needs of the child, know such situations only too
well.
In contrast, then, to the heroic view of many contemporary writers on
management (a group Du Gay, 2000, refers to as the new charismatics), a
view which stresses change-embracing, go-for-it, visionary types, the view of
the public official and manager offered here is in the best traditions of
tragedy. The merit of such a view is that it deals with reality rather than

make-believe. It is not pessimistic. If only we could abandon the chimerical

pursuit of excellence or total quality we could focus our energies on
creating systems of welfare and governance which were good enough
(Williams, 2000) something we are presently far from achieving, either in
Britain or elsewhere.
I couldnt put it better than a doctoral student of mine who is also a
senior public manager:
I have seen ethical responsibility as being closely associated with the
public service ethos. There is a persistent argument that accompanying
the role of the public services manager are duties of care about facts
and proper process, duties of balance in argument, and duties of
balance in advice. I have understood in my working life that the
manager gives expression to the ethos through dealing with people in
terms of care, diligence, courtesy and integrity. The public service ethos
is best perceived through the quality of these face to face relationships,
through processes as much as results.
(Watts, personal communication, 2003)
Consulting to public organizations: Revisiting the concept of

primary task
To recapitulate, in contrast to private, for-profit organizations, organizations
of the public sphere perform a number of functions which link them directly
to the ethical and emotional lives of citizens. This adds to their complexity
as unique moral institutions where questions of technical efficacy (what
works) can be integrated with value questions. It follows that to work as a
manager, consultant or change agent in such organizations one needs tools
and capacities which can meet the challenge of this complexity.
The concept of an organizations primary task has enjoyed a powerful
hold on the imagination of consultants working within the Group Relations
tradition which emerged from the work of the Tavistock Insititute in the
1950s. Yet the concept draws strongly upon classical functionalist approaches
to systems theory which have been abandoned long ago in organizational
research. A functionalist perspective conceives of any particular system as
having its own goals or needs typically some combination of equilibrium,
adaptation and survival. But organizations per se do not have needs, nor goals
or primary tasks for that matter; to believe that they do is simply to buy in
to the dominant definition of what a particular organization is all about, a
definition which is the outcome of particular relations of power.

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As the first section of this article argued, this is particularly true for
public organizations, whether they are housing associations, childrens
homes or primary care teams. Anyone who spends even a short time in such
organizations cannot but be struck by the different views of the aims of the
organization. Its not just that the views of professionals will often differ to
those of managers, service users and their advocates, nor even that many
differences of view will exist within the ranks of the professionals themselves but those who have the formal authority to define policy (politicians,
senior civil servants, inspectors and regulators, academics) constantly
change their views as well. Within the public sphere definitions of purpose
are constantly and necessarily contested, and, as Obholzer (2003) has
recently suggested, it therefore makes more sense to speak of the contested
primary task. Indeed, referring back to the first part of this article, it makes
more sense to ask the members of a team or organization what are the
primary dilemmas that they face and how can they negotiate a way forward
through these dilemmas. In doing so we take the actual work of the organization, and its need to do this work efficiently and effectively, more seriously
than if we fall back on some simple (and value loaded) idea that, for
example, the primary task of the hospital is to care for the patients within
its walls. Such simple nostrums actually demean the complexity of the tasks
facing members of these organizations.
To say that in human service organizations questions concerning tasks,
priorities, objectives, etc. are constantly contested is to say that within such
organizations questions of value are primary. I disagree strongly with the
view, expressed recently for example by Chapman (2003), that the primary
task is relatively value-free. In the face of this complexity the notion of a
primary task can seem not only simplistic but potentially destructive. Indeed,
as Ive suggested in the discussion of ambivalence in the second part of this
article, one of the roles of public organizations sometimes is to take on
impossible tasks. Contrary to the belief that the primary task is the task the
organization must perform if the organization is to survive, if we follow the
logic of the impossible task we begin to realize that it is in the nature of
some public organizations that they will be seen to fail, indeed it is necessary for them to fail if governments and citizens are to sustain their own sense
of inner security.
Organizational survival and organizational development

The concept of primary task can also lead us to a dangerous blurring of the
distinction, crucial to human service organizations, between survival and
development (Armstrong, 1999). Within the private sector the market is the
ultimate arbitrator of organizational survival, if there is no market for an

organizations product then it will not survive even if its product has
considerable value to society. Conversely, if there is a market for the product
then the organization will survive even if that product, like tobacco or junk
food, is destructive of value in society. The same does not hold for public
organizations, they only have legitimacy to the extent that what they do has
public value. Within the public sector, therefore, it is not organizational
survival per se that matters, it is the survival of the organizations public
value that counts. This was indicated clearly in recent research undertaken
by Steele and her colleagues. They found that whereas private sector
managers ranked the prosperity of their organization as their primary goal,
public sector managers cited their desire to benefit the community (Steele,
1999). For managers and staff in public organizations it is this wider purpose
which is the basis for their commitment and if that sense of wider purpose
is destroyed then their commitment is undermined no matter how successful
their organization (hospital, school, etc.) is in business terms.
For public organizations the crucial question is not what it must do to
survive but what it must do to survive with value, that is, as a place which
can contribute to the development of the ethical and moral capacities of the
communities that it serves. When an organizations capacity for development
is at risk what we mean is that its capacity to exist as a place with value is
now in doubt. We speak, more perceptively than we know, of workers
becoming de-moralized, that is, of losing a sense of value. These are the stakes
that have been played for over the last two decades in the British welfare state.
There were many things wrong with the old welfare state, not the least
the way in which it disempowered the recipients of its services and
programmes. But despite its faults it was at least able to keep in mind something of the complexity of the subjects that it dealt with. Compare, for
example, the multidimensionality of the idea of the patient with the unidimensional concept of the consumer, a part-object to the institution as
Armstrong (1999) put it. It is an old phrase now but worth remembering
markets tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing. The root
of the crises which have affected many organizations in the public sphere
over the last decade can be described as the abandonment of development
for survival or short-term performativity, something experienced by many
staff in terms of the feeling that their organization no longer stands for the
values and principles which originally attracted them to it.
We must make an additional distinction paralleling the one above,
namely the distinction between task and purpose, means and ends. The
concept of purpose is one saturated with value, that is, with a sense of
what is good and bad, right and wrong for me/my organization to be doing.
If a group or organization is to provide a facilitating environment for
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development to occur it must have a sense of purpose. I have in mind an

agreement which is temporary and understood as such by all parties who
subscribe to it. This purpose is necessarily ambiguous otherwise agreement
could never be reached. The point is that parties accept this ambiguity or
lack of consistency for it is this which provides each with the possibility of
infusing the organizations purpose with personal meaning and it is this
which provides the creative space for further development and continuing
dialogue, a theme picked up in Obholzers Afterword to The unconscious
at work (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994). Such temporary definitions of purpose
are therefore fictions (Hoggett, 2000) which serve to bind the group together
and contain differences without crushing them. Such fictions are necessary
illusions in Winnicotts sense, illusions which enable the organization to
traverse the transitional space between the what is and the what might be.
They therefore provide a means of sustaining direction and commitment for
organizations operating in the fundamentally contested realm of public life.
A group or organization with a strong sense of purpose has an inner confidence which is to be contrasted with the noisy declamations of those who,
having lost all sense of purpose long ago, adopt the lapel-badge approach to
values by bedecking themselves with Mission Statements, Chartermarks,
Investors in People awards and so on. In this way values themselves become
reduced to an element of strategy, something an organization uses to position
itself in the marketplace (Greer & Hoggett, 1999).
If we are to abandon the idea of there being a primary task in complex
public organizations then it follows that consultants to human service
organizations cannot easily make judgements about behaviour which is offtask and irrational in some way. Moreover, there is a danger that
irrationality is only seen in its negative and destructive guise. Bions basic
assumptions also fuel Work Group activity (Bion, 1961); magic, omnipotence, illusion and splitting can and are frequently put to constructive use
in organizations. The creative uses of irrationality are as important as the
destructive ones. What can be observed and confronted are those situations
in which members of an organization behave in ways which counter the
organizations agreed purpose, where such agreement has been reached.
Sensing and making sense

So, if we strip away the device of the primary task what equipment is the
consultant left with to navigate the unconscious currents of the organizations
psyche? How does the consultant get a sense of whats going on here? Sometimes the consultant learns from what people say, perhaps particularly from
those whose powerlessness has until now denied them a voice with which to
speak. But words are fickle things designed, as Bion noted, as much for the
purpose of dissimulation as communication. Thus the usefulness of imagery
and many consultants nowadays use imagery (pictures, sculptures, dreams,
etc.) and the process of free-associating to imagery as a means of taking
organizational participants beyond discourse. The consultant can also resort
to her own experience of the emotional life of the group or organization. As
an outsider, the consultant dips into the emotional medium of the organization, this is a medium in which organizational participants are so immersed
that they have almost no cognizance of its existence. As Armstrong (2004)
notes, a crucial aspect of this medium is what might be called the primary
process of the public organization that is, the emotional work it unconsciously performs for the rest of society keeping death at bay, managing
vulnerability, containing madness or violence, and so on. To tune into this
medium the consultant must be able to use the equivalent of the counter-transference and become aware of the feelings and sensations which they become
recipients of as they work with the group or organization.
But openness to such experience is only part of the story, sense must
then be made of it. How is this to be done? There is a danger that consultants and researchers inspired by psychoanalytic perspectives come to rely so
much upon their subjective experience and their own interpretation of this
that they can become guilty of a kind of wild analysis, one which pathologizes the organization whilst leaving the consultant/researcher on a moral
high horse. To guard against this it is vital that interpretation, the process
of sense-making, is shared with the subject of analysis and/or with a supervisor or peer group (Skogstad, 2004). A number of contemporary models of
organizational research, particularly those inspired by feminist methodologies, give emphasis to interactive approaches to sense-making which
recognize the plurality of meanings which, within complex organizations, a
shared experience can obtain. As Armstrong (1999: 151) notes, I do not see
dreams as containers of meaning a puzzle to be solved once and for all;
but rather as containers for meaning; available narratives through which we
negotiate and seek formulation for the emotional experiences we register.
The consultant therefore seeks to engender dialogues in which different
meanings can be shared, knowing full well that no higher truth will necessarily emerge or, if it does, knowing that the certainty that it briefly offers will
soon be submerged.
A double reflexivity
Effective consultancy requires a double reflexivity, to ones own emotional
experience of the collective organizational unconscious and to the nature of
191
192
ones agency within the dynamic field of forces at play in any organizational
setting. Whilst mainstream social science is conversant with the latter it is
still largely ignorant of the former. If the Group Relations perspective is to
emerge from the margins into the mainstream it must begin to demonstrate
a much stronger appreciation of the interpenetration of the realm of the
emotions and unconscious and the realm of power and politics.
To summarize, for public organizations the search for an organizations
primary task is both misleading and fruitless. Such organizations have
multiple tasks which are often in contradiction; they are certainly beset by
conflicting notions of what they should be doing and, far from task achievement being necessary for survival, for some organizations, paradoxically, it
is important that they fail in order to maintain their contested legitimacy by
serving the publics unresolved ambivalence.
Working in, leading, managing and consulting to public organizations
presents a set of challenges which are specific to the public nature of such
organizations. Yet dominant models of work, leadership, management and
consulting draw upon perspectives and experiences developed within forprofit organizations. Organizations are not all the same. Within the public
sphere working life is akin to a dilemmatic space in which leaders need to
draw upon tragic rather than heroic models of agency and consultants need
to be aware both of the hidden emotional dimension of the groups work
and the continually contested nature of the groups task.
Note
1
This is an ESRC-funded research project called Negotiating Ethical Dilemmas in

Contested Communities, reference number RES-000-23-0127.
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Paul Hoggett (BA) is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre

for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
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[E-mail: paul.hoggett@uwe.ac.uk]


Conflict, Ambivalence, and The Contested Purpose of Public Organizations

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Human Relations

Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

The Tavistock Institute

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by georgiana ciobanu on November 22, 2007

Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested

This article argues that public organizations are inherently more

ambivalence primary task social anxieties value pluralism

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Human Relations 59(2)

The value of bureaucracy

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Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

My focus in this article is the public sphere of government. But this

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Human Relations 59(2)

and governed according to publicly agreed policies. This constitutes their

Bureaucracy as contested space

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Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

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Human Relations 59(2)

It is no wonder then that Lipsky entitled his formative study Street-level

Government and social anxiety

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Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

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Human Relations 59(2)

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Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

Citizens, governments and ambivalence

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Human Relations 59(2)

standing up and shouting at me about how appalling I was with kids,

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

The ethical bureaucrat

Human Relations 59(2)

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Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

make-believe. It is not pessimistic. If only we could abandon the chimerical

Consulting to public organizations: Revisiting the concept of

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Human Relations 59(2)

Organizational survival and organizational development

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

ultimate arbitrator of organizational survival, if there is no market for an

Human Relations 59(2)

development to occur it must have a sense of purpose. I have in mind an

Sensing and making sense

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

Human Relations 59(2)

This is an ESRC-funded research project called Negotiating Ethical Dilemmas in

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by georgiana ciobanu on November 22, 2007

Hoggett The contested purpose of public organizations

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by georgiana ciobanu on November 22, 2007

Human Relations 59(2)

Paul Hoggett (BA) is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by georgiana ciobanu on November 22, 2007

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