In this book about deception and self-deception in and beyond the workplace, Stein portrays a psychological, ethical, cultural, and spiritual crisis that cannot be reduced to a business crisis. He shows how the language of economics shrouds loss, dread, rage, despair, and brutality in the guise of rational business necessity. For example, the act of ridding a workplace of thousands of people has become magically, "euphemistically" transformed into an impersonal, bottom line based exercise in downsizing and outsourcing. As Stein explores the role of euphemism in the official doctrines and public claims of business, he also portrays how people experience the trauma of repeated mass layoffs, and the constant turmoil over shifting workroles and uncertain job security. Stein shows how the inner experience of downsizing, reengineering, and corporate medicine becomes part of a person's very essence and structure, not some unfortunate epiphenomenon.

Three extensive case studies--one of downsizing (and related social engineering concepts), one of managed care, and another of the U.S. prairie's adaptation to life afterthe Oklahoma City bombing--provide the evidence for his interpretation. Stein supplements these with telling analyses of the concept of spin, the popularity of Scott Adams' "Dilbert" cartoons, George Orwell's trenchant use of euphemism in his novels, and the web of words on which the Nazis' extermination program was spun. He shows how our priorities have created long-term massive social casualty for the sake of short-term gain. Further, he shows how a widespread cultural ethos of scarcity and callousness transcends the boundaries of workplace and business. He calls for an ethical awakening from our self-deceptions and the social harm we have done in the name of good business, and for direct, honest language that expresses our feelings and intentions.

So much in our society is based on the importance of doing, achieving, striving, intervening, and producing. In contrast, Listening Deeply attempts to re-establish listening and attentiveness toward others as the key to consulting with organizations. Professor Howard Stein uses his training in anthropology and psychology to shed light on organizational relationships and tensions. He shows how a consultant can safely allow emotionally charged issues to emerge so that healing can begin. Using brief and extended case examples from his own consulting practice, Stein illustrates his approach of creating a safe holding environment, in which members of an organization can express difficult emotions and learn to understand themselves and their colleagues better. He encourages consultants to use the self creatively and constructively to look beyond the obvious in interpreting messages from group members. Sometimes it is only through the consultants own emotional response that the root of the organizations problem becomes clear. Stein provides concrete examples that show the consultant how to listen for underlying themes and thoughtfully analyze both the text and subtext of an organizations culture. Through his cases, Stein demonstrates how the consultant can go beyond conventional problem-solving to promote healing, growth, and, ultimately, a better working environment. 

This book presents a unique, in-depth examination of the effects that the popular approaches to management organizational change--downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering--had on a major American hospital. "The Human Cost of a Management Failure" shows what can happen when management insists on accomplishing its ends strictly by the numbers. The authors ask why top management so often, and with seemingly such a cavalier attitude, selects downsizing and similar methods when research indicates that they are all too often such poor choices. Based on a year-long longitudinal study, Allcorn, Baum, Diamond, and Stein report on their interviews with 23 senior and mid-level hospital administrators, then interpret their findings from a psychoanalytic perspective, to make clear that the human side of the workplace can only be ignored at great risk when change is contemplated and then implemented. This is essential reading not only for corporate management, but also for other professionals and academics throughout the social and behavioral sciences.

Readers of "The Human Cost of a Management Failure" are oriented to the literature on downsizing, restructuring and reengineering, and to the context of the study. Case material follows, enabling readers to draw their own conclusions with regard to the nature of the organizational change and its effects upon the hospital's employees, and consultants offer their own viewpoints. An update of events at the hospital after the study was conducted is provided along with summaries by each author of his own interpretation and how he interprets the others' views. In this way, readers will get an unusual opportunity to evaluate their own viewpoints against those of the psychoanalytically trained researchers, and to decide for themselves whether there are, in fact, better ways to make an organization economically competitive in the marketplace.

Insight and Imagination explores the primacy of the self in organizational research, consulting, and management / leadership. Contesting the radical dichotomy between "objective" and "subjective" understanding, and the devaluation of the latter, Professor Howard F. Stein argues that the imagination of the observer, informed by his or her unconscious, can lead to a greater understanding of the psychological reality of the workplace and in turn to better informed problem solving. Insight emerges from the disciplined use of the imagination rather than its repudiation. The book brings countertransference to center stage as a tool for understanding the emotional experience of organizational life and for formulating interventions. One often neglected use of the imagination is the capacity to not have to know beforehand what one needs to learn what poet John Keats called "negative capability." Insight and Imagination proposes the use of the humanities as a means of expanding and deepening one's access to the inner life of organizations. The author draws from the art created by others and from his own poetry written and often used during an organizational consultation. Among the specific contexts discussed in this book are the experience of organizational downsizing; helping organizations to grieve after change and loss; recognizing "red herrings" in organizational decision making; the language of organizational change; recognizing hidden agendas in meetings; and reflective practice in organizational life."

Critical appreciations of George A. De Vos, a pioneer in the cross-cultural application of projective techniques (M. Suarez-Orozco, P. Lerner), and De Vos's own reminiscences, are followed by contributions true to the spirit of De Vos's methodology. They include a demonstration of the usefulness of projective tests in the psychodiagnostic evaluation of schizophrenia (J. Stone, P. Wilson & B. Boyer); an examination of the role of historical events in the development of Chinese and Japanese personality characteristics (J. Connor); a review of the impact of Freudian and Jungian thought in India (S. Kakar); and a study of loss and grief in a community of the North American Great Plains (H. Stein).

Insight and Imagination explores the primacy of the self in organizational research, consulting, and management / leadership. Contesting the radical dichotomy between 'objective' and 'subjective' understanding, and the devaluation of the latter, Professor Howard F. Stein argues that the imagination of the observer, informed by his or her unconscious, can lead to a greater understanding of the psychological reality of the workplace and in turn to better informed problem solving. Insight emerges from the disciplined use of the imagination rather than its repudiation. The book brings countertransference to center stage as a tool for understanding the emotional experience of organizational life and for formulating interventions. One often neglected use of the imagination is the capacity to not have to know beforehand what one needs to learn_what poet John Keats called 'negative capability.' Insight and Imagination proposes the use of the humanities as a means of expanding and deepening one's access to the inner life of organizations. The author draws from the art created by others and from his own poetry written and often used during an organizational consultation. Among the specific contexts discussed in this book are the experience of organizational downsizing; helping organizations to grieve after change and loss; recognizing 'red herrings' in organizational decision making; the language of organizational change; recognizing hidden agendas in meetings; and reflective practice in organizational life.

Throughout the United States and indeed the world, organizations have become places of darkness, where emotional savagery and brutality are now commonplace and where psychological forms of violence--intimidation, degradation, dehumanization--are the norm. Stein succeeds in portraying this dramatically in his evocative, lucid new book, and in doing so he counters official pronouncements that simply because unemployment is low and productivity high, all is well. Through the use of symbolism and metaphor he gives us access to the interior experience of organizational life today. He employs a form of disciplined subjectivity, based on Freud's concept of counter-transference, and other methods to help us comprehend what such dominating notions as managed social change really mean. Downsizing, reengineering, managed care, endless organizational restructuring--all are presented as just business but in reality, says Stein, they are devastatingly personal in their effects. With numerous vignettes and anecdotes drawn from his formal and informal research, Dr. Stein shows us in often horrifying detail what work has come to be in so many of these dark places--but also what must happen, and can happen, to lift them into the light.

Through consultations, observation, and personal experience, Stein documents the ordinary assaults on the human spirit, a form of violence in the workplace that usually escapes common classification. By that he means culturally sanctioned violence, such as everyday forms of intimidation, ridicule, goading, and doubling of workloads--all in an asserted effort to make the workplace more productive, more competitive. His examples, metaphors, symbols, images come from the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, and refer back to other horrors in other times, the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition among them. His book demonstrates precisely how brutal so many of our rational business practices have become, and how disposable all of us ultimately are, at all levels, in all organizations. Stein draws upon a variety of research techniques, including a form of counter-transference based on Freud's concept, to understand the inner meanings and feelings contained in workplace metaphors and symbols. An incisive foreword by Dr. David B. Friedman, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, comments on this, puts the book in perspective and offers additional insights into Stein's themes and how brilliantly he develops them.

Critical appreciations of George A. De Vos, a pioneer in the cross-cultural application of projective techniques (M. Suarez-Orozco, P. Lerner), and De Vos's own reminiscences, are followed by contributions true to the spirit of De Vos's methodology. They include a demonstration of the usefulness of projective tests in the psychodiagnostic evaluation of schizophrenia (J. Stone, P. Wilson & B. Boyer); an examination of the role of historical events in the development of Chinese and Japanese personality characteristics (J. Connor); a review of the impact of Freudian and Jungian thought in India (S. Kakar); and a study of loss and grief in a community of the North American Great Plains (H. Stein).

This book is about anthropology as a journey of mutual understanding of increasingly greater breadth and depth. It is about allowing oneself to be inspired by those whom one is studying, teaching, treating, or counseling; how that inspiration leads to a poem or story that is shared with them; and how that personal experience becomes the basis for a more grounded relationship, deeper self-knowledge, and ultimately the accomplishment of one's goals in applied anthropology. This approach does not negate other ways of knowing--participant observation, open-ended interviews, naturalistic observation, focus groups, or surveys--but complements and extends them and the kind of cultural data they elicit. It is about how another people's world (the North American Great Plains, in this case) comes alive to an observer, therapist, or consultant. Written by a prominent medical and psychoanalytic anthropologist, this work is a daring experiment in communication. It outlines an alternative for researchers and writers that can allow one individual to tune in to another individual across a cultural or epistemological boundary. It is a new step in the empathic process, one that affects and transforms the practitioner as deeply as the client. A must read for those in caring professions.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.