Exploring Individual and Organizational Boundaries: A Tavistock Open Systems Approach

One way of conceptualizing the relationship of individuals, through their roles, to their various groupings (such as families, communities, and business and industrial enterprises) is to consider their political relatedness. This includes an exploration of organizational structures, management, and issues of responsibility, leadership, and authority. Beyond this, the Tavistock open systems approach has always held that unconscious social processes are of central importance in such explorations. The methodology of the approach, therefore, is one that encourages people to consider the unconscious in relation to the political dimensions of institutions, This involves people in examine a range of boundaries, such as those between the inner and outer worlds of the individual, between person and role, and between enterprise and environment. Also involved are less obvious boundaries - or limits, or distinctions - such as those between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos, innovation and destructiveness, reality and fantasy, and relationship and relatedness.

This volume, with a new foreword by Mannie Sher, describes the educational approach of the Tavistock open systems mode of group relations training for exploring and interpreting such boundary issues and problems. Examples of its application include family systems, rural developments, and organizational development. This volume should be of value to students and teachers of organizational analysis, training, and development, as well as to students and teachers of organizational psychology and sociology.

This volume is one of a series being reissued by Karnac Books representing the theory and practice of organizational development used over many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.