Advanced Seminar on Action Research Methodologies for Doctoral Scholars of IIT Roorkee, 14-26 October 2024
https://www.iitr.ac.in/

ISPSO AM24 (1 July to 7 July 2024)

ISPSO Professional Development Workshop 1 July 2024 Sofia, Bulgaria by Ajeet Mathur

          WHEN THE TWAIN MEET: New frontiers in working with groups and organizations

         “East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet” – Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling

The trine of distress, despair and depressive anxieties presents formidable challenges in consulting to organizations. These challenges concern, inter alia, yet another trine: return of the repressed, narcissistic injuries, and residual trauma that can continue to breed organizational toxicity and haunt organizations for a long time. When structures depart from pyramidal towards matrix forms, and strategies require wicked problems to be addressed, complexity in process involves intentions and desires that are not well understood. Consultants and coaches need developing capabilities commensurate with authority based on skill and responsibility arising from expectations in contractual commitments. There is much to gain by exploring and learning from the range and diversity of practices around the world from frontiers in psychoanalytic studies of organizing in East and West, North and South. Are you interested in thinking beyond Freudian concepts around ‘libido’, Jungian notions of ‘psyche’, Moreno’s ‘tele’ and the Lacanian idea of ‘jouissance’ in your consulting or coaching practice?. Here is an opportunity to broaden, deepen and sharpen diagnostic and therapeutic skills where you can co-creatively expand perspectives and horizons at the cutting edge of practice from the work of Charak’s therapeutic doctrine of spiritual healing and the unconscious  (about 500 B.C.), Abhinavagupta’s theories connecting aesthetics with emotional experiences, Girindrasekhar Bose’s theory of opposite wishes, and Bharatmuni’s taxonomy of Rasas. and more.

Link to preview a video about this PDW offered by Ajeet Mathur https://vimeo.com/937500938

ISPSO Symposium Paper by Ajeet Mathur 6 July 2024

‘Civilizational discontents and maladaptations in socio-technical systems: Are uncommon futures inevitable at the cusp of the Anthropocene?’

The future of organisations and institutions is of perennial concern to stakeholders  and policymakers. Change in socio-technical systems occurs more by revolutionary disruptions than through evolutionary trajectories orchestrating shared intents and perspectives. Purposes, motives and powerbases become fraught with mind-boggling complexities. Organizations get exposed to pressures from ‘digital transformation’, ‘platform architectures’,  ‘horizontal transparency’, ‘boundary-crossing collaborations’ and ‘multi-sided’ markets. These invert the organization, requiring shifts in focus from value creation to external relationships and turn organizations inside-out. Emerging systems, structures and processes challenge ways of leading, governing, organizing and managing. Paradigms around sustainability assumed commitments for our common future to prevail as a centripetal force. Diverse set of actors, with respective ‘pictures of relatedness’ are instead traversing paths for uncommon futures. Humanity has sleepwalked from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch with hubris, unmindful of species inter-dependence and habitat fragility. AI-based socio-technical systems are arriving faster than society institutes regulatory safeguards. Are uncommon futures inevitable? Can anything be done in organizational architecture and processes to mitigate systemic maladaptations? Are civilizational discontents so endemic that wicked problems unavoidably proliferate?

This paper draws on action research studies and data analysis from inter-disciplinary studies in economics, law, and system psycho-dynamics to discuss five questions:

• How do motives and powerbases affect value creation and distribution?
• What organizational processes enable (constrain) (mal) adaptations in socio-technical systems?
• How do managers navigate tensions between stakeholder well-being for sustainability and shareholder value maximization ?
• Why does international regulatory heterogeneity increase systemic maladaptations?
• Can organizations leverage stakeholder interactions to rethink value creation and distribution processes?

View the ISPSO AM24 Programme https://fb.me/e/25oHRVCE2