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.
This impressive book by Howard Stein, one of the most insightful and important cultural analysts writing today, offers a profound understanding of how social problems ranging from xenophobia, terrorism, and school violence to natural disasters and corporate downsizing are exacerbated, provoked, and sometimes even produced by our deepest psychological needs and vulnerabilities - forces of which we are largely unaware but which we can come to understand and thus deal with more productively through a method of psychoanalytically informed cultural analysis that Stein both explains and performs in this eminently readable and engaging book. The insights and methodology offered here are indispensable for any cultural workers
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. Book jacket.
Wherever there is light, there is shadow. Howard Stein's poetry deliciously depicts this inevitable duality throughout nature and life. Stein's prose has a unique rhythm, where the mundane becomes exquisite, the ordinary, extraordinary.
Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. In Beyond the World Bank Agenda, Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development. Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations. Beyond the World Bank Agenda will be essential reading for anyone concerned with forging a new strategy for sustainable development.
This book situates biomedicine within American culture and argues that the very organization and practice of medicine are themselves cultural. It demonstrates the symbolic construction of clinical reality within American biomedicine and shows how biomedicine never leaves the realm of the personal.
• Offers a deeper exploration of social, political and organizational dynamics, through applied psychoanalytic theory. • Focuses on the complexity of political life in the United States 2015-2020 and embraces sense making of the chaotic world of alternate facts, conspiracy theories, reality TV politics, hoax pandemics to help explain the ‘Age of Trump’. • Offers psychodynamic insights into the unconscious undercurrents of contemporary culture and politics in the US
Listening deeply is the foundation of all effective organizational management, research, and consulting. This book explores the many aspects of attentive listening through storytelling and includes examples of organizational case studies. In Stein’s practice, listening deeply is an attitude evoked by the psychoanalytic concept of hovering attention—a careful attending to the person or group one is trying to help and an equally careful attending to how one is hearing these others. The listener’s own feelings are as crucially diagnostic as what the consultant observes in other people. This new edition of Listening Deeply updates historical context, theory, method, and organizational stories. A psychodynamic orientation informs much of the book and the language Stein uses is direct. His lessons are useful to the manager in any kind of organization, as well as practitioners of psychology, sociology, business management, medicine, and education.
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 collection of Howardʼs poetry is a delight to read. His poems speak directly to us. They are accessible, engaging, and, most of all, truthful." Jack Coulehan, M.D. Stony Brook University Medical Center "In the poetry itself, I appreciate Steinʼs sense of moral clarity, the importance of doing the right thing ("Why weʼre here"). A pervasive element throughout these poems is his great empathy for both doctors and the always suffering, sometimes hopeless, resentful patients they serve ("Acronym")..." Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D. Department of Family Medicine University of California-Irvine In the Shadow of Asclepius brings together poems written over a forty-year career of teaching and living in American medicine as a medical, psychoanalytic, organizational, and applied anthropologist. Howard Steinʼs poems from American medicine are the fruit of careful listening, observing, and often bearing witness to peopleʼs experiences and stories. Many poems in this book come from Steinʼs love of and long familiarity with the culturescapes and landscapes of Oklahoma. Through empathy and an inner resonance with the people and situations he evokes, Stein shows how poetry can not only contribute to medical humanities, and more broadly to the humanities in general, but can also hone scientific, clinical acumen as well. That is, poetry can not only enhance self-awareness, empathy, and the doctor-patient relationship, but it can also improve the diagnostic process, the treatment, and the clinical outcome. This book deserves a wide readership among medical educators, practicing physicians, professionals in the clinical behavioral sciences and medical humanities, patients and their families, and all those interested in the lives touched by medicine in the United States.
THE STUDENT EQEDGE STUDENT WORKBOOK The Student Workbook is a companion to the book The Student EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Academic and Personal Success . The Workbook offers you a hands-on resource for gaining a clearer understanding of emotional intelligence and is filled with practical exercises for developing your emotional intelligence. Filled with case studies, self-assessments, activities around movie and television clips, and reflection and discussion questions, the Student Workbook will give you the skills and confidence you need in order to succeed in college and beyond. "Success in college is not just a matter of luck nor is it all about being the smartest person in class. The way you approach college matters. The great news in this book is that you can learn how to be successful in college and in your life beyond college." Randy L. Swing, executive director, Association for Institutional Research "We have been long aware that academic ability does not necessarily predict college success. This book provides a comprehensive look at emotional intelligence and the role it plays in student persistence. It takes these noncognitive aspects that we know really matter and puts them into a practical, user-friendly guide. This book is long overdue in higher education." Catherine Andersen, master trainer in emotional intelligence; professor and special assistant to the provost for student success, Gallaudet University
The Student EQ Edge is more relevant today than any other time in the history of our world. Our opportunity to succeed in the 21st century will depend a great deal on our emotional intelligence in our transformation to lifelong learning and our leadership ability. This book is the competitive edge." —Stedman Graham, best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur "We have been long aware that academic ability does not necessarily predict college success. This book provides a comprehensive look at emotional intelligence and the role it plays in student persistence. It takes these noncognitive aspects that we know really matter and puts them into a practical, user-friendly guide. This book is long overdue in higher education." —Catherine Andersen, master trainer in emotional intelligence; professor and special assistant to the provost for student success, Gallaudet University "As important as book learning is, we know that success in life is also dependent upon emotional intelligence. The authors of The Student EQ Edge define emotional intelligence and provide a road map for mastering emotional intelligence skills. I would highly recommend The Student EQ Edge to any high school or college student interested in knowing what it takes to be truly successful both inside and outside the classroom." —Brad Beacham, executive director, Sigma Nu Fraternity, Inc. "The Student EQ Edge is substantive, readable, and sure to appeal to students both in classes as well as those who are lucky to pick it up for personal development reading. The book is appealing because the research is understandable; numerous examples are integrated throughout, and readers are encouraged to apply what they are reading." —Dennis Roberts, assistant vice president for faculty and student services for the Qatar Foundation
Understanding experience at work, especially in toxic organizations, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include all senses. The use of applied poetry has its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. Poetry at its best condenses into relatively few words, metaphors, and images what conventional social science narratives would take much longer to articulate. Where poetry often hints and alludes, narrative seeks to spell out, expound, and complete. Where poetry leaves much mental space for the listener or reader to fill in with one’s imagination, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories offer a way of accessing workplace experience that is unique and valuable in terms of understanding lives at work. The use of complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, is a way of trying to account for what we have found and experienced and in particular why it happened. "Why," the authors suggest, is critical in terms of understanding the sensing, images, and metaphors evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers for reasons that are unconscious and are rooted in the past. These transferences that come forward from life experience into the present are the critical data we work with. These are the data of psychoanalysis. This book both widens and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other researchers, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience and stories behind the poetry, and the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, is a new and distinct contribution to organizational research, leadership, and consulting efforts to help organization members solve real, underlying problems and not offer simplistic, formulaic solutions based solely on a study of the organization’s surface. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, and management.
This book explores an aspect of organizational life that is at times difficult to acknowledge and often painful to recall. Stories invite reflection and the development of greater understanding of organizational dynamics. This fresh scholarship provides a theoretical framework for discussion. Throughout this book, Allcorn and Stein utilize a psychoanalytically informed perspective to help readers understand why a leader, colleague or friend behaves in ways that are destructive of others and the organization and provides a basis for organizations to survive and thrive in a dysfunctional workplace.
The recent debate on the consequences of structural adjustment for developing economies, which took place between the World Bank and the United Nation's Economic Commission on Africa, underlines the need for further investigation of this important economic strategy. Tanzania, which for a decade had stood as a symbol of opposition to the Internation
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.
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