Tavistock

Ahh the conspiracy nuts have been screaming its the best kept secret! Well they got me... till I read about it I had no idea this place existed. Now I come to these sites as a skeptic looking for the conspiracy and so far I have found something off in every one of them. This will be no different... taken from their about us page. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was formally founded as a registered charity in September 1947. In our early work we brought together staff from different disciplines to find ways to apply psychoanalytic and open systems concepts to group and organisational life. Psychoanalytic and open systems concepts? My daughter is currently doing her psych major so the word psychoanalytic rings a bell... Freud. Sure enough Freud came to London in 1938. Freud beyond the wild wierdness of his thinking about the problematic person and sexuality also had a unique approach, free association. Lay on the couch and the analyst sitting behind you begins to ask you questions that are to be answered by the first thing that pops in you head. Now doubtless in uncovering a major trauma that may help or it may have you registered as hating your mother wanting to get intimate with your father and kill your boss .... and you're a man's man! Really! It doesnt take long to see where this approach can lead in missunderstandings. Well back to the site. Ok one thing that this place is doing is humanizing the workplace. STS or sociotechnical system which looks at the imact of technology on people and how to deal with the changes it brings. How to get workers more involved in a manner that helps them all get along. This in turn helps the company make money to pay the workers the stockholders the management the shareholders the board the owners... I am being a little sarcastic here aren't I? They list case studies and such. Behavioral modification in the workplace is what this boils down to. A quote taken from a book written by one of the researchers. "Long term solutions to managing change cannot depend on manipulative techniques. On the contrary, they must depend on helping the individual to develop greater maturity in managing the boundary between his own inner world and the realities of his external environment." (Miller, Dependency to Autonomy, p4). Inner world... realities of his external world...? I cross kids on a four way stop for a living... i like my inner world as long as every kid is crossed morning and afternoon and my supervisors dont give me a hard time why care? Its boring out there! (grin) Well I think we all know who the pioneers are that gave us the ethics in the work place and interdepartmental psychoanalysis and investigations. This same man who is quoted above went on to co-found OPUS (an Organisation for Promoting Understanding in Society), a small educational charity which helps individuals recognise their relatedness to society. Teaching cults how to blend into the mainstream, that ought to be helpful. Now tough I take a tongue in cheek approach here... I have to admit that some of this analysis was useful, it helped created ways for employees to get at their managers and for the managers to go up chain of command and yet deal with employees. Some bosses were born butts and will never change others perhaps can be persuaded through all these techniques to be less "buttish" on the job. But do I smell a link to MK Ultra?

We had known that the Middle Class- Middle Management was being phased out but now we know why. "The inherent evolutionary capacity of modern computer technology- the capacity of the computer to learn from experience- will rapidly make redundant much of the specialized experience, particularly in middle management and administration, on which so much decision making has had to rely on in the past. With this redundancy many established careers paths and their associated promotion paths will dissapear."(Miller opd.pdf, p 259) With this goes the wage they earned and ipso presto bye bye middle class wage! "New kinds of organization will provide new roles requiring new skills, and attempts to preserve traditional organizations and traditional roles will ineveitably lead to ineffinciency and social dislocation." (Miller opd.pdf p 259) Ever hear the dreaded words outsourced down sized obsolete will retrain? All these mean your place in the company is uncertain your pay will inevitably be reduced and or you may be both unemployed and unemployable. Adapt or die me hardies! You can read through this whole report which also talks abou the cycle of invention and if wha tis invented becomes accepted that immitations appear and then the item has to be improved upon until such time as someone else so improves on the original so as to make it obsolete. Miller states the companies tend in this cycle as well. Well then we all now know why unemployment comes and goes in cycles. Follow the inventions the supply and demand etc... you can read this through the google documents goto Eric J. Miller and A.K. Rice (PDF) in google and click the quick view option. It will open the pdf in google documents and you can read it there for yourselves. Just consider with Dreamweaver software and a Gateway laptop I am putting up this site. How many people are displaced by technology on my part?

Eliot Jacques a Canadian Psychologist Psychiatrist whose work gives us the time card the per hour or per commission or annual pay. Its apparently based on the person's ability to do tasks from shortrange boring small pay by hour to strategems for forward motion in a companies over many years with large annual salaries to match. Here are some nutshell approaches to books he wrote http://canadiancentre.com/bookinf2.htm

Emery and Trist did their research again using the same metholodogy of psychoanalysis to study the modern corporation. If one understands Freud's approach to gathering information from his patients then one comes to understand how it can be expanded into a way to research ...period. Either way these researchers results gave insight as to how companies could best deal with Information Technology. 

They spoke of strategies to deal with turbulence or what you and I would call the stuff that comes when something changes at the "shop"! Thanks to Tavistock's stock of researchers the language of bussiness was born and of social technology too. Buzz words will change from time to time but the work place is an environment and your technology may be your system and there is still study ongoing as to the impact of all of it on you (the slave who is barely paid what they are worth!) Parenthetical mine. Either way so far I see Tavistocks contribution as a maze of muddle meant to snow the mployee and give the bosses terminology by which they can define and redefine you and your paycheck. Christian need I remind you Christ defines you and will provide.

Jacques- Lyth

Psychodynamics or why burn out happens. They did a study in the medical field on nursing burnout and found that the nurse came in all caring and wanting to alleviate the suffering and the very routines and proceedures in place to protect them from disease and to quarantine diseases or illnesses from spreading (cross contamination) in time made them become hardened calloused numb and they would question why they were there and leave the profession. (Having decided to enter the field myself at one time I can vouch for this.) However for those who are in the medical profession (I opted out for kids marriage and the family life.) I highly recommend this read.

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF INSTITUTIONS I am highly aware of all that is being said here and what is alleged is true and criminal in the medical profession.

Many others have contributed to this list of studies and each insight series has proven to add to the already complex post industrial world we live in.

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