ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that there are two challenges before those who sponsor and take up consultant roles in such group relations ventures. The first task is to continue to identify unconscious social processes as manifested in group settings. The second task emerges from this and the history and traditions of the thinking and practice generated through this Tavistock model: to make explicit and to realize the political value of this work. The governments of advanced industrial societies pride themselves on their ability to provide welfare services. Such a primitive dependency arises when groups or institutions find it difficult to face the realities of the situation or feel that no solutions to their problems are possible. Social passivity that is engendered, albeit unwittingly, by the State and its agencies and is also engendered in industrial and other enterprises means that individuals find it difficult to give meaning to their lives.
