ABSTRACT
Aspects of anti-work include being off task, out of role, being under or over-authorizing, or the blurring of or inattention to boundaries. Many consultants identify anti-work as a stage of group development, a form of resistance, or a set of defenses attempting to ward off anxieties. The “anti-work” member is a key voice for what is reluctant, stuck, or dysfunctional for the group. However, due to a vast number of reasons, certain “anti-work” members seem fundamentally un-workable in this sense. The change in emphasis has to do with a focus on transitioning from a working group to a sophisticated group and identifying elements of anti-work in seemingly functional working groups. The alteration has to do with the inclusion of more lingual terminology associated with overt language-based abstraction. A Tavistock learning group functioning from a language-based level of abstraction has several features familiar to traditional group-as-a-whole theory and some novel.
