ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies three major ways of relating to tradition: escaping, endorsing, and exploring. Contemporary society is characterised by fundamental changes posing serious challenges to the intellectual and practical tradition of group relations work; challenges that concern the assumptions of what constitutes a social system, as well as how the dynamics of these systems can be understood. The inability to mobilise the intellectual resources for engagement with contemporary organisational and social phenomena could be related to idealisation of psychoanalysis with its tendency to interpret such phenomena as pathological, to be treated in the same way as individual pathology. This therapeutic approach is in line with the neutral and value-free stand embedded in the network as a social form. Facing the threat of losing its fragile link to society, the inhabitants of the spaceship tend to turn inwards and idealise the vessel that was turned into prison, denying the need for connection with the external and quickly changing society.
