ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the links between the increasingly uncertain and sometimes chaotic nature of life in present-day organisations and the personal experiences of stress felt by those working in them. In order to understand many apparently personal experiences of stress, it is useful to place these in their organisational context of uncertainty about the future, and the related confusion about the organisation’s primary purpose. Although often felt to restrict, constrain and limit the individual, organisations can also provide a sense of psychological and emotional containment. With the increasing recognition of the plurality of stakeholders in public organisations, each demanding representation and influence, the primary task of many established public-sector institutions has become contested and confused. Simultaneously the structure of these organisations is increasingly democratised. One result is that difficulties that were previously managed by projection up and down a relatively stable hierarchical structure, or between established professions, may now be channelled down to the individual level, resulting in stressful interpersonal relationships and stressful personal states of mind.
