ABSTRACT

This chapter describes something useful about organizational process and organizational culture, and provides a clear, simple, and useful statement of theory against the confusion and complexity of experience. The statement comes out of reflections on the experience of being in organizations and of consulting to organizations, reflections that are shaped by particular images and ideas. Peter Senge, Jeffrey Goldstein, Margaret Wheatley, Ralph Stacey, and other recent writers on organizational change tend to imagine organizations as self-organizing systems like plants rather than as externally controlled systems like machines. The pervasive postmodern consciousness influences those who theorize about organizations. The understanding of unconscious processes and how they influence human behavior owes much to the research and thinking of Freud and Carl Jung. Archetypal psychology as a contemporary way of thinking about culture and behavior is largely based on Jung's work, but it actually goes back to the Greek philosopher Plato.