Response to Commentary by Cynthia McSwain

Professor McSwain's comments refer both specifically to my article and generally to the utility of psychoanalytic perspectives for interpreting organization. In both respects she raises important issues. At the same time, her remarks point up the difficulty of discussing complex social and psychological phenomena with limited agreement about the terms of discourse. For example, her initial question-whether drama, play, or fantasy is the appropriate term for the material presented in itself raises complicated issues about both data and framework. She raises helpful questions concerning my research. Conceptually, she asks for clarification of my references to bureaucracy. I might have been clearer in indicating that I was referring to hierarchical organizations in which authority is centralized and responsibility is diffused. Normally these organizations are characterized by more or less formal roles and relationships, in some variation of the ideal-typical bureaucracy which Weber described. However, I have focused on a peculiar typical structuring of authority relationships and a common accompanying psychological experience of those relationships. The predicaments described in the article are two aspects of that experience. I have found in my research, as have others, that bureaucratic workers frequently react irrationally or unrealistically to others, especially superordinates. Although these responses have many explanations, a significant one concerns the social structuring of bureaucratic authority. The authority who assigns, variously controls, and evaluates a subordinate usually is relatively distant, relatively anonymous, and more or less autonomous. This situation of being controlled by someone powerful but poorly visible a situation not

Psychoanalysis · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Psychology · Psychology of Social Influence · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology