Power and politics

This special issue emphasizes psycho-/socio-analytic perspectives and elaborations on the relatedness of power and politics at a particularly sensitive moment in history. Both profit and non-profit institutions and organizations have been deeply affected by significant world events as well as their own problematic internal processes, all with profound implications for the economy and for leaders, executives and managers in groups of all kinds, from global corporations to small businesses and community organizations. Employees have been particularly beset as they struggle to remain vital and effective in a time of enormous vulnerability. From a psychoand socio-analytic perspective, there is also a challenge in our current world situation to locate the Self in the Enemy Other and to identify those circumstances that obstruct negotiations and peace initiatives in the most volatile areas of our world (paying attention to the fact that the world is, at least in part, a construction of the mind). The articles selected for this special issue contribute various perspectives on power and politics and its potential impact both on organizations and society at large. They represent an interdisciplinary approach to scholarly research and writing and thus, cross disciplinary boundaries. In his article, ‘Conflict, ambivalence and the contested purpose of public organizations’, Paul Hoggett argues that pubic organizations are inherently more complex than private ones. The public sphere is the site for the continuous contestation of public purposes. Because government partly acts as the receptacle for the alienated subjectivity of citizens, public organizations have to contain much of what is disowned by the society in which they are situated. Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, in ‘The spirit of despotism: Understanding the tyrant within’, focuses on the developmental history of despotic

Ambivalence · Discipline · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Public relations · Public sphere · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Law · Public Administration · Social Psychology · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory