A few weeks ago, someone wrote to us on Linkedin saying that he had very much appreciated an article of ours, published in 2008 in Organisational & Social Dynamics.
We went to pick it up and decided to republish it on the blog. Sure it has taken a few years and there have been many evolutions. But it was definitely a pioneering article (and work). Some parts of it today, I think, among all, the nuance we had kept around ‘nature or culture’ today we would certainly write more decisively and consistently from a theoretical point of view.
But there is something that remains very present for us in the work on diversity in organisations, read through the psychodynamic keys of Group Relations, and it is around the theme of the recognition of identities, of the unconscious attempt to flatten them, to smooth them out, the alter-phagia we talk about in the article and the shame that risks, when not recognised, named, managed, to completely block the transformation.