Daily Archives: January 23, 2008

LEARN TO RELEASE

This is one of my favorite idea bites. I’ve truncated a long section of McSwain’s work to make it bite-sized. The paper it was taken from, A Transformational Theory of Organizations, is one of my all-time favorites. It actually served to put me on the hunt for new paradigms in organizational theorizing.

The baseline goal that that the organization or any human system must pursue is the development of the person within it; other matters, other goals, must come after.

…the primary axiological commitment of transformational theory is not dominantly rational or utilitarian in motivation or behavior.

… indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that the technology of the field of organization development is at bottom a set of techniques for managing the resolution of individual and group projections, thereby releasing the energy that is bound up by them.

Cynthia McSwain/
A Transformational Theory of Organizations
American Review of Public Administration 23:2.1993

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