Diving Deeper Into Organisational Weirdness

It’s been quite some time since we last bothered your inboxes but Kate and I are delighted to be able to announce that we have secured funding for a second series of the Corporate Bodies podcast! So we’re back to explore all things weird about organisations and the world of work.

After the end of the first series we spent some time reflecting on our learning, and also sent out a survey to ask you for your thoughts and reflections about the work we have done so far. As a result we have decided to focus our exploration in Series 2 on the following three areas.

1. The psychodynamics of our relationship with the legal person of the organisation

In Series 1 several guests drew parallels between our relationships to the legal person of the organisation and our intimate relationships with real people, including issues of consent, parallels with polyamory, parenting, loss and grief. In Series 2 we want to draw on psychoanalytic theory and deepen our understanding of the issues that arise from these dynamics, and the practices that we can adopt to work with them.

2. Alternative metaphors that we might use think about organisations

In Series 1 we were guided by the metaphor of the body, but a number of other metaphors for the organisation were brought into our conversations including; gardens, forests, mycelial networks and religious and spiritual metaphors. In Series 2 we want to dive deeper into these different metaphors to understand how they might help us develop different relationships to, and practices within, organisations.

3. The role of philanthropy in reshaping organisational ecosystems

In Series 1 we focussed largely on small social sector organisations and touched on the role of resource allocation in relation to building a healthy ecosystem of organisations. In Series 2 we want to understand the particular organisational dynamics of trusts and foundations and how these can support a shift in how we think about work.

We currently envisage that Series 2 will be made up of 3 ‘mini-series’, each made up of 3 or 4 episodes, covering the three topics outlined above. As with Series 1 we will be interviewing experts and practitioners with knowledge and experience of each of the themes that we will be exploring. These will be bookended by an introductory episode and a concluding episode.

We’re very excited to be back and we are looking forward to delving into these rich and fascinating themes. We’ll be deepening the exploration of psychodynamics and metaphors that we identified in Series 1, and pushing beyond them to look specifically at trusts and foundations, where power, tradition and even family relationships can play an important role.

If these are areas that you are currently wrestling with in your work - or if you or people you know are exploring them in a more theoretical or academic context - we’d love to hear from you!

You can email us at corporatebodiespodcast@gmail.com - or follow us on Instagram.

You can also follow me and Kate on LinkedIn.

In the meantime we will be posting more regularly as we start to think, read and talk about these ideas and the weird world of organisations and our relationships to them.

It’s good to be back!