POWER AND THE CORPORATE MIND

A biz school textbook of sorts, this joint effort yokes psychoanalysis, political science, and management theory in a most uneasy troika. One problem is the inevitable unfamiliarity of two of these disciplines to anyone versed in one of them--too often the vehicle must halt as a psychoanalytical term or bureaucratic procedure is trotted out and displayed. The book fails to focus, and seems to have no single, essential point: the authors examine power from every angle, as a motive, as an aspect of personal development, and as a neurotic problem; they discuss different relationships to power, subjection to it, possession of it, and failure to achieve it; they multiply examples from the corporate and political spheres from Carnegie to Nixon; they even launch their chapters with quotations from Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau; yet ultimately they provide only psychoanalytic commonplaces i.e., the claim that adult stances toward power embody the unresolved conflicts of childhood. In the business schools, where the value of a psychoanalytic perspective is: a comparatively new discovery, the work will serve some purpose--otherwise its utility is doubtful.