Psychotic Organization as a Metaphoric Frame for the Socioanalysis of Organizational and Interorganizational Dynamics

Abstract

The notion of the pathological organization provides a starting frame for better understanding irrationality and madness in organizations, profit and nonprofit organizations alike. It has been used up until now to gain a better understanding of severe personality disturbances caused by pathological fixation. The concept originally referred to the narrow frame of individual ego organization, but it is argued that the notion of the psychotic organization provides a useful metaphoric frame for application to social organizations. The attempt is made to apply the metaphor to various organizational and interorganizational contexts: the intraorganizational dynamics of hospitals, the interorganizational relatedness of the hostile takeover of an enterprise, and the increasing dominance of the shareholder value optimization in a global context. The attempt at ignoring and denying psychotic organizational dynamics is vain, resembling the futile efforts to escape a plague that is devastating the country, which is so lucidly described by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

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