Jubilee Prosperity

Again, from Eric Trist’s account of the founding of Tavistock:

A new journal was needed that would manifest the connection between field theory and object-relations psychoanalysis. With Lewin’s group in the U.S., the Research Center for Group Dynamics, now at the University of Michigan, the Institute created a new international journal, ‘Human Relations,’ whose purpose was to further the integration of psychology and the social sciences and relate theory to practice. [20]

Later, in 1954, the helmsmen at the Cybernetics Society would change their name to the Society for General Systems Research and set up shop at Stanford, at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) part of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) spun off to avoid demonstrations during the Vietnam War.

The group included Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Anatol Rappaport.

Margaret Mead, a good friend of Kurt Lewin, would later become one of its presidents, as would Karl Deutsch, who later founded the political science department at MIT. Alex Bavelas would lead a group at the University of Michigan, which also became a Tavistock outpost.

As Lazarsfeld focused on the paradigm shift via the media, Lewin’s change agents were sent into the labor unions as consultants to wage psychological warfare and destroy industry.

One of Lewin’s proteges at MIT, George P. Shultz [21], as the head of the U.S. Department of Labor, took Lewin’s conceptions in the field of group dynamics and applied them to destroy the labor unions.

In a manner reminiscent of techniques used in the mines of Africa, the labor arbiters would act as Third Force operatives in service to the cartels.

At the arbitration table, with a wink wink and a nod nod, the cartel official would act through the Third Force arbiter and convince the labor union president that consensus was essential:

A strike wouldn’t be good now, would it? Besides, globalization is here to stay. It is inevitable. We must work together to achieve consensus, even though it may not be good for us. Cooperation: Going along to get along.

In the same way the Commonwealth allowed a limited range of debate about social improvements, the unions were allowed to fight over breadcrumbs, but not globalization itself.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 5:41 am and is filed under Market Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.