The CPOS Reading Group offers those interested in organizational, psychoanalytic, and political theories with an opportunity to expand their knowledge in specific topic areas. Attendees include students, faculty, and community members. Participants read a series of papers/chapters and discuss the papers in the context of psychosocial organization studies. Anyone who is interested in psychosocial perspectives on organizations, work, and society is welcome. Meetings are held every third Thursday, 11am to 12:30pm CT, September to June. Discussions are facilitated by CPOS associates and conducted in English. The monthly meeting is held online via Zoom.
If you’d like participate please email Mindy Duncan: mindy@surfacingtheorganization.com.
Reading Group Theme for Fall/Winter 2026
This set of readings explores monsters and monstrosity as a way of thinking about the unsettling, excessive, excluded, and disavowed dimensions of organizational life.
People are endlessly intrigued, horrified, and in awe of monsters and the monstrous. Monsters are mis-proportioned or misshapen, they transgress boundaries and gobble up what is around them. We hide from, construct, and hunt monsters. We fantasize about becoming the monster, coopting their power. At the same time, we fear our monstrous aspects. Monstrosity contains or gives birth to inconceivable combinations, highlights the carnivalesque, and manifests the grotesque. It distorts reality almost beyond recognition.
Organizing is inherently about harnessing, while denying, the monstrous aspects of both human-ness and what emerges from collective activities. The authors in this set of readings invite us to ask how organizations produce monsters and what those monsters reveal about the organizations that create them. What gets pushed to the margins? Whose bodies become too much, too old, too different, or too disruptive? What must be denied or disavowed for an organization to maintain its sense of order? What do organizations make monstrous—and what do we learn when we look at what they would rather keep hidden?
We invite you to join us in an excursion into the shadows, the “borderlands” (Thanem, 2006, p. 31), to confront and embrace the disturbed and disturbing and the possibilities they embody.
Discussion format
We aim to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group. Through discussion we move across participants different perspectives, working to make sense of, and use, the ideas we are reading about. Within this space we inspire, provoke, and support one another. The diagram below represents how we try to foster connection and build bridges across our differing ways of thinking through the bridging concept of organiza/tion/ing/ns. For example:
- Clinician – moving psychoanalysis out of the consulting room
- Educator – incorporating psychoanalysis into theories of teaching and learning
- Manager – infusing theories of management with psychosocial thinking
- Consultant – practicing psychodynamic organizational consultation
- Researcher – thinking psychosocially about modes of research and participants’ experiences
This model acknowledges that scholars and practitioners use psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories, or that they could, whether they are primarily clinicians, educators, managers, consultants, or researchers. And, that very often we hold multiple roles all intersected by a psychosocial approach to studying organizations.
Past themes
- Psychopathology of work
- Lacan with the organization
- Reflections on Winnicott’s “Communicating and Not Communicating”: Implications for organizational and social spaces
- Expanding the psychosocial: Care, caring, and trauma in organizations and society
- Psychosocial debates: Locating organization studies
- Maternal Eros: (De)vitalization in working relationships
- Critical psychoanalysis: Race, society, and organizations
- Critiques
- Countertransference
- Therapeutic aims
- Associate papers
- Qualitative research