Strategic quest and the search for the primal mother

This paper seeks to offer a Jungian perspective on the purposive behaviour of organizations and to throw light on the recent preoccupation with various organizational initiatives such as quality management, benchmarking, and even strategic approaches to HRD. The paper is unconventional in its approach in that it seeks to engage with the issues it discusses in both its form and its content. The purpose of the paper is to give attention to feminine aspects of the organization and, in particular, to the relegation of the feminine from the organization and, by implication, from social life. Here the feminine equates to the Jungian anima, the archetype of the male feminine. The ideas in the paper operate in the space between the organization as regulation and purposive rationality and the organization as living, physical bodies: between the Law and the Body. The form of the paper replicates these divisions and so text boxes run throughout the text to exemplify the captured otherness which is a central concern of the paper. The rationale for the text boxes is understated to allow the relationship between the rational and the physical to remain playful and ambivalent (see Baudrillard 1990). The paper is concerned with the questing behaviour of organizations and the expression of loss of the feminine, with the construction of masculine emblems that seek to substitute for the lost feminine, and with the impossibility of fulfilment.