'Knowing (and Not Knowing) One's Place', Organisational Ranking and the Operation of Envy and Shame in Organisational Life*

AbstractOrganisational ranking and the concept of allocated 'place' in organisational hierarchy are powerful yet relatively unexplored dynamics in organisational life. While the intensity of our awareness of organisational rank will vary individually, we all carry an instinctive sense of our own and others' place in the hierarchical order. There can be strong and punitive reactions, often resulting in envious attacks, to a perceived disturbance in this implicit ranking order, yet there is little overt discussion or exploration of these concerns that nonetheless play a considerable role in below surface organisational dynamics.This paper seeks to explore two main areas in relation to the envious attack: first, our concerns with organisational ranking, making the link between these preoccupations, and the prevalence of envious attacks in organisational life - what happens when someone 'doesn't know their place'. There is also, second, an examination of how shame intersects with the manifestation of envy and a delineation of how the envious attack can be understood, not solely as a malign attack on goodness or creativity, but within the psychodynamic framework of an organisational defence against anxiety - in this case, the anxiety of the experience of shame and perceived deficit. The envious attack is conceptualised as an unconscious or conscious defence against unbearable feelings of shame and deficit.Key words: envious attack, shame, organisational ranking, over-deference to authority, philosophy of paucity, attack on creativity, defence against anxiety.ORGANISATIONAL RANKING AND HIERARCHYCaroline Garland's address to the OPUS Conference (2006) contained a rare foray into the issues of organisational ranking as she explored this question of hierarchy and 'ranking order' in the context of examining the impact of the arrival of a new member into an established analytic psychotherapy group. Introducing her discussion with a reference to her earlier profession as an ethnologist she noted the intense battles for position amongst primates, linking this to a persisting human consciousness of ranking order. She referred to 'the universal human tendency to position the self in relation to others along a scale, usually conceived of as vertical, of relative power, worth, weightiness, significance or importance, judging oneself to be either "one up" or "one down" ' (author's emphasis). Garland maintains that our 'propensity for dominance and for hierarchical relations derives from the Oedipal situation, into which each of us is born'. Each of us is born into a hierarchical configuration, a tiny child born to some variant of adult parental couple. This early configuration establishes a pattern, a lens through which we make sense of the world. Like the primates we are hugely concerned about our place within the group or organisation. The battle of the chimpanzees /primates, their jockeying for position, the determination of the established members to maintain their perceived 'better than' position, is enacted daily in our organisational settings, so common that it is a taken for granted feature of organisational life.This continual positioning of the self in relation to others is also the subject of Alain de Button's (2004) book, Status Anxiety, where he claims that a concern for status and rank is often the 'elephant in the room', a preoccupying concern that is rarely admitted or openly addressed, but nonetheless pressingly influential in terms our sense of self and interactions with others. He describes status anxiety as 'an universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser' and asserts that: 'High status is thought by many (but freely admitted by few) to be one of the finest of earthly goods' (p. 3).Where we are in relation to others matters to us all, and wide disparity in position and status harms us all, as has been ably demonstrated in one of the most important books of recent times, The Spirit Level (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009), which has demonstrated conclusively that it is relative inequality within societies that results in increased problems of mental ill-health, levels of violence, imprisonment, obesity, etc. …