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THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF
PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY |
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| Main Page |
| Contents |
| Alphabetical Index |
| Hints for prints |
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| Impressum |
| Corporate constructs | |
Social constructionists have developed our understanding of the social nature of construction, proposing constructs created within a society or culture, which become embedded in its language or socialisation procedures, and which influence, or even determine, the personal construct systems of individuals. In contrast to these ideas, corporate constructs can be described as those created between people, or within groups, which are explicitly understood and used by the group. They are the collective product of a number of individuals. The theory and practice of PCP, for example, could be seen as a set of corporate constructs, since it is understood and elaborated by a group of psychologists, made available through publication, and used by the group in their work and personal lives. Corporate constructs, while being shared to a large degree, are nevertheless liable to differing interpretations. Although we may have a corporate understanding of PCP, made explicit through projects such as this encyclopaedia, we are likely to vary widely in the individual sense we make of these "shared" understandings, and in our subsequent behaviours. Groups and communities of all kinds are likely to contain sub-groups of people whose interpretation of events is broadly similar, and markedly different from others’. Such a perspective on the personal, shared, and corporate web of construing can help us understand the gaps we experience between the formal statements of corporate intent (for example in organisational mission statements or political manifestos), and the often contrasting and less predictable behaviours of those individuals and groups who subscribe to them. Balnaves and Caputi (1993) have proposed the term "corporate actor" to describe the group within which the corporate constructs are held. They illustrate this with a football club as a corporate actor in its processes of making decisions, choosing players, enforcing rules and so on. The people in the club are aware of these constructs and act as if they were their own. When they play, they follow the rules of the game and abide by the club’s choices. This does not deny the subsequent differing behavioural interpretations of these corporate constructs, described by Balnaves and Caputi as "individual real-time construing", such as deciding whether to pass the ball or run with it. It also does not rule out the possibility of argument with, or transgression of, the corporate constructs by individual members or sub-groups, who make counter-statements through their behaviour. From this point of view, we see that an organisation’s corporate constructs are neither reducible to the individual personal constructs of its members - largely because of the complex interdependencies of individuals in groups - nor can they be held to be located solely in the corporate body, as these shared constructs only acquire agency through the behavioural interpretation (or even subversion) of them. An interesting implication of this idea of responsibility arises when we consider the possibility that, in contrast to Balnaves and Caputi’s definition, corporate constructs may not always be explicit or published. A recent example in the |
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Mary Frances
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