The Organizational Underground: Organizational Coaching and Organizational Development outside the Formal Organization

V Foley, W Bergquist International Journal of Coaching in Organizations 2010

Throughout the Western world, we are now living in a time of turmoil and economic uncertainty, even chaos. Many contemporary economists and political analysts speak and write about a world that is in a state of “supercriticality” – a state in which minor aberrations in the economic or political system bring about major alternations (and even collapse) of the global marketplace. While the challenges imposed by this state of super-criticality has many profound implications at the macro level, there are also profound implications at the micro-level with regard to the lives lived in “desperation” by men and women who have lost their job or at the very least have given up hope of realizing lifelong dreams. They are living in the organizational underground, a world populated by the unemployed and underemployed.