Group Analysis in the Time of Austerity: Neo-liberalism, Managerialism and Evidence-Based Research

Abstract

In the current climate of cuts and austerity, efficiencies and evidence, targets and outcomes, has group analysis anything to offer and can it survive? This article looks closely at the assumptions and claims made by these ruling utilitarian conventions. I argue that the reality is very different from the rhetoric; and that the ruling ethos is in the service of being seen to do good, rather than actually doing good. The article argues that group analysis ought not to go down the route of being ‘tested’ and manualized as is the norm in academic psychology today. And if it were, the ‘product’ would not be recognizable as group analysis.