The Long Conference: The Consolidation of Psychological Authority in Who’s in Charge?

On the eve of Labor Day in 1983, the Canadian Broadcast Company aired Who’s in Charge?, a two-hour documentary depicting a conference modeled after a form of experimental social psychology called a Group Relations Conference (GRC). Unfolding across a live event, an ephemeral television film, and a public debate set within editorial and legal contexts, engagement with the project came for many not from viewing the film, but instead from the broader conversation it sparked in the press and public discourse. In this paper, I turn to archives of the film’s production to examine how the film catalyzed skepticism toward psychotherapeutic expertise in the post-industrial 1980s. I consider how the authority of the conference’s psychoanalyst consultants was visually constructed, resulting in their condemnation as professional-managerial class antagonists.

I approach Who’s in Charge? as a contested site of public discourse—a discourse that reacts against the postwar application of therapeutic rhetoric to social, political, and economic issues, which, in turn, collapses all categories of psychological inquiry. Today GRCs are a largely private enterprise, catered to the professional-managerial class, with many participants coming from the corporate sector. Thus, I will conclude my analysis by considering how GRCs today mobilize a kind of leadership that reproduces conventional power relations between management and workers—suggesting an evolved alliance between corporate interest and psychological institutionalism. This sits in contrast to the filmed conference in 1983, which visualized a distinction between the categories of leadership and management by narratively centering a group of antagonistic participant-leaders.