Bullsh*t jobs

What "managerialism" actually feels like: a view from the cubicle

Years ago, I had a friend named Manuel Lopez. One day we were emailing about the uniquely smarmy forms of coercion-not-coercion that operate in the contemporary workplace. (Think Office Space.)  He likened eruptions of obligatory office fun to “a high school pep rally, without the more natural enthusiasms generated by cheerleaders. They’re more like pep rallies led by a principal and middle-aged teachers, for example those ‘say no to drugs, get high on life!’ rallies that forced one to view the stoners with a new respect, or at least discover within oneself new found powers of contempt.”

In the new theorizing about politics and society that one finds on Substack, including my own, one often finds the idea of “managerialism” invoked. But we don’t often probe the emotional register in which managerialism operates. Yet this turns out to be important. Managerial authority doesn’t simply appeal to the self-interest of workers, as in liberal economic theory. There is a personality type it needs to bring into existence, at all levels of the org chart. In 2008, James Poulos (now on Substack) wrote that in the office, “mutual respect and enthusiasm [have] reached new levels of performed social intimacy.”

What follows is based on my own experience with cubicle work. When you are desperate for a job, you may find yourself doing things that are a bit degrading.

This post is derived from my book Shop Class as Soulcraft. It is quite long, and will be automatically truncated in the email version sent out by Substack. Just click on the title, which will take you to the Web version where you can read the whole thing.

Joining the meritocracy

In 1992, after a one-year master’s degree program at the University of Chicago, I had to put philosophy on hold and get a job. Rather than go back to the electrical work I’d done after college, I wanted to put my new degree to use and claim my place in the sunny uplands of the meritocracy. This turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. I landed a job as a clerk at a prestigious Palo Alto law firm, but the job paid only ten dollars an hour. So I worked there from eight to five, then taught SAT prep classes (for fifteen dollars an hour) farther up the peninsula after work, and often tutored in Marin after that. I was driving about a hundred miles a day (in a 1966 Malibu) in a three- bridge loop around San Francisco Bay before returning exhausted each night to my sublet in Berkeley. Then I was let go from the law firm. Shortly after that, the SAT prep company went bankrupt (I never saw the thousand dollars in back pay they owed me). At this juncture it would have made sense to chuck the “meritocracy” and go back to doing electrical work, for much better pay, but somehow I wasn’t able to see my situation clearly and take this step. I had a master’s degree, goddamit.

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor market demand creates for white- collar workers “employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better- paid manual workers.” What’s more, “it may create unemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.”

My self- regard as a Master of Arts was hard to sustain through the extended trauma of job hunting, with its desperate open-mindedness and rising sense of worthlessness. Finally I landed a job as an indexer and abstractor at Information Access Company, then a division of Ziff Communications, and stayed there for eleven months. I was excited about my first day on the job as I crested the high point of the San Mateo Bridge at 8:15 one bright morning in 1992, on a day windy enough to whitecap even the South Bay. My new job was to read articles in academic journals, index them under established categories, and write abstracts of about two hundred words, which were then sold on a CD- ROM to subscribing libraries, where they could be viewed on a system called InfoTrac. I was to be a knowledge worker! Indeed, here was an opportunity to survey the frontiers of knowledge and gain a synoptic view of the whole, which seemed in keeping with my academic preparation. What met my gaze more immediately, at that high point in my first commute, was the downslope into Foster City.

Foster City is a four-square-mile spit of landfill, a chunk of San Francisco Bay (once salt marsh tideland) that was essentially annexed by Silicon Valley in a kind of privateer action led by one T. Jack Foster to create a planned community for the post-industrial age. Anchoring the west end of the San Mateo Bridge, it was developed under a uniform aesthetic of business parks, marinas, and town houses that seem to share a common genetic code when viewed en masse from the apex of the bridge.

 In the weeks between my interview and my first day on the job, the managers I had met had taken up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. Such imaginings eased my sense of isolation and indeterminacy, which had begun to make me feel almost unreal. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world—miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad—and reeled myself into its current. As I was shown to my cubicle by these same people, I felt a real sense of being honored. They had made a place for me. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts, and no longer as a private amusement tending toward alienation. Rather, these thoughts would be my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things; I felt enlarged by the largeness of it. I would wear a tie.

But the feel of the job changed as I settled into it, and to understand the shift it is necessary to say how the job was conceived and structured. Information Access Company’s (IAC) first product, in 1977, was Magazine Index, an index of about four hundred popular magazines. In 1980, IAC was acquired by Ziff, a publisher of magazines, and five years later Ziff merged IAC with another acquisition, Management Contents. Management Contents provided not only indexing but also abstracts of articles in management journals. So the introduction of abstracting to the company’s activities coincided with the introduction of serious-looking journals, with all the trappings of scholarship. I suspect the leap from indexing to abstracting, and from magazines to journals, went smoothly, indeed appeared as no leap at all, because of the peculiar content of management journals. Articles in management journals typically contain about one idea for every five bullet points, so writing an abstract for one is as easy as stringing together every fifth bullet point. But in 1991, shortly before I started, the company began providing abstracts of articles in a very different class of journals: titles in physical science, biological science, social science, law, philosophy, and the humanities. The difference between, for example, Marketing Today and Nature Genetics (one of the titles I was assigned) is categorical, yet distinctions of rigor have a hard time withstanding immersion in the solvent of mergers and acquisitions that would reduce knowledge to “information.” Here is an excerpt from the “Letters” section of one issue of Nature Genetics:

We show that miR- 214 is expressed during early segmentation stages in somites and that varying its expression alters the expression of genes regulated by Hedgehog signaling. Inhibition of miR- 214 results in a reduction or loss of slow- muscle cell types. We show that su(fu) mRNA, encoding a negative regulator of Hedgehog signaling, is targeted by miR- 214.

In some journals, including Nature Genetics, articles begin with an abstract written by the author, but even in such cases I was to write my own. Nor was I simply to reword the author’s abstract, as I learned in my initial week of training. Rather, I was to read the entire article and distill it afresh. The rationale offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by IAC’s product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this does not require understanding (like a computer that manipulates syntax while remaining innocent of semantics). I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard diagramming an abstract. The writing of abstracts had been conceived in general terms, but I soon discovered that what the task in fact demanded was complete immersion in the particular text before me. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person, and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was fifteen articles per day. By my eleventh month at the company, my quota was up to twenty- eight articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled acceleration). Whereas Charlie Chaplin’s efforts to conform himself to the accelerating pace of the machine in Modern Times took the form of a brilliantly comic ballet, mine were rather mopey and anxious. More than anything, I felt sleepy. This exhaustion was surely tied to the fact I felt trapped in a contradiction. The fast pace demanded absorption in the task, yet that pace also precluded absorption, and had the effect of estranging me from my own doings. Or rather, I tried to absent myself, the better to meet my quota, but the writing of an abstract, unlike the pulling of levers on an assembly line, cannot be done mindlessly. The material I was reading was too demanding, and what it demanded was to be given its due. To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty- eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflects the contents of that article. So the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation.

Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. Working as an electrician, you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans, and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal, and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

It will be objected: Wasn’t there any quality control? My manager would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was once or twice corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.

It will further be objected that if the abstracts produced by Information Access Company were no good, then “the market” would punish it; the company should have been beaten out by one with a higher regard for quality. The company has been bought and sold several times since I worked there, but appears to still be in business. Maybe things are better there now, and quality has improved. I honestly don’t know. In any case, the time scale on which the market administers its omniscient justice may be quite a bit longer than crucial episodes in the working life of a mortal human being. Being an early entrant into the market for electronically distributed abstracts, IAC enjoyed a temporary quasi- monopoly. I suppose it was fairly free to set standards as it pleased, and may have calibrated the production quota, and corresponding quality, to some threshold of “good enough,” beneath which the user walks away in disgust. Recurring purchases, after all, may continue even when the alignment of interests between producer and consumer is only partial, or even accompanied by a felt antagonism. Frequently we come to hate things that we nonetheless continue to depend on (like Windows). Further, a product made under conditions of harried intellectual carelessness, such as InfoTrac circa 1992, may generate its own demand by corrupting consumers’ standards in the same direction, and our initial harsh judgment of it will come to seem reactionary. The very existence of the product makes the lower standards suddenly seem respectable or inevitable.

In writing abstracts of academic journal articles, I thought I would learn a lot. Quite apart from the pay, the job seemed to promise an intrinsic good to me as a worker: satisfying my desire to know. This satisfaction is in perfect harmony with the good sought by the user of InfoTrac, who also desires to know, and the good of the author of an article, who wants to be understood. The standard internal to the job, properly conceived, was the very one that presumably animated both parties I served: intellectual excellence. But this good was nowhere accommodated by the metric to which I answered, which was purely quantitative. The metric was conceived by another party to the labor process, a middleman hovering about with a purpose of his own that had no inherent tie to the one shared by the principals. This purpose, of course, was that of realizing a profit from my labor. Work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest. That’s why you get paid. But, again, if I had been serving the user of the database directly, his interest in high-quality abstracts would have aligned with my own interest in experiencing the pleasures of comprehension. It may or may not be the case that selling my labor directly to the user would have given him a high-quality product at an attractive price and have provided me a comfortable livelihood; one would have to calculate whether such a transaction makes sense or not. And let it not be forgotten that my work would need to be marketed and distributed, as IAC did, and its technical bugs worked out, and this would contribute to the cost. Let it further be conceded that I never would have undertaken to launch such a product as InfoTrac on my own, and that the entrepreneurs who did so took risks. I have no beef with them. They made something, then sold it to others (the media conglomerate Ziff) who seem to be in the business of owning things. What I want to emphasize is that the presence of this third party seeking to maximize a surplus skimmed from my labor, in a manner not sensitive to the limitations of pace arising from the nature of the work itself, must drive the work process beyond those limits. It is then all but guaranteed that the work cannot be animated by the goods that are intrinsic to it. It is these intrinsic goods of the work that make me want to do it well. They closely track the “quality” of the product, that aspect that proves such an elusive metaphysical concept to those who merely count their surplus, but which is a central and concrete concern for both the maker and the user of the thing itself.

Yet to identify greed as the problem would be to place the issue beyond serious address, leaving only impotent lamentation or a tedious exhortation to altruism. While greed may indeed be the root cause of our impoverished work life, it is surely not the case that the managers who design and orchestrate the work process are themselves greedy (or rather, they surely are greedy, no less or more than the rest of us, but that is not the issue). They are wage earners, and as likely as anyone else to hold themselves to a high ethical standard in their private lives. The problem, rather, is in the organization of managerial work within which they must operate.

Learned Irresponsibility

Managers are placed in the middle of an enduring social conflict that once gave rise to street riots but is mostly silent in our times: the antagonism between labor and capital. In this position they are subject to unique hazards. The sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting their world, conducting interviews, and describes its “peculiarly chancy and fluid” character in a book titled Moral Mazes. He shows the vulnerability of managers in their careers, and how it gives rise to a certain kind of language that they use, a highly provisional way of speaking and feeling. I believe some of the contradictions of “knowledge work” such as I experienced at Information Access Company can be traced to an imperative of abstraction, and that this imperative in turn may be understood as a device that upper- level managers use, quite understandably, to cope with the psychic demands of their own jobs.

To begin with, Jackall finds that though the modern workplace is in many respects a bureaucracy, managers do not experience authority in an impersonal way. Rather, authority is embodied in the persons with whom one has working relationships up and down the hierarchy. One’s career depends entirely on these personal relationships, in part because the criteria of evaluation are ambiguous. As a result, managers have to spend a good part of the day “managing what other people think of them.” With a sense of being on probation that never ends, managers feel “constantly vulnerable and anxious, acutely aware of the likelihood at any time of an organizational upheaval which could overturn their plans and possibly damage their careers fatally,” as Craig Calhoun writes in his review of Jackall’s book.¹ It is a “prospect of more or less arbitrary disaster.”

A good part of the job, then, consists of “a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself,” according to Calhoun. This gives rise to the art of talking in circles. Mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation, allowing a manager to “stake out a position on every side of an issue. Or one buries what one wants done in a string of vaguely related descriptive sentences that demand textual exegesis.” The intent of this kind of language is not to deceive, it is to preserve one’s interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, “a new, more appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used. In this sense the corporation is a place where people are not held to what they say because it is generally understood that their word is always provisional.” Nothing is set in concrete the way it typically is when one is, for example, pouring concrete.

Managers may speak very colorfully with one another, for example, when describing their weekends, or even in reference to some situation at work, but such earthy talk takes place in a parallel universe of the private. In any group setting, they have to protect their bosses’ “deniability” by using empty or abstract language to cover over problems, thereby keeping the field of subsequent interpretations as wide open as possible. “[T]he more troublesome a problem, the more desiccated and vague the public language describing it should be.”

It is in this two- tiered system of language—direct in private, empty in public—that the world of managers resembles that of Soviet bureaucrats, who had to negotiate reality without public recourse to language that could capture it, obliged to use instead language the whole point of which was to cover over reality.

When a manager’s success is predicated on the manipulation of language, for the sake of avoiding responsibility, reward and blame come untethered from good faith effort. He may then come to think that those beneath him in the food chain also can’t be held responsible in any but arbitrary ways. One of the features commonly observed in ancient Near Eastern courts was that eunuchs were most capricious toward other eunuchs, those further from the center of power. The prerogative of doing so was part of the compensation package, so to speak.

One might be tempted to think this is demoralizing for all involved. But we are highly adaptive creatures, and these circumstances generate their own sort of morality, one in which the fixed points of an internal moral compass must give way to a certain sensitivity and nimbleness. Managers may continue to have strong convictions, but they are obliged to check them at the door, and expect others to do the same. “[M]oral viewpoints threaten others within an organization by making claims on them that might impede their ability to read the drift of social situations.” As a result there is social pressure (one might say a moral demand) not to be too “moralistic.” This pressure is rooted in the insecurity of managerial careers.

My supervisor, Carol, was herself a writer of abstracts, which made her situation as enforcer of the quota poignant. As an abstractor, she doubtless felt trapped in the same contradiction as I. She was a bookish person, so I imagine she had some love for intellectual precision. But this was likely an “inappropriate” moral value to bring to the table when pleading the case of abstractors before her bosses (which I like to imagine she did). Such concerns can be rendered appropriate, and higher- level management support secured, only by demonstrating how they contribute to profits. Not because the higher- level managers are heartless, but because such a demonstration provides everyone needed cover. In fact, a lower- level manager may need only to put on a performance of hardheadedness before her superiors, and produce the stage props of a profit- maximizing calculation (graphs, charts, and so on). Unless she has these skills of the corporate dramatist, she is unlikely to get the official cover she needs to do the right thing by her workers.

Given the moral maze inhabited by managers, we can understand why those higher in the hierarchy must absent themselves from the details of the production process: such abstraction facilitates nonaccountability. Lower- level managers can’t help but think concretely, and their proximity to the work process makes them aware also of its human character, including the damage it does. This was Carol’s situation, that of being caught in the middle. The damage in question includes not only such problems as carpal tunnel syndrome, but the self- estrangement that arises from a work pace that ruthlessly subordinates the intrinsic goods of the job to the extrinsic metric of profit.

How much heroin?

At lunchtime I had a standing arrangement with two other abstractors. One was from my group, a laconic, disheveled man named Mike, whom I liked instantly. He did about as well on his quota as I did on mine (which was not very well), but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. The other guy was from beyond the beige partition that defined our group of cubicles, a meticulously groomed Liberian named Henry, who had worked for the CIA in his country. He had had to flee Liberia very suddenly one day, and soon found himself resettled near the office parks of Foster City. Henry wasn’t going to sweat the quota.

Come twelve thirty the three of us would hike overland, as it were, to the food court in the mall. It would be hard to overstate the sense of release that came with this movement. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. This calls to mind Marx, who writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.” Over lunch Mike would recount the outrageous things he had written in his abstracts, which were then published under the names of untenured assistant professors. I could see my own future in such furtive moments of sabotage—the compensating pleasures of a cubicle drone. Always funny and gentle, one day Mike confided that he was doing quite a bit of heroin. On the job. This actually made some sense.

How was it that I, once a proudly self- employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.

[If you like this essay, hitting the heart-shaped “like” button will help others find it.]

Interlude: What College Is For

If I had pursued higher education for the sake of a career, it would have been looking like a mistake at this point; happily, this was not my situation, and I have no regrets about my studies. But many people seem to regard college, and even graduate school, as an extension of compulsory schooling. More than 90 percent of high school students “report that their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college.”

In this there is little accommodation of the diversity of dispositions, and of the fact that some very smart people are totally ill suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you’re supposed to do once you have a degree. Further, funneling everyone into college creates certain perversities in the labor market.

The sociologist of education Randall Collins describes a cycle of credential inflation that “could go on endlessly, until janitors need Ph.D.’s and babysitters are required to hold advanced degrees in child care.”The escalating demand for academic credentials gives the impression of an ever more knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. Consider my abstracting job as it might have been described by a business journalist steeped in the latest talk about a “postindustrial society” or “creative economy.” I perfectly exemplified the knowledge worker, and what’s more, I had an advanced degree to match. My very existence, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet, in viewing my situation from afar in this way, the M.A. degree serves only to obscure a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

If much corporate knowledge work is after all not terribly demanding on the brain, or even requires the active suppression of intelligence, then we would expect academic accomplishments to be a poor basis on which to make hiring decisions. And in fact, corporate recruiters say they care little about a student’s grades. The university itself is trusted to have done more than enough cognitive sorting on the day it admitted a student. In their book Higher Education and Corporate Realities, the sociologists Phillip Brown and Richard Scase quote one recruiter saying, “We find no correlation at all between your degree result and how well you get on in this company. Not at all. I wish there were. I would then be able to say, ‘Unless you’ve got [a good GPA], don’t bother.’”

The irrelevance of what you actually learn (or don’t) in school for job performance is hard to square with a technocratic view of the economy, which is invariably coupled with a sunny presumption of meritocracy. Together, these views sometimes go by the name of “human capital theory.” According to this theory, “schools help society get the skills that it needs while they help individuals get the social positions that they deserve,” as David Labaree put it in How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credential Race in American Education.

This technocratic/meritocratic view strikes us today as common sense, but it is predicated on a certain view of what education is for, one that arose in the last century. In the years after World War II, many observers were struck with how complex society was becoming. The rational and scientific administration of this complexity seemed imperative; mere common sense seemed a paltry thing, totally inadequate to the challenges of a modern economy. Many business executives who were doing the hiring in the postwar years lacked degrees themselves, and assumed that college graduates would make superior employees because they possessed super- duper skills and knowledge. They were eager to hire college graduates to do jobs that had long been done by people with only high school diplomas. Yet there was little evidence to show they were better at their jobs, and in many cases they were less so. In a famous study of air traffic controllers, a job requiring complex decision making, for example, the sociologist Ivar Berg found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance.

Further, the technocratic/meritocratic view of education treats it as instrumental—it is good for society, and for getting ahead—and this has a corrupting effect on genuine education. As Labaree writes, “Formal characteristics of schooling—such as grades, credits, and degrees—come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, as pursuing these badges of merit becomes more important than actually learning anything along the way. . . . Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses.”

Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind. You might want to improve the student by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning. You might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages. You do this not out of malice, but because you sense rare possibilities in him, and take your task to be that of cultivating in the young man (or woman) a taste for the most difficult studies. Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self- satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face. These are the pedagogical uses of the “D.” But give someone a low grade, and he is likely to press upon you the fact that his admission to law school hangs in the balance. The Sort is on.

With this attitude, students are merely adapting themselves to the marketlike ethic of the institutions that school them. “Educational institutions find themselves located in a hierarchy of their own, forced to compete with other institutions for position in order to enhance the marketability of their credentials to socially mobile consumers.” The result is “a growing emphasis on producing selective symbolic distinctions rather than shared substantive accomplishments.” That is, what matters is your rank among your peers; it matters not if the whole lot of you are ignorant. When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensable to survival in the contemporary office, as it was in the old Soviet Union.

Thirty years ago, Collins pointed out that higher education serves a signaling function: it rewards and certifies the display of middle- class self- discipline. But what sort of discipline is required of white- collar workers these days? Once upon a time, the passing of examinations, meeting of course deadlines, and disciplined study for the sake of mastering a body of knowledge broadcast a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, and displayed the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy. But the new antibureaucratic ideal of the flexible organization puts quite different demands on people, requiring the cultivation of a different sort of self. As Brown and Scase point out, in the new dispensation the whole person is at issue; one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well- defined set of competencies tied to the fulfillment of specific organizational ends. What the recruiters are looking for is a manner of personal comportment, a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is difficult to codify. (This makes sense for a workplace that has little in the way of objective standards such as one finds in a machine shop.) Accordingly, the credentialism of higher education can continue its signaling function only if the official items appearing on a transcript are supplemented with extracurricular items that signal the possession of a complete personality package. 22 Students and their parents seem to understand this. An important part of the package is that one be a joiner, as this signals the possession of a self that is ready for “teamwork.”

Teamwork

The rise of teamwork coincides with the discovery of “corporate culture” by management theorists in the late 1970s. The term was no longer meant as a sneering condemnation of the man in the gray flannel suit, but as a new realm of possibility. David Franz writes that “the expectation that corporate culture could be managed was both central to its appeal and its crucial conceptual innovation.” The idea that culture can be managed entails a reversal of the usual idea of culture. “Culture, as social scientists use the term, is a mostly subterranean force, taken for granted, assumed, inarticulate. We are born into cultures, which teach us how to see, speak, and think. It is only through great effort that we can bring our own culture into view and then only partially. Corporate cultures, however, can be diagnosed, evaluated, and altered.” Managers needed to become anthropologists. But above all they needed to become founders of cultures, like a Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. That is, their anthropological finesse would not take the form of detached analysis, but rather of charismatic world-making (with executive pay to match). The discovery of corporate culture opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation in the office.

Through the exercise of charismatic authority, the manager is supposed to unsettle others, shaking them out of their cramped views and stale habits, thereby unleashing the creativity of all workers. This is a charismatic leader of a new kind, a sort of radical democrat. He does not seek followers; he seeks to make every man a leader of himself. Authority itself disappears as he turns work into play. He erects Nerf basketball hoops; he announces pajama day. The creative class expands.

Such innovations arose in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of hopes for the transformation of work through technology. In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote that the ideal character type of the coming age will be “a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his well- being in highly refined alloplastic ways.” It would not have surprised Rieff that “leisure” can become “play,” and then absorbed into work. The self overflows the “regimental discipline of work,” but such overflowing may take the form of longer hours in the office.

Workers must identify with the corporate culture, and exhibit a high level of “ buy- in” to “the mission.” The division between private life and work life is eroded, and accordingly the whole person is at issue in job performance evaluations. This exposure may be on all sides; some managers are now subject to the “360 review,” in which they answer not to a superior alone (the hierarchy has been smashed), but to all of their coworkers, and indeed to the assessments of customers and suppliers. Such reviews resemble the “encounter group” therapy sessions of the 1970s, in which one person was placed in the “hot seat” and then berated from every side. The point was to break down the ego, cleansing it of those false self- conceptions we call our “identity.” Thus purified, the ego can be built up once again by the group through praise. In Teambuilding That Gets Results, we find this:

Team Activity: Building Egos for Team Strength. Each team member’s name is written on a piece of paper, which is then folded and put in a basket. Each member pulls a name from the basket and takes one minute to write down as many positive attributes for that person as possible. When this is done, each person in the group identifies the person they picked and articulates his or her praise verbally. Before moving on to the next team member, the person receiving the feedback is asked, “Is that how you view yourself? Please explain.”

The purpose of the activity is to “accentuate the positive” and build self- esteem. But this is self- esteem of a particular sort, refracted through the assessments of the Team. It is perhaps not so much “building egos” as reconstituting the ego, so that the Team becomes the controlling unit of personality. There are further devices that can be used for breaking down the individual. Elsewhere in Teambuilding That Gets Results, we get an example of such an exercise. Six to ten people are assembled and given a light wooden dowel. Their objective is to lower it to the ground, together, after it has been placed horizontally on their outstretched fingers. What happens is that, contrary to each individual’s will, the dowel goes up rather than down. “Surprise and great laughter ensue.” The facilitator offers them reminders of the difference between up and down. “That’s the floor. That’s the ceiling. Slipping off the dowel makes the group start again from the beginning—which builds more frustration.” This frustration is a key part of the pedagogy. As the would- be team continues to fail at their appointed task, she gently berates them. “I tell them that this is a very light wooden dowel—you just need to lower it together to the floor.” Each time she starts them over she puts downward pressure on the dowel. That is, she gives them the impression the dowel is heavier than it is, so they begin by putting more upward pressure on the dowel than they would if they sensed its true weight, which dooms them to their theater of failure. This failure would seem to be based on a presumption of good faith on the part of the facilitator. Eventually “the group begins to anticipate this, and they start to prepare each other for it.” What then? Having shed their false consciousness and achieved some level of worker solidarity, do they grab the dowel and beat her roundly about the head and shoulders? If so, she doesn’t mention it.

The author says her “favorite” moment is when “the group becomes paralyzed. No one person wants to be the person to come off contact—so they don’t take risks.” Having induced this group paralysis, she then sets out to re- create the spirit of innovation and charismatic rule breaking, now as a function of the Team.

The most innovative groups question the “standing” starting point of the exercise. They notice that it’s hard to make the switch from standing to the kneeling position that is required to make the last move to the floor and keep in contact with the dowel. So they ask if they can start from a kneeling position. I generally approve this as I feel that the group is learning and questioning some unspoken rules.

So here is a group of people on their knees, finally. It was their own idea, erupting from the collective genius of the Team. Together, these mavericks develop the force of personality to “question some unspoken rules”—for example, that old canard that it’s better to stand on your own two feet.

Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us. So authority becomes smarmy and passive- aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone’s best interest, as rationality itself.

The risk is of being deceived into thinking there is a common good where there is not one. The fast- food worker seems to have the clearest view of this problem. He stakes his manly pride on maintaining his disengagement; on not devoting himself to something that cannot profit him. Is such an approach to work really “pathological,” as critics of the underclass insist, if there are no jobs for him that can engage his pride? Might the office worker balancing a wooden dowel on his finger not learn something important from the hamburger flipper?

Here we see the utility of the idea of corporate culture. The corporation has to become in the eyes of its employees something with transcendent meaning; something that can sustain the kind of moral demands normally associated with culture. Some notion of the common good has to be actively posited, a higher principle that can give people a sense of purpose in their work life. And indeed “organizational citizenship behavior,” including a readiness to put “team objectives ahead of personal interests,” is the new favorite personality measure of industrial psychologists.30 This higher purpose typically remains on a meta- level, vaguely specified. Managers are instructed to generate it by talking about “higher purpose.” But the absence of specific content to this higher purpose is its main feature. All the moral urgency surrounding it seems to boil down to an imperative to develop a disposition of teaminess.

When some worker doesn’t recognize his own good in the collective good as defined by management and there is a conflict, that’s when the therapeutic manager will take up the role of life coach, and turn his attention to the worker in a diagnostic mode. It is only natural, the worker is told, to feel resistance, especially to change. Everyone has buttons that will be pushed from time to time. But, the authors of Teambuilding That Gets Results ask,

[I]s it really the change that causes the stress? . . . Or is it our reactions to the new plan? . . . It may be true that the plan seems impossible, the unexpected turns make the job more difficult, and the radical ideas seem ridiculous, but stressing out or stewing only takes more energy that would be used more wisely toward adapting to the situation at hand.

Such stressing out or stewing indicates something amiss with the individual, his idiosyncratic hang- ups, not a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable situation. The reasonableness of the new situation is put beyond rational scrutiny, because change is a natural force, like metabolism: “98 percent of the atoms in your body are replaced every year; your skeleton is replaced every three months; your skin is replaced every four to five weeks,” and so on. The analogy suggests that when the job changes in a way that makes it more odious, it is not due to decisions that have been made by somebody, it is due to inexorable laws of nature. The very idea of responsibility is shown to be untenable.

There are activities that can be used to make the team confront its own attitudes toward change. Ask for five volunteers, and have them hold on to a long ribbon. Ask the person in the middle to start moving forward, then after forty- five seconds ask the group to stop. “Notice where each participant is. Discuss their reactions to the person moving forward. Some will have immediately followed, some will have stood their ground, others may have reluctantly been pulled along.” Now it is time to process. Those who held back may have found the ribbon cutting into their hands; the ensuing discussion about how much it hurts to stay back is beneficial to all. On one occasion, a worker was reduced to tears, but with transformative effect. She explained that the exercise “put her resistance into perspective and she was ready to become fully engaged in taking the steps necessary to get her career back on track.”

The Crew versus the Team

Tocqueville foresaw a “soft despotism” in which Americans would increasingly seek their security in, and become dependent upon, the state. His analysis must be extended in our time: the softly despotic tendencies of a nanny state are found in the large commercial enterprise as well, and indeed a case could be made that it is now outsized corporations, more than government, that exercise this peculiarly enervating form of authority in our lives, through work.

Tocqueville also saw a remedy for this evil, however: the small commercial enterprise, in which Americans reason together to solve some practical problem among themselves. I believe this remedy remains valid, especially if the enterprise provides a good or service with objective standards, as these may serve as the basis for social relations within the enterprise that are nonmanipulative in character.

One way of getting at this possibility is to ask: How is being part of a crew different than being part of a “team” in the new mode of office work? The answer must lie, in part, in the ambiguous character of the thing produced in the latter. Say it is a marketing team at Apple, circa 2000. The success of the iPod, as a product, can’t be specified in narrow engineering terms. Its success is due to the production of a new kind of behavior in consumers; we listen to music in a new way. The team’s job is part of a large and complex enterprise, the object of which is to produce culture, and it is hard to get metrics of individual contributions to such an effort. Because of the scale and complexity of the undertaking, responsibility for success and failure are difficult to trace. There are no objective performance criteria to hold up before workers, but management still has to do something, so it directs its gaze to workers’ mentalities, speaks of higher purpose, and brings in industrial psychologists to track various personality measures. For his part, the team member has no solid ground on which he can make a stand against this kind of moral training. He can’t say, as the carpenter can to the foreman, “it’s plumb and level—check it yourself.” His only defense is a kind of self- division—he armors himself with the self- referential irony supplied to him by pop culture, pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.

There is pride of accomplishment in the performance of whole tasks that can be held in the mind all at once, and contemplated as whole once finished. In most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect. His education prepares him for this; it is an education for working in a large organization, and he has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. This predisposes him to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization (however tinged with irony this deference may be), since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work.

Working in construction, one is similarly a part. Say you are an electrician. Your work of running circuits, then installing lights and switches and other devices, has no meaning outside the context of a whole building, with its walls built by the framers, its pipes and fixtures installed by a plumber, its foundation, roof, and all the rest. Taken separately, these trades are pointless; together you make accommodations for someone to live in. The difference is that on such a crew, you have grounds for knowing your own worth independently of others, and it is the same grounds on which others will make their judgments. Either you can bend conduit or you can’t, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.

Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job—an autonomous good that is visible to all—then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.

The characteristic form of address on a job site is command. In the office, Jackall writes,

managers’ acute sense of organizational contingency makes them speak gingerly to one another since the person one criticizes or argues with today could be one’s boss tomorrow. . . . Moreover, the crucial premium in the corporation on style includes an expectation of a certain finesse in handling people, a “sensitivity to others,” as it is called. As one manager says: “You can’t just push people around anymore.” Discreet suggestions, hints, and coded messages take the place of command; this, of course, places a premium on subordinates’ abilities to read their bosses’ vaguely articulated or completely unstated wishes.

This sounds to me like being part of a clique of girls, where one can commit a serious misstep without knowing it; where one’s place in the hierarchy is made difficult to know because of the forms and manners of sisterhood. Under such proprieties, even one’s sense of being on probation may be difficult to bring to full awareness, taking instead the form of a dull and confusing anxiety.

The educational goal of self- esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self- esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments. Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye- checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”² The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. They become risk- averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self- assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self- esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character.

“If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers, even across disciplines. This may take the form of an actual circle at lunchtime, sitting on little coolers. An apprentice may aspire to be a journeyman so he can enter that circle, quite apart from considerations of pay. This is the basis on which his submission to the judgments of a master feel ennobling rather than debasing. There is a sort of friendship or solidarity that becomes possible at work when people are open about differences of rank, and there are clear standards.

1. Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 4, Jul., 1989. Unfortunately, Calhoun’s review of Jackall is available online only as a PDF one can purchase for $40.

2. J. Henderlong and M. R. Lepper, "The Effects of Praise on Children's Intrinsic Motivation: A Review and Synthesis," Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 5 (2002), pp. 774-95, as quoted by Charles Murray, Real Education, p. 130.