• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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. 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.9 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.”10 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.”11 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.”12

It is in this two-tiered system of language—direct in