Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [54]
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.”13 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 ab stractors 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.
At lunchtime I had a standing arrangement with two other ab stractors. 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 partition, 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