Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [59]
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.29 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.”31 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.32 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,