Management and the Soul (Or: Corporate Life, With or Without Mills)
(See also my extension of this line of inquiry into the problem of American political apathy, which was far more well-received).
WTM loaned me an extraordinary text, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past. Of particular note was the aforementioned essay by Eugene McCarraher, “Me, Myself, and Inc.” The book as a whole is a socio-historical or anthropological examination of how the corporation has dictated the evolution of modern selfhood.
This essay in particular explores the quasi-religious quality of “management theory” as developed and practiced, in all seriousness, by men like Stephen Covey, and it asserts that this framework of values and ideas has an implicitly religious quality: it defines the moral self for the modern American (excluding countercultural groups), and as such should be studied if we are to understand what selfhood means in the consumer capitalist world of the present, when it very obviously doesn’t mean what it once did.
I’ll probably post more from the essay, but this reference to Simone Weil was notable immediately, both for its serious description of what labor means for transcendence (Weil worked in a Renault factory) and because I want to get it emblazoned on a sign at my office, along with two other quotes:
[Simone] Weil saw the opportunity for management to conscript the disembodied soul through the mystification of managerial expertise. Because modern science and technical education had become “a corpus of knowledge closed to the working masses,” they comprised an “outstanding mystery” analogous to theology or the occult. The mystification of managerial expertise facilitated the entrusting of management…to “a curious machine, whose parts are men, whose gears consist of regulations, reports and statistics,” and which tried to “imitate the effort of thought to life.” In its fracturing of the laboring self and its construction of a spurious social selfhood, Fordist capitalism constituted a massive desecration of sacramental labor, because of only in the unity of thought and action could work afford “a certain contact with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order in it.” This is why Weil could warn that “it is sacrilege to degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the Eucharist.”
Honestly, the first bolded phrase (and the emphases are mine) sums up my life in middle management fairly well, and inclines me to feel a rather pronounced sense of guilt. McCarraher is right, too: anyone who is compelled to read such works as The Servant Leader can attest to the corporate humanism which attempts to replace the desecrated values of the pre-corporate era with a new morality and ethics, regrettably being articulated mostly by imbeciles in hotel conference rooms and seminars.
Update: see this fantastic essay by Stuart Willis (blimpsarecool). It offers (1) a concise explanation of the historical development of the corporation and the management class, (2) why the latter functions without meaningful regard for the success or failure of a corporation, and (3) a discussion of how the phenomenon of emergence relates to the problems of corporatism and contemporary society. Totally awesome.
