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THIS WEEK → 👨💼 Managerialism 📈 The Boomer Anomaly 🎨 Valuing Creative Work ➕ Shedding 🚿 Museum-Worthy
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
How can we build a better world? As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!
#1 👨💼 Managerialism
How do we organize ourselves as humans? I have shared a few other bits about the autocratic nature of the business world before. This piece describes managerialism as a systemic structure and ideology of organizing ourselves that keeps this autocratic nature in place and ensures the capitalist mandate of focusing solely on economic growth and profit for its own sake.
”Managerialism, an ideology so pervasive as to seem benign, is about the glorification of an elite group of people—managers—who are said to be uniquely qualified to have power over workers and companies. […]
Managerialism cloaks the sources of this conflict—the workplace’s undemocratic, hierarchical, and asymmetric power structures—in humanistic and benevolent terms. For example, you may have heard of the idea that “strong corporate cultures” offer workers bottom-up voice and power. What this really amounts to is a nascent totalitarianism, a means of keeping workers in line by telling them they’re autonomous and part of a “tight-knit family” but immediately instilling feelings of shame and guilt for any transgressions from the norm. […]
‘The idea of bottom-up employee power … has a cultural function in a democratic society at large, which explains why management ideologues greatly overstate it. On the face of it, bottom-up power seems democratic and consistent with America’s historic political culture. When employees bring their democratic values to work, managers assuage their feelings of lost freedom and dignity with the idea that the corporation is a bottom-up organization, not the top-down hierarchy that in reality it is.’ […]
Because managerialism has spread so thoroughly into society, its effect has been to anesthetize everyday life to the point that many people cannot envision an alternative way to organize themselves.[…]
Rather than trying to put lipstick on an elite pig, we need to do a complete overhaul and reinvention, cutting the umbilical cord to managerialism. This means educating organizers, not managers—creating, as Parker calls for, new “schools for organizing.” The broader purpose of such a progressive education would be to engage students in the struggle to organize a democratic society, offering a vigorous critical pedagogy that doesn’t pander to market logic.
The Boomer generation was dealt with outstandingly good economic cards. We’re living in a different world now, but the stories we tell ourselves, the goals we chase after, and the ideals we compare ourselves to—e.g. a steady career trajectory—still often come from a time that is now increasingly seen as an anomaly.It’s time to move on!
“The idea of a good career trajectory is deeply embedded in our beliefs about how work should be. If you work hard you should be able to keep consistently climbing the ladder.
[This] idea of a steady career trajectory is a byproduct of a special moment in history called the “long boom”. […] The 20+ years period after World War II is now called “The Long Boom” or sometimes the “Golden Age of Capitalism.” It combined a constant labor participation rate with a massive boom in economic growth.
William Whyte wrote this in The Organization Man in 1956:
‘The prosperity of recent years has had a lot to do with the rosiness of the view. Corporations have been expanding at a great rate, and the effect has been a large-scale deferral of dead ends and pigeonholes for thousands of organization men. With so many new departments, divisions, and plants being opened up, many a young man of average ability has been propelled upward so early—and so pleasantly—that he can hardly be blamed if he thinks the momentum is a constant.’
It was in this period that the “steady career path” was born. […] The boomer generation may have been the last generation to truly be able to start and end a career with a single company and even then, it probably wasn’t the norm. […] [But] we still operate with the assumptions that were cemented during this time. And you can still find it shaping reality most strongly in big corporations, law firms, consulting firms, and other service firms.
To hide the fact that promotions are no longer guaranteed, companies have developed “alternative” paths. Academia now has adjunct professors. […] Consulting firms have “experts” instead of partners, and law firms have “non-equity partners.” […]
‘We made a mistake and by that I mean my generation and my parents generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No it was not! It was the anomaly! We had just wiped out the manufacturing capabilities of anyone who could challenge us. So the idea that you had that job with the gold watch and you could work there for your entire career and raise a family of four and all of that, that was an anomaly. In the late 1950s Detroit was selling 80%+ of all autos sold in the world.’”
The narrative that art or creativity isn’t real work (as described below) is just one element of a much bigger discussion about what is considered and adequately valued as “real work” in today's society and economic system and what isn’t. As I wrote in Aliveness: Reframing Productivity: “We don’t really think of productivity as a measure of being a great partner, parent, friend, caregiver, lover, artist, craftsperson, neighbor, creative, sibling, contemplator, savorer, rest taker, etc.” Maybe we should!
“For the past few centuries, we’ve held the strange assumption that making art is inherently different from other types of work. Creativity, we’ve been taught, is its own reward. We can see the traces of this idea in many places: the taboo that surrounds talking about money in art schools, the persistence of unpaid design internships, and the regular propositions to pitch for free. For several decades, the price of this belief has been creatives’ difficulty in conceiving of their work as labour – and by extension, to benefit from the gains of other workers’ struggles. […]
As a rule of thumb, capitalism is risk-averse. It requires predictable forms of labour in order to ensure consistent, predictable profits – which is at odds with artists’ desires (and cultural expectation of them) to experiment and innovate constantly. With their oxymoronic name, ‘commercial artists’ straddle this divide every day, and are taught early on that they can’t have it all. Creatives are stuck in a double bind that keeps creativity and labour apart. As Greg Mihalko from worker-owned design practice Partner & Partners articulates, a project “could be really beautiful and cutting-edge or award-winning, but when you look behind the curtain, everybody who actually did that work is getting paid absolute shit. Why aren’t we including that as a kind of value?” […]
Illustrator Karlotta Freier recalls being mocked by her art school classmates for asking about how to make a living as an illustrator. “No one would make fun of a plumbing student for asking about the business side of things,” she says, “so why don’t I get to ask?” For decades, the promise of a creative career was the alleviation of the worst parts of capitalist labour. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” they said. But as Adam J. Kurtz pointed out, doing what we love without fair compensation and healthy work conditions only lead us to become ever more alienated, to blur the distinctions between personal and professional life, and to justify many sacrifices while leaving us unable to change things. […]
We’ve been told that doing “good work” will lead to economic success, but really, it might just be the other way around. With the help of large collective organising, worker-driven structures, and knowledge-sharing, we can accomplish better work conditions and more beautiful, more fulfilling creative work.”
“We have a problem with scale. The planetary crisis can seem impossible to grasp. But focusing on the local can feel limited. How do we work to a scale that feels manageable? There is a way of reorganising how we think about scale: the -shed. -sheds (from Old English scead) describe the natural boundaries between waterbodies. They are not hard-edged territories, but networks. -sheds invite us to think about the level of landscape and natural systems.” Shedding by the Future Observatory Journal
“AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet. ChatGPT, my favorite, is the most shameless of the lot. It will do whatever you tell it to, regardless of the skills involved. […] It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.” Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want To Be It by Paul Ford
“The internet is still a relatively new technology in the context of time, and it may only have been a more blissful place in those early years because people hadn’t clocked on to how it could be monetized, farmed, controlled or bent to their will. Alas, we are where we are — on the verge of ruining it completely.” I Kinda Hate The Internet Now by Stephen Moore
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue! If you enjoyed this, give it a ❤️ and share it with a friend!
What a corporate rabbit hole, I love it! I never thought of the boomers to be the anomaly but it kinda makes sense, good perspective there.
Thanks Barbs