Culture and Management by Zygmunt Bauman was published in Parallax in 2004 and speaks to the managers concerns with the managed, and how this relationship have evolved in the United Stated over the past 40 years.
Despite it’s having existed in practice for thousands of years, the sociological idea of culture was first spoken of as a term for the management of human thought and behavior. Industrial production processes that were increasingly complex and in need of absolute repeatability and precision, unlike the previous artisan approach to production, mean that there was an increased need for normative regulation within work spaces. Being part of a purposeful activity, certain human traits were seen to be like fertilizers to a productive process and thus human beings are made. Selective cultural improvement in the work site transpired by training and education in the “right” way of being. After connecting this term to another relatively new word – management – Bauman links the concept to ‘husbandry’ in the human sphere, ‘breeding’ in behavior and ‘cultivation’ of character. After this he makes a point to point out the dialectical characteristics, the interpenetration of opposites, which exists within the relationship:
“Just like ‘agriculture’ is the vision of the field as seen from the perspective of the farmer, ‘culture’ metaphorically applied to humans was the vision of the social world as viewed through the eyes of the ‘farmers of the human-growing fields’ – the managers. The postulate or presumption of management was not a later addition and external intrusion: it has been from the beginning and throughout its history endemic to the concept. Deep in the heart of the ‘culture’ concept lies the premonition or tacit acceptance of an unequal, asymmetrical social relation – the split between acting and bearing the impact of action, between the managers and the managed, the knowing and the ignorant, the refined and the crude.”
Bauman then quotes Theodore Adorno to point out how “the “managers-managed” relationship is intrinsically agonistic; how the two sides pursue two opposite purposes and are able to cohabit solely in a conflict-ridden, battle-ready mode. Put another way, from the Wobbly Constitution, the worker and the owner have nothing in common. As Baum himself puts it – “the management’s plot against the endemic freedom of is a perpetual casus belli.”
The ideas which structure workplace interactions – management – are codified into formal knowledge via educational institutions – like the Catholic University that I am now in – and the different approaches to workplace administration are taught. Culture creators are those that help apply changes to those norms, whereas managers are those that help maintain the norm. There is always a tension here too, as one seeks to change the status quo that the other previously enforced.
Bauman then quotes Hannah Arendt at length regarding the increasing liquidity of the world and its effect on human exchange in the workplace.
The second managerial revolution is the switch from normative, explicit regulation to a more implicit one.
First Managerial Qualities Neoliberal Model
Normative Regulation Seduction
Day to Day Policing PR
Routine Constant Change
Highly-Regulated Precarity
Understanding culture as operationally meaning something like ‘pattern maintenance’ of a “kind of totality inside which any deviant behavior of human units is promptly spotted, isolated before irreparable harm is done and swiftly defused or eliminated.” Another words whereas the logic of “solid” modernity was following instruction; the “liquid” modernity is doing it yourself. Bauman is very critical of this, quoting other historians and ethnographers as this helping to contribute to a culture of “disengagement, discontinuity and forgetting.” Bauman does not go on into any extended description of how thus to unravel this negative aspect of modern workplace culture, but does state that management needs to be aware of this unless the quest for abstraction, branding and profit – the reification of thought, objects and human relations – lead to workplace problems that suffocate their relationship. Cultural events, a fancy phrasing for company events, can thus be space to reinforce the norms required for a good workplace culture.