Garden Notes On: Neoliberalism in the Workplace, 'Careerism', and Education.
‘Digital gardening’ is an approach to sharing, updating, and re-articulating personal knowledge in an evolving collection of interrelated notes that emphasize explorability, iteration, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ perspectives on how one thinks. Collections evolve over time, and are expanded upon or ‘pruned’ as you learn. The intent is to showcase how thought develops organically. These are usually done in graph databases or personal websites built for the task. In this series, I will explore how this practice might look on Substack through loose but hopefully generative collections, usually centered on a broad overarching theme.
Last Updated: 08/13/23
Decoding ‘Corporate Speak’: Why do corporations speak the way they do?
While corporate neologisms are often the butt of jokes, they are far more serious and pernicious than ribs about ‘let’s circle back on this’, and ‘as per my email’ let on: Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? by Molly Young is worth a read. Take care in what terminologies you adopt, or how you deploy them in life beyond your workplace.
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The Meaning and Purpose of Education - How does it change under the assumptions of neoliberalism?
#careerism - Under the premises of neoliberalism, education is by no means unimportant, and may even be championed vigorously, but becomes ever more limited in the scope of its purpose and what it applies to. Career-driven conceptions of education, come to be seen as the highest value expression of the pursuit of knowledge, and decisions about what knowledge one pursues becomes subject to an exacting & calculating attitude of cost and benefit. Anything outside the scope of acceptable careers becomes ridiculed or worse, becomes inconceivable, entirely outside the horizon of possibility. Nothing is done to reshape focus on the most necessary fundamental knowledges required for holistic human advancement.
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Conceptions of ‘Work’ & Identity
#careerism - Work is held up as the defining force of your identity, and identity becomes inextricably tied to the accumulation of material wealth. Identity comes to be incoherently divorced from social and community life in this atmosphere. Work may be a space where radically different norms are applied compared to how you act with close connections, or even how you conceive of society. Alternatively, your conception of society becomes dominated only by the exigencies of the neoliberal attitude towards work. It might be a space where little or no reflection is devoted, and not only do we fail to ‘see’ how actions done through your work negatively affect the world, we actively, reflexively avoid any such thought.
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Behaviors and norms of professionalism are treated as a ‘given’ or default, but are actually embedded expressions of underlying assumptions & ideology.
#careerism - Behaviors and norms of professionalism are treated as though they "just are" when in reality they represent conscious and unconsciously adopted norms associated with a patterned set of beliefs and values - ultimately ideological positions that are processed with some veneer of a rational calculus. Consider the examples of truth-telling in a workplace which actively demands that only either deliberate lies or banal truths be expressed, where one cannot be oneself. consider the omnipresent myth/norm of not speaking of pay differences. consider compelling illusions of meritocracy. Consider men and women speaking of their personal lives and family obligations. the idea that speaking earnestly about family obligations is somehow a breach of career etiquette is not, whether conscious or unconscious, a ‘default’ or an accident. It is an articulation. Whenever someone, coworker or manager, states ‘that’s the way it is’ or ‘I can’t do anything about it’, know that you’re brushing up against one of these ‘defaults’ or ‘norms’.
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Neoliberal Ideology and Family Life, the Workplace as the Locus of Self-Actualization & Individualism
The advancement of women into the workplace has long been recognized as a major revolution in the cause of social and gender equality. In many ways, however, ‘the workplace’ has become one further arena where deeply rooted inequalities become manifest. The last several decades have been characterized by many different approaches to grappling with the ways that the workplace operates as a domain where gender inequalities may either become expressed and further entrenched or may be abolished. In Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work–family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture, Padavic et al. explore one dimension of these macrohistorical processes, offering some rich perspectives especially related to the under-explored, unconscious, systems-level processes that sustain inequalities. One implication relates to the way work life has dethroned family life as a locus for individualistic self-actualization. Something of note is that this process appears to be broad and affects everyone, though the risks are differential and unsurprisingly more burdensome for women: 'The risks for women who announce a family commitment that takes them from a work meeting are significantly greater than for men, though both might well feel some risk'. The notion, then, that men too face reprisals for the audacity of expressing family commitments in the workplace is not so much a contention against the idea that women face worse treatment, but rather a call to investigate even further the underlying ideological order responsible for the bifurcation in the first place.
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Notes on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and ‘Business Ontology’: is it not simply obvious that everything in society should be run as a business?
One of the achievements of capitalist realism, (or less specifically, [[neoliberalism]]) is the installation of a "business ontology" [we could read this as the most cynical venomous use of the word corporate, cf: #careerism] a pervasive pattern "in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business". The gradual 'market privatization' of social care institutions that were once "eminently possible" but which are now considered 'pie in the sky' or simply inconceivable to accomplish outside the private sector. It betrays such little faith in the power of public and collective achievement, and belies an entirely ahistorical perspective. Again, such things are always spun as natural consequences of market necessity or 'business needs' when in reality they were politically overtaken by the zombifying influence of neoliberalism. In Capitalist Realism Fisher reminds us that the highest form of ideology is that which is taken as empirical, natural fact (and seemingly non-ideological), calling to mind Lacan's Real, which can only be glimpsed through "fracture and inconsistencies" in our apparent reality, manufactured and offered to us. Such fractures include the onset of global climate disaster - which seemingly will prove impossible to fully instantiate into capitalist culture [cf. Zizek for other ‘indigestible’ catastrophes which are presumed to have the power to destabilize the current trajectory we are on.
"Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business." cf: neoliberalization
"...that we tend to perceive as non-ideological ... It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology."
"‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, ‘is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’."
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Neoliberalism as Bureaucratization, the Fusing of the Corporate and the State
Further quotes from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Cf: Governmentalities, Foucault Lectures on Governance and Neoliberalism
The Proliferation of Bureaucracy, seemingly benign, but perhaps one of the most consequential under-recognized harbingers of social harm? They provide the architecture/machinery to accomplish previously inconceivable schemes and arrangements of human affairs in ways that concretize specific assumptions about human nature into labyrinthine and inhumane structures:
"Yet new kinds of bureaucracy – ‘aims and objectives’, ‘outcomes’, ‘mission statements’ – have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence."
"The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy." Hence: business ontology, bureaucratization, proliferation
On being a manager in such an inhuman(e) bureaucracy, colorfully depicted here as a ‘zombifying influence’; and the illusion that merely replacing or redefining the individual or interpersonal is enough without confronting the (decrepit) structures :
“The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up into management and it’s usually not very long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. It is here that structure is palpable – you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/ deadening judgements speaking through them."
"Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of (‘better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves."
Consumer x Citizen: How does our status as consumers contradict or counteract our role as citizens? The question is, at what point does democracy as a seeding ground for consumer capitalism lead to a tipping point where the exigencies of political-economy turn the scales against citizenship in favor of consumership?:
"Although people are interpellated now as consumers … [and] government itself is presented as a kind of commodity or service – they still cannot help but think of themselves as (if they were) citizens."
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“Consider the examples of truth-telling in a workplace which actively demands that only either deliberate lies or banal truths be expressed, where one cannot be oneself.”
I love this description, deliberate lies or banal truths.