The Dark Side of Management

A Secret History of Management Theory

Gerard Hanlon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138801899
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317624547
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What isn't management and why doesn't it matter? This compelling book leads the reader away from the stories told by managers and management theories to show the secret history of the field.

In characterizing the progress of management as a war on workers, this book offers a controversial and revealing alternative intellectual history of this overwhelming discipline. The author employs a unique range of theories and sources, including the founding fathers of management, US labour and social history, and earlier intellectual figures such as Marx and Weber alongside the contemporary insights of Foucault and European and American workerist and post-workerist thought, to shed light on the world of management.

This book is key reading for researchers and students across the social sciences. With a controversial and stimulating approach, it also engages readers with a general interest in business and management issues.

Part I

Introducing the violence of management

Introduction

Managing the free gifts of the general intellect and the division of labour

Management as a symptom of refusal

What is the division of labour based upon in contemporary capitalism? In the Western industrialized economies, what do most of us sell in the labour market? The answer is ourselves – we increasingly sell our subjectivity. No longer do we trade technical, professional or expert skills; today we sell personality. And what do we get with the sale of our personalities? The answer, it seems, is personal dependency. What else can it mean to be authentic, or, as Peter Fleming (2009) expresses it, ‘to be your self at work’? To comment on this is simply to recognize that Mills (1951: 255) was correct when he noted that ‘personal traits become part of the means of production’.

More recently, workerists, post-workerists and cognitive capital theorists, neo-liberal human capital theorists and human resource management theorists, relationship marketing proponents, open innovation advocates, sociologists, economists and a host of others have recognized this. In different ways, all recognize that where value comes from has altered. No longer is it simply located in the factory – although it is there, too. Today, it is located in the subject, or what Gary Becker calls ‘human capital’, what Marx terms the ‘general intellect’, or what Robert Lucas names ‘external effects’. That is, it is located in you and me or subjectivity alongside the routine of our labour or the captured labour of the computer on which I am typing or the paper you are reading. Although many have noted this change in value production and perhaps more value capture from the factory and the technical division of labour to the ‘personality market’, few have linked it to the growth of personal dependency. Indeed, many see it as individualizing, liberating or an escape from deadening labour and routine. This book is an examination of this transition to new forms of personal dependency as management, itself merely a symptom of labour’s collectivity, reacts to it and attempts to dismember it and grow dependency through individualizing and isolating the worker. This is a dependency that is at the heart of the neo-liberal drive of management and of the state through their linking of self-care to work – even, or maybe especially, degraded work – or to property ownership wherein rights allocated to the latter far outstrip those of the former. (Even liberal thinkers such as Ferdinand Mount (2013) are beginning to discuss this shift in rights and obligations in favour of property.) As such, it is central to management, which in its origins shares the same fundamental principles as neo-liberalism – indeed, in the final chapter I discuss it as the first neo-liberal science.

What follows will locate these changes much earlier than many contemporary scholars have chosen to do. Rather than see the growth of personal dependency as rooted in the transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, I will contend it emerged with industrial capitalism. I begin by examining nineteenth-century America, with its prioritizing of personal independence, and then move on to examine how the independence of the craft worker and farmer was undermined to create the mass industrial worker. This shift was driven by an increased technical division of labour and the growth of mass production that simultaneously collectivized labour, thereby enabling it to protect itself from the market via unionization, collective protest and so on. But then this transition undercut this collectivist strength through the individualizing and ‘liberating’ effects of the personality market, the later assault on organized labour and globalization. In so doing, it created the thing early Americans most feared – personal dependency. This push towards personal dependency and the attempted liberation of capital from labour is the story of what today we call management.

The book will examine the struggles and recompositions that gave rise to this change. It will do so through a close reading of the founding texts of management thought. Most particularly, it will analyse the work of F. W. Taylor and Elton Mayo, the founders of scientific management and human relations, respectively. Through this excavation, I will argue that the division of labour and its management is fundamentally an exercise in dependency and authoritarianism. This is primarily, but by no means exclusively, a form of class struggle wherein those at the top – whom the proto-fascist theorist Robert Michels (1915) terms ‘the elite’ – use the management of the division of labour to secure their social position and become a new aristocracy, not unlike the oligarchs currently arising in America, the UK, Russia and China. Fundamentally, the management of the division of labour is an attempt at the technical and social deskilling of workers because the worker is always a political problem that needs to be addressed.

Oddly, this is not a very radical suggestion. In his formidable book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith acknowledged this very point. Smith’s first chapter is entitled ‘Of the division of labour’ and it is here that he describes the dividing of pin-making into the series of simple and routinized tasks that were revolutionizing production at the time. He argues that the increased division of labour would afford the capitalist three advantages: it would simultaneously deskill and increase the dexterity of the worker; it would save time through specialization and by locating workers in the same space; and it would enable machines to replace labour (Smith, 1981: 17). However, later in this same tract Smith highlighted how, if left unchallenged, the division of labour would also create new illegitimate hierarchies. He argued that although individuals were generally born with equal amounts of talent, the children of the philosopher and the factory worker would experience such different lifestyles because of their parents’ occupations that by their seventh year their paths would radically diverge (Smith, 1981: 28). Smith implicitly acknowledged class was at the centre of the division of labour, its management and its new hierarchies. Furthermore, he acknowledged that his own project turned labour into a political problem because

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his mind in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

(Smith, 1981: 782)

Managing work and the division of labour are thus about creating new forms of subjectivity, authority, hierarchy and individual and collective ways of being, and hence new forms of political problem. As we shall see in what follows, Marx, Braverman, Durkheim, Weber, Michels, the first neo-liberals and early management theorists all made central the issue of the division of labour and the management of work to their construction of their various imagined communities.

What follows places the growth of the modern division of labour and management within the development of capitalism and the two forms of control that emerged out of the Enlightenment. In Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici argues that two basic modes of thinking about social control emerged out of the Western Enlightenment and that both were central to the despotic attack on women, the commons, the racialization of ever more labour and the (often female) knowledge vital to maintaining the (semi-)independent ways of life that were being savaged by capitalism, the market, colonialism and science. One form, most associated with Hobbes, focused on external control wherein the state acts as both the creator and policeman of acceptable behaviour. The second is linked to Descartes and stresses conscience and the human will so that it ‘allows for the interiorizations of mechanisms of power’ (Federici, 2004: 149).

Management, I will contend, combines both strands of control, which it then put to work in the service of capitalism. As such, despite what management may tell itself, I will argue that – far from being a break with a past that was itself located in the expropriation of knowledge, slavery, colonialism and the degradation of women, non-whites or the working class – it is an extension of the reach of this discipline and control. It is not the story of Smith or Montesquieu’s civilizing process (Hirschman, 1977). Rather, it is a history of violence. The choice of scientific management and human relations is not random because they both represent ends of what I see as Federici’s continuum – a continuum of the physical to the psychological, perhaps (Mills, 1951: 110 also alludes to this tradition).

Taylor and Mayo fit into this dual form of control and both have had a profound influence on management knowledge over the last century or more. In 1955, Peter Drucker (2007b) described Taylor as perhaps making the United States’ most profound intellectual intervention since the Federalist papers. He credited Taylor with significantly contributing to today’s mass consumption society. More recently, Eva Illouz (2008) suggested Mayo was the most important management theorist of the past century. She claimed he was responsible for feminizing management and the workplace and that he thereby changed how we interact, how we accept authority, and how we legitimize power within and between institutions such as the work organization and/or the family. Similarly, every management textbook holds forth that Taylor and Mayo made important contributions to our understanding of modern management and, as a result, of social control within modern life. Even though their theories were never fully implemented, simply by outlining the potential of managerial ambition they helped to shape the actual management control structures we have created and resisted over the past 150 years. And yet, I would suggest that management theorists’ work and what it represents is understated or misunderstood because we ignore its links to violence, expropriation and authoritarianism. Remedying this is a major theme in what follows.

I will argue three things: first, Taylor and Mayo complement each other; second, they centralize concepts that have remained vitally important to management thought and practice in the century or more since they wrote; and third, management itself is ultimately a tactic for implementing neo-liberalism. To simplify, if we understand these theorists, we understand much of contemporary management, its role in society, the growth of the personality market, the neo-liberal collapse between work and life or polity and economy, the brutality of organizational life, and increasing personal dependency. The concepts examined in this book include the moral and political agenda of management, the invoking of science and objectivity to support what are political ends, the attempt to remould the individual subject, the creation of new lines of authority and power, the reconfiguring of the organizational form to create today’s externally regulating bureaucracy – ‘the most efficient type of social organization yet devised’ (Mills, 1951: 78) – and the increasing sophistication of management techniques of internal discipline. Underlying these concepts are very real areas of struggle based in the pursuit of profit through the control of labour; the rise and rise of instrumentality and formal rationality; the manipulation of the work ethic; the expropriation of knowledge; the legitimization of management’s right to manage the workplace and beyond to the whole society; and the sifting and shaping of populations through the emergence of biopolitics. In different ways, all of these topics are central to the creation of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and they have been, and importantly still are, deeply embedded in management thought and practice. An understanding of this thought and practice enables us to understand better our contemporary experience – an experience located in violence, primitive accumulation, expropriation and value capture.

As we will see, Taylor and Mayo continuously raise these themes. Often they examine different spheres of management: for example, Taylor has little to say on the issue of interviewing workers to ascertain how they feel about work, whereas Mayo quite precisely details how such interviews should be conducted (and claims to have led) on projects wherein thousands of workers were interviewed and encouraged to unburden themselves. Conversely, Mayo contributed little to debates on the technical division of labour, whereas one could safely say that Taylor was obsessed by the topic – so much so that today his name is synonymous with deskilling. Nevertheless, they overlap and complement each other. For example, in his talk to the Taylor Society in 1923, Mayo commented that he was continuing Taylor’s project – he was in some respects doing a Taylor of the mind. To read the two as complementary enables the reader to see both of Federici’s control mechanisms and to see that the concepts they developed have been germane to management ever since. In short (and very crudely), if you cannot confiscate the soul by seduction, you can try to force the body to submit to your control and will. This is management.

Frederick W. Taylor and Elton Mayo understood this. I will argue both are necessary to understanding the nature of management and its relationship to authoritarianism (see Chapter 1). Taylor insisted on using the division of labour to deskill the workforce. Mayo subsequently acknowledged that the new Taylorist nature of work had lost any inherent value to the workforce and hence he sought to persuade workers that they could find meaning through work groups that were formally organized and controlled by management. In essence, he sought to control the worker through his or her conscience and a hierarchical organizational culture. C. Wright Mills (1951: 225) argued that with the creation of the increasingly deskilled mass industrial worker and his or her reliance on their subjectivity in the ‘personality market’, the management of the division of labour had in some sense shifted from coercion to manipulation – from Taylor to Mayo (however, coercion was and remains important; see McKinlay and Wilson, 2013). Having been deskilled through the technical division of labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers were increasingly subjected to manipulation in an attempt to persuade them that work, the increased division of labour, the growing need to sell their subjectivity and the rise of the large corporations were all good for them. Indeed, for workers to reject such a proposition and its accompanying dependency was to exhibit irrationality (Mayo, 1923a, 1923b). Control necessarily becomes ‘self-control’ as Mills (1951: 183) expressed it.

Here the physical violence of Taylorism or scientific management becomes the mental violence of Mayo and the human relations school of management. Inherent in this transformation is a transition from the technical and specific skills of craft to the generic and individual skills of subjectivity that are developed in socialization, or what Marx called ‘the general intellect’ (Marx, 1973: 704–12; see Chapter 1). Having limited worker knowledge of the total production process through deskilling, management and capitalists created new forms of hierarchy, authority and personal dependency – the elite used the division of labour to establish new undemocratic forms of organization because they deemed workers’ refusal of the rhythms and dependency of capitalism as irrational and ‘pathological’ (Michels, 1915: 23–40; Lippmann, 1935, 1938/1943; Röepke, 1948; Mayo, 1949: 3–51).

Dependency, knowledge and the division of labour

Paolo Virno (2004: 40–1) argues that the technical skill of craft, professionalism or expertise is hierarchical and that it enables a worker to stave off the excesses of management and the division of labour. As such, technical skill essentially creates alternative forms of authority to managerial hierarchy. It is for this reason that craft work was so decisively undermined in early industrial capitalism. This was done through deskilling and the replacing of expensive labour with cheaper workers or technology (Tronti, 1965). All of this was itself done through an assault on workers’ skill and knowledge.

In the ‘Fragment on Machines’, Marx (1973: 704–12) notes a change in capitalism based on the prioritization of scientific knowledge. He argues that objectified knowledge in science and technology increased productivity so that labour was increasingly ‘to the side of production’ and an ever-decreasing direct element of it. He highlights the trend in capitalism for capital to replace workers through the use of science and technology (dead labour). As he puts it, ‘Capital itself is a moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as a sole measure and source of wealth’. For Marx, this becomes increasingly unsustainable because the development of objectified human creativity in science and machines means the ‘social individual’ emerges as ‘the foundation-stone of production and of wealth’ (Marx, 1973: 706).

This ‘social individual’ is created collectively through spontaneous cooperation in and out of the workplace and is made up of persons within each of whom is a pre-individual (shared language, social cooperation, perception or culture) and the individuated elements of each individual that help to create his or her unique subjectivity (Virno, 2004: 80). When labour in the factory is replaced by machines it is this social individual, with its universal and individuated potential, that drives value capture in the personality market. This development highlights capitalism’s prowess because societies have attained such a level of technological and science-led productivity that only a part of production time is necessary for immediate consumption. In turn, this means the social individual is increasingly developed outside the immediate production process, although not outside the circuit of capital, and hence management becomes ever more attentive to the outside of the production process as capitalism develops. One consequence of this transition is the creation of ‘disposable time’. This comes about directly because of increases in productivity and capital’s desire to reduce to a minimum necessary labour time through technology and management because o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I Introducing the violence of management
• Introduction
• 1 Management's authoritarian heart Managing the free gifts of the general intellect and the division of labour
• PART II The dark nature of management knowledge
• 2 ‘Class struggle without class?'1 Attempting to manufacture incompetence
• 3 ‘An almost equal division of the work and the responsibility'1 Driving towards the mass industrial subject
• 4 ‘Spontaneous cooperation'1 Excavating the soul
• PART III Management, neo-liberalism and a history of violence
• 5 ‘Confiscate the soul'1 Taylor, Mayo and the fundamentals of management
• 6 Management The first neo-liberal ‘science'
• Appendix Management, Durkheim and discipline
• Bibliography
• Index