Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay

The Theory of the Organizational Ideal

Howard S. Schwartz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814739563
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Howard S. Schwartz shows how American industry is in a process of decay unable to cope with foreign competition and stagnant in technological development. He attributes this Organizational Decay to a reluctance in the part of corporate members to deal with reality.

Part One
THE THEORY OP THE ORGANIZATION IDEAL

Introduction

When I left graduate school and began teaching organizational behavior courses, I was struck by the irrelevance of what I had learned to the actual organizational experience of my students.

My students experienced and understood organizational life as a kind of “vanity fair,” in which individuals who were interested in “getting ahead” could do so by playing to the vanity of their superiors. One needed to do this in two ways: one needed to flatter the superior as an individual and as an occupant of the superior role. This latter process tended to trail off into an adulation of the organization in general.

Work either fit into this process of adulation, in which case it made sense; or it did not, in which case it did not make sense. Work that did not make sense in this way, my students felt, was best left to the suckers who hadn’t figured out yet how to get ahead and who deserved whatever torment this system led them to inherit. If, through this process, important, valid information was lost to the system by being withheld or simply unappreciated, that was not their concern. Through luck or guile, the consequences would, or could be made to, occur on somebody else’s watch.

At first glance, my students’ attitude looked to me like cynicism. But closer analysis suggested that, although they had a great deal of cynicism in them, they were not being simply cynical, for they believed in the righteousness of what they were doing.

For them, getting ahead was a moral imperative, which justified any means necessary for its accomplishment. But more than this, the system itself, which called upon subordinates to idealize it, was held morally sacrosanct. A person who refused to go along with the system was seen as not only stupid and naive, but as morally inferior. And this was so even if the individual in question was offering a point of view that was essential for the organization to do its work effectively and efficiently.

It thus seemed to me that, for my students, the organization’s processes defined moral value. As defined by its processes, the organization seemed to exist in a moral world of its own, which served to justify anything done on its behalf and which did not require justification on any grounds outside of itself. This view was inconsistent with a view of the organization as an instrument to do work. For my students, the organization did not exist in order to do work; it did work in order to exist.

Yet, even while holding this point of view, many of my students did not appear to have a deep loyalty to the organizations they so supported. On the contrary, for the most part they were willing to change organizations with no regrets or guilt. Their loyalty, if that is what it was, seemed to be to an abstract idea of organization, an idea of the organization as a vehicle for the revelation of their own grandiosity. Ultimately, therefore, their loyalty appeared to be to themselves.

Over time, trying to be a good empiricist, I came to take their stories about organizational life increasingly seriously. I made the assumption that organizational life was just what my students, whom I came to consider my research subjects, and sometimes informants, appeared to be living. Relegating what I had learned in graduate school to the status of a fantasy, I tried to fashion a theoretical conception that would explain this organizational reality.

The theory came to center on the Freudian (1955a, 1957; Chasseguet-Smirgel 1985, 1986) concepts of narcissism and the ego ideal. In this part of the book I try to use these concepts to explain the experience of my students. I do this through an interpretation of the idea of the organization that they hold. The reader will understand, however, that I do not intend just to interpret an idea. For, if I am correct, those who hold this idea of organizations do so in a way that determines their behavior. It therefore provides a basis for the interpretation and understanding of organizational process, insofar as that process is based upon this psychological dynamic.

The vision of organizations I have developed here is negative. Certainly, the topics I have chosen to investigate—totalitarianism, decay, antisocial actions, and so forth—represent parts of the seamy side of organizational life. I make no apologies for this. These matters concern me, and I offer my work as my best attempt at trying to understand them.

The determination as to how much of organizational reality is represented by this vision must be left up to each reader. My own estimate, specifically with regard to American organizations in our epoch, is that a great deal of organization behavior can be understood in this way. And I offer the further hypothesis that the evident inability of American industry to compete may be due, in no small measure, to the dynamics I describe here.

1
The Clockwork or the Snakepit:
An Essay on the Meaning of Teaching Organizational Behavior

There is a problem in teaching introductory organizational behavior courses that used to cause me great distress. Most of the textbooks in this area have always seemed to me to be essentially useless for the purpose of teaching students about organizations.¹ Yet the students expected and even demanded that one of these texts be used. For my own part, believing that my purpose was to teach students about organizations and that organizational reality more closely approximates a snakepit than the bland picture most texts convey, I’ve developed and used a psychoanalytic framework, expressed in this book, that explains much of what I see and have heard about. The problem was that this split my course into two separate courses, almost entirely distinct from one another.

One was the course that I taught. It focused on organizations as they seemed to me to exist in reality. The other was a course, taught by the text, which focused on organizations that seemed to me to exist only in fantasy. This situation was unsatisfactory both to my students and to me.

Trying to resolve this issue, I did an experiment in one of my classes. I first asked my students to form in their minds a picture of the organization they knew best, either from their own experience or from listening to the accounts of somebody close to them. Then I described two types of organizations. One type was a textbook organization. In it, the organization is like a clock: everybody knows what the organization is all about and is concerned solely with carrying out its mission; people are basically happy at their work; the level of anxiety is low; people interact with each other in frictionless, mutually supportive cooperation; and if there are any managerial problems at all, these are basically technical problems, easily solved by someone who has the proper skills and knows the correct techniques of management.

The other type of organization, the “snakepit” organization, is just the opposite of the textbook projection. Here, everything is always falling apart, and people’s main activity is to see that it doesn’t fall on them; nobody really knows what is going on, though everyone cares about what is going on because there is danger in not knowing; anxiety and stress are constant companions; and people take little pleasure in dealing with each other, doing so primarily to use others for their own purposes or because they cannot avoid being so used themselves. Managerial problems here are experienced as intractable, and managers feel that they have done well if they are able to make it through the day.

Having presented these alternatives, I asked my students to indicate which type of organization more closely approximated the picture of the organization they knew best.

The results were dramatic. Approximately three quarters of the students responded, and, of those, virtually all indicated that the snakepit model fit better. Here was my answer, I thought. The snakepit, each of them knew, was not an exception to the rule; it was the rule. We could forget about the clockwork picture presented by the texts. Organizations aren’t like that. So now we could turn to the study of the snakepit with a clear conscience. We were, after all, there to study organizational behavior, right?

Not according to them! For the demonstration, impressive enough to me, had no impact on the bulk of my students. Facts be damned. They wanted to know the techniques for managing clockworks.

For the thinker with clinical interests, the bizarre is the point at which things begin to get interesting. How was it possible to reconcile the interest of my students in the textbook/clockwork image of the organization with the fact that the best evidence of their own senses, and of the senses of their peers, was that such things do not exist?

Over time, I came to believe that the idea of the clockwork organization had much more than pragmatic significance for them. It was rather an article of faith. And, as with all articles of faith, the way to understand this one is to understand its place in the individual’s psychological configuration. We hold to articles of faith because we need to. That is why they cannot be dislodged by facts. In other words, the question becomes what did the idea of the clockwork organization mean to these students? What did it represent to them that was so important for them to believe in?

THE CLOCKWORK ORGANIZATION AS AN EGO IDEAL

The idea of the clockwork organization, I propose, symbolized an ego ideal for my students. As we shall see more elaborately later on, it represented the return to narcissism—the healing of the rift between subject and object, self and other, freedom and necessity, that permeates postinfant mental life. It represents the end of the instability in the sense of identity that arises from these (Sartre 1953; Lichtenstein 1977). Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that my students were attached to it. They wanted to know about the clockwork organization not because it represents a perfect organization, but rather because it represents the possibility of becoming perfect themselves.

The problem is, of course, that while the clockwork organization is an idea that has great emotional appeal, it does not represent anything that exists in the world, or even that could possibly exist in the world. It is appealing because students believe that they can redefine themselves in terms of the organization, but in fact all they can do is act the role. There is a qualitative difference here. Defining themselves in terms of the organization would mean defining away what is particular and concrete about them. This is what makes it possible to think of the organization as a clockwork: if everyone in it is defined in terms of the same collective “person,” there is no basis for bruising competition, for there is only one person. But what is particular and concrete about one is oneself. We take ourselves with us wherever we go.

The clockwork organization has the same problems connected with it as any ego ideal. The ego ideal is formulated as a response to anxiety, and we are driven to pursue it by anxiety. It represents an end to the anxiety that drives us toward it. But at its core, our anxiety concerns our finitude, vulnerability, and mortality (Becker 1973), and these are the biological givens of being an organism (Freud 1955b). We can transcend biology only in fantasy. The clockwork organization is one of these fantasies.

The fact that we bring our own particularity, finite and vulnerable, to organizational life and the fact that organizational life has no use for that particularity combine to explain, perfectly adequately, the snakepit character of organizational life. For an organization is a drama (Goff-man 1959)—a play put on by actors. And there is room in this drama only for the performance. But the performance is put on by a performer, who always differs from the performance. Yet the performance defines us normatively, specifies who we should be. Thus the performer is not what he or she is supposed to be. This means that there must be for each of us, individually and collectively, a shameful, secret underside to organizational life. Where does this leave the teacher of organizational behavior?

Given the premise that organizations are snakepits, it is obvious why one should teach that they are snakepits: because the business of the college professor is to teach the truth. But given the premise that they are snakepits, I can also think of five arguments why one should teach that they are clockworks nonetheless. I don’t think that any of these arguments is adequate; but each of them seems inadequate in a sufficiently interesting way to justify refutation.

TEACHING THE CLOCKWORK

The first two arguments propose that one should teach the clockwork theory because students demand it. One of these may be called the consumer-sovereignty argument. Here, the college professor rests the legitimacy of teaching the clockwork model on the basis that he or she is providing a service that students want. There is not much to this argument. It is the equivalent of saying that the physician should make a diagnosis based upon what the patient wants to hear. It countenances, in short, a betrayal of the academic profession. While what it describes might be explainable in some instances, given the necessity of the professor to maintain his or her job, this says nothing more than that universities can be snakepits, too.

The other variant of the argument from student demand is more subtle. I call it the argument from necessary illusion. It recognizes the basically defensive character of the belief in the clockwork organization and asserts a compassionate case for not shattering the student’s psychological defenses. The case here is similar to one I experienced in a former incarnation, as a teaching assistant in a humanities program. There, I would lead discussions focusing on the critique of systems of ideas, including philosophies and religions. Every now and then, I would have a student who held the religious beliefs that were under attack. What does one do in a situation like this? If such beliefs give a person solace, is it always good to interfere—especially if one has no equally comforting alternative to offer?

On the level of religious beliefs, it seems to me, this is a most disturbing question. Even Freud (1961), who argued for the abandonment of religion, expressed clear misgivings about his conclusion. On the level of organizational beliefs, the question is less formidable. The difference is that religious beliefs ultimately address the meaning of life, while organizational beliefs refer only to the facts of life. One can live an entire life and maintain belief in religious ideals. Disillusionment with organizational beliefs usually sets in shortly after one gets a job (Klein and Ritti 1984). Under the circumstances, the trade-off becomes the maintenance of a comforting illusion during the student’s college life versus the consequences of maladaptation after graduation (Wanous 1975). Add to this the opportunity costs associated with foregoing a veridical education about organizations, and it does not seem to me that the results of the calculation can be in doubt.

At any rate, anyone still concerned about the effects of attacking someone’s defenses should bear in mind the experience I had when I was dealing with the issue in the sphere of religion. What I found there was that, despite my horror at what the massive power of my intellect would do to the minds of my poor religious students, I had little reason to worry. Defenses, if that was what they were, defend. These students did not come to their beliefs through reason, and they did not feel much threatened when reason came to attack them. The notion that the intellect is irresistible is perhaps an element of our own narcissism, as teachers, which we would do well to examine on our own behalf.

The third argument for teaching the clockwork strikes me as being the most compelling. It is that the clockwork organization not only is a more appealing picture of organizational life, but represents a better organization. It is, perhaps, not what organizations as we experience them are like, but it is what organizations should be like, and therefore teaching this model might bring organizations closer to the ideal through the actions of our students. I refer to this as the argument from idealism.

The problem with the argument from idealism is that it mistakes the qualitative difference between clockwork and snakepit organizations for a quantitative one. If the difference between the clockwork and the snakepit could be placed upon some continuum, even upon a set of continua, it would make sense to try to approximate the clockwork and to work toward it incrementally. But if the difference is a difference in kind, then no amount of incremental change is going to matter. Thus, if one values longevity, then it makes sense to pursue ways to increase peoples’ lifespans. But if it is immortality that one values, then increasing lifespan will be beside the point.

My contention is that the clockwork organization, as an ego ideal, represents an impossible bridging of the gap between the self and the other. The theorists of the clockwork organization want to bridge this gap by proposing the organization as a unity of self and others—a unity created by the redefinition of both selves in terms of organization. But this unity falls apart on the new grounds of being a contradiction between the abstract (the idea of the organization as a unity) and the particular (the individuals who would have to give this abstraction whatever reality it could have). Each of these individuals remains particular, finite, and, hence, separate from the abstraction. But the abstraction is just the idea of the lack of separation. That is what gives it its attractiveness. Thus, the clockwork organization is impossible—a contradiction—and a state that, because of its contradictory nature, cannot even be approximated in a way that would maintain its character as attractive.

The easiest way to miss this point is by supposing that the organization is behavior. Analysis of the ego ideal shows that it is the intentional context of the behavior that poses the problem. I have no doubt that people can behave as if their association functioned like a clock. But within the ego ideal of the clockwork organization is the idea that people are acting spontaneously. And to the extent that people are acting as if the organization were a clockwork, they are not expressing themselves spontaneously. Their experience of their existence as actors would stand apart from, and in contradiction to, the roles they are playing. But this distinction, between the player and the role, is just the contradiction between the individuals and the abstraction that we saw earlier—and that we saw was a fatal flaw in the notion of the clockwork organization.

My penultimate argument is one that I think many teachers of the clockwork theory would find most natural to them. Let me call it the argument from necessity. It holds that the clockwork theory should be taught because organizations will demand it from their employees, and it will be necessary for them to know if they are to get jobs, keep them, and work their way through the hierarchy.

I think there is a good deal of truth to this argument, but not as an argument for teaching the clockwork theory. Rather, it is an argument for teaching the snakepit theory and showing how using the language of the clockwork theory is a strategy for getting by in the snakepit. Unfortunately, this part of the lesson is often only tacit. The teacher teaches the clockwork theory, not with an expression of belief in it or commitment to its truth, but because “Pm supposed to teach you this stuff, so here it is.” The student “learns” in a similarly detached fashion, making notes on it and studying it in preparation for an exam. Neither party takes it seriously, and both understand that what they are going through is a kind of charade: the charade of the wise professor who knows the truth and imparts it and of the dutiful, conscientious student who sops this truth up and comes to know it and to revere the teacher who teaches it. In other words, what we have here is a perfect lesson in the way the theory of the clockwork is used in the snakepit.

The pity is that, to the extent that this lesson remains tacit, to the extent that the participants pretend to take the clockwork theory seriously, a great deal of pedagogical leverage is lost. The teacher loses the opportunity to discuss the importance of vanity in the organization, to consider the place of meaningless rituals that serve only to separat...