A thought-provocative post once again by Stowe Boyd on /message: “Management Lies”. The post discusses some comments on “a wholesale failure in management”. It’s not just about the banks, but also about the car industry, retail and telecoms – for instance about the suicides at France Telecom.
Read also Farewell, with a last word on the blunder years by management editor Simon Caulkin at The Guardian, and Hating what you do in The Economist, about “disenchantment with work” (hey, am I preparing here some future session of We Are the Network in Second Life?)
Stowe discusses all this and concludes:
Management seems to have responded to the new stresses in the world’s increasing globalization by passing them along to the workers, and operating under an ersatz ‘we’re all in this together’ bonhomie while they sharpen the knives for the next round of cutting. This leads to a growing alienation of people from their work, and from those that they work with.
Whether a cultural transformation for the good will arise from these ashes remains to be seen. Richard Sennett wrote, in The Corrosion of Character – The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism, “If change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don’t know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.”
I think this is very interesting, also in a virtual worlds context. “We in virtual worlds” are rather change-minded. We want change and we want it now. Abolish the old structures! Stop being dependent employees! Become internationally collaborating and networking entrepreneurs! But many people have other priorities. They want some stability. They are not enthusiastic about the news that people change every few years from employer.
Of course, maybe the whole entrepreneurship ethos of virtual worlds is already a reaction on the “disenchantment with work.” Instead of being angry at shareholders and managers, people try to be their very own boss and to control their own environment and destiny.
But also, thinking about Sennett who writes about what happens on the ground, about persons speaking out of inner need, maybe here virtual worlds are relevant as well, as environments where such more private, small-scale conversations can take place, and where micro-strategies can develop – micro for the macro-economy and politics (for now), but very important for individuals.
Roland Legrand
