CORPOCRACY: THE BANALITY OF CORRUPTION

CORPOCRACY: THE BANALITY OF CORRUPTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007

“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman

I wrote “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers” (2000), hoping to get the attention of corporate executives and professional workers that I failed to get with “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (1998), by offering an analysis and blueprint of recovery.

It has since become apparent to me that great crimes do not come from terrible ideas. The worst atrocities rise from the simplest of vices. And few vices are more vicious than careerism. The corporation is a career. The United States is built on careerism.

The pyramid climber has a job with a daily routine. It has its ups and downs, but no matter how immoral or intrusive the work may be on a market, or competitor, or culture, it is work. If it is work that has to be done, people have to be hired and paid. To be done well, they must be supervised and promoted. Morality never enters the equation.

The pyramid climber is a careerist of the first order. He has no motive other than to be promoted, demonstrating extraordinary diligence in looking out for such personal advancement. He joined the company, not to make a difference, but saw it as an opportunity to start from scratch and still make a career. The only thing a pyramid climber believes in fervently is success.

The peculiar nature of success, differing with the popular belief being measured by money, is in fact a matter of inclusion. The pyramid climber will pine away if not invited to lunch by those that count.

Parallel to the world of the pyramid climber is that of the technocrat. The technocrat is a thoughtless follower of rules who can cite the page, chapter and book of the policy manual without apprehending its essence.

The technocrat is a passive instrument of corpocracy; the careerist is the architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in computer printouts; the second hoists himself up the corporate ladder, rung by rung, filling all the boxes with the appropriate curriculum vitae information. The first is how the organization sees its minions; the second is how they actually are.

Those who theorize about organization consider ambition and careerism as checks against rather than conduits to entropy. Yet, careerists and technocrats manage to drain the organization of its energy and spirit. This is so because corpocracy no longer cares about having an authentic existence, much less sponsoring careerism, and thus it destroys individuals who do.

There is a remarkable sameness to the twenty-first century organization that preys on the dissolution of discrete functions and establishes hierarchies of cyberspace, or dissolves those that remain into a shapeless bureaucracy that more resembles an onion than a pyramid.

The main reason this banality is evaded is that a critique of careerism would force a confrontation with the corrupting soul of the dominant ethos of our times, capitalism. At a time when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient, but also a source of freedom and enterprise, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism.

Unlike the idealist, whose great sin is to think too much, ask too many embarrassing questions, while demonstrating no reluctance to be confrontational and wanting the leadership to lead, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself desiring only to be seen as a safe hire. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of conscience, considering himself a realist and pragmatic; not utopian or fanatic.

Yet, the careerist may be as lethal as the idealist, as his ambition is an adjunct to his barbarism. Some of the worst crimes in corpocracy are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas. These I have described in the two books mentioned above: passive aggression; passive defensive; passive responsive; approach avoidance; obsessive compulsive; and malicious obedience.

These behaviors are not the result of draconian measures against employees as a group, but the result of the liquidation of the person as an individual. There is great pressure, both subtle and obvious to produce a mass organizational society, which has its history in the movement in the industrial period from workers being craftsmen to being interchangeable parts in the industrial machine. When professionals came into the picture in the last quarter century, the culture and methodology were so firmly established that it could not be reconciled to the new challenges. Without a sphere of influence or a social stratum, corpocracy has come to denote a pathological orientation of the self.

Corpocracy members work for a paycheck with little or no concern for their well being or the survival of the organization, as they have no beliefs, sense of community, or individual identity. They are takers, not givers. Stripped of their essence as individuals, this has brought on a sense of anxiety and loneliness surrounded by hundreds and sometimes even thousands of other workers. They have a sense of being in the organization but not belonging to it. They have literally subsumed themselves to an existence that insists on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience, while promoting a sense of structure and belonging to fill the need. Company policy reinforces this grip.

Corpocracy has used an ideology of straitjacket logic to relieve workers of the freedom to think and the capacity to create by making work dull, routine, and essentially a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home even at the cost of their identity. Laptops, iPods, BlackBerrys, et al, have only added to this fiction.

With the banality of corruption, we can ignore the distribution of power: in corpocracy, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard grievances: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we need not worry about moral responsibility and accountability because workers have become automatons incapable of judgment or being judged.

The drift of corpocracy, cutting through the rhetoric, is evident in that there is a supreme disregard for immediate consequences at all levels rather than any display of draconian ruthlessness. There is rootlessness and neglect of company interests by workers rather than insurgent sabotage. There is contempt for practical motives rather than blatant self-interests. And there is unwavering faith, despite it all, that the company will survive with its ideological fictitious view rather than a lust for power.

The main constituency of American capitalism is the corporation. It has revived the most toxic elements and folded their ethos into the rhetoric of security and employee rights, but with intrusion into the family and personal privacy. This reflects a general desire to dissolve the public and private into one at the expense of the employee but to the benefit of the employer. Actually, it has been to their mutual disadvantage. Employers don’t want to give up control, and so workers are counter dependent on them for their well being. Workers in such dependency bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home, doing as little as possible to get by, not as much as they are capable of doing. It is a vicious circle of chaos and resentment.

Capitalism’s most important product is progress with the impulse for expansion for expansions sake, bigger always being seen as better. Capitalism provides a model, not a motive for the venture capitalist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the basis of the accumulated capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The venture capitalist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Few developments have bred more cynicism and contempt for work as an expression of life fulfillment than this double standard.

So what? It is time to review instead of reify our system and consider how best to go forward. This is written in this interest and for no other reason.

* * * * * *

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 - 3631
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Cell Phone: none