by Mark Cole and John Higgins
Once in a while in the UK, most of us get the chance to take part in elections. These exercises in representative democracy sees each elector in a given area selecting someone from a list of approved candidates. Occasionally, there are referenda in which we are invited to participate.
For some, this can feel like a futile activity: the anarchist adage that, “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government gets in” can cast a shadow over our casting of a vote. And we are sometimes advised: “Don’t vote, it only encourages them”.
Certainly, putting one slip of paper with our cross on it into a box can feel like yet another instance of gestural politics, an act that can feel invisible amongst all of the other individual actions. Yet there are instances – broadly at a more local as opposed to a national level – where a movement gathers pace and interestingly alters the political complexion.
Elections and Actions
For example, three political activists – two of whom had previously been members of the two major parties – came together under the umbrella of Chislehurst Matters and were comfortably elected as the three councillors for that ward in the London Borough of Bromley in 2022.
There are other similar examples, which remind us that we can change the direction of the system by taking collective action. The Canvey Island Independent Party has contested local elections in that corner of Essex since 2004, constantly increasing its number of representations election by election until they became the largest group on the council in 2022.
One view of all of this suggests that liberal democracy of the sort outlined here creates the illusion that we are citizens and not subjects, although our subaltern position in respect to the exercise of power in our society remains unchanged.
Certainly, we participate in the political system, but limited direct democracy means our voice can feel lost in the social sphere. And crucially we have no influence or voice in the economic structure, especially in regard to being properly heard in corporate life.
Feudal Features of Contemporary Capitalism
Organisational life in that respect feels somewhat feudal. Some commentators have analysed our contemporary socio-economic structures and – in terms of concentrations of wealth and changing class dynamics – have argued that capitalism has been followed not by communism, as hubristically promised by Marx, but instead by neo-feudalism.
In the current workplace, rulers are:
- Unaccountable to the people they rule (employees).
- Untouchable by employees (they can be replaced by those above them, but there is no voice of the people at work).
- Appointed not elected.
In liberal democracy, my vote might form part of a wider movement that sees a Prime Minister removed from office and a new one appointed. But I am powerless to contribute to the removal of a senior leader who is inappropriate for the role. The channels for me to express an opinion as to their competence and suitability in the role simply do not exist.
On the terraces of football grounds, we occasionally see disgruntled fans unfurling banners critical of the present owners of their club, demanding expressly that those individuals should leave the club. While this is mere gestural politics, utterly meaningless in terms of impact but reassuring perhaps to those who otherwise feel powerless to influence a situation that matters deeply to them, there is at least some space for their voice.
In the workplace, however, even the option of voicing discontent in such a fashion is denied in most companies. The position of those at the apex of the hierarchy is unquestionable and unchallengeable. In light of this, our workplaces appear to have all the qualities of dictatorships; some can be benign and some toxic, but they all strip people of their voice when it comes to meaningful decisions.
Propping Up The System
Much of what underpins the world view of Business Schools and Management Consultancies, is a belief in the acceptability of that Dictatorship. A cursory glance at the dreary curriculum of the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), with its obeisance to scientism, its fixation on crude quantification as the only way to make sense of the world, and a failure largely speaking to acknowledge the centrality of human beings to corporate life, reminds us of the way in which all aspects of corporate life are dictated through a range of practices that dehumanize the very human beings on which our corporations depend.
In this respect, it is worth visiting the work of Louis Althusser, who sought to make sense of how capitalism persists despite the limitations of the system for the vast majority of people who live under it. He argues that people in this context are subsumed by two structures: Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The former encompasses things like the police, the courts, and the army; meanwhile, the latter involves cultural expectations and norms, alongside the education system and religion.
Our workplaces are tightly bound up with structures and processes that prevent us from exploring our potential for freedom, chief amongst which, of course, is the “dull compulsion of the economic”. By that is meant that we bite our tongue in face of the need to put a roof over our heads and food on our tables, which requires someone to give us money. But generalised ideas and socially accepted norms also shackle us: school teaches us the three Rs…but also to stand in line and work to time, and to accept reward for work done, specifically a high mark or a gold star.
We experience both repressive practices and subtle but extremely effective ideological constraints at work, two aspects that combine to generate the corporate absolutism that means that, despite risible academic ideologies like organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), we are subjects in our organisations, rather than actual citizens. And we are subjects in circumstances that combine a feudal relation between the company monarch and us as serfs, alongside a wider culture that leaves us feeling that this connection is both natural and unchallengeable.
As conniving courtiers served their respective monarchs, in order to perpetuate the system and secure their place in it, so we see now how professional services companies and business schools produce obfuscating propaganda that seeks to naturalise our present circumstances, in order to maintain that arrangement and to ensure that they benefit from it.
A good deal that happens these days in our firms serves to prop up these dictatorships through creating the illusion that they can be humanized and reformed. Our health and well-being would be improved if we felt freer at work and experienced a good deal more autonomy, instead of having the HR Department impose resilience and yoga classes on us. Such distractions are merely modern versions of the Roman prescription of “bread and circuses”. And they serve to underscore Carol Axtell Ray’s observation that our companies have moved to a situation wherein corporate culture has become the dominant instrument of control in our workplaces, superseding what she describes as bureaucratic control and humanistic control.
It is the system that undergirds all that we see in corporate life that needs to be challenged and torn down. Fiddling with the structures doesn’t touch the system, so the change required is a huge deal more radical than the reforms that organisations are seemingly intent to promote at this time. It’s time to find our voices as a collective to demand that we need to step beyond tweaking the structures and to instead expose and dismantle the dictatorial constructs that dominate this one critical element of our lives, namely where we go to work.
Radical OD 