I am brathless in admiration of this conversation so far.
Jay wrote:
"I was trying to suggest that the end of our present
social-political-economic order is overdetermined in yet one more way than
is usually discussed ... not just that it works against humane interests
and people come to hate it and rebel against it, but that it seeks to scale
itself up to the point where it can't cope "socio-technologically" with
what it must become to continue to survive.
The best time to rebel against a system is when it's facing internal
pressures of functional collapse ..."
For me this is the heart of the matter. But what constitutes 'rebellion'?
What we see in our work time and time again are people who take their
corporate setting as a given, albeit one which paradoxically gets in the way
of their ability to engage in the activity that te corporation itself has
articulated.
Faced with this contradiction the response is more often to creatively learn
how to manage it by expanding, rather than to seek to dismantle it through
root and branch rebellion. It often transpires that the contradiction itself
produces the means to overcome it. To me this is understood better as
subversion than as rebellion. In CHAT terms it is what one might expect to
find.
What is most interesting to me is that part of this dynamic often entails
operational level workers taking as real the high level visionary goals of
their employer (e.g. 'customer satisfaction') and establishing those as the
object of their activity, even though the very people who articulated those
visionary goals - senior managers - routinely behave in ways which
demonstrate their own hypocrisy and which impede the efforts of their
employees to achieve them.
A common example of this is call centre operators who devise ingenious ways
of spending more time with each caller than their managers specify in their
throughput targets - even though to be found out would result in dismissal.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
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