Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on the corporate world from the blog Base and Superstructure. The corporate world is complex. It’s confusing to anyone not involved. Corporate life has its own characteristic forms, language, jargon, and mannerisms. Neoliberalism structures our politics and thought, and so this is also a major focus of these posts. The non-profit corporate sector is its own distinct mini-world. And, in particular, spending significant time involved in corporate life engenders a special form of ennui. All of these subtopics feed off of one another. Each is critical to thinking about corporate life and its role in the United States.
The business world loves talking about transparency. Leaders strive for it. Consultants tell them to create a ‘culture of transparency.’ Peddlers of business trends and fads trumpet it. All of them say it’ll open up leadership decisions to more worker input, ’empower’ staff, and so on.
Readers of this blog likely know I roll my eyes at all this stuff. It’s annoying, yes, but it’s also troubling in many (often unintentional) ways. Let’s take a quick look.
I want to pick up a thread from three recent posts on the Agile business approach. This thread concerns the role of project management and project managers – two different roles, as we’ll see.
In those other posts, I pointed out – among other things – that Agile concerns product development, not product management. But I pointed out that – at a deeper level – project managers serve a role in the system of class struggle underneath Agile. Beyond that, they often serve in roles oddly parallel of those of middle managers.
Let’s ask another question along those lines: do companies really need project managers? At all? Even on their own terms (i.e., profit and loss)?
As some readers know, I’ve written several posts on Agile as a business term and theory. I’ll link to those past posts with these two links. I wanted to follow up on one issue, namely the term ‘cargo cult Agile.’
What is cargo cult Agile? Is it a problem and, if so, how can companies avoid it?
About a month ago, I wrote a post on Agile – a set of ideas, business methods, and (perhaps) ideology. I invited readers to share their experiences with it, and I reflected a bit on my own. There’s also plenty of business literature available to those who want to find it. In short, Agile starts from the need for business agility (i.e., adaptability to change), and then it moves to a variety of methods of implementation. Scrum stands out as the most common.
With a month behind us, let’s take another look at Agile!
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The pundits and ‘wise men’ – especially the ones in tech – tell a tired narrative about jobs and automation. It goes something like this: Automation destroys jobs. As it gets more sophisticated, it will destroy millions of jobs, leaving people destitute and desperate. Andrew Yang built an entire presidential campaign – one he centered on UBI – around this narrative. Tech libertarians love telling this story.
But it’s not just wacky candidates and tech geeks. Classic sci-fi took up the banner all the same, and they did so as far back as the 1950s. From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano to Isaac Asimov‘s The Caves of Steel, we see it from every direction. These days, popular sci-fi series like The Expanse simply take it for granted and bake it into their plots.
OK, so the narrative isn’t entirely wrong. Yes, automation destroys jobs. Marx pointed out more than a century ago that this happens. At the same time, it redirects and creates jobs. The net impact of automation on overall employment? It’s less clear than one might think. When we look at how work…works, we find that automation poses a bigger threat.
This post is about that threat.
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