NEETS want to be self-governing, objecting to hierarchy without future.
Lasch, p. 217ff: “…experts in scientific management began to study group dynamics in the office and factory in order to remove friction and raise output…. [M]ost … conflicts orginiated in the attempt to impose outmoded authoritarian controls on an institution [the family] that was evolving from an authoritarian to a democratic form…. In “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960), Douglast McGregor urged corporate executives to accept the “limits of authority.”… [A]authority represented an outmoded form of social control in an age of “interdependence.” …Experience had overturned the assumption that “employee satisfaction” led to greater productivity or that “industrial health [flowed] automatically from the elimination of conflict.” The worker still needed direction, but he had to be approached as a partner in the enterprise, not as a child.” Decisions rest on consensus. p. 205:”Scientific management gave way to the school of human relations, which tried to substitute cooperation for authoritarian control… cooperation rested on management’s monopoly of technology and the reduction of work to routines imperfectly understood by the worker and controlled by the capitalist.”
Decentralization and a flattening of hierarchy has become a reorienting trend in corporate structure. This empowers employees, countering alienation.
Best business practices in leading corporations now include decentralized decision-making, marking a diametric shift to flatter from more hierarchical organizational structures. A flatter structure not only harnesses the observations and thoughts of individuals throughout the organization, thereby strengthening it, but also empowers employees and reorients the employer-employee relationship in a polar direction from one of exploitation to one of nurture. Employers increasingly provide supportive and flexible working conditions, improving the employee’s work experience and thereby compensating them indirectly and non-materialistically, with possibly little direct cost to the employer. [Aside: is this an example of “spiritual compensation”?] Silicon Valley technology companies became known for such innovative employer-employee structures, now widely copied, and find them necessary to attract and retain the best talent and inspire their best efforts and productivity.]
More people are becoming small share owners through pension funds and profit sharing plans, democratizing the ownership of capital. (Decentralization and flattening of income distribution.) At the same time, a few people with the most wealth are becoming increasingly wealthy, concentrating capital ownership and pointing to a need for government to play a role. Plato believed that for democracy to function properly, the earnings of the highest and lowest paid members of society could differ by a factor of no more than five, or they would inhabit and be debating different realities.[1] Society is awakening to the notion that capital serves all of society and in this sense belongs to all.
Individual Empowerment
Increasingly, each employee regardless of their position in a corporate hierarchy has to justify their compensation by the equal standard of their profit contribution to the whole. They are valued and appreciated as unique individuals instead of as dehumanized and interchangeable laborers or position holders in a corporate hierarchy. There has been a liquification of the old hierarchical structures. The new information and communications technologies equalize differences across corporate power structures, thereby empowering individuals and putting them in a more cooperative and less authoritarian relationship with each other. The most evolved, post-hierarchical organizations require selfless group thinking in order to carry the distributed responsibilities that go along with decentralized decision making and employee empowerment. Large numbers of individuals are leaving hierarchical environments and starting small businesses, often as solo operators, greatly facilitated by the new technologies, and thereby empowering themselves. And so management consultants such as Peter Drucker, Thomas Peters and Peter Senge are explicit that personal maturation is essential for such organizational structures to work.
Until mid-20th C, F.W.Taylor’s 1909 “Principles of Scientific Management” represented the inherited wisdom on the subject of organization structure. Taylor advised as one of his principals that decision-making throughout the organization be systematized by upper management, to eliminate ad hoc decisions made by middle-management. It was thus a hierarchical model that epitomized management theory until Peter Drucker published his “The Practice of Management in 1954”, in which he advised decentralizing decision-making to the lowest competent level within the organization. Drucker believed that decentralization could lead to increased efficiency, better adaptation to local conditions, and improved responsiveness. He advocated for empowering employees and managers at various levels to make decisions based on their expertise and understanding of local contexts, rather than relying solely on top-down command and control structures. Drucker’s ideas led the metamorphic reorientation in the structure of organizations across society.
Technologies have made this organizational transformation possible. Power tools and other machines now compensate for individual differences in physical strength; office machines and computers fill in for differences in clerical skills. Many jobs have been routinized to be performable by anyone without specialized skills or abilities. This leads to a flattening of the rewards for human differences in physical and intellectual abilities. At professional and management levels individual employees have come to be evaluated as individual profit centers, more autonomous but also self-responsible in the organization.
An extension of the trend to view individuals at management and professional levels as individual profit centers is the flowering of home-based businesses, facilitated by low cost office machines, internet connectivity and widely available home-office computer programs, enabling individuals to establish home-based businesses with minimal capital investment. And increasing numbers have been doing so. The self-employed loose the security of a steady paycheck, but gain autonomy and more efficient time management, both of which can boost morale.
As gender, racial, cultural and class boundaries begin to dissolve, society’s productivity potential increases because more the pool of individuals eligible to fill specific jobs enlarges, and the pool of jobs open to each individual widens. While technologies raise skill barriers in some fields, they reduce them in many more. At the same time the bond of loyalty between employers and employees weakens with the eased access to enlarged pools of labor and jobs.
As differences and barriers diminish and dissolve across genders, races, religions and cultures, romantic opportunities widen, but at the same time become more fluid and fragile. The wider pool of potential partners may lead to better matches, but at the same time the added fluidity makes these partnerships more tenuous and less stable. Within a relationship, the bond of specialized abilities and responsibilities becomes weaker as household appliances and consumer conveniences empower all parties to perform all roles interchangeably.
[1] Plato reference.
Snippets:
More one-person businesses. (yes or no?)
Flattening and broadening of authority relationships is liquid-like inasmuch as molecules in a liquid state freely float and come in contact with myriad molecules, whereas in a solid state they are tied to only those few molecules immediately touching.
Notes to self:
Concentration of capital and mergers – Piketty and role of government.
Increasing income inequality.
How do social media compare with face-to-face communication. Can there be community, brotherhood? The search for brotherhood. Sisterhood. Kymlicka.
What is a virtual life and is this where society is headed and how should we think and feel about that.
Social interaction reorients diametrically from local to global, as do relationships, loyalties and identity. The stable and bounded quality of social structure in industrial age towns becomes diametrically transformed into one of dynamic flux unbound by geographical limitation. Human interaction migrates from the street and the public arena and to the private realm of one’s phone or computer, dematerializing it.
Relating electronically in some respects diametrically differs from face-to-face communication. Social media diametrically reorients social interaction, from the street and the public arena, to the private realm of one’s smart phone. Social media and online shopping save resources by saving on travel.
Electronic communication is “de-materialized”, another signature trait of societal adolescence.
Flattening of Hierarchies Notes:
International flattening: Emerging markets accelerating to join developed markets. First Japan, then China & Korea & S. America. Now widespread. Shift from a uni-polar US/European hegemonic world to one of multipolarity. Multipolar vs unipolar world and broadening of technological benefits globally.
Demystification of sex, gender, and money with their familiarity and exposure. Wealth no longer hidden behind high walls. Sex is no longer taboo. Money still off limits, but that will change.