Human, all too human: Difference between revisions

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-{{G}}A view infects modern [[management consultant|management consultancy]] that a business enterprise can be — ''should'' be — reduced to its data points: broadly, inputs and outputs; a balance sheet of assets and liabilities. On this view any activity the firm undertakes, and any plant, chattel or servant with which or through whose agency it undertakes it — should be quantified and then articulated on one side of the ledger or the other.
+{{a|mgmt|}}A view infects modern [[management consultant|management consultancy]] that a business enterprise can be — ''should'' be — reduced to its data points: broadly, inputs and outputs; a balance sheet of assets and liabilities. On this view any activity the firm undertakes, and any plant, chattel or servant with which or through whose agency it undertakes it — should be quantified and then articulated on one side of the ledger or the other.
 Legend has it the specifications given to farmers who grow the potatoes McDonald’s turns into French fries run to 30 pages. With that level of control you can unitise your inputs. One potato meeting criteria as tightly drawn as those is entirely substitutable for another even though, if you look at them closely, each is subtly different.
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 You can understand the impulse to do this: making sense of the almost countless inputs and outputs that make up a modern multinational conglomerate is hard enough without having to evaluate them ''qualitatively''. Switch off the lights, and a corporation resembles a huge, organic, steam-punk machine. If you stand back from a skyscraper at night, the light behind each window flipping on and off as clerical assistants come and go, might as well be a transistorised chip. In this way do the springs, valves and pistons of commerce twist, turn and push.
-Yet, what works for potatoes works less well for people. It works badly for people whom you employ to use their brains - to evaluate and react to novel situations and opportunities for which an no-one has written a bullet-proof decision tree. It’s hard to see people like this as interchangeable units when you see, up close, what they do and ''how'' they do it. Much depends on interpersonal relations and similar collateral skills that are not directly what the employer is paying for. That doesn't stop consultants — who must perpetrate some kind of willful blindness when considering their own position to do so — convincing themselves that the [[meatsack|sacks]] of flesh and blood that parry emails, attend [[conference call]]s and flip on and off those light switches that so resemble transistors is a unit of production, as interchangeable as a spud.
+Yet, what works for potatoes works less well for people. It works badly for people whom you employ to use their brains - to evaluate and react to novel situations and opportunities for which an no-one has written a bullet-proof decision tree. It’s hard to see people like this as interchangeable units when you see, up close, what they do and ''how'' they do it. Much depends on interpersonal relations and similar collateral skills that are not directly what the employer is paying for. That doesn’t stop consultants — who must perpetrate some kind of willful blindness when considering their own position to do so — convincing themselves that the [[meatsack|sacks]] of flesh and blood that parry emails, attend [[conference call]]s and flip on and off those light switches that so resemble transistors is a unit of production, as interchangeable as a spud.
 Now just to be clear, here, no-one is suggesting that [[middle management]] professionals and brainworkers are an irredeemable good: it is not that human judgment is an ineffable, inscrutable magic — more that its ''benefit'' is really, really hard to value (''[[cui bono]]'' from the analysis of a [[credit officer]], or an [[inhouse counsel]]?), but its ''cost'' is straightforward. (Salary. Pension. Office rental.)
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 The higher you fly, the easier it is to see your organisation this way. The [[CEO|chief executive officer]] has little choice - but even {{sex|he}} will find that dystopian analysis breaks down when his gaze falls upon his own executive suite. Well; it must do. For he is a genius! No-one else could lead the enterprise with such clear-eyed vision!
+===Seeing like a state===
+There is a contrarian view, articulated by {{author|James C. Scott}}<ref>{{author|James C. Scott}} — {{br|Seeing Like a State}} (1998).</ref> that this kind of [[reductionism]] is not so much wilful as ''inevitable''; without some kind of prism for “[[legibility]]” the comintern cannot otherwise understand their organisations at all. But in any system stocks, flows and feedback loops are interconnected; if you change one the others will adapt to cope with it. So restricting your view of the organisation to a homogenous set of data-points incentivises its personnel to respond only to those data points, and neglect the other, potentially vital, interconnections that in subtle ways make the organisation tick.
+{{Sa}}
+*[[Legibility]]
+*[[High modernism]]
+{{ref}}