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Scripted "conversations" for employees.   Some customers as "members," and the others "not."   A larger cup of coffee being an "upgrade."   It occurs to me that a blue collar worker would simply laugh in the face of a chain retail store employee using any of these misappropriations as if they were natural and fitting.  That the rest of us don't laugh and the employees are not even likely to be aware of their own fakeness, much less stop it, tells me that modern society has to some extent adopted the corporate practice, even if tacitly.  That is to say, many of us have been mindwashed into accepting fakeness as authentic in the public square.

Meanwhile, inside corporate offices, the language used can bespeak a sickness far worse than mere fakeness. Consider, for example the statement made by the head of finance at Morgan Stanley in September, 2008 when he was looking at Wachovia's bad debt: "That's a shit-sandwich even I can't get my big mouth around."  (Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, p. 450).   Add to this the myriad of military bloodsport references routinely made in stark corporate offices by suits whose actual sport is golf, and the nature of the corporate illness is clear: undealt-with aggression--unrequited anger really--in stint of malignant narcissism.  The linguistic signs and the over-reaching are palpable.

Ordinarily, I would predict that feckless fakeness projected outward from vulgarity is bound to be exposed or collapse one day. However, this is not necessarily so if enough people take the fakeness for genuine and do not know of the underlying pathology behind the store walls at headquarters.  It is perhaps like a wife who has been married to an alcoholic for decades.  Can she be expected to recognize the obvious?  Sadly, the fakeness of corporate retail consumer relations may become the de facto archetype for ordinary human interaction in modern society.  Adopting an employee's manner of fakeness--even a false smile and sales talk under some subterfuge--can give one yet another means of passive aggression. For example, one might use fake expressions and mannerisms as a way of pushing someone away.  Fake kindness can be more insulting than genuine complaint. 

What particularly concerns me is the extent to which people enable the corporate misappropriations and fake emotions in stores and customer relations centers.  Perhaps we really don't get it.  Maybe we need an upgrade in our state of awareness, and in our guts.  In the end, weakness is all too comfortable with fakeness.  If a malady is sufficiently ubiquitous, it can be easier to take it for normal and adapt to it than to challenge it.  Even in such a context, a few free spirits may still be driven by their nature to overcome the fakeness and insist on genuine communication.  Once I heard a customer say matter-of-factly to a Barnes & Noble employee, "No, I'm not a member. I'm a customer."  The employee just looked at her. The authentic communication must have strunned the employee, who had doubtless been mindwashed into believing that fakeness was real.  Where retail fakness is ubiquitous, calling employees out on it is akin to waking someone from the Matrix. Of course, health can only be viewed as sick to the sick. A person accustomed to a dark movie theatre is apt to enter a sunlite lobby in pain.

As another example of utter fakeness designed to manipulate under a subterfuge, consider the ubiquitious, "We apologize for any inconvenience."  Of course, the lack of any real regret can be easily concluded by the failure of any accompanied "money where your mouth is."  If a business, which is an economic entity, refuses to put its money with its apology in the form of willing compensation, the verbal "apology" should mean nothing. In other words, words alone are neutral or invisible where money is the lifebloood.  It is so easy--so utterly convenient--for one who loves money to simply make a verbal statement that does not involve paying out any money.  Yet we are all such suckers for being so easily mollified by the easy corporate-speak.  No one says, "this is a business, so unfortunately there must be a financial component to your apology for me to recognize your apology."   The inevitable answer would be a mere repetition of, "I apologize for any inconvenience" as though it were not a mere repetition (i.e., fakeness again) and thus sufficed.   It is in the nature of weakness--of sickness really--to disagree or refuse by ignoring (i.e,, repeating as though not doing so). The repetition simply adds injury to insult, for there is passive aggressive in it. I suppose this is really what those of us in modern commerical society are missing: the passive aggression in business (and, more specifically, as manifested in customer relations).  Business managers and employees cannot express their anger toward customers, so the emotion comes out via fakeness as "friendliness." It is no wonder the underlying dyanamic is not apparent, for it is using its opposite to express itself.  Customers ought to recognize the self-serving convenience and fakeness, yet this might make the underlying vulgarity transparent.  At least that would be authentic, and perhaps a solution found.

Joseph Natoli avers that "what we think comprises a 'good education' has already been affected by market values." He observes further, "Organizations come into being by solving problems. The problem solver is a corporate asset."  Whereas Natoli treats problem-solving and critical thinking as mutually-exclusive, I contend that critical thinking has been reduced in popular parlance problem-solving.  As in the coming of Thursday nights to be reckoned by college students are a weekend night, here too business schools have been the conduit wherein critical thinking has gained primacy over even the higher analytical and synthetic thinking activities (which are not limited to problems, and, in fact, can transcend them even in problem-solving). The schools have also been the conduit wherein the power-point presentation in business has come to the classroom, as if lecturing were merely presenting. To be sure, there is nothing out of place for problem-solving and presentations in the corporate world. All the power to them--or maybe not. Maybe this is the problem wherein corporate customs know no bound, and thus feel no self-restraint as they over-spill onto disparate domains as though spoiled children. My contention is that the easy slide onto college campuses of both critical thinking reduced to problem-solving and presentations reduced to bullet-points has conflated, in effect, vocation and education. Even worse is the baleful portent of education being reduced to training. It is bad enough when a business school becomes "commercialized" in this respect. Faculties of Liberal Arts and Science schools ought not to have appropriated so much from commercial education (and ultimately corporations) without paying sufficient attention to the negative impacts on pedegogy. Teaching by power-point, for example, may cut off higher forms of thinking; problem-solving may involve losing "why?" to "how?"

One might ask: where have the scholars in the schools of education been as corporate ways have made such inroads in academia?  Why haven't education faculties written more the funnelling effects on pedegogy of critical thinking as problem-solving and teaching as presentation?  In December, 2010, the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report announced plans to grade more than a thousand schools of education. The deans of several of these schools objected that the teacher quality council’s methods for arriving at ratings were not transparent enough and were not supported by research. Course information, textbooks and admissions selectivity are, according to these officials, too superficial.  That may be so, but it could nevertheless be the case that the school officials were nervous about being graded because they had a sense that education schools had been asleep at the wheel as universities (and presumably high schools) have come unwittingly to embrace corporate practices at the expense of that which is sui generis, or unique, in education. 

Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, said the push-back from education schools was evidence of “an industry that doesn’t want to be examined. These teacher-education programs are hugely important and not very well scrutinized. This is coming at a time when you have this tremendous national push for improvements in teacher quality: Who’s teaching the teachers?”  Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, said that many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre. “It is time to start holding teacher-preparation programs more accountable for the impact of their graduates on student learning." According to The New York Times, "Education schools have faced criticism frequently over the years. They are faulted by a recent wave of education advocates as emphasizing education theory over hands-on classroom training, and as graduating teachers with weak academic skills." Rather than theory, however, faculties of education schools may have been absorbed in various ideological movements at the expense of being oriented to knowledge, with K-12 teachers buying into the fads at the expense of even the basic subject-matter of their courses.

For example, process-learning was at one time the rage in some high schools. In this movement, teachers threw out their course textbooks in the mistaken assumption that the process of being educated itself proffers such content. However, focusing on learning how to read, for example, does not include a systematic coverage of a given course's subject-matter; instead, the latter is relegated in a hit or miss manner. I once heard a high school civics teacher at a suburban school brag that he had put the U.S. Government textbooks in the school basement and was instead showing movies on immigrants in the U.S. How from this "alternative teaching" approach were his students to learn about federalism and the separation of powers, as well as about the U.S. Senate, House, Supreme Court and Presidency?

Although the misguided "alternative" movements have typically been inflicted on K-12 education, the education scholars' various sidetracks have not only sidetracked the scholars themselves from developing improved teaching techniques oriented to learning a given content of knowledge; the causes that have been at the expense of education (i.e., serving other agendas) have also distracted the zealots from even being able to detect what was occurring on their own campuses, let alone putting their pedegogical expertise at the service of their colleagues, university-wide. It is almost as though college professors got bored with their respective bodies of knowledge and wandered off to pay with new toys from business. Antethetically, I contend that even in business schools the focus should be on knowedge--explaining the phenomenon of business through its various disciplines rather than becoming virtual corporations.  In other words, even business schools can be academic. The best ones are. They have not substituted what they are with what they are studying. Therefore, resisting the encroachments of corporate culture on to academia, I recommend that university faculties and academic administrators recommit themselves to the university's unique, or sui generis, situs and essence.

There is much to do on college-level pedegogy without wandering off onto other pastures.  Exams, for example, should be devised and used based on tests for their validity (is an 80% on a given test really a "good" understanding of the knowledge of the course so far?) and reliability (consistency from test to test). I suspect that test-making and grading are far from systematic, perhaps including such spurious assumptions that only a certain proportion of a class can get A's, or that A's go down to 85% because there is a gap from there to 81%. What is it about the particular test and the body of knowlege covered that makes getting a 90% a measure of excellent knowledge?  Typically, graders simply parrot the custom wherein 90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, etc. However, what if a test is made more difficult, or less so?  How should the percentage intervals be adjusted? In short, getting back to basics means thinking about and operationalizing what "excellent," "good," and "satisfactory" mean in the context of learning knowledge.  Compounding the problem of what a grade means is the obfuscation of grades as measurements of knowledge learned and grades as compensation for work done. I suspect the transmutation of a grade into compensation is yet another instance of corporate culture finding its way into academia via business schools. The conduit here are business school administrators and faculty who confuse themselves with what they are studying (i.e., corporations). To give a group an A for having put a lot of work into a presentation, or for being dressed well, is essentially to pay the group for its effort, rather than to measure the extent of knowledge learned. Even assessing a skill is closer to rewarding practice than measuring knowledge learned; knowledge is not skill, and vice versa. 

With a sort of cultural imperialism in full swing at business schools, the faculties of other schools cannot afford to be sidetracked or led astray without seriously undermining their own distinctive raison d'etre. Just as what is good for GM is not necessarily good for America, what commercialized business schools believe is in their interest qua corporations producing skills is not necessarily good for a university as a whole (or even for the business schools). That school of education faculties have stood by, occupied elsewhere, while business school practices and understandings have been allowed to perculate through other schools does indeed implicate the pegegogical experts.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/education/09teachers.html?scp=1&sq=grading%20schools%20of%20education&st=cse
http://www.truth-out.org/our-market-regime-and-public-education67474

Here are to snapshots of modern American retail business:

1. “Are you a member of the store?”   Major bookstore chains, including Borders and Barnes & Nobels, refer to the customers who have registered for a discount card as “members of the store.”  Once while ordering a mocha at a Borders cafe, I was stunned when the clerk asked me if I was a member. "A member of what?" I asked. "Borders."  Stores have customers, not members, I thought to myself.  It seems presumptuous for retail sales clerks to think of customers as members, and elitist to distinguish members from non-members.  Moreover, it sounds fake to say that members shop; it is as if the people working in retail in are pretending that their store is somehow more than a store. It is the twisting of language here that is particularly of concern to me. As Borders faced bankrupcy and the closure of at least 200 of its stores in 2011, it occurred to me that part of the company's problem might be the way the stores were managed. For example, on another occasion while ordering a drink at a Borders cafe, the clerk asked me if I wanted a Borders reward card. I said "no thank you," but the clerk proceeded to ask me again, as if he had not already asked me.  He explained to me that the manager of the store had instructed the cafe employees not to take "no" for an answer until at least two. Ignoring the customers' answers if they are not what you want. Nice. So beyond the linguistic "creativity," I suspect that modern retail management, at least as evinced at Borders, has derailed into something rather toxic based on an excessive desire to manipulate not only language, but also human beings.

2. “Thinking outside the Box.”  The promotional statement going with the $4.99 cheeseburger and fries deal at Applebees.  If coming up with such a deal for a burger and fries represents thinking outside the box, I would hate to see what conventional business thinking is like.  I think it’s time that the blinders be returned to the horses.

Putting these two little case-studies of marketing mentality together, one might ask whether viewing customers as members represents thinking outside the seller-customer box.  Perhaps it does, but not by much and the box is pretty small. Moreover, supervening the club or social organization paradigm onto an impersonal store context seems contrived and ill-fitting.  That the seller ignores the contrivance just adds to the fakeness and underlying sordid character. Either it doesn’t represent thinking outside the box because it is a case of “overreaching” instead, or it must be admitted that thinking outside the box is not in itself a laudable quality.  Were I ever to be asked by a store’s clerk whether I am a member, I would reply, “no, I am a customer.”  Of course, I would probably then be asked whether I want an “upgrade.”  I understand that at Starbucks clerks refer to ordering a larger cup of coffee as an upgrade.  I suppose a window-seat is not included.  Anyway, I don’t think that pretentiousness makes for good selling, but that won’t stop the overreaching any time soon.  It is perhaps engrained in the modern sales psyche.

On a cold and rainy weeknight in the early spring of 2010, I treated myself to a light movie (Valentine’s Day) at a small movie theatre. Only a handful of moviegoers were there that night.  Before the film, I discussed movies generally with the manager, who had been playing cards on his office computer.  He had just one employee working.  She was acting as cashier, concessions clerk, and film projectionist.  The image of the manager playing solitare on his computer while the employee covered these functions reminded me of something that has bothered me about American management more generally.  This in turn prompted me to come upon an insight regarding managing and presiding (which in turn prompted me to write this post).
It struck me that the manager of the small theatre was essentially presiding.  That is to say, he was literally “sitting before.”  He misunderstood management as “being there” in case there are any problems that would compromise the theatre’s viability.  But with just one employee doing conventional tasks, the likelihood of such a manager being called into action for any “macro” problems was pretty remote.  I would argue that he was confusing presiding (something a president does) with managing.  To manage is to be actively engaged in the operations of an organization; it is not to “sit before.”  In other words, being the manager is not a free pass out of taking part in operations.  For example, the theatre manager could have manned the concession stand (or ticket counter) even if the other employee was not busy. The manager - employee distinction has been overdrawn in American business.  In effect, management has been replaced by presiding.

What makes the “management by presiding” oversight particularly interesting is that the reverse has been the case among presidents of large companies (and the US), who essentially manage.  The president of Microsoft, for example, does not function as a figure head.  Rather, he has a managerial function.  I submit that virtually every large American business is misusing the title “president” (and vice-president).  Essentially, what they mean by “president” is just another upper-level manager (with the emphasis on upper-level).  I think it could be argued that very large businesses could use real presidents, whose role it is to act as the figure-head—actively intervening only when intestine arguing within or a major incident compromising the continued viability of the company occur.  An ongoing management role would undercut such a president’s credibility (and power) in stepping in when there really is a major problem.  We see such undercutting in the modern US Presidents, whose ongoing partisanship has compromised the respect they would need in intervening in a major crisis facing the US.  The overwhelming majority of US Presidents have spent their “presiding capital” in putting out bush fires…hence they have too little water left for the rare but potentially devestating major forest fire.

Therefore,  in the US, we have small managers acting like presidents, and harried presidents acting like managers.  I suggest that the “management vs. leadership” fad that so mesmerized American business schools in the 1980s finally be replaced by “managing vs. presiding” because we need to clarify these two roles.  A potentially interesting question involves where to place “leadership” in this new dichotomy.
We should resist the temptation to apply “leader” to both managing and presiding.  Leadership too often in presiding undercuts that role (as one can lead the way to a bush fire), and leadership applied to management at a low organizational level can backfire as presumptuous and pretentious. Leadership applies to presiding only when a president 1) stands for the entire organization or polity in mapping out a general direction that the management/government can follow or 2) actively intervenes in a crisis that theatens the entire organization or polity.  Leadership applies to managing only when operational tasks or legislation are informed by a change in principles or ideal.  Just as managing should not be switched with presiding, leadership should not be applied willy nilly just because it sounds good.

Without realizing it, I was essentially following such a fad when I wrote my dissertation on leadership (and ethics) after swimming through a decade of the “leadership vs. management” fad. I have since dove deep into ethical and political theory to touch a more solid intellectual foundation.  From this vantage-point, I have looked back up at the water’s surface to see the frogs still playing on the surface—jumping from lilly pad to lilly pad as if the green patches were foundations.  For a while, I published articles in the Journal of Business Ethics, only to have a reviewer (and a section editor—a lawyer actually) so obviously not understand the philosophy applied yet still, in a presumptuous manner, procede nonetheless to pass judgment on that which they did not understand.  You can’t fight ignorance, especially when it is puffed up with itself and in a position of power. Would it kill a business ethicist to admit to not understanding Nietzsche, for example?  A while back, I received an email from a business ethics “scholar” boasting of having taught a college course on the philosopher after having read one or two of his books.  Incroyable!  Nietzsche would call such pretentious weakness utterly emetic. The literature on “corporate citizenship”—another fad following on the heels of corporate social responsibility in business ethics—is no better. Here “scholars” who have not studied political theory (beyond a few books) presume to spout their ideology qua scholarship.  I mention all this by way of uncovering the squalid state of the “academic” field that ran with “management vs. leadership” in the 1980s (and into the 1990s).  I would argue now that ethical principles (i.e., business ethics) are not the primary vantage-point from which to study “management vs. leadership.”  One would do better to consult organization theory and the leadership literature in political science.  I would like to think that twenty-first scholarship would put an end the ideological fads masquerading as scholarship and the related dilettantes that true scholars excessively tolerated during the last half of the twentieth century. However, the continued dearth of solid academic scholarship in business ethics and the continued wandering of its herd animals onto extrinsic pastures suggests that we will have to wait a while longer for the decadence of the twentieth century to finally die out.  There are of course exceptions to the rule.  Dr. William C. Frederick, for example, who was one of my professors when I was in graduate school, did some diving of his own. He transcended the superficial fad of corporate social responsibility by swimming down to the more solid rock of Ecology in order to apply principles of that science to human organization.  I am proud to think of Bill as one of my teachers.  We both began our dives in the early 1990s—perhaps we were both tacitly rendering a “verdict by direction” on the extant field of business ethics that had become preoccupied with corporate social responsibility (as if it constituted an ethical principle).  As scholars, both Bill and I wanted something more substantive intellectually.  As human beings, we don’t often know completely why we make changes of direction; we tend not to dive deep enough to question what we are doing and what changes we plan to make.  Yet from hindsight the reasons can be plain as day.

The practice of managers presiding and presiders managing demonstrates the innane tyranny of the status quo wherein doing simply follows doing.  That is: too many people not thinking about what they are doing (or not doing). Too many small-time American managers are like cows, chewing their cud while “lower” herd animals do the heavy lifting.  In true, such managers are herd animals themselves. There is no reason why someone who has a manager title can’t lift too…it comes down to laziness and presumptuousness utilizing “presiding” as a subterfuge.  Furthermore, there is no reason why people in authentic presider offices need to run around like rabbits in order to impose (or reproduce) themselves on others.