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By “a society of managerialism,” I mean a society characterized by overtly or tacitly manipulating other people.  Advertising is a notable example; it is so ubiquitous in modern society that I would not be surprised if its inherent manipulativeness has seeped into our psyches as well as human relationships.  In virtually any conversation an ordinary person might have with a person working in an organization (i.e., “on the job”), the employee makes use of his or her organization’s carrots and sticks.  It is so engrained in “organization speak” that we hardly recognize it.

In fact, some private individuals try to appropriate for themselves organizational “perks.”  That is to say, they make demands as though they were representing organizations, and they act like those demands are beyond their ability to alter.  For example, there are individual home-owners who in renting out a room, floor or the house itself  insist that an “application form” be filled out as though it were required.  Such forms typically indicate that a person’s social security number is required (even though it is against federal law for a private citizen or business to require it).  If proof of identity is desired, one could simply show his or her passport or driver’s licence.  That most property owners presume nonetheless that they are somehow owed another citizen’s government numbers is presumptuous; it is particularly rude if the person making the “demand” does not offer his or her own numbers in exchange.  The asymetry evinces a sordid and self-serving attitude that has strangely been swallowed by American society as valid.  Particularly with so many foreclosures, potential renters would be more than justified in requiring prospective lessors to fill out a property assessment form.  Potential lessees could presume their own organizational requirements too!  Information enabling the renter to assess the lessor’s mortgage payments and ability to continue paying would be relevant. Such information would include access to information on the relevant bank account and mortgage, as well as the lessor’s employment (to verify the income amount cited on the form).  If the owner can insist on an application form, a renter would be more than justified in insisting on a property assessment form.  That a given house owner would no doubt be offended by being presented with such a form, even as he or she insists on an “application form,” indicates to me that the typical property owner’s presumption is without foundation and that a double-standard is tacitly assumed.  That such presumption could be assumed as normal, even as “required,” in a society suggests to me that perhaps a managerial society is not as neutral, or “objective,” as it might seem.  In other words, its playing field is skewed—caused by the weight of managerialism and its propensity to overextend itself without any boundary.

In the film, The Matrix, Neo is eventually able to see the matrix for what it is: series of green numbers scrolling up or down.  It is only then that he has power through it.  Likewise, it is only when a person sees the allurements and arrows in an employee’s end of a discourse that the person/customer can fully resist them.  Seeing the attempted manipulation is apt to quickly lead to resentment, for it is presumptuous to assume that so much of one’s communication with another person must involve threats.  In other words, organizational employees tacitly view “outsiders” (and perhaps even their colleagues) as objects to be controlled.  It is as if these objects were feared as potential threats (so manipulations and threats are assumed necessary from the get-go).  There is also an element of unfairness in the mix.  A customer brings only the power of his or her money and word of mouth, whereas an employee representing an organization typically presumes that the potential customer is already under the organization’s policies and procedures.  Besides being presumptuous, the employee’s use of threats (as in, “you have to…”) is not fair play, given that the other person has no such weapons.  It is hardly imaginable that a potential customer would use phrases such as “you have to…”, even after one has become a customer.  It is the lack of symetry that ought to be obvious to us all, yet we tacitly accept it as “normal.”

There is evidence that the carrots and sticks have a rather narrow application with human beings, so much of the effort to induce or threaten may be in vain.  According to CNN, “In laboratory experiments and field studies, a band of psychologists, sociologists and economists have found that many carrot-and-stick motivators — the elements around which we build most of our businesses and many of our schools — can be effective, but that they work in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. For enduring motivation, the science shows, a different approach is more effective. This approach draws not on our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but on what we might think of as our third drive: Our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. In particular, high performance — especially for the complex, conceptual tasks we’re increasingly doing on the job— depends far more on intrinsic motivators than on extrinsic ones.”

So organizational employees and their task-masters may well be selling their fellow human beings short in presuming that they must be buffeted with inducements and threats from the get-go.  Perhaps these organizational creatures are of the lower sort that function only by being manipulated and threatened.  Perhaps they project their own self-centeredness out onto ordinary, free, human beings.
In any event, we, the free-spirits, should call the presumptuous and insulting employees on their modus operendi.  Interruptions such as, “I am not in your organization so I am not subject to it as you are” or even more directly, “I do not appreciate being threatened” or “I feel insulted being sold to even as I am at the counter ordering” indicate to the employee that his or her antics have been made transparent.  Typically, the employee will feign ignorance of what he or she has been doing, or simply ignore the statements.  However, such responses will only confirm the rudeness—which is really passive aggression.  We are bombarded with organizational passive aggression every day and yet we are so used to it in the organizational society that we take it in without knowing it.  If I am correct here, much that passes for normal in managerialism is really sordid behavior that naturally causes irritation and frustration.

CNN source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/02/pink.motivation.bonuses/index.html?dsq=38857033#comment-38857033

Despite the weak U.S. economy, 2010 could be the second most profitable for New York City's securities industry, and the average bonus may top last year's because so many bankers and brokers have been laid off. Wall Street earned $21.4 billion during the first three quarters of 2010. The prior year's record of $61.4 billion was fueled by the bailout by the U.S. Government. Wall Street paid out $20.3 billion in bonuses on the $61.4 billion in profits. According to New York City Comptroller John Liu, "The astounding recovery of financial firm profitability in 2009 has been followed by a mixed year in 2010, yet total compensation in the industry is expected to be up modestly once year-end bonuses are paid," Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs’ Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein and his top deputies will collect about $111.3 million in stock in January, 2011, in a delayed payoff from 2009 and their record-setting 2007 bonuses, according to a Bloomberg News report. Within a year after the bonuses were approved, Goldman Sachs took $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury, converted to a bank and was borrowing as much as $35.4 billion a day from Federal Reserve emergency programs, Bloomberg reported, adding that in 2010 the firm paid $550 million to settle U.S. regulators’ fraud charges related to a mortgage-security the company sold in 2007.

Analysis:
Three points come to mind from this report from MSNBC.  First, the disjunction between Wall Street and Main Street means that any recovery underway in 2010 was not uniform through the U.S. economy. In other words, the "jobless" recovery did not hurt bonuses in the financial sector.  Secondly, the dictum that the fraudulant must inevitably pay is effectively countered by the example of Goldman Sachs.  Blankfein testified before Sen. Levin's Investigations committee that Goldman Sachs had merely been a market-maker even as the bank had traded on its own books to short against the mortgage derivatives even as it was selling them to its clients. In other words, the bank was profiting both ways even as it was contributing to the financial crisis.  After an infusion of government cash, the bank has made off quite well. Lest I be accused of envy, it is the unfairness involved that has inspired this post. Lastly, the positive impact of the bank bailout on the industry (and its bonuses) can be distinguished from the lack of help from the U.S. Government to the millions of homeowners who have lost their homes.  I say "homes" rather than houses to extentuate the point that foreclosure extolls rather severe costs in addition to the financial kind. I distinguish the luxuriating bankers from the plight of the foreclosed in order to point to Barak Obama's priority. His chief economic advisor until the end of 2010, Larry Summers (whose high school economics teacher is one of my mother's cousins), had been involved in obstructing efforts to regulate derivatives in 1998 (Summers was one of Rubin's deputies in Treasury under Clinton at the time).  Furthermore, Tim Geitner, Obama's Treasury Secretary, had been appointed as President of the New York Federal Reserve by a board with the urging of Citibank).  In other words, Obama's leanings toward Wall Street can be understood both from the directionality of the bailout and whom he has appointed. We should not really be surprised that the big banks and their employees whom the banks have not let go came back to vigor so quickly while the general recovery has been jobless.  Those who have, get more, while those who don't have, remain stuck.  The impact on the viability of our republics can not be good. Increasing inequality exascerbated by government policy cannot but render us even more a plutocracy (i.e., rule by the wealthy). To reply that any effort to tamper with this increasing inequality threatens property rights and economic liberty ignores the disparate impact of government policy (e.g., the bank bailout) on the wealthy. Moreover, when economic inequality threatens the viability of representative democracy, that democracy has a right to correct that which threatens it. One might call the policy-driven inequality a systemic risk that cannot be allowed to continue to exist without threatening the viability of the system. To put it plainly, a person does not have the right to riches if they risk the entire system coming down or even being compromised.  An absolute right to property, like an absolutist conception of sovereignty, is simply irresponsible and ultimately selfish. The 2010 bonuses coming out of Wall Street so soon after the crisis of 2008 and the subsequent bailout suggest that the extent of economic inequality in the U.S. is neither an accident nor natural.

FYI: If any of this post is significant enough to be logged in memory and reflected on later, it might be that the bank bonuses occurred during a jobless "recovery." This juxtaposition is in itself indicative of something troubling going on.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40681578/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/%22%3Ehttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40681578/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/%3C/a%3E%3C/p