The Demise of Management and the Ritual of Employment

Abstract

Industrial man's central social ritual is employment. This article is about my continuing personal explorations of the link between the condition of employment and a range of pressing issues - alienation, the overconsumption of scarce resources and pollution. I am expressing here a point of view relevant in limited time and space. Since the tradition of industrial social and behavioural enquiry is geared to maintaining a deception, our primary task is the search for reality. The case against the institutions of employment begins with their literary basis (the central role of written words and numbers in transactions) and rational veneer. Rites in this context fail to fulfil the function of religious activity. Employment, in short, is bad ritual. Important, though. debatable, distinctions are made here between positive work and negative employment and the consumption of the former by the latter. Attention is focused on the convergence of employment and ritual with the growth of large organizations and the service sector and their links with the demise of management. At the pivot of employment and its maintenance stands the manager, propped up by the professional, educator, and trade unionist, with his lopsided and now dysfunctional view of organization. His stereotyped means of maintaining control by and within the closed system of employment has led to the flight into bad ritual. The second part of the paper considers some solutions which fit the belief expounded by Illich above. It recommends a return to the pursuit of emancipation as a primary concern in re-examining the relationship between man, work and employment. The final section is an attack on the wastefulness, suffering and lunacy of industrial man's continuing faith in compulsory employment. Escape from its enslavement can only come from making public, and acting on, the private feelings that a large section of men and women in employment now harbour.