The Oppressed Middle:
Jackall, Robert
THE OPPBESSED MIDDLE POLITICS OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT Earl Shorris Anchor Press, $13.95, 393 pp. Robert Jackall WHAT is one to make of a book compelling in its very idiosnycracy but so often...
...Moreover, in his zeal to portray the plight of tiie white-collar worker, he paints an absurdly distorted picture of the blue-collar worker as a latter-day noble savage who is free precisely because of his alienation from an enveloping .organization...
...But even if Shorris's thesis fails, his searing portraits of the manager's world make the book worthwhile...
...Any writer who interlards his text with Latin phrases, a la Arendt, should at least learn the proper declension of Homo...
...The result is a deeply flawed but nonetheless interesting book...
...once the terror vanishes, as Arendt herself tells us, people awaken as if from a dream unable to believe, what transpired...
...What he reveals is a capricious, secretive, savagely competitive world where appearances are more important than substance...
...where language is perverted and deceit the rule rather than the exception...
...The second part of Shorris's book is a different matter...
...by tailoring their selves to suit their corporation's fashion, they participate to a great extent in shaping their own dilemmas and their own fates...
...where all moral issues are transformed into practical concerns...
...Shorris elaborates his argument in two parts...
...The problem is that, in writing about corporate managers, he has read too much of writers like Hannah Arendt and relied too little on his own cogent first-hand perceptions...
...Totalitarianism hinges upon naked coercion...
...But one wonders how much Shorris has grasped of these and other writers...
...The process begins when a person accepts an externally defined notion of happiness-such as economic success-and tries to fulfill that definition by joining a large organization ostensibly set up for a benign purpose, like creating wealth...
...in a sense, they constitute the phenomenon...
...Managers are not just victims acted upon by their organizations...
...Jackboots not only symbolize totalitarianism...
...Earl Shorris is an intelligent and at times gifted writer...
...indeed, in this, Shorris comes a lot closer than sociological attempts to do the same...
...He uses his own managerial experience as a touchstone and pries away the public faces managers are so adroit at manipulating...
...For him, totalitarianism is not a complete social order like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but a social process in which individual autonomy is destroyed...
...Shorris's basic thesis is that the modern corporation is totalitarian...
...At the least, they are a welcome antidote to the cheerful views of many organizational sociologists and consultants alike who suggest that all the corporation needs is a little tinkering...
...It consists of forty eau-tionary tales, all fictional, in which he presents scenes from corporate life to illustrate various facets of his notion of totalitarianism...
...They are portraits of men and women caught in a moral maze, unable to understand even the terms of their confusion let alone a way put of the puzzle...
...By contrast, the corporation upon its leadership, its managers, internalizing its criteria for success and actively rationalizing themselves...
...For instance, he completely misses the structural thrust of Marx's notion of alienation, reducing it instead simply to psychological discontent...
...If such a portrait even approximates the truth, why discount Shorris's equation of the corporation and totalitarianism...
...and where the price of success is the willingness to place one's very self continually in jeopardy...
...he maligns Studs Terkel's Working in a way that indicates he either didn 't read the book carefully or has discounted what many of Terkel's interviewees actually say...
...At their best, Shorris's pieces have the same disturbing resonance as Michael Herr's Dispatches...
...They reduce men and women to creatures totally dependent on the corporation who gradually abandon their love of freedom and become content with beefsteak and shrimp cocktail...
...Robert Jackall WHAT is one to make of a book compelling in its very idiosnycracy but so often monolithic and wrongheaded that it leaves the reader exasperated...
...and, most important, he misses perhaps the central aspect of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism, namely the crucial significance of terror (not shrimp cocktail) in maintaining fantastic ideological systems...
...If one sets aside the few overly melodramatic stories in this bunch and prescinds from Shorris's postscript attempts to straitjacket his own imagination, one can learn a great deal about the emotional reality of the management world from these fictional pieces...
...The answer is simple and already hinted at...
...The section is marked by exegeses of writers as diverse as Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Machiavelli, Marx, Schumpeter, Kafka, Weil, Popper, and, above all, Arendt...
...Each tale is followed by a brief discussion...
...The first is a tortuous theoretical discussion of the social, economic, and psychological conditions which favor the emergence of the totalitarian process...
...Such acquiescence or "cession" to the organization is a prelude of what might await our whole society...
...There are minor irritations as well...
...not only do they rationalize work to increase efficiency but, especially in the white-collar world, they rationalize the worker: In doing this, they borrow unintentionally the tools of totalitarian regimes and make, among other things, secrecy, fear, and betrayal commonplaces of corporate life...
...However, organizations, particularly those with economic goals, have their own dynamism...
Vol. 108 • August 1981 • No. 15
