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WHEN THEY REACH out for help, the unemployed enter an insidiously manipulative culture—one that was utterly foreign to me. I have some acquaintance with another kind of institutional culture—that of the university—and had expected the corporate culture to be very different, with far less wasted effort, for example, in the form of tradition or self-indulgent personality conflicts. I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military—or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway—in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say, science and journalism—a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.
Of course, I was never officially accepted into the corporate world as a regular employee, but I have every reason to believe that the transition zone occupied by the unemployed offers a fairly accurate glimpse into its culture. For one thing, the individuals who provide coaching, who lead group sessions and facilitate networking events, are for the most part themselves veterans of the corporate world. In addition, many transition enterprises serve not only the unemployed, but corporate clients as well, providing counseling and pep sessions for current executives and other professionals. Hence the ideology and expectations of the transition industry cannot be too far out of line from those of the corporate culture at large—and much of what I found there was disturbingly loony.
The reliance on empirically baseless personality tests, for example, and the deeper assumption that humans can be sorted into nine or so distinct “personality types,” echo the medieval notion of “humors”—“choleric,” “bilious,” et cetera—determining mood and health. Then there’s the almost numerological faith that things have been clarified once they have been organized into categories and counted, as in the “seven habits,” the “four competencies,” “the sixty-four principles of success.” Lists may be useful as a mnemonic device, but they are not an analytic tool and, whether the subject is chemistry or marketing, do little to illuminate the world.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the corporate world as I encountered it was the constant emphasis on “personality” and “attitude.” In the world of journalism, as in the academy, quirky, even difficult, people are commonplace, and no one complains as long as the copy gets in on time or the students master the subject matter. But the path to the corporate world is lined with admonitions to upgrade or improve one’s personality. Coaches administered personality tests and talked about the importance of being upbeat and likable; Internet and book-based advice urged a thorough retuning of one’s attitude; networking events emphasized the necessity of staying “up.” Other job searchers agreed that success depends on one’s ability to conform to the immediate microculture. As Hillary Meister put it: “If they find someone who gets along with them and who has the right personality, they’ll like them. In an interview today, chemistry matters more than skills.” Jeff Clement attributed success to
personality, who you knew. If the boss was into golf, we were all supposed to be into golf. If he smoked cigars, we all smoked cigars. If he drank brandy, we all had to drink brandy. Eventually you saw some serious vices and then you had something on him. Then, if you have the dirt on them, they’ll keep you on. To survive, you need to know where the bodies are buried.
What does personality have to do with getting the job done? I am still confident that I could have been, as Kimberly put it, a “crackerjack PR person,” at least as far as job performance goes. But could I have played the requisite role, as prescribed by the coaches and gurus? The rationale commonly given for the emphasis on personality is that today’s corporate functionaries are likely to work in “teams,” within which one’s comportment and demeanor are at least as important as one’s knowledge and experience. Yet despite the personality tests, which rest on the assumption that personalities vary from person to person, only one kind of personality seems to be in demand, one that is relentlessly cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient—the very qualities fostered by the transition industry. Even at the higher levels of management, where you might think there would be room for the occasional disagreeable person—as Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling or AOL’s Robert Pittman appear to have been—niceness is supposed to prevail. A recent article in the Financial Times points out that the requisite personality traits even trump intelligence, and do so at all levels of the corporation.
Think what characterises the really intelligent person. They can think for themselves. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent comes easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only unnecessary for most business jobs, they are actually a handicap when it comes to rising through the ranks of large companies.12
Worse, from my perspective, the same article tells of a woman in a senior position who was upbraided for revealing, in a personality test: “Irony is one of my favourite forms of humour.” “She is not going to be fired,” the article reports, “but it has been made clear to her that unless she seriously rethinks her sense of humour she might fit better somewhere else.”
It is a strange team in which everyone is equally good-natured, agreeable, and not too threateningly bright. In my own experience of group projects there is always at least one, and possibly more, irascible or cynical team member. In fact, it is his or her presence that requires the others to possess the “people skills” that are so valued in the corporate world. Besides, at a time when corporations are supposedly striving for “diversity”—forming “diversity committees” and hiring “diversity specialists”—it seems counterproductive to bar diversity in personality. It can only hinder the achievement of more familiar forms of diversity along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity. The African-American who is deemed overly sensitive to racial slights, or the woman who speaks out against sexist practices, may be just what the company needs if it is ever to achieve true demographic diversity. But he or she risks being dismissed for failing to be a sufficiently compliant “team player.”
Despite all my putative personality defects—sarcasm, impatience, and possibly also intelligence—I did take the rhetoric of “team work” very seriously. The cover letters that accompanied my job applications always emphasized my desire to work collaboratively, in a “dynamic team,” and to enjoy the camaraderie of working with others in a long-term effort “to advance the company brand and image.” I had been “consulting” as an individual, and now I was eager to come in from the cold. What I was failing to notice was that my fellow job seekers had been “team members” once themselves, meaning that these must be very fragile “teams” indeed.
For all the talk about the need to be a likable “team player,” many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates—of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that “the nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest people to fire.”13 Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter.
And even as I write, the bar is being raised. Likability and enthusiasm are no longer enough to make one’s personality attractive; just in the past few months, I’ve noticed more and more demands for passion. The advice-meister Stephen Covey, who wrote the 1979 best-seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has come out with an “eighth habit,” explaining that
being effective . . . is no longer optional in today’s world—it’s the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thri
ving, innovating, excelling and leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond effectiveness. The call and need of a new era is for greatness. It’s for fulfillment, passionate execution, and significant contribution.14 [Covey’s italics.]
Increasingly, company web sites offer breathless claims of “passion” as one of their corporate attributes and requirements for employment, as in, “If you are an enthusiastic, creative, passionate person looking for a place where your ideas will be valued, look no further than Delphi.” Kevin Craine’s online business commentary, “Weekly Insight,” advises businesspeople to acquire “. . . passion. You must believe in your strategy and feel passionate about it.” USA Today observes that:
. . . it’s widely accepted that the winning companies during the next generation will be those that have employees come to work and bring with them their hearts, minds, creativity and passion.15
Energy and commitment are so 1995; in the twenty-first century one is required to feel, or at least evince, an emotional drive as consuming as romantic love. Before we swoon at the possibilities, though, Covey reminds us that the appropriate level of passion sometimes needs to be whipped up by force. How do you achieve “a united, cohesive culture” in your corporation? “Induce pain,” he answers: “As long as people are contented and happy, they’re not going to do much. You don’t want to wait until the market induces pain, so you have to induce it in other ways.”16
The new insistence on “passion” marks a further expansion of the corporate empire into the time and the spirit of its minions. Once, white-collar people were expected to have hobbies; in fact it would have been odd not to cite one in an interview, even if it were only reading or bridge. Today’s “passionate” employees, however, are not expected to have the time or the energy for such extraneous pursuits; they are available at all hours; they forgo vacations; they pull all-nighters; they stretch to the limits of their physical and mental endurance. Scientists, writers, and political campaign operatives sometimes do the same, but not for years on end, and not for ever-changing goals.
It is the insecurity of white-collar employment that makes the demand for passion so cruel and perverse. You may be able to simulate passion, or even feel it, for one job, but what about the next job, and the next? Not even prostitutes are expected to perform “passionately” time after time, and of course their encounters seldom end in rejection. Picking up after a firing and regrouping in a mode of passionate engagement, and doing so time after time—this is a job for a professional actor or for a person who has lost the capacity for spontaneous feeling.
OTHER WHITE-COLLAR occupational groups—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and college professors—have done better at carving out some autonomy and security for themselves. Their principal strategy, undertaken in the early twentieth century, was professionalization: the erection of steep barriers to the occupation, backed up by the force of law and the power of professional organizations like the AMA.17 No one can practice medicine, for example, without a thorough education and a license, nor can a physician—or a professor, for that matter—be fired without cause. To the strategy of professionalization, some occupations added the further protection afforded by unions: teachers, college professors, journalists—even some physicians—have banded together, much like steelworkers or miners, to defend themselves against arbitrary and autocratic employers.
The “business professions,” on the other hand, are so called mainly as a matter of courtesy. Management, for example, made a relatively late entry into the college curriculum; and even today, although the MBA has been the fastest-growing graduate degree for the past two decades, it is by no means a requirement for a management job.18 A current TV commercial even mocks MBAs as snotty young know-it-alls who are helpless in the face of a copying machine. Among the business “professions,” only accounting has the traditional hallmarks of a profession: legally enforced educational requirements, licensing, and a recognized body of knowledge. In the case of management, human relations, marketing, and PR, anyone with a college degree—myself, for example—can present themselves as a potential practitioner. And with this openness comes a huge vulnerability for the veterans in the field: there is no transparent way to judge their performance, and no protection from capricious firings.
But there is something even more central than job security that white-collar corporate workers lack—and that is dignity. A physician sells his or her skills and labor; so, in fact, does the blue- or pink-collar worker. Both the warehouse worker unloading trucks and the engineer designing a bridge can reasonably expect their jobs to involve a straightforward exchange of labor for wages. As the young temp worker I met at the New Jersey job fair put it, “Just give me a job, and I’ll get it done.” Not so for the white-collar corporate employee, who must sell—not just his skill and hard work—but himself. He may wear a “power suit” and look down on the army of more menial workers below him, but he—or she—faces far more intrusive psychological demands than a laborer or clerk would likely countenance. His is a world of intrigue and ill-defined expectations, of manipulation and mind games, where self-presentation—as in “personality” and “attitude”—regularly outweighs performance.
The failure of white-collar corporate workers to band together and defend their jobs and their professional autonomy is usually attributed to their individualism—or to an unwarranted faith in the meritocratic claims of our culture. But physicians, journalists, and even many blue-collar workers are no less likely to be individualistic believers in meritocracy. What sets the white-collar corporate workers apart and leaves them so vulnerable is the requirement that they identify, absolutely and unreservedly, with their employers. While the physician or scientist identifies with his or her profession, rather than with the hospital or laboratory that currently employs them, the white-collar functionary is expected to express total fealty to the current occupants of the “C-suites.” As my “crisis management” instructor, Jim Lukaszewski, made clear: the CEO may be a fool; the company’s behavior may be borderline criminal—and still you are required to serve unstintingly and without the slightest question. Unfortunately, as the large numbers of laid-off white-collar workers show, this loyalty is not reliably reciprocated.
SO THE UNEMPLOYED continue to drift through their shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events, and costly coaching sessions. The tragedy is that they could be doing so much more. They could, most obviously, be lobbying for concrete improvements in the lives of the unemployed and anxiously employed. Topping the list would have to be an expansion of current unemployment benefits to a level more like that in the northern European countries, which offer a variety of benefits extending potentially for years. The entire debate about outsourcing, for example, would take a dramatically different and perhaps less nativist tone if American workers had an adequate safety net to fall back on. As it is, the IT person who is required to train her Indian replacement—a not uncommon indignity—might as well be digging her own grave.
Almost as urgent is the need for a system of universal health insurance that is not tied in any way to your job. When people were likely to have three or four jobs in a lifetime, it might have made more sense to leave health insurance to the employers. But as the number of jobs per lifetime rises into the double digits, employer-provided insurance leads to long periods without coverage—with the chance, especially among the middle-aged, that a “prior condition” could come along and disqualify you from further individual coverage, or even from a job. Furthermore, the cost of health insurance has become a major disincentive to job creation; companies would rather outsource or hire benefit-less “contract workers” than take on the burden of providing insurance for new hires. There are eight million unemployed people, of all occupational levels, in America; imagine the effect they might have if they launched a concerted campaign for publicly sponsored universal health insurance.
If an expansion of benefits seems unlikely or even utopian in the current po
litical climate, there is still the immediate challenge of self-defense. On many fronts, the American middle class is under attack as never before. For example, the 2005 federal bankruptcy bill, which eliminates the possibility of a fresh start for debt-ridden individuals, will condemn more and more of the unemployed and underemployed to a life of debt peonage. Meanwhile, escalating college costs threaten to bar their own children from white-collar careers. And as company pensions disappear, the president is campaigning vigorously to eviscerate Social Security. No group is better situated, or perhaps better motivated, to lead the defense of the middle class than the unemployed—assuming they could recognize their common interests and begin to act as a political force.
They have the time, for one thing—not endless hours, since job searching does require some sustained effort, but far more than their counterparts in the workplace, many of whom put in sixty or more hours a week. They also have, in many cases, skills unavailable to the blue-collar unemployed: administrative and computer-related experience, as well, presumably, as the ability to work out a plan or strategy and implement it. And, as living representatives of middle-class decline, they surely have the motivation. If anyone can testify credibly to the disappearance of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed—the people who “played by the rules,” “did everything right,” and still ended up in ruin.
Yes, it will take a change in attitude, a psychological transformation, to make the leap from solitary desperation to collective action. But this is not the kind of transformation the career coaches envision. What the unemployed and anxiously employed need is not “likability” but the real ability to reach out to others and enlist them in a common project, ideally including very different others, like the chronically stressed lower-level workers. What they need, too, is not a “winning attitude” but a deeper and more ancient quality, one that I never once heard mentioned in my search, and that is courage: the courage to come together and work for change, even in the face of overwhelming odds.