Marc Bousquet rants eloquently about the crisis of the humanities and the academy. What I really like in this recent post, When “Bad” is Right, is the righteous indignation he builds up about professionalism and the generally absurd connection management literature has implanted in our heads between profession and success.
In this vein, “professionalism” is today more of an ideology than a lifeway. As an ideology useful to one’s employers, for instance, professionalism as devotion to one’s clients, the public good, and the culture of one’s field is clearly a vector for the super-exploitation of all kinds of other workers, from retail sales to schoolteachers....
Like professionals, millions of service-economy and clerical workers are now expected to donate hours of work off the clock, donating time to email and other employer-related communication, engaging in unpaid training and “keeping up,” etc. Throughout the economy, workers are urged to give freely of themselves-to serve-in exchange for psychic returns. All of this “acting professional,” however, doesn’t come with what used to be a professional’s paycheck.
Back in the 1990s I was an avid reader of The Baffler, which appears to be defunct now that Thomas Frank has moved onto bigger and better things. What made The Baffler so much fun was their continuous assault upon the ridiculous management guru stylings of people like Tom Peters and the re-engineering the corporation guys from the early 1990s.
On the other hand, management is increasingly professionalized, via the worldwide triumph of the business curriculum-the first true global monoculture, with the keywords and master concepts (excellence, quality, change, accountability, learning organization, eg.) framed by the “great authors” of our time: W. Edwards Deming, Peter Senge, etc.
Over the weekend I watched the first few episodes of Breaking Bad. I haven’t decided what I think of the show yet, but the description below is pretty accurate.
The premise of BB is the murderous logic of putting profit-seeking dolts in charge of social goods, like health care and education (or fighting wars, or food security, for that matter). When diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, the scales fall from the eyes of high-school chemistry teacher Walter White, a role for which Bryan Cranston deservedly won an Emmy.
White’s turn into ruthlessness-he abruptly “breaks bad”-resolving overnight to become the exploiter rather than the exploited, is what separates the show from Showtime’s Weeds, which features a soccer mom dealing pot to keep up her sense of entitlement.
BB is more like the Sopranos, where half-smart gangsters in McMansions allegorize the organized criminals actually running the country, or The Wire, where the actually-existing thuggery of management theory in public service is continuously thematized.
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