Corporate culture and it's problems
(youtu.be)
Comments (16)
sorted by:
It's part of the overall trend of the Infantilization of Western society, another example is adults wanting to go to Disney World and commercials for adults featuring childish or cartoon themes, etc. Good write up about it here
https://theconversation.com/the-infantilization-of-western-culture-99556
Have the Archive
https://archive.ph/Xwx3b
Claude Levi Strauss had this big problem where any culture he looked at had to be inferior to him. He couldn't imagine an anthropologist studying mall culture of the 80's. Also, a country that creates so many awful cars is not in a position to say that other cultures trying to make them better is bad.
I enjoyed the article, and agree with it, but there are niggling bits that make me want to analyze it harder.
Also, Levi Strauss' 'criticism' of American culture is pretty infantile in itself. Baseball is a very cerebral game; Americans actually worked on the 'toy-cars' with their hands; and hobbies like hunting or HAM radio are not at all childish.
I'm embarrassed that I used to read that sort of stuff -- you know, when I was infantile.
It never makes sense to me as it takes away the whole reason to have a corporate job. I've been with a big company for a long time now. Why? It's a easy consistent paycheck I don't hate doing what I have to do to get it. I don't have to invest myself into it, I just have to show up and do a good job, then go home and sleep at night. If I wanted to make something a part of myself, I'd rather make my own business or be in some small business where there is an upside.
I guess it works for someone though. I work from home most of the time, but when I go in to the office, there's people playing on pool tables and such. Doesn't make sense to me, I'd rather finish my work so I can leave and have time for something else.
I know people that basically live at their company. It's like a college campus bubble.
Firstly, I resent his genuflection to DIE and its positives, and relating it to a reason for a corporation to be concerned about its 'culture.' Ironically, he mentions it in a line about how all the new non-White non-male employees might take something meant as a joke as an insult. Quelle suprise.
I was alarmed in the beginning when he brought up "Culture Managers," and my first reaction was that the role was for micromanaging the workers and trying to force a singular belief system across the lot of them. The management must feel so powerless and confused about how to improve and affect the working environment that their instinct is to find some "Expert" to fix it for them, with zero understanding of whether that person would actually be useful or not. How long would the manager bludgeon their employees with this tool before deciding it wasn't properly working, and how much permanent damage would it do in the meantime?
I heard a funny idea a long number of years ago; when you see an "under new management" sign, what it really means is "we got rid of the previous assholes, please give us another chance." It seems like the idea of controlling the behavior of your employees to maximize their productivity has become yet another modern mental poison, driven by increasingly invasive psychological studies on manipulating and controlling human behavior, all wrapped up in a hefty dose of social shaming.
I liked how they pointed out the culture is actually a cult. Since die is very cultish, it makes sense that the two mix.
tl;dr it's a stupid CEO fad that says if you tell your employees "We're a family" enough times they'll feel too guilty to quit until you decide to fire them and offshore their jobs.
FYI if anyone at your company says "we're a family!" get your resume polished up.
edit I recall reading a story about a CEO who found once his company expanded beyond 150 people the culture fell apart and people became disinterested and detached from one another. So he broke his company up into 100-150 people groups to keep them closer-knit. Something about being related to ancestral human settlements being around 150 people.
That idea in anthropology and sociology is known as the Dunbar Number.
I hate that 'family' crap. Any family that's worth anything doesn't throw a member out when they become financially inconvenient. It's insulting to be told that at a job.
Unless the ball gets into everything.
I worked at an arcade in Hawaii. Those stupid balls got everywhere.
Really glad my CEO is anti- Contrived Corporate Cool and scathingly shuts down any mid level manager that even suggests nonsense like this.
It's the midlevel managers getting disrupted by AI anyway.