8.   February 27
Innovation and Emancipation

Questions: Is the new economy accompanied by a new corporation?  How are things for the “cubicle dwellers”?

Quotes for Class Fifteen

It is in this relaxed way that the new workday begins.  A day filled with rancid coffee, angry clients, drawn-out staff meetings, grouchy supervisors, incompetent coworkers, lecherous bosses, unreliable equipment, relentless faxes, incessant voice mail and enough “Dear Colleague” memos to move the acid production in the stomach into high gear.
                If it seems we are working harder and longer for less, that’s because we are.  The economic data paint a grim statistical portrait of what lies behind the amorphous mix of grief and anxiety that has caused many of us to develop sudden cravings for Hamburger helper.  For more than twenty years there has been a steady slide in real wages . . . And a recent blip upward has done little to reverse the trend.  In fact, about the only economic indicators that are setting records these days are corporate profits and executive compensation.  These increases are not being driven by faster growth of productivity, but instead came about from a squeeze on wages in the 1990s . . .
                The debate gets framed in many ways.  Critics talk about the widening gap between rich and poor, between workers and CEOs, but what really eats away a people and demoralizes them is their failed expectation of fairness in the workplace.  For some reason they expect hard work to be rewarded, think those rewards should be proportional to the contributions made to an enterprise and feel everyone should be treated the same.  The workplace has never been fair.  Like they used to say in ancient Egypt, “You don’t get promoted to Pharaoh by working hard on a pyramid.”
-- David S. Levine, Disgruntled: The Darker Side of the World of Work (1998).

Assignments:
Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web, pp. 3-161.

March 1
Defensive Individualism

Question: What is the relationship between self-defense and creativity? Does corporate management require self-defense at the expense of creativity?

Quotes for Class Sixteen

Like any successful cult, sacrifice and penance and the idea that the deity is perfect and his priests are better than you works at Microsoft.  Each level, from Gates on down, screams at the next, goading and humiliating them.  And while you can work any eighty hours per week that you want, dress any way that you like, you can’t talk back in a meeting when your boss says you are shit in front of all your co-workers.  It just isn’t done.  When Bill Gates says that he could do in a weekend what you’ve failed to do in a week or a month, he’s lying, but you don’t know better and just go back to try harder.
               This all works to the advantage of Gates, who gets away with murder until the kids eventually realize that this is not the way the rest of the world works.  But by then it is three or four years later, they’ve made their contributions to Microsoft, and are ready to be replaced by another group of kids straight out of school.
-- Robert X. Cringeley, Accidental Empires

Corey Thomas, senior at Vanderbilt was told he was being self-centered in his job hunt.  “But the way I see it is that while I want a company that’s good for me, I truly believe that if I don’t perform they’ll get rid of me in a heartbeat.  My dad worked for Sears for 19 years as a security guard, and then he was laid off.  I have to position myself so I can constantly watch out for myself.  I have to be self-serving.”
-- “The New Organization Man,” Fortune (March 1998).

Assignments:
Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web, pp. 165-246