The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Literature Readings in the st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the...

Author: Heather J. Hicks

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American Literature Readings in the st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons

Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks

The Culture of Soft Work Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative

Heather J. Hicks

THE CULTURE OF SOFT WORK

Copyright © Heather J. Hicks, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60823–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–60823–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hicks, Heather J. The culture of soft work : labor, gender, and race in postmodern American narrative / Heather J. Hicks. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) ISBN 0–230–60823–X (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Work in literature. 3. Management in literature. 4. Industrial relations in literature. 5. Sex role in the work environment. 6. Management— Philosophy. 7. Corporate culture—United States. I. Title. PS374.W64H53 2009 810.9⬘355—dc22

2008019900

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Kennard and Jane Hicks and Caroline Scott

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C on ten t s

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: “Soft Is Hard”

1

1 2

3 4

5

6

“No Good to Anybody”: Player Piano, General Electric, and the Consumption of Work

15

Soft Soap, Snow Jobs, and Apartment Keys: Human Relations Management in Mid-Century Literature and Film

45

Automating Feminism: Self-Actualization versus the Post-Work Society in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man

89

A Cyborg’s Work Is Never Done: Programming Cyborgs, Workaholics, and Feminists in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It

113

“Sleeping Beauty”: Corporate Culture, Race, and Reality in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun and Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor

139

Hoodoo Economics: On Management Gurus and Magical Black Men in Postmodern American Culture

165

Conclusion

201

Notes

207

Bibliography

241

Index

251


Figur es

1.1 An advertisement generated by Boulware’s office for GE and republished in his book 1.2 Excerpts from Boulware’s print campaign at GE, republished in his book 2.1 The Relay Assembly Test Room Women, as portrayed in Management and the Worker 2.2 The Mica Splitting Test Room Women, as portrayed in Management and the Worker 2.3 The Bank Wiring Observation Room, as portrayed in Management and the Worker 6.1 Still from Unbreakable 6.2 Still from The Green Mile 6.3 Still from Family Man

23 24 48 50 52 180 189 194


Ack now l ed gmen t s

Many wonderful teachers have nurtured my enthusiasm for ideas and the written word. David Fulenwider, Deborah Litchfield, Jody and August Schau, and Monique Sondheim committed enormous energy to teaching the students in our small, rural Maine high school. In retrospect, I’m not sure they realized how good they were at what they did. Alexandra Halasz, Thomas Luxon, and Peter Stallybrass helped me on my way to specializing in literature during my years at Dartmouth College. My earliest scholarship on American labor and literature took shape under the guidance of several inspiring faculty members in the graduate programs in English and Literature at Duke University, including Cathy N. Davidson, Thomas J. Ferraro, Michael Moon, and Janice A. Radway. The support of a number of friends, including Jed Esty, Carolyn Gerber, Andrea Goulet, Nancy Grey, Emma Lipton, and Katherine Stubbs, has helped to sustain my faith in the merits of my own academic labors. At Villanova, this book has benefited from the comments and suggestions of many past and present colleagues, including Michael Berthold, Scott Black, Danielle Bobker, Crystal Lucky, Jean Marie Lutes, Evan Radcliffe, Jill Rappoport, Lisa Sewell, Vincent Sherry, and Lauren Shohet. Villanova has also enabled my work in other ways, granting me a sabbatical, a Summer Research Fellowship, and a publication subvention, as well as supplying me with a number of excellent research assistants, most notably Sally Groomes and Marc Napolitano. I am grateful for the assistance provided by the staff of Villanova’s Falvey Library, especially librarians Luisa Cywinski and Judith Olsen. Other members of the Villanova community, including Bernadette Dierkes and Jennifer Pohlhaus, provided invaluable assistance with the production of the images for the book. Villanova is situated in a neighborhood rich with academic institutions, and I am grateful to be a member of the Tri-College Faculty Working Group in American Studies. Thanks especially to Gustavus T. Stadler and Christina Zwarg at Haverford College, who have made participation in that working group consistently rewarding.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am also grateful to the editorial staff at Palgrave, who have valiantly shepherded this text through the editorial and production processes. Brigitte Shull has answered my many questions with a promptness and clarity that reflects her thorough knowledge of the editorial ropes. I thank Farideh Koohi-Kamali for her guidance and enthusiasm for my project, and Linda Wagner-Martin for including this book in her series. My greatest debts in my thinking about work, and for my life as an academic, are owed to my parents Kennard and Jane Hicks, whose tireless work provided the financial support for me to attend college and launched me on the many intellectual ventures to come. This book is dedicated to them, and to my grandmother, Caroline Scott, who has inspired me over the years with her strength and humor. The Culture of Soft Work would not have come into existence without the love and support of Stephen D. Fischer. I am profoundly grateful for his keen intelligence, editorial savvy, and unfailing patience as I have labored to complete this text. The graciousness and generosity of Sofia Luna Frank-Fischer has helped me to keep perspective during the years that I have had the good fortune to be a member of her family. Maxwell Hicks Fischer has made the completion of this project all the sweeter. Parts of the book have appeared in earlier forms elsewhere, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press as “Automating Feminism: The Case of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man” in Postmodern Culture 9:3 (1999). In a different form, chapter 4 was published as “Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the ‘Human’ in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It” in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 85–106. Parts of chapter 6 were first published as “Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film,” in Camera Obscura 53, 18: 2 (2003): 27–55. Copyright 2003, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission: Illustrations from page 43, “Steady Jobs through Steady Friends,” and from page 115, “Specimen Headlines from Articles in Employee Publications” from The Truth about Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily, by Lemuel R. Boulware. Copyright © 1969 The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc, Arlington, VA 22202. For BNA Books publications call toll free 1–800–960–1220 or visit www.bnabook.com.

I N T ROD U C T ION

“Soft Is Hard”

In 1982 management consultants Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., published a critique of the American workplace that became the best-selling business book in history.1 Written with little attention to literary artistry, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies might seem an unlikely place to begin a study of literature, film, and other post–World War II texts that have contributed to the discursive construction of work and workers in postmodern America. Yet what is striking to a twenty-first century reader of Peters and Waterman’s book is the matter-of-fact fashion in which they advance their thesis through the highly sexualized business idiom of their moment. Their world is one in which managers want their workforce to be “turned on,” where workers strive to “stick out,” where “tight coupling” is a celebrated business practice, and all things “hard” are privileged. The American workplace they describe appears to have gone untouched by the political efforts of the 1970s Women’s Movement. In their introduction, for instance, Peters and Waterman intone that “the excellent companies require and demand extraordinary performance from the average man,” and they continue to portray the American workforce as almost exclusively male. 2 In keeping with this perspective, they elevate the best workers they discover in their survey of American companies to a masculine pantheon of “heroes,” “godfathers,” “champions,” “pioneers,” and “mavericks.” Women, meanwhile, make only fleeting appearances, mainly as mothers, daughters, wives, and consumers. In general, the authors’ dismissive perspective on women is summed up by their repeated use of the term “motherhood” as a synonym for platitude.3 Just as notable as this unapologetically masculinized rhetoric, however, is the end to which they direct it: What Peters and Waterman argue for is a set of management techniques that privilege irrationality,

2


intuition, fluidity, faith, and emotion. Presenting rationality as a stricture needlessly imposed on workers’ imaginations in the past, they explain, “What our rational economist friends tell us ought not to be possible the excellent companies do routinely.”4 Exhorting managers to revise their perspective on what counts as productive work, they write, “All that stuff you have been dismissing for so long as the intractable, irrational, intuitive, informal organization can be managed. Clearly, it has as much or more to do with the way things work (or don’t) around your companies as the formal structures and strategies do.”5 They support their case with examples of “excellent” companies that are already pursuing this course, “allow[ing] for— and tak[ing] advantage of—the emotional, more primitive side (good and bad) of human nature.”6 Given that the domestic work of women has historically been disparaged for being emotional and “primitive,” Peters and Waterman’s embrace of these attributes appears to constitute a remarkable revaluing of the feminine within the arena of postmodern work.7 Yet, on the contrary, Peters and Waterman are eager to disavow any association between “excellent” work culture and femininity. Rather than granting the conventional association between the concepts of irrationality and femininity, for instance, they characterize irrationality as a masculine form of genius. They cite the remarks of Lehman Brothers chairman Peter Peterson, who explains that he is committed to experimentation in his company “[b]efore we let an idea get emasculated, and before we let any thoroughly rational appraisal of the idea convince us that it will not work.”8 Rationality, far from its traditional role as the wellspring of masculine productivity in the workplace, is reconceived as an emasculating hindrance. Declaring that, “It’s amazing . . . what one highly charged, crazy man can do,” Peters and Waterman ascribe to what they call “irrational product champions” an Emersonian quality of defiant masculinity.9 They distill these arguments about contemporary work culture into the declaration, “soft is hard.”10 Touting the corporate culture paradigm of business management they have outlined throughout their book, they explain, “culture is the ‘softest’ stuff around. Who trusts its leading analysts—anthropologists and sociologists—after all? Businessmen surely don’t. Yet culture is the hardest stuff around, as well. Violate the lofty phrase, ‘IBM Means Service,’ and you are out of a job.”11 Corporate culture, a business concept in which “senior managers . . . attempt to define, for their employees, the meaning of employment, and the relationship these employees

INTRODUCTION

3

should have with their employing organization,” has its origins in the insurgence of humanistic models of management into the American workplace that began in the 1930s.12 In their allusion to the softness of such methods, Peters and Waterman unintentionally invite us to consider the degree to which these management strategies complicate earlier associations between work and autonomous manhood. Although aiming to restore the masculine credibility of work with the formulation “soft is hard,” Peters and Waterman instead capture the contested status of gendered identity in the work culture that emerged after World War II. In their celebration of businesses that privilege what appears to be a feminine ontology, Peters and Waterman herald the emergence of what I call “soft work.” While the term “hard work” is equated with industrial machinery, hard bodies, and a no-nonsense, commandand-control style of management, soft work is performed in an economy sustained by software, soft bodies, and soft management techniques. Representations of soft work in novels and films, as well as a host of popular arts and sociological, political, and corporate publications, suggest that this new socioeconomic formation has realigned the signifiers of economic production with those of femininity. Soft work collapses the boundaries between worker and consumer, rationality and emotion, publicity and privacy, the real and unreal, the American and “un-American,” and the managerial and magical. Again, Peters and Waterman’s maxim that “soft is hard” serves as a useful point of reference, for the texts I examine in the following pages suggest that the suffusion of feminine ideals and signifiers into the workplace is often experienced by both male and female workers as “hard.” The struggles to define the subjectivity of workers occasioned by soft work result in micro-regimes of gender—historically specific expressions of gendered identity including transgressive forms of masculinity that are abject and irrational and equally novel forms of femininity that are disembodied and instrumental. *

* *

A number of literary critics and scholars of cultural studies have established the impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s innovations in scientific management on the American arts. It was Antonio Gramsci, in his assessment of Taylorism’s notorious scion Fordism, who first articulated the enormous scale of the cultural change that Taylor effected.13 More recent scholars have traced the repercussions of

4


Taylorism in the literary forms of sentimentalism, romance, melodrama, realism, naturalism, and modernism, as well as a range of other popular and high-brow media.14 In the wake of Michel Foucault, critics have inevitably understood Taylor in terms of his discursive effects and strategies. From this perspective, Taylor conceived a new language for describing work that profoundly altered how it was understood and experienced. As Mark Seltzer explains, “the real innovation of Taylorization becomes visible in the incorporation of the representation of the work process into the work process itself—or, better, the incorporation of the representation of the work processes as the work process itself.”15 We should not be surprised, then, that literary and cultural representations that were devised to respond to Taylorism often resemble Taylorism in their structure and mechanisms.16 In addition to this formal cross-contamination, certain fundamental themes surface in the cultural responses to scientific management. Taylor’s obsessive drive to pare away the wasteful humanness of the workers he studied and trained, his sense that “bodies and persons are things that can be made” (to borrow Seltzer’s phrase), reflects a modern sensibility in which subject formation is understood to be in human rather than divine hands.17 Taylor regarded women as interlopers within his own private modernity—sentimental meddlers who threatened to delay the completion of his utopia of perfect efficiency—and the embattled position of women as reproducers and producers recurs in many of the texts of what Martha Banta calls “the culture of management.”18 While Taylor’s influence was prodigious, the history of twentieth-century management philosophy did not end with scientific management. On the contrary, the deep antipathy Taylorism inspired in workers, managers, and a new breed of management theorists led to the development of three subsequent paradigms that have had equally profound impact—“human relations,” which shaped the workplace from the 1930s through the 1950s; “self-actualization,” which took hold in the 1960s; and “corporate culture,” which gained prominence in the 1980s.19 For the human relations movement, the keys to increased productivity were capitalizing on group dynamics in the workplace and treating workers as emotional beings. The emphasis of self-actualization, on the other hand, was not on group equilibrium but instead on optimizing one’s personal growth through work.20 Corporate culture responded to the sweeping effects of globalization by reimagining workplaces as discrete cultures founded on ostensibly sacred (but eternally adjustable) values, visions

INTRODUCTION

5

and missions. The priorities set by these philosophies have both reflected and helped to create larger social ideals within American society. Within human relations management, the stress on workers’ emotions redefined work as an act of consumption and management as a form of seduction. The discourse of self-actualization shaped both the work culture of the 1960s and the emergent Women’s Movement, making work simultaneously feminizing and feminist. The advent of corporate culture, with its nonrational discourse and mysticism, has promoted not only work’s feminization but its racialization, as well. In charting these changes through a range of texts, this book enters conversations about the interplay between post-Taylorist management and both postmodernism and gender. Postmodernism here refers to certain formal elements of the works I examine as well as to larger social transformations. While the effects of Taylorism were articulated in a range of forms stretching from sentimentalism to modernist poetics, soft management inspires postmodern formal innovations, including pastiche, fragmentation, the trope of the cyborg and the devices of magical realism. This is not to say, however, that the form of these texts should be read exclusively as a response to the work culture from which they emerge. Such an argument would risk oversimplifying the complex aesthetic processes that coalesce in the production of a literary text or film.21 Given the ambiguous semiotics of form, this study also does not venture to claim that the form of the books and films under investigation constitutes proof of their engagement with the notion of soft work; in most cases the content of the texts does a more satisfactory job of engaging questions of work than their formal dynamics. As the emphasis on irrationality, intuition, and fluidity in Peters and Waterman’s study suggests, contemporary work has undergone a transformation that might well be understood as a process of becoming postmodern. Despite this transformation, however, the topic of work has been largely absent from discussions of postmodern culture. Influential theorists of the postmodern movement, including Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, have located the economic engine of postmodern culture in the global forces of “late capitalism” and “flexible accumulation,” but the daily realities of work—the primary lived experience of men and women across the globe—have received little attention as a category of analysis. 22 While Jameson alludes to “the crisis of traditional labor” in his characterization of late capitalism, for instance, his portrait of capitalism in general emphasizes its scale as an “impossible totality,”

6


and his call for postmodern political art to capture this totality tends to deflect attention from the dynamic role of work within postmodern culture. 23 This conviction of late capitalism’s omnipresence in turn leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to achieve critical distance from postmodernism itself—that there is nowhere to stand outside its system of images and effects. Jameson remarks that “distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation.”24 Ironically, while work, a constitutive part of capitalism, at first seems an unlikely vantage point on the broader cultural and social transformations produced by capitalism itself, the texts I examine suggest that the subjective crises of soft workers, catalyzed by management’s manipulations, provide a means of gaining just such a critical perspective. Admittedly, even critics who have gone in search of representations of postmodern work have found them somewhat elusive. At the conclusion of her magisterial study of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American labor narratives, Laura Hapke states that “a whole new work fiction remains to be written on the daily lives of working people inside and outside the old-fashioned factory.”25 Although she acknowledges that “the twenty-first century factory may well be relocated to the computer terminal (whether at the workplace or at home), the cubicle, the discount-store cash register, the nighttime cleaning stint, the home-health visit, the microwave counter, and the wrapping department,” Hapke remains committed to finding remnants of working-class literature.26 In this search, she is largely disappointed, discovering a smattering of texts that have foregone “the nobility of hard work” for an “easy work culture,” in which authors depict a quest for “easy money and . . . escapes from wage-earning work.”27 In contrast to Hapke’s analysis, I argue that “a whole new work fiction” has been written, but that it cannot be assessed, or perhaps even recognized, by the criteria of the workingclass tradition on which she focuses. Rather than recoiling from the failure or sacrifice of “hardness” she identifies, my study looks squarely at what I see as the soft (rather than easy) work that is everywhere in contemporary culture. While her study remains resolute in its commitment to class-consciousness and the integrity of working class experience, this study opens its gauge of analysis fully, considering the interplay of all classes of workers as they perform tasks softened by

INTRODUCTION

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management discourses that import feminine conventions into the mechanics of work itself. Hapke’s observations about the hunger for ease manifest in contemporary narratives that are ostensibly about work serve as a tacit reminder that the category of consumption is crucial to any discussion of postmodern work. Throughout this study, I chart the ways that a consumer ethic has suffused American work culture. Human relations set this trend in motion, appealing to the desires of workers in an unprecedented fashion. As Nikolas Rose points out, the rhetoric of self-actualization deepened the infiltration of consumerism into the workplace, reframing work itself as a menu of life-enhancing options that workers were (and are) encouraged to consume through their acts of labor.28 This merging of consumption and production has a counterpart within postmodern art, where “the fiction of the creating subject gives way to frank confiscation, quotation, excerption, accumulation and repetition of already existing images.”29 In light of this acquisitive mode of artistic production, postmodern theorists often claim that postmodernism has seen the demise of the “work” of art, leaving only ephemeral, fetishized “texts.”30 Yet the writers and filmmakers I analyze, while attuned to the growing importance of consumption in American society, do not concede their identities as workers. Instead, they consistently position their own literary and filmic efforts as soft work, a self-reflexive move that underscores that, far from perceiving a complete rupture between postmodernism and the “work” of art, contemporary authors and filmmakers understand postmodernism through the lens of work, and vice versa. While this study treats management culture as an alternative to the abstractions of the postindustrialism-postmodernism dialectic, we cannot discount the degree to which soft management methods have been driven by postindustrial economic developments. Rose, for instance, cites “the imperatives of the new technology, the pace of technological change, competition from the Third World and Japan, and the crucial importance of continual stimulation of consumption” as driving forces behind the management techniques that have evolved since the 1960s.31 American and European models, he explains, “sought to reshape the internal world of the organization so as to release the autonomous subjectivity of the worker in such a way that it aligned with the aspirations of the enterprise, now construed in terms of innovation, flexibility, and competitiveness.”32 The texts I examine identify the more immediate expression of these trends in the changing ways work has been defined and overseen.

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It is not only postindustrialism’s instabilities that figure in the softness of management and work phenomena that I explore, but new gender patterns as well. The controversies that have surrounded the term “postindustrialism” are epic and have been well documented by others.33 It would seem a safe generalization, however, that most definitions of this concept include the automation of manufacturing and the new dominance of the service economy. In his analysis, sociologist Fred Block identifies a third, less widely recognized aspect of postindustrialism: “the decline of patriarchy and the breakdown of the linear life course.” Block explains, “Earlier patterns of female subordination, based on the restriction of most women to the domestic sphere, have given way to the mass entrance of women into the paid labor force.”34 It sometimes seems that every point in American history is characterized as the moment in which women entered the workforce in vast numbers (one thinks of the Lowell Mills, the Civil War, the influx of immigrants at the turn of the century, World War I—all are watersheds, moments of surge). And, of course, African American women are often bracketed within these discussions, their status as workers throughout American history taken for granted. Yet, despite these caveats, the period after World War II does mark a(nother) turning point. The increased presence of women adds to the confusion within soft work culture about the longstanding relationship of work to masculinity. In its exploration of the connections between various developments at the economic and administrative levels of American work and the historical conventions of femininity, this study builds on the scholarship of several contemporary theorists. While James Knapp and Nikolas Rose analyze the construction of worker subjectivity without reference to gender, others make it a central concern. Donna Haraway, for instance, in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” characterizes America’s shift into a postindustrial service economy with the phrase, “the feminization of work.”35 Haraway attaches to all workers a set of descriptors historically associated with those judged to be biologically female: Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.36

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In this formulation, Haraway treats femininity as an ideological construct defined by weakness, fluidity, servility, abjection and sexuality. In her suggestion that almost all workers are now feminized, she implies that current economic relations have extended the highly recognizable restrictions associated with a “feminine” existence well beyond those understood as biologically female.37 Her answer to this feminization is her post-gender, post-human myth of the cyborg, a creature of “fiction and lived experience” that promises liberation from the dualistic epistemologies she argues underwrite postindustrial power dynamics.38 In my own reading of cyborgs in the second section of this book, I suggest they share uncomfortable similarities with another post-human construct: the workaholic, an abject being that springs from the same seed of self-actualization that spawned a third, rarer chimera, the feminist. While Haraway identifies contemporary work with a toxic strain of feminization, my study shares Fred Pfeil’s somewhat more hopeful view. Pfeil suggests that the modes of production and social organization associated with the postindustrial economy have partially depleted the power long associated with masculine subjectivity and destabilized the American gender formation: The extreme separation of working life from hearth and home, production from leisure time, and, indeed, the withering of the entire public sphere effected by suburbanization and the spread of TV, transform the hitherto socially backed authority of the Father into an increasingly diminished and abstract principle . . . . Such transformations, together with the entrance of increasing numbers of women into the paid workforce, serve to erode (but not, as yet, wholly dissolve) the socially constructed polarities around which gendered identities had formerly been constructed: for example, male = authority/autonomy/ freedom/power/public sphere, female = nurturance/identification/ connectedness/love/private sphere.39

Influenced by object relations theory, Pfeil suggests that “developed industrial capitalism” spawned “the culture of oedipality,” which he characterizes as “the rise to hegemonic power of the discrete, individualized, empowered male ego against woman, nature, collectivity, and the libidinal self.”40 He argues that the postindustrial era has in turn ushered in a period of post-or non-oedipality, which, marking “the deauthorization of the Father,” presents us with both “problems and possibilities.”41 The Culture of Soft Work is informed by Pfeil’s claims that recent transformations in work culture have broken down “the traditional oedipal ‘family romance’

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of engenderation and individuation” and led to the “partial dissolution, decentering, and devaluation of the autonomous ego” among men.42 Yet Pfeil says little about how women’s engagement in postindustrial work reconstructs their subjectivity, since they were never oedipalized in the first place. In a similar vein, while Pfeil makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the “professionalmanagerial class” in both the postindustrial economy and the postmodern cultural forms that have blossomed in tandem with it, my project explores how those workers who fall outside this rubric experience what can be understood as the deoedipalizing, feminizing or softening of gender codes.43 To both Haraway and Pfeil’s accounts of contemporary work, I also add more concerted attention to the central role questions of rationality play in the emergent gender formation. My readings in the following pages reveal that the automation of work has intensified the association between work and rationality, even as post-Taylorist management has promoted nonrational models of worker identity. In a number of texts I discuss, the concepts of humanity and rationality are rent apart by the concession of rationality to the domain of machines. In these texts, humanity, leisure and feeling are elevated above machines, work, and rationality. There are exceptions to this disavowal of rationality: women workers are sometimes depicted as investing in rationality and forms of mental labor as a means of escape from the emotional and embodied status they have historically been assigned within patriarchal culture. In either case, rationality’s increasingly contested status figures crucially in soft work’s redefinitions of gender. It is in these terms that we can elaborate on the connection Andrew Hoberek draws between a middle-class crisis of agency in postwar American fiction and the shift in the basis of middle-class men’s authority from small property ownership to employment.44 Although Hoberek calls on William H. Whyte, Jr.,’s analysis of the alienation of organization men, he does not address the degree to which Whyte is critiquing human relations management techniques in his characterization of the emergent social ethic. I read Whyte’s disavowal of human relations as a rejection of the softening of work culture brought about by its emphasis on cooperation and emotion as opposed to rational individualism. From this perspective, the crisis in agency is motivated not simply by the shift to corporate employment, but by the specifically feminized and feminizing work culture that has taken hold within American corporations. And, indeed, the works that I analyze by Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Bissell and Billy Wilder depict

INTRODUCTION

11

their male protagonists forfeiting individualistic and rational modes of agency in response to the softness of human relations discourse. In exploring these questions, this book extends the scholarship on texts that grapple with the relationship between work, gender, and subjectivity from the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first. It is divided into three sections that consider artistic responses to the management practices of human relations, self-actualization, and corporate culture, respectively. My aim in the project is not to produce a comprehensive treatment of depictions of soft work; instead, each chapter takes as its starting point a specific historical development within post-Taylorist management practices that has figured importantly in the ontological or epistemological transformation of work in the past seventy years. I then examine a text or texts that register the gendered dimension of that phenomenon. The first chapter offers a reading of what I regard as the first important novel to respond to the emergence of soft work, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Vonnegut’s period of employment with the General Electric Company (GE) coincided with the introduction of a distinctive human relations management approach at the Schenectady complex where he worked. The management of employee relations was overseen by a pioneer in market research, Lemuel Boulware, who controversially reframed the relation between workers and management as one between “job customers” and “job salesmen.” Contextualizing the novel within this remarkable labor history, I argue that Vonnegut’s novel critiques this “selling” of work to male workers and depicts it as precipitating a strategic turn on their part from rationality to abjection. Chapter 2 extends and historicizes my inquiry into the relationship between human relations management techniques and the gender dynamics of postindustrial work. Reviewing the studies by Elton Mayo and Kurt Lewin that popularized human relations, I excavate the largely unexamined effects of women workers on the evolution of management theory after Taylor. I then analyze several popular depictions of the gender complications that surround the human relations approach—The Pajama Game (1954, 1957), the hit Broadway musical and film based on the novel 7 ½ Cents (1953) by Richard Bissell, and Billy Wilder’s Academy Award-winning film, The Apartment (1960). These texts represent the new management strategies of human relations as techniques of seduction directed at female and male workforces alike. In chapters 3 and 4, I investigate the ways that management approaches associated with the notion of “self-actualization” have

12


continued to transform the gendered nature of work since the 1960s. In chapter 3 I uncover the shared origins of liberal feminism and contemporary management practices by tracing the impact of 1960s psychologist/management guru Abraham Maslow on both. The major inspiration for Betty Friedan’s claim that women should seek empowerment through paid employment, Maslow went on to develop a highly influential management philosophy which maintained that workers should use their work to fulfill their personal potential. In the context of this intellectual history, I review one of the critical historical debates that emerged in response to the development of cybernetic technologies after World War II: whether Americans should or should not embrace a post-work existence in which all forms of work were automated. I contend that Joanna Russ’s classic postmodern novel The Female Man (1975) is deeply engaged with this debate, and presents it as a crucial conflict over gender and power. Russ’s text reflects the tensions between the New Left’s promotion of the post-work paradigm and the simultaneously emergent discourse of self-actualizing feminism that treated paid, public work as the key to women’s empowerment. Chapter 4 again treats the impact of self-actualization as a management concept, this time in relation to the emergence of two cultural icons of the contemporary workplace that I understand as interchangeable: the cyborg and the workaholic. While Russ’s novel is shaped by the New Left post-work rhetoric of the 1960s, Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It (1991) engages with the more academic, but equally powerful rhetoric surrounding Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” I read Piercy’s novel as an intervention into the “cyborg” debate, one that challenges accounts of the cyborg that overlook the centrality of work to its existence. Rather than treating the cyborg as a figure for the infiltration of cybernetic systems into the human body, Piercy presents the cyborg as the human subject penetrated by a late capitalist work ethic. Although she depicts the cyborg as a bleak signifier of contemporary overwork, she simultaneously celebrates the state of rational disembodiment women can achieve through such an immersion in work. Chapters 5 and 6 examine texts suffused by the discourse of corporate culture. Chapter 5 considers two popular novels, Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (1992) and Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor (1994), which emerged at the height of late-millennium anxiety about Japanese economic power, anxiety largely driven by management tracts that presented Japanese culture as superior to America’s. It begins by reading a series of corporate culture management texts that

INTRODUCTION

13

characterize the economic competition between Japan and America as a cultural war. I then demonstrate that Crichton and Clancy, the two most widely read authors in the contemporary era, produce accounts of soft work that treat its hallmark gender fluidity with deep suspicion. For both, the introduction of Japanese technologies and management practices into American work culture threatens to compromise Americans’ very grasp on reality. Crichton and Clancy represent Japan’s economic influence as a mystifying threat to the autonomous, rational masculinity they privilege as the essence of American identity. In chapter 6, I arrive in a present in which American management has become a palimpsest of the discourses of consumerism, teamwork, self-help, mysticism, and multiculturalism that have shaped it over the past half century. I again take up the racialization of soft work, in this case through the figure of the “management guru” that has emerged as part of the metaphysical emphasis within corporate culture. I begin this chapter by asserting that the emergence of the term “guru” in management circles since the late 1980s reveals the reluctance of white men to fully lay claim to the nonrational approaches associated with corporate culture. I then interpret the phenomenon of the management guru in relation to the magical black man who has surfaced as a stock character in contemporary novels and films about white male workers’ difficulties in the postindustrial economy. Tracing a genealogy from the domain of management to these contemporary narratives by locating the birthplace of both in the discourse of the self-actualization movement, I analyze a series of books and films including The Legend of Bagger Vance (1995, 2000), The Green Mile (1996, 1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Family Man (2000), that suggest the degree to which the racialized magic of corporate culture has become a central device in popular economic narratives about white men whose masculinity is threatened by the new economic order. Fredric Jameson has called for a “new political art [that] will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”45 The Culture of Soft Work delineates a group of texts of various political inclinations that begins to provide the sort of map for postmodern

14


subjects within multinational capital that Jameson calls for. These texts suggest that to “truthfully” represent postmodern subjectivity one must explore the ideological imperatives that organize the workplaces in which most of these subjects spend most of their waking hours—imperatives that are, themselves, deeply at odds with the gendered identities produced by the industrial era. By recovering soft work as an overlooked dimension of postmodern culture, the following chapters reveal its ongoing revision of the rules of gender and its historic transformation of the meanings and lived experience of American work.

CH A P T ER

1

“No Good to Anybody”: Player Piano, General Electric, and the Consumption of Work

If a manager manages a workplace where there are no workers, is he really a manager—or a man—at all? This is the metaphysical problem faced by Paul Proteus, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s postmodern satire Player Piano (1952). Set in the near future in a town called Ilium, New York, Vonnegut’s first novel imagines an America in which virtually all work is done by cybernetic machines—early forms of which were guided by the “player piano” principle.1 In Vonnegut’s futuristic world, the economy is centralized and coordinated by a supercomputer, which uses standardized test scores to determine individuals’ occupations. Although a few men become part of an elite corps of managers and engineers, most are assigned to vast makework programs contrived to keep them busy while machines perform the labor for which they were once responsible. Appalled by this massive dislocation of American men from economic productivity, Proteus ultimately conspires to overthrow the system, moving from the improbable category of manager-without-workers to the still more unlikely one of manager-as-revolutionary. Player Piano has received considerably less attention from literary critics than some of Vonnegut’s later works, including Cat’s Cradle, the Sirens of Titan, and, most notably, Slaughterhouse Five.2 Those who have discussed Player Piano have either examined the novel as part of the dystopian tradition or focused on decoding its allusions to thinkers as far flung as Homer and Norbert Wiener.3 While many of these critics acknowledge that Vonnegut based his portrait of automation-induced class warfare on his stint as a public relations employee at the Schenectady headquarters of General Electric (GE) from 1947 to 1950, none has examined how Player Piano is a response to the

16


significant events in the history of American labor relations that took place at GE during those years. Reading Player Piano in this context reveals it to be a powerful lens through which to consider management trends and transformations in the gender formation of American workers that are still underway. The history of GE at mid-century illuminates two phenomena pivotal to the inauguration of the soft work era: post-Taylorist management’s fusion of the discourses of consumption and production, and the increasing association of the white male worker with the notion of waste. Vonnegut’s satirical extrapolation of these changes conceives of workers as governed not by reason but by emotion and irrational drives, a conception bolstered by a fable-like narrative style that is unmoored from the conventions of realism that have long served as one of the mainstays of labor fiction. Repositioned in the economy as inefficient workers and irrational consumers, the male workers Vonnegut depicts ironically resist this new regime by strategically deploying their condition of abjection.

The Truth about Boulwarism Vonnegut has been candid in interviews about the degree to which Player Piano is based on his time at the Schenectady headquarters of GE. In an interview in 1974, Vonnegut explains, “When I started to write, I was living in Schenectady, working as a public relations man, surrounded by scientists and machinery. So I wrote my first book, Player Piano, about Schenectady.”4 The novel itself provides numerous clues to its provenance, the most compelling of which are its fictional company’s motto, “Better Goods for More People at Less Cost,” a variation on one of GE’s longstanding slogans; and its extended satirical portrait of Association Island, a retreat that GE used for intensive week-long motivational programs until Vonnegut’s mockery of the activities there shamed the company into shutting it down.5 As an aspiring writer with an eye for social issues, Vonnegut could not have entered a workplace with a more suggestive history or compelling future. In many respects, GE is the quintessential American company, and to understand the outlines of its history is to confront many of the central paradoxes of work culture in the twentieth century. GE was founded in 1892 by Thomas Edison, whose ingenuity positioned GE at the crossroads of production and consumption as cultural forces in Americans’ lives. On the one hand, GE, as a producer of a panoply of new consumer goods including “fans, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, toasters, refrigerators, and radio sets,”

"NO GOOD TO ANYBODY"

17

was instrumental in developing advanced marketing techniques that drove America to become the most consumer-oriented culture on earth.6 On the other hand, GE pioneered many forms of workplace paternalism, including “paid vacations; accident, sickness, and death benefits; employee associations and recreational activities; company hospitals; educational courses and tuition reimbursement for continuing education; and cost-of-living increases in addition to hourly wages,” that spread to other large corporations in the 1920s and defined the nature of work life for millions of Americans throughout the twentieth century.7 The company’s effects on Americans’ buying and working practices were not the only aspects of its history that mark it as emblematic. Like many other corporations, GE experienced enormous labor turmoil and transformations in its work culture during the twentieth century. Despite (or perhaps because of) its often paternalistic efforts, its major union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, known as the UE, was, by the 1940s, “the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the United states.”8 That history of union power was dramatically answered by an era of corporate resurgence during the reign of (“Neutron”) Jack Welch, CEO of GE from 1981 to 2001. Welch’s role as the most notorious American CEO of recent times has meant that GE has continued to be central to Americans’ comprehension of what it means to be a worker. Welch’s efforts to “de-layer” the company, transforming it from an established bureaucracy into a highly flexible enterprise, have made it a model of corporate culture, a management theory to which I will return in the latter chapters of this book. It was into the apex of the company’s labor unrest that Vonnegut stepped when he began work at GE in 1947. By the mid-1940s, operations at all of its primary plants had been shut down by strikes that were part of what has been described as “the greatest strike wave in our history.” 9 Nationally, this unrest inspired the Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed into law in June 1947 and reversed most of the prolabor measures of the New Deal era. Taft-Hartley made mass-picketing illegal, empowered the federal government to intervene in labor disputes, formalized the procedures for contract negotiations, and required union officials to take an anticommunist oath. Individual corporations, skeptical of the government’s efficacy in resolving labor disputes to their advantage, also took action. At GE the strikes inspired the company’s president, Charles E. Wilson, to develop a new position, “Vice President of Employee and Community Relations.” In May 1947, a month prior to the passage of Taft-Hartley,

18


Wilson appointed Lemuel Boulware, an experienced executive and former operations vice chairman of the War Production Board, to the new position. Boulware had begun working for GE in 1944, and the seven subsidiary manufacturing companies of which he was in charge did not go on strike in 1946; it was this fact that brought him to Wilson’s attention.10 According to Boulware, in his book-length defense of his activities at GE, The Truth about Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily (1969), when he began his work in employee relations there in 1947, he discovered that workers had been persuaded by socialist propaganda to believe that they were being underpaid while the company owners and shareholders were becoming rich. Doggedly committed to a free-market model, Boulware explains that in the post–New Deal climate of the 1930s and 1940s union organizers and welfare state advocates joined forces “toward their mutually desired ends of discrediting and weakening voluntary private activity, of cutting down free choice and individual responsibility, of attacking private property and limited government, and of building up blind confidence in gang force, central planning, and thinly veiled central dictation.”11 Despite passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, he regarded the government itself as complicit with unions, compromising collective bargaining. To Boulware’s eye, “government planners,” working insidiously to support unions, were a “new kind of robber barons.”12 Some of Boulware’s previous work as an executive had been in marketing, and he had been a pioneer in market research. In order to dispel pervasive distrust of GE management by workers and the community at large, Boulware imported into labor relations the techniques that corporations use to sell products. At the heart of his radical approach was the redesignation of GE’s employees as “job customers” and their supervisors as “salesmen” responsible for selling them their jobs. To “sell” labor, Boulware did exhaustive market research in which he polled GE’s workforce about what they wanted from their work. These efforts were part of the larger trend in business management known as “human relations.” As Nikolas Rose explains, “In the postwar period, . . . new ways of thinking and acting on the group and on human resources were deployed in debates about labour productivity, about industrial unrest, and about maximizing the commitment of the worker and his or her integration into the enterprise.”13 As I will discuss in the next chapter, industrial researcher Elton Mayo pioneered the human relations approach through his studies of workers at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company between


19

1923 and 1932. Mayo conducted numerous experiments and interviews with employees that focused on their emotional experience of work. His research set the stage for an era of industrial relations in which “the minutiae of the human soul—human interactions, feelings, and thoughts, the psychological relations of the individual to the group—had emerged as a new domain for management.”14 By the late 1940’s, human relations-style management was being taught in many business schools, including Harvard’s Advanced Management Program, and it was becoming common for corporations to conduct interviews and surveys of employees to understand their relation to their jobs. Yet Boulware’s framing of human relations as a problem of marketing and his reconception of workers as consumers of their jobs were new. Boulware’s efforts did not represent the first time that GE had attempted to use propaganda to shape workers or discourage them from joining unions. In his remarkable account of GE’s prodigious production of company photographs during the period from 1890 to 1930, David Nye has argued that, after World War I, the company relied on its employee publications to “project . . . a new conceptualization of workers” that represented the worker “not . . . as part of a larger group but as an individual achieving autonomous success.”15 While acknowledging the presence of written anti-Socialist propaganda in publications distributed to employees, Nye sees the tendency of GE to use photography in these house organs to represent its workers on athletic teams and in other leisure activities where solidarity did not threaten the corporation as a concession of “the impossibility of reinterpreting work itself to the worker audience.”16 By 1947, however, Boulware no longer regarded such an undertaking as impossible. Rather than producing photos of workers that subtly conveyed their ideal identity as placid producers, Boulware adopted an entirely overt approach to selling GE-brand work to GE workers. He and his public relations office orchestrated a multi-pronged media campaign. They required management and all employees to attend a three-session, four-and-a-half-hour seminar entitled, “How our Business Systems Operate” in which employees were introduced to the basic principles of free-market capitalism; encouraged employees to join discussion groups in which they read and discussed the text “How You Really Earn Your Living;” and produced and distributed an avalanche of pamphlets and advertisements in employee and local community newspapers promoting their product.17 Their messages included the following: workers should not demand too much money because that causes inflation, which causes lay-offs and the automation

20


of factories; corporate profit is good for workers, and owners and shareholders actually make far less money than the workers; it is government taxes, not corporate greed, that is limiting wages for workers; and unions are dishonest and needlessly combative. In 1954 Boulware hired an actor named Ronald Reagan to serve as a public relations spokesman for the company. From 1954 to 1962, Reagan hosted the television show “GE Theater,” acted in its productions, and gave speeches at GE factories that Reagan would later describe as addressing “the swiftly rising tide of collectivism that threatens to inundate what remains of our free economy.”18 The legacy of Boulwarism seems especially evident when we consider where this first speech-making job ultimately led Reagan. The media war that Boulware launched against the unions at GE was unprecedented, and it received considerable business coverage throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.19 The term “Boulwarism” was coined for his practice during labor negotiations of immediately presenting a “final offer” that he would aggressively promote in employee publications to short-circuit communication between union representatives and their constituency. In 1963 the unions won a victory against this form of “take it or leave it” bargaining, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it was an unfair labor practice. Boulware himself was officially removed from his position as vice president of Employee and Community Relations in 1957 and retired from the company in 1961 in the midst of the controversial legal battle. Kurt Vonnegut began work as a publicist for the GE Research Laboratory the same year Boulware took over employee relations for the company. It appears that Vonnegut has never made any public reference to Boulware’s influence on life at GE during the three years he worked there. Vonnegut’s specific assignment as a publicist for the activities of the research laboratory at Schenectady may not have required him to personally produce the sorts of anti-union propaganda that Boulware made his specialty. The laboratory researchers did not go on strike in 1946 and were at odds with those walking the picket lines.20 Given the researchers’ compliant relationship with GE management, Vonnegut probably would not have been asked to “sell” their jobs to them but instead would have been expected to promote their successes to the world at large. It is nonetheless likely that Vonnegut, like every other employee, was asked to sit through the seminar on “How Our Business Systems Operate.” He also would have been exposed to the advertising Boulware’s team ran in the employee and local newspapers, and given his own public relations responsibilities, may well have taken more


21

than a passing interest in what his counterparts in other parts of the company were doing. As I will show in the following section, there can be little doubt that Vonnegut did absorb the message Boulware propagated throughout GE and that a number of the central crises in his novel are derived directly from paradoxes he perceived in it. Not only Boulware’s message, but also his methods were transforming the nature and meaning of work at GE, and in less overt ways Vonnegut’s novel also registers how the consumption of work that Boulware introduced to male workers complicates their relation to conventions of masculinity.

“Steady Jobs through Steady Friends” At the outset of Player Piano, Paul Proteus’s most pressing concern about his job and the system in which he performs it is that both exist at the expense of those for whom they ostensibly provide. In the opening pages of the book, he reflects on the industrial workers that the cybernetic revolution has devalued: On his office wall, Paul had a picture of the shop as it had been in the beginning. All of the employees, most of them recruited from surrounding farms, had stood shoulder to shoulder amid the crude apparatus for the photograph, almost fierce with dignity and pride, ridiculous in stiff collars and derbies. The photographer had apparently been accustomed to taking pictures of athletic teams and fraternal organizations, for the picture had the atmosphere, after the fashion of the day, of both. In each face was a defiant promise of physical strength, and at the same time, there was the attitude of a secret order, above and apart from society by virtue of participating in important and moving rites the laity could only guess about—and guess wrong. The pride in strength and important mystery showed no less in the eyes of the sweepers than in those of the machinists and inspectors, and in those of the foreman, who alone was without a lunchbox.21

The detail with which Vonnegut describes this photograph suggests that this passage may have been inspired by one of the more than a million photographs David Nye has reported were taken by GE photographers between 1892 and 1965. Vonnegut’s work in the press office would have provided him with unusual access to such photographs, and Vonnegut’s description is strikingly similar to Nye’s characterization of them as typified by “strong poses that indicated the worker’s sense of self-importance.”22 Like Vonnegut, Nye sees such photos as testament to a by-gone period of worker empowerment.

22


Throughout the remainder of the novel, this initial image of collective pride and dignity provides a point of contrast to the condition of the working men who now perform busy work for government programs. In scenes reminiscent of the New Deal era, the novel repeatedly depicts work crews of forty men or more, all assigned to repair a single pothole and desperate to perform more meaningful work. As Lasher, the leader of the Luddite revolution in the text explains, “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! [I]t’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell” (90). It is in this articulation of the central conflict of Player Piano that we can begin to see the impact of Boulware’s program on Vonnegut’s vision of the future of work in America. The worship of “competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness” to which Lasher alludes is clearly resonant with the central messages Boulware was zealously broadcasting throughout GE. Speaking of the need to preserve competition and markets against efforts to regulate them, Boulware writes in The Truth about Boulwarism, “eventually . . . there comes to light . . . the inevitable value-killing and job-killing effect of the improper use of force to interfere with the free market and to put above-market prices on the ingredients which go into consumer prices.”23 On productivity and usefulness, he writes that employees “had been misled into believing that they should resist rather than cooperate . . . that they could better themselves by being less useful. They had been seriously affected by the constant brute, crook, exploiter charges against private business in general.”24 Boulware promoted competition and productivity directly to employees in their newspapers. In an advertisement with the headline, “Steady Jobs through Steady Friends,” for instance, he stressed the need for “flawless” production to keep GE ahead of its competitors (see figure 1.1).25 In other advertisements, he trumpeted the need for workers to commit to high production rates and to reject the unions’ interpretation of such pressure as an exploitive work “speed up” (see figure 1.2).26 Lashers’s speech not only mimics the motivational rhetoric that was pervasive at GE during Vonnegut’s tenure there, but also underscores how misleading it was, given the company’s aggressive research into automating production processes. Even as the Employee and Community Relations office was churning out messages urging workers to greater productivity, GE was increasing its dedication to


23

Figure 1.1 An advertisement generated by Boulware’s office for GE and republished in his book. Source: Reprinted with permission.

automation that would, in Vonnegut’s vision, eventually allow them to forego employing these workers altogether. In these terms, Vonnegut also impugns his own work as a research laboratory publicist for facilitating the displacement of workers by machines. In the same diatribe in which Lasher describes the rug being pulled from under workers’ feet, he also suggests how publicity

24


Figure 1.2 Excerpts from Boulware’s print campaign at GE, republished in his book. Source: Reprinted with Permission.

for researchers is implicated in this process: “Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production—know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines” (91, emphasis in original). While the Boulware team was internally promoting worker efficiency,


25

another message was already being transmitted to the world beyond GE, in which faith in workers was being sacrificed to faith in technology. A press release written by Vonnegut in 1950 reveals his role in such communications: Powerful atom smashers, special motors to drive a supersonic wind tunnel, and calculating machines for solving in minutes problems ordinarily requiring months were among the accomplishments of General Electric engineers during 1949, according to a summary released by the company here today. Listed among the year’s engineering highlights were such new developments as a gauge that measures the thickness of sheet materials with radioactivity; apparatus for testing parachutes for bailouts at 500 miles per hour; a radiation detector with a long, gun-barrellike probe for testing for radioactivity from a safe distance; an instrument which can distinguish between more colors of light than there are grains of wheat in Kansas; and a repeating photoflash tube that can be used thousands of times before having to be replaced . . . . 27

In the future that Player Piano portrays the effect of such rhetoric has been to shift Americans’ loyalty away from the fate of the masses of workers who had long sustained America’s thriving industrial economy to the elite engineers who perform the ultimate service of innovation within the service economy. In some sense, Vonnegut’s novel becomes the rejoinder to the writing he published for GE during his brief career there. While as a public relations man he spoke on behalf of the engineers, as a novelist he speaks for workers whom he understands to have been devalued by his own words in the zero sum game between the industrial and postindustrial economies. Vonnegut’s account of the worker’s loss of pride and sense of self must not simply be read as a general lament about the encroachment of automation, then, but also as a specific response to the unprecedented strategies GE effected in an attempt to determine the ways its workers saw themselves and their place in American society. The infiltration of market research and advertising into the workplace vis-à-vis Boulware’s trademark style of human relations management meant the subjection of workers to powerful new discursive technologies. Player Piano suggests that while in the past workers derived their sense of self within the workplace from a private conception of expertise (“a secret order, above and apart from society by virtue of participating in important and moving rites the laity could only guess about”), the company for which they work now aggressively, publicly shapes their subjectivity (“they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, pro-

26


ductivity and economic usefulness”). This redefinition of work and workers to create ontological conditions more salutary to the corporate bottom line also shapes Vonnegut’s novel at the level of literary form. His exposure to these manipulations helps to account for what Robert Scholes characterizes as his “fabulative” prose style, a postmodern variation on satire in which the “ethical absolutes” on which satire conventionally depends have been overthrown, and a more provisional critique is articulated through humor.28 Vonnegut’s novel suggests that one risk of the aggressive discursive construction of working subjects is that they come to regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as little more than machines.29 Such a condition makes them all the more vulnerable to replacement by newer models of working selves that are machines. Late in the text, a disenchanted engineer urges a young, ambitious man to avoid the path he himself has taken, to avoid working with and for machines: “What have you got against machines?” said Buck. “They’re slaves.” “Well, what the heck,” said Buck. “I mean, they aren’t people. They don’t suffer. They don’t mind working.” “No, but they compete with people.” “That’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it—considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?” “Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave. . . .” (280–81)

Vonnegut witnessed such direct competition at GE, as the work of machinists and others was automated. He frames his apprehensions about the effects of this trend on the self-conception of workers in a 1973 interview: I was working for General Electric . . . right after World War Two, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn’t a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.30


27

While Player Piano powerfully evokes the physical competition between “little clicking box[es]” and human workers, it also suggests that GE’s rhetoric placed workers in ontological competition with machines by framing their subjectivity in terms that were purely instrumental. In this sense, machines only complete the process of automating work that the corporate sloganeering sets in motion.

“No Good to Anybody” Yet if machine-like compliance, and hence obsolescence, is one potential outcome of the construction of male workers by advanced marketing techniques, Player Piano illustrates that the other is their transformation into irrational consumers, who, in the absence of meaningful work, are left to the ravages of heedless desire and impulse. In his highly influential account of the emergence of American consumer culture, T.J. Jackson Lears has argued that in response to pervasive rationalization, the Protestant work ethic, which promised salvation in the afterlife as a reward for hard work, was replaced by what he calls “the therapeutic ethos”—the secular self-fulfillment of buying things: By the turn of the century the iron cage of bureaucratic “rationality” had begun subtly to affect even the educated and affluent. Many began to sense that their familiar sense of autonomy was being undermined, and that they had been cut off from intense physical, emotional, or spiritual experience. The therapeutic ethos promised to heal the wounds inflicted by rationalization, to release the cramped energies of a fretful bourgeoisie.31

Lears is clear that one domain of this rationalization was the American workplace: “In the new social world of the corporate system, the middle- or lower-level manager could tolerate dull work and bureaucratic paternalism, provided he had the chance to pursue intense experience in his leisure time. A quest for self-realization through consumption compensated for a loss of autonomy on the job.”32 The burgeoning advertising industry capitalized on this increasing concern with self-realization, moving from advertising in which the merits of a product were itemized to an approach that “addressed nonrational yearnings by suggesting the ways [a] client’s product would transform the buyer’s life.”33 The “GE nine-point job” that Boulware attempted to sell to prospective “job customers” reflects this turn from the Protestant ethic to

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more secular forms of self-fulfillment. Yet the novelty of Boulware’s program was to bring the therapeutic ethos into the work environment itself. Ironically, while the rationalized workplace helped to trigger the quest for self-realization through consumption, that quest eventually penetrated the workplace itself, de-rationalizing it. Reflecting on product marketing in terms reminiscent of Lears’s, Boulware remarks: The practice too generally across business had been for an inventor or some engineers to design a product, for the production people to build it, and for it then to be turned over to the salesmen to sell. There was some informed reporting back by salesmen as to the customer likes and dislikes that had lost them orders. But it was a hit-or-miss procedure, and too often the customer had had a choice only between competing products which the makers had largely turned out their way.34

By contrast, he cites a history of the Marketing Executives Society that heralds the shift from this “old ‘me’ kind of selling to the new ‘you’ kind of marketing.”35 In keeping with this emphasis, Boulware explains, “We went out to ask our employees what they wanted in their jobs and how they felt their present jobs fell short of their desires. We tried to diagnose what they consciously or subconsciously liked and disliked about their jobs; what they understood, misunderstood, or just didn’t know or ignored about their jobs.”36 If work has traditionally been associated with the rational and material, we see the impact of the therapeutic ethos in Boulware’s focus on desire and an economy of emotion. Boulware’s market research yielded the following profile of the average worker’s desires: He wanted—and we wanted to give him—a boss who was on his side, who kept the human considerations up front in their very personal association, who respected and protected employee dignity, who engaged in genuine and forthright two-way, fully adequate, man-to-man communication on the things that to the employee’s way of thinking counted. He wanted—and we wanted to give him—a boss who provided him with a deserved sense of importance, significance, and genuine participation and who had a real interest in the employee both as a person and as a welcome and appreciated associate in the rewarding activity they were carrying on together.37

Accordingly, the “nine-point job” that Boulware’s team ultimately “took to market” promised improvements in the following features: compensation, working conditions, supervision, job security, respect,


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promotion, information, belief, and satisfaction.38 The salesman who had to guarantee the longevity of this product was the supervisor, who Boulware explained had to be not only “Mr. General Electric” but “Mr. Everything,” a designation that captures how the work culture Boulware conceived expanded to include not only the public activity of work, but also the private domain of feeling.39 Although there is no documentation to prove Vonnegut’s awareness of the specifics of Boulware’s market approach, it was certainly widely publicized. Regardless, it might seem improbable to see evidence of this treatment of workers in a novel in which workers only nominally work at all. Yet, it is precisely in its portrait of the paradigmatic employer, “the system,” transforming production-minded workers into desiredriven consumers that we can again detect traces of GE’s distinctive labor history in Vonnegut’s novel. Although Boulware’s program promised to sell GE workers a dignity they desired, while Vonnegut’s workers are provided only with material goods, in both instances the workers have been repositioned in terms that privilege their therapeutic need for comfort and self-fulfillment over the rational power to produce that is historically associated with Western masculinity. Passive, homogenized consumption is all that is left for the formerly proud workers in Vonnegut’s world. Early in the novel, when Paul expresses concern about a young man whose mechanical skills no longer have any application, Anita, Paul’s wife, responds: “He’s got a place to live and warm clothes. He has what he’d have if he were running a stupid machine, swearing at it, making mistakes, striking every year, fighting with the foreman, coming in with hangovers” (37). Anita’s attention to the consumer goods workers now receive for their make-work jobs echoes the justification those who manage the system in Vonnegut’s future offer those who criticize it; even the system’s slogan, “Better goods for more people at less cost” reflects the degree to which consumer identity is privileged over any other conception of self. Yet this passage also sets in motion a critique of this new emphasis on consumption that will resonate throughout the remainder of the novel. In her work on the Book-of-the-MonthClub, Janice Radway has suggested how that institution stirred anxiety among male critics who understood its creation of a captive market of male consumers to be an infantilization of once freethinking men.40 The transformation of active men—running a machine, swearing, making mistakes, striking, fighting and drinking—to passive recipients of shelter and warm clothes signals a similar reconstruction of men as babies whose needs must be fulfilled. That it is Anita, the central female character in the novel, who

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makes this dismissive comment only underscores the gender implications of this repositioning of male workers. Player Piano stresses the ways in which this consumer culture has been produced through market research. Early in the novel, a visiting dignitary from a non-automated society, the Shah of Bratpuhr, is told by an ambassador, “we’ve raised the standard of living of the average man immensely” (21). The Shah expresses confusion at the term “average man,” a concept that could only exist as a consequence of statistical research. Vonnegut stresses the indignity of such a construction when the Shah translates the words as “slave” (22). Yet it is later, in the one chapter of the book that Vonnegut dedicates to the plight of a displaced worker, where his larger critique comes into focus. Again through the satirical device of the visiting Shah, Vonnegut presents the life of Edgar Rice Borroughs Hagstrohm, who is selected for a visit by the Shah by a computer that determines that he is “statistically average in every respect save for the number of his initials” (161). Satirizing the effects of market research, Vonnegut writes that Hagstrohm and his family live in a “postwar development of three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams” (160). Halyard, the ambassador who serves as the Shah’s tour guide, explains: Two bedrooms, living room with dining alcove, bath, and kitchen . . . . This is the M-17 house. Radiant heating in the floor. The furniture was designed after an exhaustive national survey of furniture likes and dislikes. The house, the furniture, and the lot are sold as a package. Simplified planning and production all the way round. (163)

The language of likes and dislikes here is eerily resonant with Boulware’s survey of what employees “liked and disliked about their jobs.” Such homogeneity again hearkens to the machine-like rationalization the system threatens to impart to the workforce, stripping individual workers of their skills and replacing them with a uniform and highly domesticated identity.41 More powerful than Vonnegut’s portrait of the rationalization of the world in which Edgar lives, however, is the emotional neediness, the irrationality, it unleashes in him. The ambassador stresses that all of the irrationality has been eliminated from this “average” worker’s consumer practices by computerization: “He has a complete security package. . . . His standard of living is constantly rising, and he and the country at large are protected from the


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old economic ups and downs by the orderly, predictable consumer habits the payroll machines give him. Used to be he’d buy on impulse, illogically, and industry would go nutty trying to figure out what he was going to buy next. Why, I remember when I was a little boy, we had a crazy neighbor who blew all his money on an electric organ, while he still had an old-fashioned icebox and kerosene stove in his kitchen!” (165–166 emphasis in original)

While Halyard’s remarks seem to suggest an end to the era of therapeutic consumption, Vonnegut ironizes them by depicting Hagstrohm, in the absence of any other freedom or meaning in his life, embroiled in a passionate extramarital affair, which he perceives as “a bright, fat cherry on the gray mush of their lives” (162). Hastrohm’s affair is explicitly framed in terms of irrational consumption when he muses on his choice to use his negligible income on his lover: He fingered the three ten-dollar bills in his pocket, his take-home pay—cigarette money, recreation money, small luxury money the machines let him have. This tiny atom of the economy under his control he was going to spend, not on himself or Wanda or the kids, but on Marion. Edgar’s troubled heart had gone out to the crazy man in Halyard’s story, the guy who’d bought himself an electric organ. Expensive, impractical, strictly personal—above and beyond the goddamned package. (166)

At the conclusion of the chapter, Hagstrohm confesses his affair to his wife, explaining the infidelity precisely in terms of his transition from a useful worker to a needy consumer in search of some form of personal gratification: It’s the world, Wan—me and the world. I’m no good to anybody, not in this world. Nothing but a Reek and Wreck, and that’s all my kids’ll be, and a guy’s got to have kicks or doesn’t want to live—and the only kicks left for a dumb bastard like me are the bad ones. I’m no good, Wan, no good!” (167, emphasis in original)

Even as Hagstrohm’s assessment of himself as “no good” seems an ironic rejoinder to the company slogan, “Better Goods for More People at Less Cost,” in his language of “kicks” we can hear the echo of the “intense physical, emotional, or spiritual experience” Lears claims the therapeutic ethos of consumer culture promises to provide. Vonnegut’s novel implies that while Boulware’s campaign seemed to promise a new emphasis on worker fulfillment, its very

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conceptualization of workers as consumers paradoxically diminished their agency and repositioned them as the passive recipients of a “package.” For Vonnegut, this shift also threatens a transformation in the nature of masculinity. Lears briefly explores the gender implications of the rise of the therapeutic ethos, considering the way in which “women were victimized in new ways by the leaders of the consumer culture,” who “promised fake liberation through consumption.”42 He hastens to add, however, that “it is easy to exaggerate the sexual dimensions of hegemony. Men, too, were being eased into conformity with all levels of the corporate system. As frequently as women, they were the target of therapeutic ideals.”43 What Lears does not address here, however, are the implications of a male American population submitting to such irrational drives. As Andreas Huyssen has suggested in his work on the gender inscriptions of mass culture and modernist aesthetics, Western masculinity is associated with a constellation of concepts, including “instrumental rationality, teleological progress, fortified ego boundaries, discipline and self-control.”44 Since, as Huyssen explains, “the lure of mass culture . . . has traditionally been described as the threat of losing oneself in dreams and delusions and of merely consuming rather than producing,” to capitulate to the therapeutic ethos of consumption, whether in the form of consumer culture itself or Boulware’s carefully marketed workplace, is to surrender the conventional terms of masculinity.45 Indeed, despite an early avowal of masculinity, in which Hagstrohm tells himself, “a man was a man for all that” (162), by the conclusion of the chapter, the degree to which Hagstrohm has been emasculated—or deoedipalized, to use Pfeil’s term—by his life as a consumer is made explicit. Vonnegut confirms Hagstrohm’s self-evaluation that he is “no good to anybody” by depicting him as a failed patriarch; the final scene of the chapter depicts Hagstrohm’s son glaring hatefully at him as he lies to the family in order to ensure a liaison with his lover. The son then assumes his father’s role by offering to stay with his mother in his absence. Ultimately, however, Vonnegut further complicates the gender identity of his representative worker. When we are first introduced to Hagstrohm, we are told that he was named after Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan. Both Hagstrohm’s father and Hagstrohm himself admire Tarzan because of his simple, masculine existence, in which he “swung through trees on vines, . . . built like a brick outhouse with square wheels and Venetian blinds, and took what he wanted of civilization’s beautiful women in tree houses, and


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left the rest of civilization alone” (160). Later in the novel, we catch a final glimpse of Hagstrohm vis-à-vis a police report Paul overhears: Hagstrohm cut up his M-17 home in Chicago with a blow-torch, went naked to the home of Mrs. Marion Frascati, the widow of an old friend, and demanded that she come to the woods with him. Mrs. Frascati refused, and he disappeared into the bird sanctuary bordering the housing development. There he eluded police, and is believed to have made his escape dropping from a tree onto a passing freight—(263)

In this absurd scene, the fabulative poetics of the novel converge with its critique of the ontological pressures brought to bear on male workers by the discourse of consumption. Hagstrohm’s retreat into the role of ape man who disavows civilization, narrated in a postmodern style that itself retreats from the rational discourse of realism and the stable foundations of conventional satire, enacts the form of resistance to homogenization and disempowerment that the novel ultimately privileges. The identity that Hagstrohm embraces is a curiously provisional and anti-rational one: Rather than returning to an existence of purposeful industry, a likely place for nostalgia to lead him, he reverts to a pre-rational state free of all forms of civilization. Naked and profoundly embodied, Hagstrohm’s new model of post-work, post-consumption identity is oddly androgynous and liminal.

“Out on the Edge” Hagstrohm’s departure into the woods might seem an improbable mode of resistance to the postindustrial system Vonnegut’s novel imagines, yet I understand his act to be representative of a larger pattern of revolt in the text. In his account of Player Piano, Leonard Mustazza argues that, unlike Orwell and Huxley, “Vonnegut leads his protagonist (and the reader) down the darker paths of the human psyche.”46 He goes on to assert that “the dichotomy that Vonnegut wants to set up [is] . . . the all too rational and predictable functioning of machines and their proponents on one end [and] . . . the essential unpredictability and irrationality of human desire on the other.”47 I would take this argument further and suggest that rather than reembracing the sort of rationality on which industrial concepts of labor were predicated, the characters who seek to rebel against the system that converts them into non-rational consumers actively commit to an alternative subjectivity that is also primarily emotional and non-rational. In particular, these rebels embrace

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abjection, a condition that scholar Julia Kristeva has identified as a psychological state in which the subject “escape[s] that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based” and “finds that the impossible constitutes its very being.”48 Although Hagstrohm’s atavistic retreat into the identity of his namesake might at first glance seem to signify a reassertion of raw masculinity, this transformation is part of a larger shift among Vonnegut’s characters toward a more complex gender position that resonates with the psychological ground mapped by Kristeva. In the opening pages of the novel, Vonnegut includes a curious episode in which Paul brings a cat into one of the buildings at the Ilium Works to hunt for mice. The cat encounters an automated sweeper in the plant that identifies her as garbage, sweeps her up, and expels her into a freight car outside the building. Frightened, she attempts to escape the facility by climbing a fence, but it is electric, and she ultimately lies “dead and smoking” outside the grounds of the plant (13). Critics typically read this scene as a comment on the unnaturalness of the Ilium works, where every vestige of nature is quickly destroyed.49 Yet the image of cleaning here, and the improper assignment of the cat to the category of trash, is more significant. The cat is eliminated even as it is being rendered useless: one of Paul’s colleagues is in the process of inventing an electronic mouser elsewhere in the Works as this action is unfolding. The scene functions as a mise-en-abime, then, encapsulating the vision of deskilled workers thrown away by a system that no longer needs them. Such workers are presented throughout the text as abject, a term that I use here not only to connote a state of spiritual impoverishment and hopelessness, but also in its more theoretical sense. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva identifies abjection as a condition caused not by “lack of cleanliness or health,” but rather by what “disturbs identity, system, order.”50 Such disturbances reveal to the speaking subject “the place where meaning collapses,” and although the subject recoils from this place she/he is also fascinated by it, for it is, according to Kristeva, “the place where I am not and which permits me to be.”51 Elizabeth Grosz explains that within this theory: “Proper” sociality and subjectivity are based on the expulsion or exclusion of the improper, the unclean, and the disorderly elements of its corporeal existence that must be separated from its “clean and proper” self. The ability to take up a symbolic position as a social and speaking


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subject entail [sic] the disavowal of its mode of corporeality, especially those representing what is considered unacceptable, unclean, or antisocial. The subject must disavow part of itself in order to gain a stable self, and this form of refusal marks whatever identity it acquires as provisional, and open to breakdown and instability.52

Abjection is the disorder at the edges of consciousness that permits subjects to recognize themselves as coherent beings. Kristeva derived much of her thinking on abjection from Mary Douglas’s landmark anthropological study, Purity and Danger. As Kristeva notes, Douglas resists psychological interpretations of “rituals of the human body” in her work, instead seeing each ritual as “a diagram of a social situation,” an expression of concerns within a given community about its boundaries.53 Rather than conforming to a “psychological tradition [that] turns its face away from society . . . back towards the individual,” Douglas insists that “To understand body pollution we should try to argue back from the known dangers of society to the known selection of bodily themes and try to recognize what appositeness is there.”54 Kristeva is particularly concerned with the problem of the relation of social structures to individuals that Douglas raises. While acknowledging Douglas’s dismissal of Freud and psychological readings of defilement and cleansing, she attempts to move past these “questions of cause and effect,” suggesting that rather than understanding society as the source of such rituals, “One might advance the hypothesis that a (social) symbolic system corresponds to a specific structuration of the speaking subject in the symbolic order.”55 Vonnegut articulates such a sense of the correspondence between social systems and subjects in his portrait of the identity formation of the corporate system, which he describes as “the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality” (63). While in Kristeva’s model of subjectivity, the human subject works to establish a “clean and proper” body in order to avoid the collapse of its psychic boundaries, the corporate social order that Vonnegut portrays strives for perfect rationalized efficiency in order to avoid the collapse of its own mechanisms of meaning and self-justification. While the “abjects” that must be expelled by the human subject include “tears, saliva, faeces, urine, vomit, [and] mucus,” the abjects that haunt the postindustrial corporation are human workers, who signify “the waste, the stoppages, the lemons” that they (must) believe their system can vanquish once and for all (Vonnegut, 52).56 Early in the novel, Paul speaks of these workers as “the others—across the

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river” (52), a characterization that emphasizes the workers’ literal marginalization in a ghetto known as “Homestead” that members of the corporation are discouraged from entering. In response to Paul’s allusion to these men, Kroner, the head of the Eastern Division of the system, quips, “they never did work” (52). This comment suggests the powerful refusal of those who subscribe to the corporate ideology to see their own lives and identities as informed by the material labor of this earlier generation of industrial workers. Again the origins of Vonnegut’s symbolic economy can be traced to the complex labor relations at GE. In Boulware’s treatise, he suggests that it is the workers themselves who are responsible for GE’s increasing dependence on automation. Boulware explains that one of the central messages that his office attempted to broadcast to all employees was the real cause of unemployment: Unemployment—or a so-called “surplus of labor”—came from the lower sales of labor resulting from the price of labor having been forced above what the free market could and would pay. Unemployment also came from the sacrificing of the jobs of the few in order to save the jobs of the many—as, for instance, where an employer’s sales and prices were stuck at a practically constant level for four years, while he was being forced to raise pay rates artificially by 5 percent a year. He just had to find ways to “automate” or otherwise kill off 20 percent of the jobs over those four years in order to operate within the prices he could get and to have any jobs at all for the remaining 80 percent of his employees.57

Boulware sees unions and their constituents as responsible for automation, then, through their inflationary demands for higher wages. Underlying this account of union greed is Boulware’s sense that workers are wasteful and inefficient. In the chapter of his treatise entitled, “Job Marketing,” he explains: Our objective here was employee cooperation. We wanted first to deserve to have—and then to have—our employees want to abandon their misled resistance, which was estimated by our top management to be keeping output at least 20 percent below what it would be—with no one going home tired—if only the employees understood that it was in their own material and nonmaterial interests to cooperate. Incidentally, this 20 percent estimate was shown many times to be way, way low. Managers, employees, and community neighbors—once they knew the truth about this waste and its consequences to all of them—would surely cooperate to eradicate it.58


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In its concerns with what constitutes the “system” and what must be expelled from it, Vonnegut’s text recapitulates this emphasis on the eradication of human wastefulness. Early in the novel, Paul offers an explanation of why the society in which he lives is fully automated that is deeply resonant with Boulware’s outlook. Having humans involved in production, he muses to his secretary, was “Expensive . . . and about as reliable as a putty ruler. You can imagine what the scrap heap looked like, and what hell it was to be a service manager in those days. Hangovers, family squabbles, resentments against the boss, debts, the war—every kind of human trouble was likely to show up in a product one way or another . . . . And happiness, too. I can remember when we had to allow for holidays, especially around Christmas. There wasn’t anything to do but take it. The reject rate would start climbing around the fifth of December, and up and up it’d go until Christmas. Then the holiday, then a horrible reject rate; then New Year’s, then a ghastly reject level. Then things would taper down to normal—which was plenty bad enough—by January fifteenth or so. We used to have to figure in things like that in pricing a product.” (14–15)

More than the unions’ demands for high wages, then, Vonnegut’s text suggests that it was GE’s obsession with competitiveness and efficiency, and its intolerance of shortfalls in productivity produced by human error, that drove it to efface humanity from the production process. This preoccupation with waste underscores the continuing influence of Taylorism at mid-century, yet it also reveals how human relations looked beyond physical and economic forms of waste, attempting to also manage the less tangible domain of affect. While Taylor paid lip service to worker happiness in order to try to derail worker welfare programs, his efforts to regulate the “human element” were never systematic.59 The version of human relations that Boulware pioneered, on the other hand, attempted to achieve worker cooperation by quantifying their various hopes and desires. In meeting these desires, Boulware aimed to eliminate extraneous or non-instrumental emotion in the same way Taylor strove to eliminate wasted motions in the work process. The former’s campaign to induce workers to “buy” their jobs suggests that, to his mind, the useful aspects of worker emotion were those conditioned by their subject position as consumers. Vonnegut’s futurism extrapolates these developments to their logical endpoint: While Boulware concentrates his efforts to eliminate waste on stamping out conscious resistance, Vonnegut imagines a near future when all human emotion—both “trouble” and

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“happiness”—will be construed as a defilement of the system’s “clean and proper” body that must be expelled. Having exhausted emotion’s potential as a resource for heightening worker productivity, the system relegates it all to the category of waste. Yet, as Vonnegut’s novel demonstrates, attempts to eliminate abjects are never fully successful since “they remain the preconditions of corporeal, material existence.”60 On the most literal level, the population of non-working workers, while repugnant to those ensconced within the system, are also essential to its identity, both because the system’s efficiency is defined in direct contrast to their human foibles and because it is these workers whom the system provides for. In figurative terms, the essential materiality of not only the workers, but the managers, is conveyed by the many images of their hands in the novel. Whether it is the “huge hands” of Rudy Hertz, a skilled machinist Paul displaced with a machine he designed (27), the “enormous, hairy hand” of Kroner, Paul’s manager, who repeatedly grasps and touches him throughout the narrative to assert his authority (42), or Paul’s own “soft hands” which have “learned to do little save grip a pen” and other implements of the postindustrial economy (146), these images remind us of both the manual labor and the human emotions that continue to resurface despite the system’s attempts to eradicate them.61 Kristeva is careful to stress the relative nature of abjection, writing that it is “a universal phenomenon; one encounters it as soon as the symbolic and/or social dimension of man is constituted, and this throughout the course of civilization. But abjection assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various ‘symbolic systems.’ ”62 Although in her work on nineteenth-century writers, she describes the special force of the symbolic within a “technocratic, state-dominated social milieu,”63 nowhere does she fully anticipate a “symbolic system” in which the “human” itself is positioned as defilement. Vonnegut, imagining the “clean technology” of cybernetics will precipitate such a social system, reframes the condition of abjection itself as a political stance and presents it as the leaping off point for the novel’s Luddite politics. It is in this regard that gender again surfaces in the novel, for the condition of abjection is deeply bound up with the feminine and the maternal: no matter what differences there may be among societies where religious prohibitions, which are above all behavior prohibitions, are supposed to afford protection from defilement, one sees everywhere the importance, both social and symbolic, of women and particularly the mother.64


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The effort of the subject to achieve a “clean and proper” body is an attempt to maintain the limits essential to the symbolic, limits that guard against the formless, pre-symbolic existence the subject experienced in its early bond with the mother. Religious rituals of defilement, then, are enacted to “ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.”65 A shift toward abjection can be understood as a move away from hegemonic masculinity as it is typically constituted. Given the complications of gendered identity that abjection signifies, it is noteworthy that at every turn in Player Piano we find displaced male workers who, in the face of increasingly hygienic and automated spaces, are instead drawn to “dust-and-germ trap[s]” with “bad light, poor ventilation,” and service that is “unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest,” qualities that constitute the very essence of abjection within the social system the text imagines (26–27). The most emblematic of these is Finnerty, a former manager and friend of Paul’s who has come to despise automation and the rhetoric of management that justifies it. In the symbolic economy of the text, Finnerty is conspicuous for his dirtiness. Early in the novel, Paul recalls: Finnerty had always been shockingly lax about his grooming, and some of his more fastidious supervisors in the old days had found it hard to believe that a man could be so staggeringly competent, and at the same time so unsanitary-looking. Occasionally, the tall, gaunt Irishman would surprise everyone—usually between long stretches of work—by showing up with his cheeks gleaming like wax apples, and with new shoes, socks, shirt, tie, and suit, and, presumably, underwear. Engineers’ and managers’ wives would make a big fuss over him, to show him that such care of himself was important and rewarding . . . . After Finnerty’s periodic outbursts of cleanliness and freshness, the wives would watch with increasing distress as he wore the entire celebrated outfit day in and day out, until the sands and soot and grease of time had filled every seam and pore. (33–34)

Finnerty’s relation to the abject is two-fold. First, he himself is an abject of the system, quitting his high-level managerial job, but then, to quote Grosz’s characterization of the abject, “hover[ing] at the border of the subject’s identity, threatening apparent unities and stabilities with disruption and possible dissolution.”66 Second, Finnerty personally embraces the abjects at the borders of his own identity as a means of escaping the system. For instance, while the other men in the text aggressively assert heterosexuality as a part of their sense of

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personhood, Finnerty has a “candor about his few emotional attachments that Paul found disquieting . . . . It wasn’t homosexual; it was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second” (85). Nor does his polymorphous sexuality mark the extent of his fluidity. Instead, Finnerty permits himself to shift identities without fear of obliteration. Paul reflects, “Finnerty had been finding himself ever since Paul had known him. And, weeks later, he’d always deserted that self with angry cries of impostor, and discovered another” (142). Ultimately, Finnerty articulates his own openness to the abject when he explains to Paul why he refuses to see a psychiatrist. “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over,” he states. “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center” (84). Abjection’s association with the feminine might lead one to expect Vonnegut’s female characters to be particularly identified with it. The characterizations of Finnerty, however, underscore the degree to which women are instead aligned with the system/symbolic in Vonnegut’s novel. Finnerty’s dirtiness and anti-social behavior place him constantly at odds with the corporate wives, who are characterized as “immaculate” (35). In particular, Finnerty appalls Anita, who is consistently represented as perfectly attuned to the system’s machinations. For instance, when Kroner offers Paul a promotion, he does so precisely “the way Anita had said he would” (128). This alignment of the biologically female with the symbolic order is consistent with the highly abstract and anti-essentialist way in which Kristeva understands gendered identity within the symbolic economy she describes. As John Lechte explains, Kristeva makes a distinction between “the feminine” and “woman,” in which the former connotes an “unnameable, heterogeneous element” that “may be potentially disruptive of an overly rigid form of the symbolic.”67 While Finnerty remains in an embattled relation to women-as-system throughout the novel, the aspect of the system that most compels him to embrace abjection is the practice by the company of sending all of its most promising executives to a camp known as “The Meadows.” Upon his first appearance in the text, Finnerty announces to Paul that he has quit the company. “When I got this year’s invitation to the Meadows, Paul, something snapped. I realized that I couldn’t face another session up there. And then I looked around me and found out I couldn’t face anything about the system any more. I walked out, and here I am” (39). Modeled on a long-standing camp run by GE called Association Island, the Meadows is represented as the epitome of monolithic corporate


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programming. Fervently enforcing a narrowly defined code of behavior, the Meadows puts the young executives through a series of social events and games that are intended to congeal them into a single corporate identity. When Paul looks upon the other managers as they gather for a speech by Kroner, he reflects, “the crowd had miraculously become a sort of homogenized pudding. It was impossible to tell where one ego left off and the next began” (199).68 Within this reading, Kroner is particularly important. Embodying the Law of the Father, Kroner is the ultimate apologist for and enforcer of the system in the novel.69 Characterized by his “power and resolve” (43), and repeatedly described as paternal, Kroner “personified the faith, the near-holiness, the spirit of the complicated venture . . . he had the priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told” (44). Consistent with the novel’s focus on emotion as a means of social control, Kroner’s “administration of the Eastern Division had an emotional flavor about it” (43). Yet beneath the language of faith and emotion lies a stolidity consistent with the symbolic order as it is characterized within Lacanian theory. Vonnegut describes “Kroner’s belief that nothing of value changed; that what was once true is always true; that truths were few and simple; and that a man needed no knowledge beyond these truths to deal wisely and justly with any problem” (124). During a consultation with Paul at his home early in the novel, Kroner projects the essence of paternal control as embodied by the phallus: he meticulously cleans the barrel of a shotgun, explaining, “Got to keep after a bore, or it’ll pit on you just like that,” while lecturing Paul about the threat of “doubters, criers of doom, stoppers of progress” (126, 127). In response to both Kroner’s pressure to fully enter the symbolic order and Finnerty’s example of disavowing it, Paul Proteus ultimately assumes a condition of abjection as a form of radical politics. Ever more disenchanted with the system, Paul, like Finnerty, is increasingly drawn to dirtiness and inefficiency. At the beginning of the novel, these impulses are reflected in his choice to drive an old, poorly running car, and to exchange his coat and tie for a leather jacket before his periodic visits to Homestead. As his faith in the system continues to erode, Paul is drawn to “novels wherein the hero lived vigorously and out-of-doors, dealing directly with nature, dependent upon basic cunning and physical strength for survival—woodsmen, sailors, cattlemen” (137). This attraction for the “primitive” ultimately compels him to buy an ancient Homestead farmhouse that, without electricity or plumbing, is “a completely isolated backwater, cut off

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from the boiling rapids of history, society, and the economy” (151). Here Paul hopes to “work with his hands,” escaping from his current, disembodied existence in which his hands “rarely touched anything but steering wheels, levers, and switches” (153, 154). Vonnegut’s portrait of the farm is in direct contrast with “The Meadows,” a space that, despite its name, is described as hygienically clean, and represents the apotheosis of the system. With its close associations not only with dirt, but also animals, waste, and manual labor, the farm embodies abjection’s “insistence on the subject’s necessary relation to death, to animality, and to materiality.”70 Finally, Paul’s desire to escape the system leaves him in the ultimate position of abjection. Forced into the role of double agent, in which he is both working for a revolutionary cadre and being asked to spy on that group, Paul lives as a ghost without a secure position inside or outside the system. Near the end of the novel, Paul is called a saboteur and reflects: Somehow the idea of a wrecker of machines had become the smallest part of the word, like the crown of an iceberg. The greatest part of its mass, the part that called forth such poisonous emotions, was undefined: an amalgam of perversions, filth, disease, a galaxy of traits, any one of which would make a man a despicable outcast. The saboteur wasn’t a wrecker of machines but an image every man prided himself on being unlike. The saboteur was the man who, if dead, would no longer make the world a trying place to live in. (233–234)

This passage has powerful historical resonance, since one aspect of the strike wave that GE experienced the year before Vonnegut joined the company was multiple cases of sabotage within its facilities.71 Yet, on another level, the language here suggests how completely Paul has become an abject, an “other” against which the system identifies itself. In his understanding of himself as capitulating to an identity that is the very opposite of what “every man prided himself on being,” we see again the latent presence of femininity, the “other,” in his experience of abjection. Although throughout much of the novel the psychological currents I have been tracing require some excavation, the novel’s denouement brings them fully to the surface of the text. Put on trial for treason, Paul is interrogated about his motives for joining the conspiracy against the system. At the pivotal moment in this interrogation, the prosecutor proposes that Paul has acted in response to a deep Oedipal conflict with his deceased father, a former head of the system. He


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declares, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury and the television audience: I submit that this man before you is little more than a spiteful boy, to whom this great land of ours, this great economy of ours, this civilization of ours, has become a symbol of his father! A father whom, subconsciously, he would have liked to destroy!” (316). As the lie detector confirms Paul’s unconscious loathing of his father, he concedes to the prosecutor’s interpretation. Disclosing the Freudian paradigms that undergird the narrative, the novel matter-of-factly presents its protagonist as in flight from a symbolic order achieved through the embrace of the father. At the conclusion of this scene, Paul announces, “I suspect that all people are motivated by something pretty sordid, and I guess the clinical data bears me out on that. Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings . . . move. That’s what it is to be human, I’m afraid” (317). By the end of the text, then, the very notion of humanity itself has been expressed in terms of abjection. Trying to concretize his statement, Paul explains, “The most beautiful Peonies I ever saw . . . were grown in almost pure cat excrement” (317). Vonnegut provides here a nice summation of the dynamics of abjection—dynamics that the system’s embrace of automation leaves as the last resort of the human. The absurdity of the image meanwhile again reminds us that Vonnegut’s off-kilter satire is itself an articulation of abjection, suggesting that in America “the place where meaning collapses” is the workplace.

“White Men’s Bullets” If consumer culture initially functioned as a source of self-fulfillment in reaction to the bureaucratic structures of corporate life, by the end of the twentieth century, the same therapeutic ethos that was originally conceived as a means of escape from work life had fully suffused the work environment itself. The emergence of corporate culture in the early 1980s, which I described in my account of Peters and Waterman in the introduction to this book (and to which I’ll return in the last two chapters), signaled the completion of this transformation, reflecting “a conviction of the importance of ‘soft’ aspects of organizational structure and process, in contrast to rational systems and structures.”72 Quoting management guru Hugh Willmott, Graeme Salaman explains that “the Corporate Culture approach offers to ‘colonize the affective domain.’ ”73 This chapter looks at mid-century, after the emergence of a consumer culture whose advertising industry propelled fantasies of selffulfillment through consumer identity, and before the emergence of

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the discourse of self-actualization, with its emphasis on workers’ ability to find meaning and personal fulfillment through work itself. Player Piano was produced in response to a moment in which consumer culture is beginning its infiltration into work life in unprecedented forms. In his attempt to depict a strategy of resistance to the “colonization of the affective domain,” Vonnegut imagines workers turning management’s construction of them as consumers of their jobs on its head, taking recourse in a mode of thought and being that is deeply contrary to the conventions of rational masculinity on which industrial economic models were predicated. His novel simultaneously adopts a counter-realist, postmodern mode of discourse that formally enacts that destabilizing embrace of abjection. At the conclusion of Player Piano, when Paul finally sheds his role as double agent and commits to fighting the system, the form that his organized resistance takes is an alliance with the Ghost Shirt Society. This group of Luddite rebels takes their name from the Native Americans who, at the turn of the century, embraced magic as a means of resisting their annihilation, adopting the practice of going into battle wearing “magic shirts that white men’s bullets couldn’t go through” (289). A number of critics have argued that Vonnegut’s decision to associate the Luddite movement with this failed attempt at marshaling magic to a political cause signals his final skepticism about the revolution he depicts in the novel. Stanley Schatt, for instance, describes the Ghost Shirt Society as a collective “based completely upon emotion, the kind of irrationality revealed in the intentional destruction of sewage plants and food facilities by people who hate any and all machines and who fail to use their rational powers of discrimination.”74 The revolution that Paul joins does fail, and the irrational currents within the insurgency do lead to disorder and mayhem. In their embrace of Native American mysticism, however, the beleaguered workers translate their abjection, emotion, and irrationality into political action in terms that powerfully anticipate the postmodern turn toward anti-rational forms of political expression. This turn to mysticism also anticipates the reliance on magical thinking evinced by corporate culture’s management gurus, which I will discuss in the final chapter of this book. In these terms, it is particularly interesting to imagine a form of worker empowerment in which workers answer such management discourse with their own claims to supernatural insight. It remains to be seen whether, as Player Piano forecasts, such strategies will be deployed in the future to reclaim the “affective domain” from the incursions of soft work.

CH A P T ER

2

Soft Soap, Snow Jobs, and Apartment Keys: Human Relations Management in Mid-Century Literature and Film

Lemuel Boulware’s approach to labor relations, with its conception of workers as job customers, was distinctively his own. Yet it can also be understood as part of a larger shift in management philosophy that gained momentum during the mid-twentieth century. That movement, known broadly as “human relations,” reconceived of workers as primarily emotional rather than rational beings and sought to regulate their newly recognized feelings about work and each other in order to maximize their productivity. In the same article in the February 1949 edition of Fortune Magazine that heralds Boulware’s program as an innovative means to “improving intracompany communications,” the authors conclude, “[I]t is plain that while concentrating on technical skills, man has failed to develop his social skills, particularly his ability to secure the cooperation of others. Whatever the diagnosis, no treatment will be effective without changes within man himself, achieved through the civilizing process of emotional re-education.”1 If technical skills— the mechanics of the “one best way” to do a job—were the central preoccupation of industrial-era “scientific” managers, social skills were emerging as the dominant concern of postindustrialism’s new “personnel” managers. 2 Although a number of studies have examined the cultural impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management, much less has been said about the equally influential management movement that emerged as a reaction against Taylorism. Management scholar

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Andrea Gabor describes the human relations movement as a “century-long backlash against scientific management within the business community itself.”3 This is not to say that the drive for efficiency that Taylor spawned simply faded away. Fortune’s feature on human relations, for instance, acknowledges that “personnel departments . . . have tended to perpetuate the old, cold techniques of ‘scientific’ management, whose apostles were the ‘efficiency experts’ of the Twenties.”4 Yet the Fortune writers also describe how the imperatives of war production in the 1940s helped to popularize human relations approaches. They explain that through a “Job Relations Training” program organized by the government, managers were taught that “cooperation between the worker and management was essentially a problem in human relations, that all working people must be treated as individuals. . . . ”5 In a departure from Taylorism, workers were no longer to be regarded as interchangeable means to the end of efficient production. Fortune’s reference to workers as “individuals,” however, discounts the larger ideological forces that inform subject formation and obfuscates the degree to which both conscious and unconscious assumptions about gender informed these new management techniques. While little remarked, one of the most striking aspects of the human relations movement is the debt its existence owed to the presence of women in the workforce.6 In fact, the experiments that ushered in the human relations era—experiments that established the degree to which workers’ emotions could be used to increase their productivity—were conducted primarily on female workers. The first section of this chapter examines these studies, suggesting how the performance of female workers set the agenda for how all workers would be treated in the post-Taylorist period. The second section offers readings of William H. Whyte, Jr.,’s Organization Man and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, demonstrating that although cultural studies and literature scholars have treated these sociological classics primarily as broad critiques of the social norms and work culture of the late 1940s and 1950s, both books are centrally concerned with human relations management philosophy.7 While the human relations pioneers themselves did not acknowledge the importance of gender to their research, Whyte and Riesman understand human relations’ soft approach as a significant deviation from rational, masculine conventions of work. The popular texts of the 1950s and 1960s offer still more complex reflections on the gendered stakes of post-Taylorist management.

SOFT SOAP, SNOW JOBS, AND APARTMENT KEYS

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The third section of this chapter takes up several of these, including a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and an Academy Award–winning film, that explore how gender shapes and is shaped by human relations strategies. The artists who capture this new style of management depict it as a synthesis of gender, emotion, and power, and in reaching for a recognizable metaphor for these new interpersonal dynamics, they call on the motif of sexual seduction. Richard Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents and its stage and screen adaptations as The Pajama Game explore the interactions of a male manager and female workforce in the coyly sexualized setting of a pajama factory, where the manager’s deployment of human relations simulates—and at times constitutes—the sexual seduction of employees. By 1960, when Billy Wilder makes his Oscar-winning satire about the American corporation, The Apartment, the workers who are seduced and violated by male management are both female and male, suggesting that the emotional and economic effects of human relations have the capacity to rewire the conventional circuits between biological sex and gender in the workplace.8 While these sexualized exchanges might appear to simply reify conventions of patriarchal control of the workplace, Bissell’s and Wilder’s texts demonstrate that the crossfertilization of public and private feelings within human relations techniques often negate the command-and-control tradition of workplace masculinity, yielding new, promisingly compromised models of identity.

“The Softness of Men” While Taylor’s most notorious—if apocryphal—subject was the burly Schmidt, it was a very different cohort of workers who provided the foundation of the human relations movement.9 Elton Mayo, the most well-known human relations researcher, conducted many of his influential experiments on a group of five female workers at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois (see figure 2.1). The meticulously recorded reactions of the Relay Assembly Test Room women, who submitted to several years of manipulation of their work schedules and breaks during the late 1920s and early 1930s, were pivotal to Mayo’s revolutionary claim that worker attitudes directly correlated with productivity. In the 1940s, in another well-known study, Kurt Lewin and his colleagues experimented with group dynamics on the female employees at a pajama factory.10

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Figure 2.1 The Relay Assembly Test Room Women, as portrayed in Management and the Worker. Source: Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Remarkably, the male researchers in charge of these experiments made no acknowledgment that the models of cooperation they were generating might be shaped in part by the fact that the workers under scrutiny were women.11 While it seems probable that those in charge of the studies found interacting with and experimenting on female factory workers less intimidating and demanding than working with their male equivalents, neither Mayo nor Lewin gives voice to these considerations in their reporting on their findings.12 For instance, in their 600-page account of the Hawthorne experiments, Mayo’s collaborators F.J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson acknowledge that in their selection of particular women for their Relay Assembly Test Room, the researchers made a point of choosing candidates who would be “willing and co-operative.”13 Yet they never mention that by choosing women as subjects in the first place, they were likely both to receive more cooperation than from male factory workers and to find their subjects more amenable to discussing their emotional responses to the various experiments conducted on them.


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The Hawthorne Works experiments were a watershed moment of transition from the age of scientific management to that of human relations. The Western Electric company began a series of studies there in 1924 focused on the relationship of working conditions to productivity. Specifically, they set about to study “the relation of quality and quantity of illumination to efficiency in industry.”14 In methodically analyzing production rates in relation to specific, incremental changes in the level of lighting, the company was abiding by a basic tenet of scientific management: physical conditions must be optimized to create maximum efficiency in the work process. The researchers were quickly stymied, however, when they found no correlation between productivity and workplace illumination. Instead, they discovered surprising instances where productivity was sustained even when the light was dramatically reduced—in some cases to “moonlight” levels.15 It was at this point that Mayo and his team of researchers from the Harvard Business School were invited to join the study. They devised a more controlled experiment by isolating a group of five women in the Relay Assembly Test Room and making various modifications to their work conditions and incentives.16 Rather than simply monitoring output, they also kept a “daily history record” that “was designed to give a complete account of the daily happenings in the test room,” including “the remarks made by the operators (both spontaneous and in reply to questions).”17 In these further experiments, Mayo and his colleagues reported that they were “astonish[ed]” to discover that all changes to the work environment—whether ostensibly positive or negative—stimulated productivity.18 They concluded that it was not the physical conditions or the financial incentives that motivated the women but instead the ongoing attention they received as subjects of the experiment—a phenomenon that has become known as “the Hawthorne Effect.” In this first stage of research, Mayo’s group went on to study two more cohorts of female workers—a second Relay Assembly Group and the “Mica Splitting Test Room”—a group of five women who were studied while they performed the work of “split[ting] off thin layers or sheets [of mica], a few thousandths of an inch thick, to serve as insulating material in telephone apparatus” (see figure 2.2).19 In these follow-up studies the researchers experimented with wage incentives, but they also continued to amass data on the personal situations and attitudes of the workers—factors that they became convinced were the unrecognized key to worker productivity. At no point in the reporting

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Figure 2.2 The Mica Splitting Test Room Women, as portrayed in Management and the Worker. Source: Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

on these studies do Roethlisberger and Dickson address the fact that no similar group of male workers had been isolated to measure their responsiveness to such attention. It was only in the second stage of their research that Mayo’s team extended their study to male workers at the plant. In light of their increasing interest in workers’ feelings, they embarked on a vast experiment exploring how interviews affected productivity. Workers of both sexes were interviewed in this new study, which after two years was extended to all divisions of the Hawthorne Works. In this case, the researchers did make some distinction based on gender, both coordinating interviewers with subjects along gender lines and tabulating their data in these terms.20 Yet, again, Roethlisberger and Dickson do not address how males and females responded differently to the actual experience of being interviewed. If anything, that information seems present but unexamined in their data on worker feedback. In analyzing their results they remark, “Women are much more articulate than men in their praise of the company’s employee relations activities.”21 Although the interviews themselves were the centerpiece of those activities, the researchers fail to explore why the women were more enthusiastic about being interviewed than their male counterparts.


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In the final phase of the research, male workers were studied in the Bank Wiring Observation Room. Interestingly, Roethlisberger and Dickson acknowledge that “there was a fundamental difference between the types of co-operation required in the two cases.”22 In the Relay Assembly Test Room “it had been desired that the group would respond as they felt to changes introduced, and certain special inducements had been given to insure a natural, wholehearted response.”23 No such changes were introduced in the working conditions of the male workers. They explain In the bank wiring group all that was required was a willingness on the part of the employees to carry on in their usual way and to express themselves freely in the presence of the interviewer and the observer. The investigators did not expect them to work harder or do anything to which they were unaccustomed. They were interested in performance only in so far as it could tell them something about the departmental situation. If, upon entering the observation room, the group’s output had suddenly increased, the investigators would have felt they had failed in their objective of keeping the situation unchanged. 24

The women of the Relay Assembly Test Room were subjected not only to changes in their schedules and work practices, but also to physical probing through regular medical checks for which they were rewarded with cake and ice cream. 25 The men, meanwhile, were asked only to be observed. This difference in the degree of invasiveness also extends to the visual record of the experiments. While the women were photographed for Roethlisberger and Dickson’s book, the Bank Wiring Observation Room was photographed when the men were not working there (see figure 2.3). Such variability in the experiments suggests that human relations practices were more readily implemented among female employees than their male counterparts. In the late 1940s, a second influential experiment took place at the Harwood Pajama Factory in Marion, Virginia. Kurt Lewin and his colleagues experimented for five years on female pajama-factory workers, exploring the nature of group dynamics in manufacturing situations. Earlier, Lewin had performed studies comparing the effects of unilateral versus interactive forms of communication on both schoolboys and housewives. 26 Yet it is the Harwood experiment that is best known for its impact on human relations thought. Historically, there had been a very high quit-rate at the pajama factory when the women were asked to switch from a task with which

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Figure 2.3 The Bank Wiring Observation Room, as portrayed in Management and the Worker. Source: Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

they had become comfortable to one that involved new learning. The piece rate, set by the time-study men, required that the women achieve a certain pace each time they were moved to a new task. The researchers deduced that the women experienced great frustration and resentment when management commanded them to develop new skills. To abet this difficulty, the researchers had meetings with groups of workers, discussing with them the necessity for the new task. The sense of participation in decision-making that these meetings instilled in the workers reduced the rates of attrition significantly. 27 Alfred Marrow, the president of the company, observed: The results provided convincing evidence that open communication, greater self-direction, and broadly based participative approaches were a considerably more practical and profitable way to use human talent than the traditional approach, in which management decides what employees should do and then orders them to do it.28

Lewin’s choice to conduct research at the pajama factory was based on the coincidence that Marrow, one of his protégés, had a family


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connection to it. Yet the researchers again offer no commentary on the ways that the gender of the workers might affect their receptiveness to Lewin’s promotion of such group behavior. The success of Mayo’s and Lewin’s experiments meant that by the late forties, the “emotional re-education” to which Fortune refers was a pervasive aspect of management training in the United States. For American workers, the principles of cooperation, teamwork, and emotional commitment began to balance or even outweigh the older Taylorist notion of mechanical compliance to a regimen of tasks. While cohorts of female workers served as the primary subjects for these experiments—and, in the case of Mayo’s later mixed studies, proved most responsive to them—these methods were increasingly applied to male and female workers alike. Although the researchers most credited with the emergence of human relations avoided any suggestion that the emotional register they were opening in the workplace might have gendered implications, by the 1950s critics of human relations started making a connection between such “soft” management and the shifting gender formation of American society. In William H. Whyte’s Organization Man (1956), he argues that the older Protestant work ethic has been replaced by the “social ethic,” which he defines as the “contemporary body of thought which makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.”29 Whyte identifies human relations management trends as driving this shift with their premise that, “By applying the methods of science to human relations we can eliminate . . . obstacles to consensus and create an equilibrium in which society’s needs and the needs of the individual are one and the same.”30 Resisting this celebration of equilibrium, he challenges the notion that workplace conflict is necessarily detrimental to productivity. In Whyte’s critique of human relations, American masculinity itself is at stake. He complains, “No matter what name the process is called—permissive management, multiple management, the art of administration—the committee way simply can’t be equated with the ‘rugged’ individualism that is supposed to be the business of business.”31 “Rugged” autonomous masculinity is compromised by human relations’ preoccupation with the “deep emotional security that comes from total integration with the group.”32 Suspicious of the sacrifice of rationality that this emphasis on emotion implies, he highlights Mayo’s nostalgia for a pre-Enlightenment era of social cohesion and characterizes the

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Hawthorne Works interview technique as a reframing of the working man as an irrational being:33 Implicit in this technique is the assumption that the worker’s problems can indeed be talked out. He is to adjust to the group rather than vice versa; and the alternative of actually changing reality is hardly considered. If a worker is sore at his foreman the chances are good that he is not really sore at the foreman because of some rational gripe but is merely venting on the foreman certain repressed feelings.34

For Whyte human relations has ushered in a new work culture in which talk replaces action, consensus trumps individuality, and unconscious drives override rational deliberation. The Agency (in its collective sense) stifles agency (in the individual sense) by diverting workers’ attention from material circumstances to what Whyte presents as contrived internal conflicts. While he gives little attention to women, Whyte implies that they are in part responsible for this shift. In analyzing what he views as the Ford Company’s misguided movement away from its notorious scientific management approach toward human relations, he cites a Ford executive’s assessment of the priorities and values evinced by young management trainees: I always felt that human relations and getting along with people was all very important. But these trainees made me do a lot of thinking. At Ford we judge a man by results. I mean, what he gets accomplished. And I think this is the way it should be. Sure, human relations is important, but it should be subsidiary to results. Look at it this way: if the girls in a steno pool run away when a man comes around to give dictation on account of his manners, or other people hold out information on him, his results will be bad. I think that the colleges that send these men to us ought to put more emphasis on doing things. A lot of the young fellows I talk to think that most engineering problems are all solved and that it’s just a question of human engineering. That’s just not right.35

The executive implies that men have traditionally produced “results” while women have dictated “manners.” Yet increasingly the imperative of skill is being outweighed by steno girls’ need for politeness. In his reference to these female office workers fleeing from an illmannered engineer, he portrays women as the canaries in the feelings-oriented coalmine of the service economy, hastening the implementation of human relations.


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In contrast to organization men, Whyte lauds high-level executives whose lingering Protestant ethic prevents them from harmonizing with those around them.36 While the personnel men in charge of human relations prefer workers who are “harmonious,” and “cooperative,” Whyte notes that elite executives privilege terms such as “imagination,” “vigor,” and “judgment” in their account of the ideal worker.37 Although acknowledging that their single-mindedness is a “mixed blessing,” Whyte subtly commends their willingness to ignore their families to concentrate on their companies.38 “To the executive,” he writes, “there is between work and the rest of his life a unity he can never fully explain, and least of all to his wife. One of the few secrets many an executive manages to keep from his wife is how much more deeply he is involved in his job than in anything else under the sun.”39 Whyte’s celebration of these diehard workaholics reflects his lingering hope that work can continue to buttress American masculinity.40 Despite such hold-outs, however, he sees organization men everywhere. As he dolefully puts it, “The roughand-tumble days are over.”41 Although Whyte scarcely acknowledges it, his book was preceded six years earlier by another sweeping critique of the effects of human relations practices on American society.42 David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) is perhaps the less well-remembered of the two texts, but it was more widely read in the fifties and sixties, and remains the best-selling sociological study in American history.43 Like Whyte, Riesman diagnoses a shift toward group consciousness in American society, “a greater resonance with others, a heightened self-consciousness about relations to people,” which he terms “other-directedness.”44 He also shares Whyte’s view that this new sensibility is marked by an increased need for emotional affirmation: “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed; he wants not to gull or impress, let alone oppress, others but, in the current phrase, to relate to them; he seeks less a snobbish status in the eyes of others than assurance of being emotionally in tune with them.”45 Explicitly describing this change as a softening of work culture, he writes, “today it is the ‘softness’ of men rather than the ‘hardness’ of material that calls on talent and opens new channels of social mobility.”46 Riesman is less willing than Whyte to condemn this emphasis on “softness,” insisting that he is not calling for a return to rugged individualism and enumerating the benefits of other-direction, including “considerateness, sensitivity, and tolerance.”47 Yet he is critical of the trend as well, remarking that “men of conviction . . . are relatively rare,” overcome by cultural tendencies toward “plasticity,” “malleability,” and “acquiescence.”48

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What will likely surprise contemporary readers of Riesman—we who are still experiencing the profound influence of human relations on American society—is his pointed critique of human relations’ effort to make work enjoyable. Riesman sees new cybernetic technologies as a harbinger of a near future when most forms of human work will be obsolete. Why then, he asks, should we allow ourselves to be seduced into liking our jobs? For Riesman, human relations techniques take workers from the clutches of the invisible hand to that of the “glad hand,” an artificial friendliness that pervades the office place and insidiously blurs the line between work and life.49 While in his paean to elite executives Whyte celebrates the “unity” between work and life that such men achieve, Riesman is profoundly skeptical of such integration. According to The Lonely Crowd a pivotal element of this unwanted unity is the corporate expense account, which encourages employees to lose sight of when they should stop working. Lamenting that “the expense account gives the glad hand its grip,” R iesman explains that “the executive and professional continues to put in long hours, employing America’s giant productivity less to leave for home early than to extend his lunch hours, coffee breaks, conventions, and other forms of combining business with pleasure.”50 Drawing on their expense accounts permits office workers to eat and sleep without ever shifting from the public register of productivity into a private register of leisure. He maintains that “the invasion of the office by sport clothes” has a similar effect, explaining that casual office clothing “looks like an offshoot of the cult of effortlessness, and of course men say ‘it’s too much trouble’ in explaining why they don’t change for dinner or the evening. But the explanation lies rather in the fact that most men today simply do not know how to change roles, let alone mark the change by proper costuming.”51 Contemporary readers might regard this early prototype of “casual Fridays” as a positive step toward a more pleasant work experience, but liking work is precisely the problem for R iesman. The men he describes can no longer change roles because human relations, with its emphasis on making the workplace a domain of emotion, has given them the sense that once-private gestures and activities can and should be marshaled in the interest of the job. A still deeper source of confusion between private life and public work is the phenomenon Riesman terms “false personalization,” to which he dedicates an entire chapter of his text. It is in his account of false personalization where women again surface in the story of


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human relations, for it is “white-collar girls” that he identifies as its primary perpetrators: The inner-directed manager never “saw” his secretary. The latter, as a member of a different class and, often, a different ethnic group, also seldom “saw” the boss as an individual. Brought together by the invisible hand, both were concentrated on the work, not on each other, save as a benevolent but insensitive paternalism bridged the social gap. By contrast, the other-directed manager, while he still patronizes his white-collar employees, is compelled to personalize his relations with the office force whether he wants to or not because he is part of a system that has sold the white-collar class as a whole on the superior values of personalization. The personalization is false, even where it is not intentionally exploitative, because of its compulsory character: like the antagonistic cooperation of which it forms a part, it is a mandate for manipulation and self-manipulation among those in the white-collar ranks and above.52

In the era of human relations management, it would seem that a lot of “seeing” is going on between managers and their female office workers: the invisible hand has been superseded by the visible co-worker. The lines of vision that Riesman is registering telegraph several forms of content between female worker and male manager. First, there is the recognition of one another’s humanity, which Riesman understands as a false gesture induced by human relations management culture. Yet encoded in these glances is also a sexual form of seeing, signified by Riesman’s winking use of quotation marks. Indeed, according to Riesman, what drives false personalization is female white-collar workers’ desire for glamour in their work lives. By the time that he was writing in the late 1940s, “glamour” primarily denoted physical beauty and appeal, but it also preserved some of its original connotations of magic—to live a glamorous life was to live a life of magical distinction. In Riesman’s usage, glamour in the office place involves an explicitly sexual charge, in which the women’s sex appeal has to be registered by the male manager. Hence, he points out, “Most unpopular of all is work in a pool, which minimizes glamor, [sic] or work for a woman boss, which inhibits it.”53 According to Riesman, then, it is women who thrive on and fuel the new culture of emotion in the workplace. Although he concedes that “the other-directed manager helped start this chain of personalization because he, too, holds skill in disrepute,” he ultimately underscores that “the women actually wish to throw their emotional reserves into the office situation.”54

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The degree to which Riesman sees women as the key agents of the proliferation of human relations management becomes especially clear when he argues that, in contrast to this office situation, factory workers (whom he genders male) remain unwilling to commit emotional energy to their workplace. Riesman writes, “The white-collar worker imitates, even caricatures, the style of the otherdirected upper middle class. The factory worker, on the other hand, is from Missouri: he has to be sold on the virtues of the glad hand. And to date, he has not been.”55 Here he calls on the colloquialism “from Missouri” to evoke a skeptical state of mind, one that does not take kindly to feeling kindly to co-workers, the boss, or the work itself. He goes on to predict that, “it will be a long time before the factory worker follows the example of the white-collar worker and, in imitation of the boss, puts pressure on him to personalize still more and better.”56 Thus, while Riesman understands “whitecollar girls” to be highly receptive to human relations strategies, he anticipates that male factory workers will “seek to retain their emotional freedom against the efforts of the factory to force them to mix work and play.”57 Implicit in the work of human relations researchers, and increasingly explicit in that of its critics, was the suggestion that this new mode of management, with its emphasis on emotional engagement in work, was particularly effective on and encouraged by the burgeoning female workforce. The remainder of this chapter considers a set of mid-century texts that explore the gendered implications of human relations by depicting the dynamics between male management and both female and male workforces on the factory floor and in the office place. While Riesman imagines that women yearn for emotional engagement as a source of sexual validation, novels and other cultural texts of the period suggest that it is male management that takes the lead in translating the emotional language of human relations into overt sexual seduction. In today’s parlance, such overtures in the workplace are typically understood as sexual harassment. Yet the idea of sexual harassment did not become meaningful until Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made sexual discrimination in employment illegal, and the term did not gain legal force until 1980, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission set up guidelines against such conduct. In some sense, then, these texts serve as interesting artifacts of sexual (mis)conduct in the unapologetically discriminatory work culture of the 1950s. And, indeed, all, to one degree or another, suggest the emotional costs and anxieties for employees who are subject to this


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sort of attention.58 The analysis that follows, however, also considers how the emotional entanglements signified by the act of seduction disrupt gender conventions in these work narratives, suggesting human relations’ powerful effects on the American gender formation.

Pressed Flowers and Paving Bricks Are the problems of love and labor relations the same? Nothing could have been further from Frederic Winslow Taylor’s approach to managing a workforce. In Taylor’s well known encounter with the worker he called Schmidt, his imperious methods were captured in his command to Schmidt to obey his supervisor: “When he tells you to pick up a [piece of pig iron], and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what’s more, no back talk.”59 Schmidt’s feelings about his supervisor, and vice versa, were of little consequence to scientific management.60 Even after human relations had elevated the importance of feelings, commentators like David Riesman regarded the factory as a refuge of more unilateral forms of management. Yet by the early 1950s, Richard Bissell’s novel 7 ½ Cents and the hit musical The Pajama Game it inspired suggested that even in factories, what Riesman euphemistically called “glamour” had gained a beachhead. 7 ½ Cents is a realist novel about the dilemmas of a supervisor named Sid Sorekin, hired to run a pajama factory where union demands for a wage increase threaten to boil over into a strike. A 1953 Book-ofthe-Month Club selection, the novel became the hit Broadway musical The Pajama Game in 1954, which was, in turn, released as a film of the same name in 1957. For both book and musical, one of the central themes is the problem of male management confronting a female workforce. In both, Sid’s problem of managing a group of women is compounded by his more immediate goal of seducing one of them, Babe Williams. So intertwined are management and lovemaking in the pajama factory that human relations techniques themselves become figured as a form of seduction. Scientific management, on the other hand, is represented as a betrayal of trust—even a form of rape—in the musical version of this story. While associating this new mode of industrial relations with seduction maintains an association between management and masculine power, it is a far cry from the Taylor-style “command-and-control authority” human relations pioneers had begun to critique in the 1920s. Instead, the sexualized connotations

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of human relations reframe the workplace as a zone where softer techniques win greater rewards. The trajectory of this narrative, meanwhile, from hard-boiled novel to sunny musical mirrors the very cultural shifts that Bissell was charting in his fiction. It appears to have been a coincidence that Bissell’s novel about labor relations, like Lewin’s group dynamics research, made pajama manufacturing its subject.61 After World War II, Bissell, a Harvardeducated Midwesterner, returned to Dubuque, Iowa to work as a superintendent of his family’s pajama factory.62 It was on the basis of this experience that he wrote his realist account of Sid Sorekin, the tough son of Russian immigrants, who is hired to move from Chicago to Junction City, Iowa, to become the superintendent of the Sleep Tite Pajama Plant. Bissell was compared to Mark Twain after his first novel, about a boy’s adventures on the Mississippi River, was published.63 His second novel, narrated by Sid in a dryly humorous and cynical voice, is more reminiscent of the work of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. In its details of the daily workings of a garment factory, the novel captures several of the key aspects of labor relations in the period. It reinforces Boulware’s sense, for instance, that workers had become consumers of work and that work had to be packaged attractively. In the opening pages of the novel, Sid overhears several male workers discussing which local company offers the best wages, to which an older employee, the “senior steam fitter,” cynically responds, “Yes, George, . . . you only had nine jobs in the last two months chasin them high wages around. Why don’t you go up to the packing company? I hear they give every employee a Ford car after thirty days’ service, and a 200-a-month pension after you been there eleven months. Here, hold the wrench, if you got the strength.”64 The older man’s final remark underscores his contempt for the younger generation’s consumer mentality in seeking jobs that offer easy money—a pursuit that leads him to insinuate that they are too weak and feminized for ‘real,’ masculine work. Meanwhile, Sleep Tite itself aggressively advertises its factory work to prospective employers with a seductive help-wanted ad that promises the very effacement between work and leisure that Riesman critiques: “Music While You Work in the Clean Modern Sleep Tite Factory. Sit-Down Work in Clean Surroundings. Music for your Enjoyment in a Friendly Atmosphere. Meet your Girl Friends at Sleep Tite” (227–228). While the opening of the advertisement retains a focus on the notion of productive labor, in a few lines its promotional rhetoric begins to efface the labor process


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altogether. Its final two phrases better describe a nightclub than a factory: work has morphed into a social occasion sanitized of masculine associations with effort and skill. Nor is this the only echo of Boulwarism. The novel also underscores the degree to which human relations efforts are driven by the need to compete with unions for the loyalty of employees. It is the union, for instance, that hosts the annual picnic and sells ice cream to workers during their breaks.65 Early in the novel, Sid explains to his boss, Myron Hasler, “The union came to me and they said since the company didn’t have any ice cream in the lunchroom would I mind if they got a service from the local distributor. They would take care of it and one of the girls would do the selling in the noon hour and the rest periods and we would not have to bother about it at all” (21–22). Riesman cites research that suggests many managers, influenced by the emphasis on interpersonal exchanges produced by human relations discourse, felt resentment toward such efforts by unions. He describes one study that “depicted the psychological dependence of a contemporary sales manager on the approval of the men under him, his willingness to go to great lengths, in terms of concessions, to maintain interpersonal warmth in his relations with them, and his fierce resentment of the union as a barrier to this emotional exchange.”66 While Sid expresses no anxiety in this regard, Hasler objects to the sale of the ice cream, remarking, “we pay for the upkeep and operation of the [ice cream] machine while they pocket the profits to fight us with” (emphasis in original, 22). This battle for worker loyalty extends to middle management at Sleep Tite, as well. In Whyte’s critique of Mayo’s work he complains that much of human relations psychology is directed toward manipulating managers: While Mayo intended human relations to apply to the workers and managers both, the managers first seized on it as an excellent tool for manipulating the workers into a chronic contentment that would turn them away from the unions. But manipulation is a two-edged weapon; having learned how illogical workers were, managerial pioneers of human relations soon began to ponder the fact that their colleagues weren’t so logical either. They needed to belong too—and even more than the worker, for more of their life was involved in the organization.67

Such a need to belong could draw a manager toward union membership just like a worker. Fearing that Sid might take this route, Hasler encourages him to join the Associated Foremen, a decoy organization

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meant to deter foremen and other members of middle management from unionizing. Hasler explains: Boy, some of these foremen are all crazy on this socialistic stuff and they want a union. So management has got up this Associated Foremen to have meetings and speakers to show them that they’re part of top management and get ‘em over this union idea. We have a chummy get-together and some fellowship and usually a good speaker and make them feel they are on the Management Team. It’s a big movement. (49)

The discourse of teamwork here is transparently meant to lure middle management from that other team, the union. Such manipulations were, indeed, “a big movement” during this period. Fortune magazine describes how Ford handled the unionization of its foremen in the late 1940s: Ford, after its foremen struck in 1947, withdrew recognition of their union and instituted a Management Relations Program aimed to make them better managers. Their status was clarified by making them salaried, not clock-punching, personnel; and by giving them identity cards (instead of badges), a separate parking place for their cars, a new work coat (which they designed) clearly labeled “Supervisor.” The men now are kept informed of management attitudes through a management newsletter and every month they discuss personnel, production, and cost details jointly with higher management. At the same time Ford’s personnel chief, John S. Bugas, hopes to create cooperative foremen who will encourage workers to communicate their dissatisfactions and constructive suggestions up the line.68

Forswearing union membership appears to be the essential element of becoming a “better manager” at Ford. Freedom from the time clock, along with receipt of identity cards, parking spaces, customized work coats, and a newsletter were all perks geared, like membership in Hasler’s Associated Foremen, to provide foremen with a simulation of managerial status. This motivational flotsam and jetsam suggests the degree to which human relations strategies could be boiled down to cheap, formulaic enticements, intended to make employees willing consumers of their work. The novel is also a reminder of the degree to which scientific management and human relations coexisted during this period. Hines, the time-study man, sets the piece rates in the plant. Although Hines keeps abreast of more “modern psychological approach[es],” he monitors workers with a stop-watch and invokes the thinking of


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Taylor and his protégé, Henry Gantt (131). This allegiance to scientific management leads him to privilege highly schematic incentive structures. When Hines recommends to Sid that they fight the labor unrest in the same way another factory did, this managementby-numbers approach is evident. “They devised a bonus plan,” he explains, “based on one per cent of the expected man-hour output per machine potential over a specified base of 20 per cent of the production units of average normal incentive ratio” (123). Sid is not persuaded by Hines’s “clinical approach to every little thing,” remarking to Hines that instinct might serve management better than “play[ing] by the scientific rules” (123, 125). Yet Hines’s method is not the only one that Sid resists in the novel. Throughout the text, Sid’s immediate superior, Myron Hasler, whose name reflects his management style, repeatedly clashes with the union because of his inflexibility. Hasler stands as a figure for the older, conventionally masculine sensibility of the Protestant work ethic. He says of the union picnic, “We never had picnics when I started in this business . . . . Worked till eight and nine o’clock on Friday nights and no overtime. All this picnic stuff is a lot of fol de rol. New Deal socialistic nonsense” (48). His industrial-strength masculinity is also captured in his office decor: His office looked like the wealthy railroad president’s office in one of the 1910 silent movies where the hero shoots his cuffs and rolls his eyeballs almost into the camera. It was all there, the black-oak trim, the black-oak chairs, the black-oak hatrack, the black-oak desk, the wire letter basket, the chromo of the Falls of the Yellowstone, the steel engraving of General U.S. Grant, the photo of the board of Directors in high collars, and even a nickel-plated stand-up telephone. (162)

The signifying power of black-oak office furniture to encode entrepreneurial masculine power has undoubtedly had its day. Yet in the 1950s, Hasler’s silent-movie era office telegraphs his association with a pre– New Deal emphasis on “dog-eat-dog” competition. Throughout the novel he dismisses any attempts to placate the workers, instead positioning himself as a “fighter,” at odds with the unions and egged on by the conservative broadcasts of radio personality, Fulton Lewis, Jr.69 Sid increasingly experiences a mixture of admiration and contempt for what he sees as Hasler’s atavistic style of masculinity. His moments of sympathy for Hasler accentuate the degree to which the novel dramatizes a crisis of post-War masculinity. Sid’s father, a Russian immigrant, worked in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, and Sid’s life

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in Gary has left him with a tough and cynical vision of the world. He remarks to Babe: “That’s a rugged life over there—you small town kids don’t know what it’s like. Being born in a steel town is like being born with a ton of rock on top of you. You got to fight your way out. While you kids over here in the sticks are studying the birds and the bees and pressing flowers in the family album, us roughnecks are throwing paving bricks and trying to get a breath of fresh air.” (100)

His friends from Gary work in an array of marginal jobs, including bank teller, milk-truck driver, fruit store manager, and steel worker. Disillusioned by their dead-end occupations, Sid remarks to Babe, “There’s only three of us looking good—Kosciuszko painting some kind of goofy pictures over at the Art Institute. Stan Marco running around the country doing three shows a night in the punk nightclubs. And me” (100). Overall, the novel paints an economic landscape in transition from manufacturing to services. Yet Sid’s identification with an artist and an entertainer—professions that require, like his own, that one satisfy the desires of an audience—emphasizes the ascendancy in the labor market of what Riesman calls the glad hand. The “audience” that Sid must satisfy is his predominantly female workforce, an important member of which is his middle-aged secretary, Mabel Ellis. According to Riesman’s theory, as Sid’s secretary, Mabel should be the perpetrator of false-personalizing, glad-handing, and “seeing.” As it turns out, Mabel both supports and complicates Riesman’s assessment of the dynamics between male managers and their female office staff. Mabel is not immune to the temptations of glamour: the rapid-fire banter between her and Sid appears inspired by Dashiell Hammett film adaptations such as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man; and Sid observes that along with colorful dresses, her work wardrobe includes, “tailored suits, which she wore partly because she thought they made her look like a career woman such as Colbert or Roz Russell” (9). While Riesman presents such gestures toward glamour as attempts at sexual seduction and false personalization, however, Mabel’s relationship with Sid is neither sexual nor false. Mabel treats as a joke the possibility of a romance between herself and Sid, and when he ultimately chooses to leave the factory, her sincere attachment to him as a friend is evident in her despairing remark that she’ll “have nobody to talk to again” (241). Rather than portraying Mabel as an instigator of what Riesman calls “white-collar personalization,” Bissell depicts her as a behind-the-scenes


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authority within the factory, and, more importantly, as a gifted personnel manager. Early on, Sid recognizes Mabel’s sweeping knowledge of the workforce he has been hired to supervise. He reflects, “Mabel had the goods on every operator, every cutter, and even the elevator boy, back to the first generation, including out-of-town connections and relations ‘on the other side of the family’ ” (10). Despite her lack of human relations training, Mabel has a profound grasp of human relationships. These superior “people skills” come into focus in a scene in which Hasler tries to approach the workers with “determined good fellowship” (50). The workers immediately detect his insincerity and bypass him, confiding instead in Mabel and soliciting her ministrations (50–52). Later, when Sid becomes enraged by Hasler’s harsh treatment of him, Mabel explains to Sid that Hasler, “don’t know nothing about the manufacturing end of the business” (152). She then relates a story that begins, “Once upon a time Belle Casey got mad at Sadie Hanson some reason. Something about the electric fans. She wanted them on and Hanson wanted them off, I don’t know, some crazy stuff—anyway Casey walked out and went home” (152–153). In the remainder of Mabel’s anecdote, she recounts how Hasler attempted to bully Casey into returning to work and then demanded that Mabel fire her for violating her contract. Mabel in turn explained to Hasler that Casey would return to work the next day, and they could not fire her because “ ‘she’s the best elastic girl we ever had in here. And she’s got an old father all crippled up with the arthritis to support. . . . And besides . . . she’s union chairlady in her section’ ” (153). Mabel’s story reflects her adeptness at negotiating the irrational aspects of worker interactions. Moreover, her understanding of Casey in terms of the quality of her work, her personal need for the income from the job, and her powerful status in the union puts Hasler’s crude grasp of management to shame. Although this characterization of Mabel conveys the potential of women to manage what Taylor called the “human element,” her position as Sid’s secretary leaves her with only rare opportunities to do so. Instead, the novel focuses primarily on Sid’s work of managing the assembly line of female pajama-makers. As Sid reflects at length on the particular challenges of this role, it is clear that what Whyte might call Sid’s “rough and tumble days” of autonomous masculinity are indeed over: Now whereas the average man with one wife to put up with is often hard pressed to remain outside the laughing academy, the superintendent of a garment plant has 100 to 500 or more women on his hands in varying stages of intimacy ranging from hatred to the schoolgirl

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crush. In some men this can breed strange mental conflicts yet to be classified by Professor Jung. Others, such as myself, take a wild sort of pleasure in living amidst this chaos of feminine charm. In either case life is not simple compared to that of Clyde Beatty. Bawling out somebody who is likely to burst into tears or slump to the floor of the office in a faint, poses some interesting problems in approach. You’ve got to come out with it and tell them that unless they get on the ball and quit blabbing so much and get down to work that you are going to fire them. Now how to go about it without a riot? Or you have got to tell the girl who is obviously about six months along that she has got to go home and stay there. Another nice task. (157–158)

The old masculine “rough and tumble” has been overtaken by the new “chaos of feminine charm.” Confronted with the prospects of tears, fainting, and furtive pregnancies, Sid is self-conscious about the challenges of managing women. The reference to Clyde Beatty, the lion tamer famous for his “fighting act,” in which he entered the ring with a pistol and whip, ironizes the softness of Sid’s managerial duties by comparison, and also underscores his difference from Hasler, the “fighter.” In rare moments, Sid’s attitudes toward his woman employees slides from paternalistic indulgence toward raw contempt. Near the end of the text, when his patience is frayed by their ongoing resistance, he ruminates over them in scathing terms: You stupid females, you lousy old bums, there is hardly an operator among you. You are lazy and whining all the time and your work is rotten—you are skip-stitching, leaving seams open, leaving raw edges, mixing colors, getting oil on garments, twisting fronts, ruining collars, spoiling buttonholes, breaking needles—you are a disgrace to a sewing room and yet you are hollering all the time for more money, you ignorant, busted-down bums. What you ought to get is a cut, not an increase. Haha! How would you like that, you wonderful old tramps, you. You are causing me more trouble than the World War. (216–217, emphasis in original)

Yet rather than speak such thoughts aloud, and rather than wield a whip, a gun, or some other implement of coercion, Sid, who has taken management classes in “Elementary Time Study” and “Standard Data,” but also “Personnel Problems” and “Advanced Labor Relations,” generally takes a more progressive and humanistic approach to management (140–141). Near the outset of the novel, Sid makes a speech at the union picnic that reflects his sensibility, emphasizing “cooperation,” and his own background as a garment worker. He recalls, “I gave them that line about we are one of the five biggest


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industries in the country and should be proud to be associated with it and then I got in some very original stuff about ‘pulling together,’ ‘the garment worker of today,’ ‘enlightened top management’ and that old favorite, ‘teamwork’ ” (33). Sid’s dismissive recollection of his speech, which he sees as chock-a-block with standard management rhetoric, reflects how pervasive human relations discourse had become by the early 1950s. Sid’s human relations training is even more obvious when he reflects on his approach to convincing a garment worker to accept the prescribed piece rate: The setting of rates and the reaction by the operators is a routine you have to go over again and again, forever and ever, apparently, as long as there shall be garment plants, superintendents, sewing-machine operators, piece rates, and broken needles. You study carefully and set the rate, say 49 ½ cents a dozen for hemming. You post the rate and then the operator has a fit. She says she can’t make nothing on that rate. She says she’s been here on the line for twenty-three years and no young squirt time-study man is going to push her around. You tell her there’s a lot of factors involved (what would we do without those involved factors?), and that management wants to meet the operators half way and continue to enjoy mutual confidence for the highest production, Sleep Tite quality, and high earnings based on output and ability. The operator says she can’t buy no groceries on mutual confidence and is going to work at the Packing Plant unless something is done about that rate. The other girls in the unit glare at Management and exchange significant looks and talk so much about it all day that production goes off twelve dozen. You promise to analyze the situation and make an “eight hour study” to check for any factors that might have been overlooked (or involved). (133)

Far from Taylor’s days of “no back talk” the routine exchange Sid describes is one of conciliation and compromise. He goes on to explain that after the study, the rate is often raised a miniscule amount. The worker then protests, and in a meeting with the Union President, “ ‘Mutual confidence’ is mentioned” (134). The repetition of this term underscores its function as a shibboleth within human relations discourse, and indeed, it figures prominently in Fortune’s overview of the burgeoning influence of this school of management: In short, poor communications is basically the result of a lack of mutual confidence between management and labor. This occurs on all levels, between sections, departments, divisions, foremen, managers, executives. It can and does exist almost regardless of the number

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of memoranda, house organs, bulletin boards, and conferences. These may help, but good communications are possible only when there is mutual understanding—and trust—over a two-way circuit. As a good many managements now realize, giving orders or instruction or information is not communication.70

In the language of “mutual confidence,” as well as the personal appeals and praise of the workers’ ability, we see a mode of management where the feelings of the worker are manipulated to increase her productivity. In the case of the particular protest that inspires Sid’s meditation on negotiating piece rates, he implores of the operator, “Do me a personal favor and try the rate until the first of the year” (134). He goes on to offer an inspirational speech about her talents: “An operator like you, twenty-three years in here, why there’s nothing to hold you back on a singer machine. Let yourself go. Show us what you can do” (135). The operator, although she acquiesces, dismisses his canned compliments, remarking: “Soft soap . . . . You must buy it by the barrel” (135). This “soft soap” also resembles the language Sid uses in his attempt to seduce Babe. As with the operator, Sid comments on Babe’s distinction from her counterparts. “You know you don’t seem like a small-town girl to me,” he remarks to her. “You seem different somehow from the other girls I see around town” (41). Babe, sensing that he is attempting to manipulate her, responds, “This is the greatest snow job since the blizzard in 1938” (41). Undaunted, Sid expresses surprise when Babe states that she doesn’t go out often. “With a face and a shape like that!” he exclaims (42). Again, she receives his praise skeptically, saying “Calm down now, don’t get excited . . . . I’m terrific, it’s true, but don’t overdo it” (42). In a final bid to get her to agree to go home with him, he actually compliments her as a worker, commenting, “I picked you out the first day I walked through the plant . . . . I saw you there setting sleeves a mile a minute and I said, ‘There’s a small-town dope worth investigating’ ” (44). As he speaks this line, Sid inwardly reflects, “That was a big lie, I hadn’t even noticed her for over a month, or any other girls either . . . . ” (44). Just as the operator scoffs at his “soft soap,” Babe instantly calls him on his ingratiating rhetoric, retorting, “Oh what a big lie . . . . You didn’t even know I was alive until after you’d been here over a month” (44). Yet while both Babe and the sewing-machine operator recognize Sid’s self-interested verbal artifice, both are also swayed by it. This enmeshment of romantic and managerial discourses intensifies when labor unrest begins to simmer at the factory. Sid is a former union member, and he regards the union’s call for a wage increase as


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reasonable given the financial success of the factory and the “industry-wide” trend toward higher pay. Yet Sid’s relationship with Babe complicates his relationship to the union’s actions. As Babe initiates a slowdown at the factory, she also puts a halt to their burgeoning romance, explaining that their relationship is not possible, “As long as you’re the superintendent and I’m a member of the Associated Garment Workers . . . ” (101). At first, Sid treats the slowdown as an understandable act given the circumstances, reflecting of Babe’s participation, “It was funny but Babe’s part in the thing didn’t make me a damn bit mad. She was labor and I was Capital with a big C now and she was doing what I’d have done and what I was perfectly at ease to see her doing in this divine mess” (138). As Sid is confronted with a situation in which both his personal and professional lives are paralyzed, however, he resentfully comes to see the slowdown as the whim of an angry lover: That’s what happens when a woman gets the idea that she is being dramatic. As for the slowdown, she was only doing that out of a determination to stir up some new and unusual emotions, too. She didn’t really give a goddamn about the 7 ½ cents like some of them did, but she sure enjoyed kicking up a fuss, irritating Hasler, getting a hand from the other girls, further complicating our love affair and getting more or less into the movie scenario field (174).

Sid’s interpretation of Babe’s actions as the orchestration of a “movie scenario” recalls Riesman’s claim that female employees’ self-conscious preoccupation with stylized sexuality and “glamour” has infiltrated the workplace. Just as Sid uses the same discursive strategies to seduce the factory employees into working hard and Babe into entering a romantic relationship, he believes that Babe uses a single gesture to fight management and to punish him. The “new and unusual emotions” both feel are understandable, as older conventions of heterosexual romance become entangled with new, emotionally calibrated strategies of human relations. Sid’s interpretation of Babe’s involvement in the slowdown as emotional warfare again highlights the vulnerability that managers as well as workers experience in a work environment where interpersonal feelings are manipulated for the purpose of heightening productivity. To the degree that there is a climax in Bissell’s novel, it comes when Hasler, who has learned that Babe is the instigator of the slow-down, demands that Sid fire her. Although by this point in the narrative Sid’s own patience with his workforce is fraying, he persuades Hasler that

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firing Babe would mean playing into the hands of the union, providing them with a rationale to finally call the strike that they have been threatening. Hasler accepts Sid’s intervention, remarking, “All right then . . . . You’re supposed to know labor relations” (164). Ultimately, however, the larger crisis concerning the labor unrest at the plant is not resolved by Sid. Instead, it is handled by a labor relations consultant, Hoffman, who informs Hasler that his only course of action is to capitulate, explaining, “This is industry-wide stuff. They got a pattern. It’s all cut and dried. You’re not big enough to bust it” (225). Both Hoffman’s introduction into the narrative and his recommendation to Hasler are consistent with Riesman’s assessment of human relations’ impact on labor relations. Riesman claims that businessmen’s eagerness to conform to the demands of consumers and avoid conflict with labor compels them to call on a host of experts, including lawyers, public relations men, market researchers, and management consultants (133). He also argues that labor negotiations themselves have become formulaic as “[f]ollow-the-leader is . . . played in arriving at the price and working conditions of labor; and unions have profited from their ability to play on the wishes of top management to be in stride with the industry leaders, and to be good fellows to boot . . . . ”71 Yet if the new emphasis on emotional attunement drives many businessmen to conform with national wage patterns, such conciliatory behavior is at odds with Hasler’s lingering commitment to competition and the bottom line. Although it is he who summoned Hoffman, he refuses to comply with the consultant’s recommendation. Ultimately, Mr. O’Hara, the owner of the company, intercedes, demanding that the 7 ½ cent increase be put in place retroactive to within a month of when other firms had instituted it—a gesture that encodes the ascendancy of the communal impulses that Riesman identifies. Marginalized by these machinations, Sid’s gender position is ambiguous at the conclusion of the text. He announces the wage increase to the employees, then quits, certain that Hasler will fire him once the holiday season is over. He then returns to Chicago with Babe, having won her love even if he did not solve the labor conflict. The emphasis on this personal triumph might suggest that 7 ½ Cents finally stresses Sid’s domestic arrangements more than his professional existence. Yet Sid has not cast aside his ambitions: rather, he remains sanguine that he’ll be rehired by his old employer in Chicago. Although his choice to quit is rather surprising since it leaves the factory understaffed at its crucial moment of pre-holiday production, it also can be read as an occasion when Sid reasserts his sense of


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autonomy. Breaking from the ranks of organization men, he opts for “changing reality”—to use Whyte’s term—rather than “adjust[ing] to the group.” By quitting, however, Sid definitively disavows Hasler’s model both of management and of masculinity. Near the conclusion of the novel, Sid recalls Babe’s concerned remark, “Oh Sid, don’t you see, you shouldn’t be mixed up with a man like that. After a few years you’ll turn into a Hasler yourself” (229). His choice to quit can be understood as defiance of this prediction, and more broadly, as a renewed commitment to a form of management that makes him more lover than fighter. In 1954 Bissell, along with George Abbott, turned the novel into a hit musical that enjoyed a run of 1,063 performances at the St. James Theater on Broadway.72 The play, in turn, was made into a film starring John Raitt and Doris Day and directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen; it is that film adaptation that I’ll discuss here. While the novel focuses exclusively on the relationship of Babe and Sid, its adaptations balance that relationship with a second between Vernon Hines, the time-study man of the novel, and a new character, Gladys Hotchkiss, a secretary at the factory. The relationship between Hines and Gladys provides a foil for the relationship of Babe and Sid, figuring alternative forms of labor relations: the former couple subjects one another to distrust and betrayal, in contrast to the latter, which models a relationship of communication and accommodation. While Bissell’s novel equates management with seduction, The Pajama Game treats the relationship between manager and worker more like a marriage in which both parties must be loyal and willing to compromise. For the purposes of stage and screen, Bissell recasts the central romantic plot in more dramatic terms, polarizing Sid and Babe through starker associations with both masculinity and femininity, and management and labor. Sid is presented as more authoritative and conventionally masculine, shoving a male worker who defies him to the ground and firing Babe when he realizes she has sabotaged a machine in the plant. While in the novel, Sid has a brief affair with a rich woman in town, in the film these shades of gray in his character are eliminated. His infidelity becomes a heroic gesture: he takes out his coworker Gladys only in order to convince her to give him the key to Hasler’s ledger so he can resolve the labor dispute. And resolve it he does—in The Pajama Game, there is no labor consultant; it is Sid who confronts Hasler and forces him to compromise with the union. Babe is likewise presented in more archetypal terms. While she displays a cynical edge on the page, she is sweeter and more conventionally feminine in the film, qualities that are reflected in the casting

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of Doris Day. Yet sweetness is not the whole story in the adaptation of Babe’s character. While in the novel Babe epitomizes the larger female workforce that Sid must seduce, the new Babe functions as a synecdoche for the union with which Sid must learn to cooperate. She is no longer simply a faithful member of the AGW, but is head of the grievance committee and a union leader. Strong and resolute in her commitment to organized labor, she explains to Sid, “I happen to think there are certain things a person has to stand for in this life.” At first glance, the film’s increased emphasis on Babe’s association with the union, and its more elaborate and unsympathetic portrait of that organization, seem to overshadow the relationship between gender and contemporary management practices with which the novel is concerned. In its opening minutes, the film’s music hints that issues of gender will be central to Sid’s task as manager. Sid marches toward the factory to the tune of martial music that evokes the commanding style of management he plans to employ in his new job. Then, as he passes through the threshold of the plant and encounters the women working on the machines, the music softens, ironizing his intentions of command-and-control. Despite this initial sequence, however, the film generally departs from the novel by presenting the union, rather than female workers per se, as the key challenge to Sid’s authority. One inventively choreographed scene, for instance, features all of the workers, male and female alike, shifting into slow motion in order to protest Hasler’s recalcitrant stand on their requested wage increase. The adaptation also introduces a character known as “Prez,” the male president of the union, who is often shown leading the resistance to management. Nor is the union of The Pajama Game the relatively benign organization presented in the novel. Although the novel mocks the redbaiting of Fulton Lewis, Jr., the film adopts a disparaging view of unions consistent with Lewis’s McCarthyism. In 7½ Cents Sid himself is a former union member with deep sympathies for organized labor, but the updated Sid has no such ties. Similarly, while the workers in the novel limit their resistance to a slow-down, in the film they commit multiple acts of sabotage. Indeed Babe herself commits a flagrant act of sabotage, in response to which Sid fires her. This hostility toward organized labor comes into focus most clearly in the staging of a union meeting: As “Prez” makes a fiery speech before enormous banners, the evocation of a fascist political rally is unmistakable. While such a scathing portrait of the unions might suggest that the film takes a bleak perspective on labor-management relations, instead it becomes the occasion to underscore the degree of effort


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which management must expend to “relate” to labor—effort that is again characterized in gendered terms. That is, by making Babe the frequent spokesperson for the union, and presenting the union in starkly negative terms, the film establishes the challenge that Sid-asmanager faces in creating a stable relationship with Babe-as-union. Interestingly, the film deploys the relationship of a second pair of lovers, Hines and Gladys, to underscore Sid and Babe’s successful negotiation of the labor-management dynamic. If Sid and Babe are icons of masculinity and femininity respectively, their alter-egos, Hines and Gladys embody a host of negative characteristics. While the Hines of the novel is a level-headed administrator, he is reimagined as an alcoholic who is tortured by chronic jealousy. In rewriting Hines in these terms, Bissell and Abbot associate time-study (and scientific management in general) with distrust of employees. In the opening musical number, as Hines rushes the workers onward in their work, we are reminded that scientific management places no trust in them to perform efficiently without relentless pressure. Most absurdly, the character of Hines is also provided with a new hobby: knife-throwing. On one level, of course, this embellishment becomes the opportunity for some theatrical high jinks. Yet it functions on several thematic levels as well. The combination of Hines’s alcoholism and his hobby make for scenes where he wildly hurls his knives, first at Babe and later at Gladys. Given the phallic connotations of knife-throwing, these moments are redolent of both sexual violence and, given his poor aim, impotence. The knife throwing also speaks to a form of masculine aggression that associates Hines with Hasler’s macho warrior rhetoric. Near the conclusion of the film, Hines reacts to Gladys’s purported infidelity by hurling knives at her rather than attempting to communicate with or understand her. This eerie scene, in which Gladys cowers in a stockroom at the factory as Hines stalks her with his knife, invites the audience to see the scientific manager as rapist. Gladys, meanwhile, is Babe’s opposite: untrustworthy and disloyal. A white-collar girl, Gladys introduces an emphasis on glamour that is only hinted at in the novel’s portrait of Mabel. Gladys is interested in dating her male coworkers—not only her steady, Hines, but also Sid himself. This mild promiscuity places Gladys at the crux of two storylines. For while Hines struggles to trust Gladys as his girlfriend, Mr. Hasler entrusts Gladys with the key to his accounting books, remarking, “If I can’t trust Gladys, who can I trust?” She ultimately betrays the trust of both men, going out with Sid, who persuades her to relinquish Hasler’s key. If Hines can be construed as a bad romantic

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partner and a bad manager, Gladys can likewise be understood as an unworthy girlfriend and an irresponsible employee. While Taylor chose animal metaphors to describe unsatisfactory employees—once explaining that, “Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing”—in the era of human relations, the bad worker is equated with a particular kind of woman, specifically a lying, cheating girlfriend.73 In contrast to the knife-throwing fit of jealousy that marks the climax of the Gladys-Hines storyline, Babe and Sid manage to negotiate their relationship both as lovers and as boss and unionized employee successfully. They do undergo a test in both regards: in fact, the central violation of trust between Sid and Babe is also the most aggressive challenge by the workers toward management. Babe sabotages a sewing machine, an act that disrupts production throughout the factory and moves Sid to fire her. Hasler views this and the workers’ subsequent plot to improperly sew the waist button on the pajamas, literally leaving the company with its pants down, as “open rebellion.” Again represented as an unyielding bully, invested in fighting to the detriment of his company, Hasler expresses his desire to retaliate for these acts of sabotage by firing all of the workers. Yet Sid resists this plan, exclaiming, “Let me make my position clear. I’m for the company, first, last, and always. But labor problems have got to end up in one way: compromise.” By the end, Sid succeeds in creating a compromise not only between Hasler and the union but also between Babe and himself. The conclusion of The Pajama Game offers an unequivocal celebration of these values of trust and compromise. The final scene shows Hasler happily transformed into a friend to his workers, participating in an intimate pajama fashion show with the staff and line, where he makes a speech heralding their new sense of harmony and solidarity. His aggressive masculine investment in fighting has been entirely effaced, not only from his speech but from his body, as he dances among them in the soft pajamas that are their bread and butter.

White-Collar Girls To David Riesman’s mind, mid-century factories remained bastions of inner-direction, where the need to glad hand was held to a minimum. Yet Bissell’s page, stage, and screen portraits of a pajama factory challenge the assumption that factory workers of this period all emanated from the masculine state of mind Riesman calls Missouri. Instead, the “pajama game” is played by a coed workforce whose


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human (inter)relations in the factory are negotiated through the conventions of heterosexual romance and seduction. If Bissell’s texts highlight a softening of work in the American factory, others capture a similar transformation in the office place. In his account of false personalization Riesman characterizes female office employees as too willing to grasp the glad hand that is extended to them by managers trained in the “mood engineering” of human relations management theory.74 He supports his claim by analyzing the “attitudes toward women’s office work” expressed in two Chicago newspapers. He suggests that while the Tribune’s column, “White Collar Girl,” “stands by the older values of job-mindedness,” The Sun-Times, “speaks implicitly for the newer values of personalization.”75 The latter, he writes, “project[s] the sense of a personnel-managed economy in which most executives are dutifully other-directed and, whether male or female, interested in the girls as more than the ‘help,’ in fact, as glamour-exuding personalities.”76 According to Riesman, the Sun-Times interpellates a new subject known as the “career girl”—a subset of white-collar girls induced to an ever more comprehensive commitment to work by columns detailing methods of “successful self-promotion by glamorous women, and articles on the psychology of office relationships.”77 In all of this, Riesman detects “a much closer connection between styles of sociability at leisure and at the work place” than were conceivable in an earlier work culture.78 In its references to glamour, Riesman’s analysis implies that human relations and sexual relations are inevitably intermingled when men and women introduce private interactions and feelings into the public work environment. While a full reading of the newspaper columns from which Riesman derives these views is beyond the scope of this chapter, for now it must suffice to note that even in “White Collar Girl,” which Riesman portrays as the column less inclined to promote an emotional relationship between secretaries and bosses, there are entries that reflect a shift in emphasis from “the nonglamorous skills of shorthand and typing” to the fulfillment of the boss’s more personal needs.79 One of the very first “White Collar Girl” columns published in the early 1940s, for instance, appeared in the following form: Joan of Arc to your boss’ foes, Florence Nightingale to his woes. Dale Carnegie to his psycho bug, And Gunga Din to his water jug. Hedy Lamarr to his roving e’e,

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Emily Post to his family. The perfect stooge for all his jokes, Simon Legree when he oversmokes. Izaak Walton in fishing season, Gen. MacArthur for any reason. All these people you must be To be the Perfect Secret’ry. —The Belle of Clearing80

The references here to the consoling role the “Perfect Secret’ry” must play for her boss’s “woes”—and, more ominously, his “psycho bug”— suggests the emotional exchange, the “seeing,” to which Riesman objects. The secretary’s obligations to the boss’s family also convey the fungibility between work and home that characterizes the post-War office place as it has been shaped by human relations discourse. Among the roles of martyr, nurse, therapist, domestic servant, etiquette advisor, disciplinarian, chronicler, and loyal soldier, too, is tucked the image of seductress in the reference to glamorous Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr. In this early manifesto of the responsibilities of the white-collar girl, she must oblige the ostensible desire of her male employer for magic and romance. Riesman presents such a sensibility as a by-product of a human relations work culture that has humanized, and thus inevitably sexualized, the dynamics of the office. A second entry from the same period, entitled “Romance in the Office,” and attributed to “G.C.M.” is even more to the point: One glance from you, Tho meaningless and swift Can stir my heart— And send my thoughts adrift. When you’re not near It’s simple to be cool, For then my thoughts are sane My head can rule. MOR AL: White Collar Girls, prepare to take a Loss If you insist on falling for the boss!81

While this poem asserts the discomfort and danger of “falling for the boss,” it also captures the allure and excitement of such an office romance. These examples of the “White Collar Girl” column suggest that, as Riesman laments, white-collar girls and their bosses were


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indeed relating—were “seeing” each other—in ways that promised to make the workplace an increasingly emotional realm. Riesman feared that these emotional entanglements would delay the inevitable obsolescence of work itself. By 1960, ten years after the first publication of Riesman’s study, Billy Wilder’s Academy Award–winning film The Apartment suggests that the new sexualization of the corporate office spurred by human relations discourse is even more complex and multivalent than Riesman’s analysis suggests.82 Set in 1959 in New York City, The Apartment tells the story of C.C. Baxter, an insurance agent who, he informs us in an introductory voiceover, is one of 31,259 employees at the Consolidated Life Insurance Company. The opening of the film finds Baxter caught in a physically and emotionally taxing arrangement in which four of his corporate superiors expect him to regularly loan them his apartment so they can enjoy private assignations with their mistresses, most of whom are their female employees—white-collar girls. While Riesman assigns women the role as aggressors in the pursuit of relationships with “the boss,” Wilder’s film takes as one of its central premises the predatory attitude of male executives toward their female staff. Even as Wilder complicates the issue of culpability in the sexual dynamics of the new, soft office place, however, he shares Riesman and Whyte’s skepticism about the human cost of human relations. In contrast to Bissell’s relatively complacent portrait of the flirtations of Sid and Babe, Wilder is far more critical of the emotional manipulations unleashed by this new work culture. In the first half of his film, what appears to be at stake in these management practices are Baxter’s prospects for achieving the conventions of autonomous masculinity. Yet, by its conclusion, the film’s most palpable aversion to the work culture it depicts is expressed less in terms of the violation of Baxter’s masculinity than of his human dignity. If Bissell figures the human relations dynamic between male manager and female employee as seduction and scientific management as rape, Wilder presents human relations management in the American office place as the prostitution of both female and male workers to male management. Ultimately, as in Vonnegut’s Player Piano, the complexities of soft management culture move Wilder’s film beyond traditional gender conventions, this time through the figure of the mensch. Despite early references to a monthly efficiency report, human relations management techniques are far more prevalent in The Apartment than such Taylorist practices. Early in the film, as Baxter is receiving his first promotion, he is informed that his superiors have characterized

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him as “loyal, cooperative, [and] resourceful,” judgments of his personality that reflect the new emphasis on workers’ emotional engagement with and social adjustment to their workplace. Certainly, cooperation is the key to Baxter’s advancement at the firm. Promoting him for his willingness to surrender his apartment, his managers compliment him on his sense of “teamwork,” with one adding, “That’s what counts in an organization like this.” The incentives that motivate Baxter are likewise part of the new human relations work culture that Riesman understands to obscure the line between work and leisure. When the head of Personnel, Jeff Sheldrake, offers Baxter a second promotion at the conclusion of the film, he promises Baxter a key to the executive washroom, an expense account, and access to the executive dining room. Such amenities, which make the workplace like a home and many leisure activities part of work, are the reason, in Riesman’s view, that there is “much strenuous ‘play’ [in] the glad handers’ work and much group-adjustive ‘work’ [in] their play.”83 The Apartment unmistakably critiques several dimensions of this contemporary work culture. At one level, it is a social satire about the pervasiveness of infidelity among male executives. Much of its comedy is generated by the endless sexual exploits of the handful of executives to whom Baxter feels professionally obliged to loan his apartment. One could infer from their behavior that in the corporate offices of the 1950s, more energy was given to extramarital sex than to economic productivity. Yet the film is also about what it takes for an ambitious young man to get ahead in a vast postwar corporation, where people skills and personal accommodation supplant more immediate measures of material output. In these terms, it hardly seems a coincidence that the film’s villain, Jeff Sheldrake, is the head of Personnel. When Baxter finally rejects the endless pressure to conform to the demands of his superiors with regard to his apartment, Sheldrake expresses shock that Baxter would sabotage his own career after, as Sheldrake puts it, “I picked you for my team.” Yet each time we see this “team” of philanderers in action, the moral consequences of Baxter’s position within an organization that demands complete cooperation with the norms of management are underscored and the potential shortcomings—and plain distastefulness—of such a management philosophy are viscerally conveyed. Like Riesman’s study, The Apartment explores how the particular accommodations required by a human relations–era workplace shape the identity of those enmeshed in its operations. This problem of identity is immediately foregrounded in the opening scene when we are confronted with an image first of the vast New York skyline, then


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a huge office space filled with rows of hundreds of identical, perfectly aligned desks. Baxter provides a voiceover in which he cites the current population of New York as 8,042,783 and the number of employees at his company as 31,259. The enormity of such figures suggests the struggle to distinguish oneself, and this struggle is accentuated further by Baxter’s failure to identify himself in these opening images. The company’s name, “Consolidated Life,” with its implications of a uniform mass, further signals Baxter’s invisibility. Yet perhaps most telling are his initials, which indicates that he is a carbon copy of every other corporate employee. The degree to which Baxter’s struggle for an identity is gendered becomes clear in the next sequence, where the action shifts to his apartment. In the most fundamental of ways, the arrangement Baxter has struck with his employers reflects the effacement of the boundary between home and workplace that Riesman identifies. Indeed, Baxter’s very career advancement depends on his home itself. It is not that Baxter does his work at home, but that his home is his work, given that it is his apartment that provides him his professional distinction and wins him promotions. The particular feminization Baxter suffers as a consequence of this arrangement begins to come into focus when he first enters his apartment after one of his superiors, Kirkeby, has departed with his mistress. He is immediately placed in the role of housekeeper, cleaning up the mess they leave, washing their dishes, and replenishing stocks of liquor and hors d’oeuvres Kirkeby and his cohorts want on hand for their trysts. In these images of domestic labor we might remember the “Belle of Clearing’s” image of a secretary as Gunga Din with a water jug. And, indeed, in a later scene in which Baxter attempts to organize the elaborate schedule of appointments for his apartment in a protracted series of phone calls from his desk, he resembles nothing so much as a secretary. In these scenes Baxter is just another “white-collar girl.” It is also significant to the gender concerns of the film that, while his space is used for sexual liaisons, Baxter is not personally enjoying such conquests. In this same early sequence involving his apartment, his neighbor, Doctor Dreyfuss, expresses both awe and dismay at what he imagines to be Baxter’s sexual exploits. Unaware of his neighbor’s arrangement with his superiors, Dreyfuss gathers from the sounds he hears through the wall that Baxter is involved in constant sexual activity—even remarking that Baxter occasionally enjoys a “twilight double header.” Convinced that such sexual energy distinguishes Baxter as an “iron man all round,” Dreyfuss asks that Baxter make a provision in his will to donate his body to researchers at

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Columbia Medical Center. At this suggestion, Baxter responds, “My body? I’m afraid you guys would be disappointed.” In this remark, we see that Baxter’s anonymity is matched by his sense of failing to meet a cultural standard of masculine virility. This verbal objectification of Baxter’s body also foreshadows its figurative prostitution in the film. The Apartment portrays public virility as part of the currency of the contemporary workplace, where men’s power is achieved in part through the sexual control they exert over secretaries, elevator operators, and other female co-workers. Baxter’s virility, by contrast, continues to be ironized in the scene immediately following Dreyfuss’s request. Forced to surrender his apartment and left to sleep on a park bench, Baxter finds himself weak and feverish the following day. The coincidence of these events begins to illuminate the ways that the invasion of Baxter’s apartment figures for violation of his body. As his key is passed from one male executive to another and his private space is invaded again and again, Baxter appears increasingly subjugated and feminized. Like his female co-workers, he is a victim of the sexual economy of his workplace. A potential antidote to this feminization emerges when Baxter falls for a young woman in the office, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). As a prospective sexual partner, Kubelik’s capacity to establish Baxter’s own workplace virility is obvious. Yet Kubelik also seems to promise to convey him into the more abstract realm of professional masculinity from which he has been excluded, a possibility that is symbolized by her job as an elevator operator. While Baxter’s apartment ultimately becomes the space where he is transformed into a new order of man, his corporate environment provides the more conventional geography of gender roles to which he initially subscribes. Baxter sits at desk number 861—one of hundreds of identical desks—working among an enormous mass of men and women. On the higher floors are individual offices occupied by the company executives, all of whom are male. A visual register is immediately established, then, in which higher, individuated spaces are associated with masculinity, while lower, uniform spaces signify femininity. This sense of the feminine as a mass identity is reinforced by images of rows of women plugged into headsets working the company’s switchboards with machine-like routinization. Baxter aspires to move upward into a private office with his name on the door, an ascent that would implicitly lend him individuality and shift him from the feminine register to the masculine. Indeed, as he continues to allow the use of his apartment, both he and those who use his space assure him that he is “on [his] way up.” Kubelik literally has the capacity to move Baxter upward


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into the higher reaches of the corporate structure both figuratively and literally, then, by serving as the means of establishing his office place virility and by operating the elevator on which he routinely rides. Yet she also offers him this opportunity through a third, more oblique route. Baxter develops an attachment to Miss Kubelik, only to learn that Sheldrake is involved in an extramarital affair with her and intends to make Baxter’s prospects for advancement at the company contingent on access to his apartment for their liaisons. Rather than playing out Baxter’s potential to use Kubelik to achieve masculine power, The Apartment increasingly draws parallels between them as victims of sexual exploitation. Miss Kubelik is used ruthlessly by Sheldrake, who chronically lies to her in order to continue their physical relationship. The degree to which Sheldrake demands that Kubelik prostitute herself to him becomes most salient in a scene set at the apartment, in which, having failed to buy her a Christmas gift, Sheldrake gives her a hundred dollars. The dialogue of the scene draws a direct connection between Kubelik’s position in relation to Sheldrake and Baxter’s own victimization at his hands. Numbly moving toward the bedroom, Kubelik indicates that she and Sheldrake should have sex “as long as it [is] paid for,” making explicit her despondent sense that he thinks of her as a prostitute. She immediately adds that, “you must be paying somebody something for the use of the apartment,” linking Baxter himself into the circuit of sex and money the scene depicts. This comment reinforces both Baxter’s complicity in the abuse of Miss Kubelik and his own prostitution of his private space for the professional advancement it earns him. The unisex nature of the exploitation that Sheldrake commits as the head of personnel is best summed up when Kubelik remarks of Sheldrake, “He’s a taker. Some people take. Some people get took”—a generalized vision of exploitation that retains its sexual connotations in the language of “taking.” Both Kubelik and Baxter, then, are associated with spaces that are routinely occupied by men who use them to revel in their own sense of professional and sexual power. Both are shown attempting to resist these invasions; in an early conversation with Sheldrake at a restaurant, Kubelik refers to herself as an elevator, remarking flatly, “I’m sorry Mr. Sheldrake, I’m full up. You’ll have to take the next elevator.” Shortly after, Baxter resists the executives’ entreaties to provide more access to his apartment, remarking, “it’s private property. It’s not a public playground.” Yet they are overcome by the pressures applied to them, a fact dramatized when Miss Kubelik, left alone in Baxter’s apartment to contemplate the money Sheldrake has given

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her before joining his family for Christmas Eve, attempts suicide. Baxter discovers Kubelik in a near-coma from taking a bottle of his sleeping pills, and he and Dr. Dreyfuss struggle throughout the night to revive her. The devastation wreaked on Miss Kubelik’s body by her relationship with Sheldrake is conveyed powerfully as it is carried and dragged, and her face is repeatedly slapped by the doctor as he attempts to keep her awake. In general, the portion of Wilder’s film that depicts Kubelik’s suicide attempt seems a markedly dark interlude in a comedic rather than dramatic film.84 The protracted attention it gives to Kubelik’s imperiled body brings into focus the particularly dire stakes for women employees in a work culture where they are viewed as glamorous—and disposable—sex objects. She has fallen prey to a corporate dynamic in which masculinity is predicated on a combination of sexual conquest and upward spatial mobility of which she, as mistress/elevator operator, serves as object and vehicle. The negative force of this culture is conveyed not only through her battered body but also her shattered sense of self, symbolized by the broken mirror that she carries with her because, as she puts it, “It makes me look the way I feel.” While Kubelik suffers the most grievous injuries from her suicide attempt, Baxter’s attachment to, and identification with, her means that he also suffers as he confronts her wrecked presence in his apartment. Yet Baxter also shares some responsibility for her state, and this episode provides the turning point in the film where he decisively breaks from his male colleagues and their sexual practices. In the wake of Kubelik’s suicide attempt, Dr. Dreyfuss implores Baxter to become “a mensch . . . a human being.” Humane and generous throughout the film, Dreyfuss emerges at this point as an alternative to the predatory model of masculine power Baxter is exposed to in the office place. That Dreyfuss is associated with the apartment building, where he apparently enjoys a loving partnership with his wife, emphasizes the potential of domestic space to offer a corrective to (rather than simply a new frontier of) work culture. His manifest Jewish identity (and the Yiddish/German etymology of “mensch”) lends additional historical dimension to his call for humane behavior, evoking as it does Europe’s recent history of predatory masculine power on a global scale.85 Importantly, Baxter’s primary means of meeting Dreyfuss’s challenge to become a mensch is to care for Miss Kubelik, cooking for her, hiding items she might use to harm herself, and attempting to distract her with card games. The dialogue foregrounds his caretaking, with both Kubelik and Sheldrake referring to Baxter as her


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“nurse.” Significantly, this care-taking coincides with Baxter’s reclaiming of the interior of his apartment. It is during his oversight of her convalescence that he first denies the attempt of one of his superiors to bring a mistress to the apartment. “Are you going to leave?” Baxter asks, “Or am I going to have to throw you out?” His simultaneous care for Kubelik and denial of the executive’s entry suggests a habitation of his physical spaces with a subjectivity that cannot be violated. While such self-assertion could be understood in conventionally masculine terms—that is, Baxter is simply becoming a man, rather than a mensch—this transformation is enacted in the private sphere of his apartment through a series of unequivocally domestic acts. He is undergoing a transformation that is as much about conventional femininity as masculinity. Ultimately, Baxter demonstrates that he has become a mensch—a human being who, in Dreyfuss’s sense of the term, transcends the limits of traditional gender categories—when he defies Sheldrake by returning the key to the executive washroom while refusing to relinquish the key to his apartment. This moment, in which the two keys present alternative futures for Baxter, reveals the executive washroom as nothing more than the stunted and abject offspring of the marriage of home and workplace that Riesman describes. In finally reclaiming his domestic/private space, while rejecting the ultimate token of professional masculinity in the era of human relations, Baxter establishes both his autonomy and his investment in a private sphere separate from the masculine arena of work. In the final scene Baxter’s new, more complex and fluid identity is emphasized. When Kubelik rushes to his apartment, she is met with a tableau that again combines masculine and feminine imagery: he appears at the door of his domestic space carrying a newly uncorked champagne bottle that is spewing its contents suggestively. This ambiguity is reinforced by the revelation that he is in the final stages of packing his apartment. When Miss Kubelik asks him where he is going, his answer, “who knows, another neighborhood, another town, another job . . . ” suggests a mobility and freedom that contrasts dramatically with the “executive track” on which he had previously been locked.

“Breaking a Fresh Egg” This chapter has explored the overlooked history of women’s involvement in the evolution of human relations management and the degree to which the work of William H. Whyte, Jr., and David Riesman provided early commentary on the gendered stakes of its

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implementation. It has also examined popular texts from page, stage, and screen that further complicate our understanding of what sorts of transformations of work and workers were produced by the widespread application of human relations in factories and offices across America. To grasp the larger implications of the new association between work and emotion I have been tracing here and in the previous chapter, it is helpful to revisit the aspect of the labor process which the mood engineering of human relations has arguably replaced: namely, skill. From a traditional Marxist perspective, it was the satisfaction that workers took in their own skill that prevented them from being alienated from their labor. Marxist critic Harry Braverman explains, “For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery—that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production.”86 For Braverman, to exercise skill is to exert intellectual as well as physical control over a task from inception to completion. This emphasis on knowledge suggests the implications the concept of skill has for discussions of gender. While Braverman discusses the deskilling of secretaries along with factory workers, for him the quintessential skilled worker is the (male) cabinet maker. In seeking to define skill, Braverman quotes an unpublished colleague: When a cabinet maker is skilled in his craft, skill covers his ability to imagine how things would appear in final form if such and such tools and materials were used. When he can estimate accurately both aesthetic appeal and functional utility, organize his tools, his power and his materials in a way which accomplishes his task and gives him livelihood and recognition—then, we are speaking of his skill.87

The skilled worker is the thinking worker, imagining, estimating, organizing. This mindful quality within the tradition of work has been a key element of its association with masculinity. It is industrialism, not human relations, which Braverman and others have blamed for stripping work of its mental component. In his well-known critique of labor practices, Braverman identifies the “Babbage Principle”—the systematic breakdown of every task into units to be performed as cheaply as possible—as the true pollutant of skill and characterizes Taylorism as a significant accelerant of this process.88 By the twentieth century, the larger conceptual understanding of most forms of work was progressively concentrated in the hands of management, while workers were left to go through the mechanical


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motions of production.89 The worker became primarily a body, and while Taylor himself famously opted for analogies between workers and animals to capture this embodied condition, to render workers mere bodies is also to feminize them. Braverman resists claims for the revolutionary impact of human relations, instead maintaining that its management techniques do little more than add a bit of soft padding to the hard reality of Taylorism. He dismisses the reforms implemented by Mayo and others, complaining They are characterized by a studied pretense of worker “participation,” a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illusion of making decisions by choosing among fixed and limited alternatives designed by a management which deliberately leaves insignificant matters open to choice.90

In response to claims that human relations ended the sovereignty of scientific management, Braverman argues that “[w]ork itself is organized according to Taylorian principles, while personnel departments and academics have busied themselves with the selection, training, manipulation, pacification, and adjustment of ‘manpower’ to suit the work process so organized.” 91 According to Braverman, the drive for efficiency that Taylor set in motion is still the primary concern of American managers. And, indeed, patterns of downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring, and restructuring, along with the automation of various industries, can be seen as the legacies of Taylorism. Yet even as Braverman dismisses the impact of human relations, he also identifies one of its most powerful effects. If Babbage and Taylor stripped work of the mental element of skill, human relations adds to it a new component of feeling. When reaching for an apt metaphor for this new mode of management, Braverman characterizes it in terms of the irrational emotions and consumer sensibilities of women. He writes One can best compare this style of management with the marketing strategy followed by those who, having discovered that housewives resent prepared baking mixes and feel guilty when using them, arrange for the removal of the powdered egg and restore to the consumer the thrill of breaking a fresh egg into the mix, thereby creating an “image” of skilled baking, wholesome products, etc.92

In the regime of human relations, workers become resentful and guilt-laden “housewives,” whose work has been reduced to pouring a baking mix in a bowl, and whose inclination to feel rather than think

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makes them vulnerable to slick marketing techniques. Human relations here is about selling work to workers, as Boulwarism made explicit. Yet in Braverman’s account the work that is being marketed through human relations appears even worse than the mindless brand developed by Babbage and perfected by Taylor; this new line of work is not simply emptied of thought, it is suffused with feeling. Implementing human relations strategies in the workplace involves replacing the complex mental processes of skill with the faux skills of cooperation that Braverman equates with “breaking a fresh egg” into a baking mix. From this perspective, human relations is an insulting new stage of the alienation of labor: while management controls all knowledge, it infects workers with emotions. By replacing the authentic satisfaction of applying one’s knowledge in an act of production with the salve of feeling emotionally adjusted to the social dynamics of the workplace, human relations mystifies actual power structures and further degrades workers by completing their transformation from animals or machines to women. The tensions between skill and feeling, mind and heart, and masculinity and femininity that have shaped the so-called labor process debate that Braverman enjoined are all evident in the texts under investigation in this chapter. Yet in their fictional renderings of the workplace of the human relations era, Richard Bissell and Billy Wilder portray the introduction of feelings into the workplace as far more than a superficial marketing gesture or a the peddling of a cheap knock-off of skill. Both Bissell’s and Wilder’s texts equate this new mode of management with various forms of gendered intercourse— seduction, marriage, prostitution. They suggest that workers are not commanded and subjugated, but seduced with the acknowledgement of their desirability as people and workers. Managers, meanwhile, are not abstract receptacles of knowledge and power, but human subjects—desiring subjects. If Boulwarism transforms workers into customers of their jobs, human relations more generally transforms managers into consumers of their workers. In the case of The Pajama Game, this dynamic of seduction does not leave either Babe or the larger workforce more objectified and disempowered. Instead, the very concession of lack, and hence desire, on the part of Sid as both man and manager produces negotiation and compromise rather than a rigid polarity between worker and management and women and men. In The Apartment, the practices of management are represented as far more ruthless and violating. Emotional rhetoric of cooperation is used to coerce both Miss Kubelik and Baxter into assenting to debasing exploitation. The breakdown between private and public


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space that serves as a crucial technique in the repackaging of work by human relations is the means by which this fragmenting assault on the subjectivity of these employees takes place. Yet this remapping of men and women into both public and private domains is also the crucial spur to remaking Baxter, the manager-in-training, into a “human being,” who transcends some of the forms of power and control associated with more conventional notions of work and masculinity. In the following two chapters of this book I turn to the next stage of management’s infiltration of “the depths of the human soul”—the rise of self-actualization as a motivation for workers.93 The development of human relations was only the first of several transformations in American work culture in the post-Taylor age. In the years after his experiments at the Harwood Pajama factory, for instance, Lewin went on to develop a method of management training known as the “T-group,” which brought groups of managers together to analyze and dissect the specifics of their interactions with one another. As Nikolas Rose explains, the self-consciousness required of these training groups moved discussions of management beyond the domain of group dynamics toward the idea of self-improvement. “The aspirations of management and the conditions of effective functioning at occupational tasks had been fused with the pathway of the individual to self-awareness.” 94 Human relations focused on the emotional fulfillment of workers within the social space of the workplace; Lewin, along with several other researchers, began to shift the emphasis toward individuals’ relationships with their jobs as potential sources of personal growth. Rose goes on to explain In the psychologies of human relations, work itself could become the privileged space for the satisfaction of the social needs of individuals. In the psychologies of self-actualization, work is no longer necessarily a constraint upon the freedom of the individual to fulfill his or her potential through the strivings of the psychic economy for autonomy, creativity, and responsibility.95

The next chapter will consider how psychologist and management theorist Abraham Maslow developed and popularized this notion of work as a source of self-actualization in management circles and also served as a mentor for Betty Friedan as she wrote The Feminine Mystique. The shared origins of contemporary management theory and liberal feminism are evident in the novels of feminist writers Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy, who depict the liberal feminist as the ideal worker of the postindustrial age.


CH A P T ER

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Automating Feminism: Self-Actualization versus the Post-Work Society in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man

The first two chapters of this study have analyzed narratives that register the changes in the American gender formation that coincided with the development of human relations management. As Gabor and Rose have documented, human relations gradually fell out of favor in the 1960s as a backlash of rationalist management techniques gained currency.1 Yet even as Robert McNamara and his notorious bean counters worked at R AND to vanquish what Roethlisberger called the “soft, gooey data” of human relations research, a new set of soft management theories concerned with “self-actualization” were beginning to take shape.2 While human relations was concerned with social adjustment and cooperation, self-actualizing management posited that humans must strive to fulfill their full potential as individuals. Within this new discourse, Rose explains, “The worker is portrayed neither as an economic actor, rationally pursuing financial advantage, nor as a social creature seeking satisfaction of needs for solidarity and security. The worker is an individual in search of meaning, responsibility, a sense of personal achievement, a maximized ‘quality of life’, and hence of work.”3 The architect of much of this theory in America was psychologist Abraham Maslow, who in 1954 published a study that argued that humans are motivated by a “hierarchy of needs,” the highest of which is “self-actualization.” While it was not until the 1960s that Maslow actually began his career as a management theorist, his early work on motivation immediately gained the attention of business thinkers. Nor was his influence limited to the field of management; it was

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Maslow’s concept of self-actualization that largely inspired Betty Friedan’s claim in The Feminine Mystique that women were being denied the opportunity to be complete selves. While the impact of Maslow’s thought on American work culture has been widely credited, and a few historians have acknowledged his influence on Friedan, the fact that modern management theory and contemporary feminism share the same theoretical origins has been largely overlooked.4 Self-actualization, as it was assimilated into both feminist and management discourse, encouraged an unprecedented investment in work as a source of identity. According to Rose, “In the new developments in management thought, work is no longer an obligation imposed on individuals, nor an activity only undertaken for instrumental reasons. Work itself is a means of self-fulfillment, and the pathway to company profit is also the pathway to individual selfactualization.”5 This embrace of work was at odds with the thinking of many in the New Left, who regarded the advent of postindustrialism not as an opportunity for more fulfilling work, but instead as the occasion to liberate oneself from work altogether. Given the current statistics about the dramatic number of hours Americans work, it is clear that, in the long run, commitment to work won the day.6 As this chapter and the next suggest, the profound quest for self that many feminists embarked on made them the ideal employees of the era of self-actualizing work. While male workers might look askance at selfactualizing management rhetoric as the latest manipulative fad, the apparently political origins of these ideas in the work of Friedan and liberal feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) lent the connection between work and self-fulfillment a credibility that has sustained a generation of feminist rhetoric about empowerment through career. The emergence of women as model workers has, predictably, further softened the longstanding association between work and masculinity. Yet it has also led to a series of strange inversions, in which work morphs into “overwork” and “workaholism,” and what was once empowering is recast as a feminizing affliction. It is difficult to think of a novel more indebted to both the managerial and feminist brands of self-actualization than Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. In this chapter I will read The Female Man not only as a classic instance of postmodern form, but as a narrative obsessed with the implications of soft work for women. Specifically, Russ’s text is an attempt to rethink “women’s work” in a historical moment when liberal feminists, inspired by new theories of self-actualization,

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were campaigning to put women to work while the New Left, increasingly wedded to the concept of “postindustrialism,” was claiming that cybernetic automation would soon make work obsolete. In these terms The Female Man historicizes and complicates Donna Haraway’s conception of contemporary female workers as “cyborgs,” interrogating the long-standing connection between work and power.

“What a Man Can Be, He Must Be” The Female Man, which was written in the late 1960s but not published until 1975, explores the lives and feelings of four female characters, Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael, each of whom is from what Russ terms a different “probability/continuum.”7 They are, in other words, women from four parallel universes that are characterized by different economic and social histories. Joanna, based explicitly on Russ herself, is the product of our own “continuum.” She is a college professor living in a late 1960s America that is historically recognizable to the reader. Jeannine is a librarian who lives in a universe in which World War II did not happen, the Great Depression never abated, and the revolutionary social changes of the 1960s have not even been imagined. Janet, who is arguably the main character in this text, is an envoy from a world more than 900 years in the future in which a plague killed off the men, and the women built a utopian society, “Whileaway,” in their absence. Finally, Jael is an assassin from a future point closer to the present in which men and women are at war with one another. Anything but a linear narrative, Russ’s novel weaves together a variety of genres, from dramatic monologues, to fairy tales, to excerpts from fictional book reviews of The Female Man itself, all the while playfully staging a series of encounters between the four women. The first three quarters of the text are structured around Janet’s adventures and impressions, which Russ uses as a framework to introduce not only Janet’s history and the history of Whileaway but also the daily experiences and private thoughts of Joanna and Jeannine. In the last quarter of the text, Jael, who has previously made only fleeting appearances, takes centerstage, and we learn that it is she who has engineered the time travel necessary for the four women to come together. In the process of enlisting their aid in her war against the men in her continuum, she reveals that they all are, in fact, the same woman; their differences are the product of the different histories of their respective universes (161–162).

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Critics typically identify The Female Man as an implicit or explicit response to the burgeoning American feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a reading that would not draw this conclusion, given the novel’s unwavering preoccupation with women’s oppression.8 Yet the school of feminism with which Russ engages is more open to question. Most scholars have treated The Female Man as an expression of radical, rather than liberal, feminist politics.9 However, perceiving the degree to which Russ’s text is a meditation on liberal feminism is the first step to understanding its role as an equally complex exploration of soft work. There are a number of grounds on which to read Russ’s feminism as radical. Sally Robinson locates in The Female Man’s fragmented, heterodox form “the kind of radicalization that can disrupt the symbolic order through dissidence.”10 In an interview in 1984, Russ remarked that the genre of science fiction generally lends itself to “radical thought” because “it is about things that have not happened and do not happen.”11 Through its utopian and futuristic elements, The Female Man exemplifies this transgressive tendency, exploring a number of themes that were central to radical feminist speculation. According to feminist historian Alice Echols, “Early radical feminists believed that women’s oppression derived from the very construction of gender and sought its elimination as a meaningful social category.”12 In Russ’s fragmentation of one woman across four different “universes of probability,” as well as her title’s invitation to mingle female and male identities, we see her preoccupation with the social construction of gender (163).13 On a less abstract level, in imagining her feminist utopia as one entirely free of men, Russ defers to those radical feminists who claimed liberation meant separation of the sexes.14 It is also fair to concede the point made by Gardiner that the palpable anger that surfaces periodically in the text echoes the outrage expressed by many early radical feminists.15 Yet while reading Russ’s text as a response to the radical currents within American feminism is both appropriate and productive, considering its engagement with liberal feminism reveals its relevance to current debates about both feminism and work. Interwoven with the radical feminism in The Female Man is a persistent focus on the complex, and in some senses paradoxical relationship between women’s liberation and women’s entry into the (public) workforce. To begin to understand this relationship, we need to return to the origins of the theory of self-actualization on which

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much of liberal feminist doctrine was predicated. At the core of this theory is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. First widely publicized in his 1954 study Motivation and Personality, his hierarchy attempted to understand human behavior as a response to needs ranging from the physical to the psychological. The most basic are the former; according to Maslow, “If all the needs are unsatisfied, and the organism is then dominated by the physiological needs, all other needs may become simply nonexistent or be pushed into the background.”16 Once drives for food, water, and sleep have been met, humans next strive for a sense of security. This is followed by the need to feel loved, then to experience self-esteem and prestige. Maslow identifies the highest order of motivation as the craving for self-actualization: Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he, individually, is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.17

In Maslow’s view this highest human need can be met only by completely fulfilling one’s individual potential, by becoming “everything that one is capable of becoming.”18 It was business thinker Douglas McGregor who first took Maslow’s thinking into the realm of management theory in his influential treatise, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960).19 McGregor drew on Maslow’s research to argue that modern workers’ lower level needs of physical and emotional security had been met by the improved working conditions of the twentieth century.20 As a consequence, a higher need for self-actualization through the labor process had become paramount. Yet management was failing to capitalize on the new demand for rewarding work, instead assuming that “the average human being has an inherent dislike of work” and must be coerced into doing it—a sensibility that McGregor referred to as “Theory X.”21 In place of this outdated approach, he promoted what he called “Theory Y,” a new set of assumptions that stressed workers’ desire to take on responsibility and exercise their creativity at work in order to be personally fulfilled. In 1962, Maslow himself began to apply his thinking to the American workplace when he was invited to serve as a consultant at the enticingly

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named Non-Linear Systems, a high-tech California company that was committed to management innovation.22 Maslow’s observations there and his readings of the management theory of McGregor and others coalesced in a management volume entitled Eupsychian Management (1965). Appropriately, the volume is itself formally postmodern and “non-linear,” consisting of a series of unedited entries from the journal he kept while at the company. In this volume Maslow elaborates on the possibility that work can serve as a prime means of self-actualization, stating “proper management of the work lives of human beings, of the way in which they earn their living, can improve them and improve the world and in this sense be a utopian or revolutionary technique.”23 In keeping with this utopian perspective, he imagines the development of Eupsychia, a utopia of 1,000 self-actualizing individuals in part inspired by his reading of science fiction.24 Crucial to his vision of self-actualization in such a working utopia is the notion of synergy, a term which he borrowed from Ruth Benedict. As Maslow characterizes it, the synergistic organization coordinates the workers’ needs for self-actualization with the company’s economic imperatives so that both personal and corporate goals are met. Maslow explains, “It is possible to set up organizations so that when I am pursuing my own self-interest, I automatically benefit everyone else, whether I mean to or not. Under the same arrangement, when I try to be altruistic and philanthropic, I cannot help benefiting myself or advancing my own self-interest.”25 Even as Maslow was exploring the application of his ideas about selfactualization to American work culture, feminist pioneer Betty Friedan was doing the same. Friedan, who had done graduate work in Psychology at Berkeley, met Maslow several years before the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique to “discuss his theory of self-actualization as it might apply to women’s psychology.”26 Her study, which set out to expose the nebulous misery plaguing American middle-class women, argues that the “feminine mystique” compels women to seek “fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”27 Friedan relies heavily on Maslow’s work in her pivotal chapter entitled “The Forfeited Self,” which begins, “Scientists of human behavior have become increasingly interested in the basic human need to grow, man’s will to be all that is in him to be.”28 Invoking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, she asserts that “the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential.”29 She applies his model to the experience of middle class women, claiming that self-forfeiture is the fate of those “who adjust to the feminine mystique, who expect to live through their husbands and children, who want only to be loved and secure, to be

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accepted by others, who never make a commitment of their own to society or to the future, who never realize their human potential.”30 Friedan identifies important implications for gender identity in Maslow’s research. She recollects of her first meeting with him, “Professor Maslow told me that he thought self-actualization is only possible for women today in America if one person can grow through another—that is, if the woman can realize her own potential through her husband and children.”31 Taking issue with this suggestion, she remarks, “It is still very difficult, even for the most advanced psychological theorist, to see woman as a separate self, a human being who, in that respect, is not different in her need to grow than is a man.”32 Moving beyond Maslow’s apparent complacency with respect to gender oppression, she treats the concept of self-actualization as pivotal to current definitions of masculinity and femininity, explaining, “The failure to realize the full possibilities of their existence has not been studied as a pathology in women. For it is considered normal feminine adjustment, in America and in most countries of the world.”33 In understanding the feminine mystique as an ideology that “does not permit [women] to become what they now can be,” she characterizes femininity, in its very essence, as a condition defined by the failure to reach self-actualization.34 While such a mapping might suggest that to be self-actualized is to be masculine, however, she points out that Maslow maintains that among self-actualized people there is no differentiation between the sexes.35 Indeed, she quotes comments from Maslow that suggest that self-actualization is itself a transcendence of gender: “In self-actualizing people ‘the dichotomies are resolved and the individual becomes both active and passive, both selfish and unselfish, both masculine and feminine, both self-interested and self-effacing.’ ”36 Having excavated the gendered stakes of Maslow’s thinking, she carries these over into an exploration of the relevance of self-actualization to the arena of work. She explains that “Professor Maslow found in his study that self-actualizing people invariably have a commitment, a sense of mission in life that makes them live in a very large human world, a frame of reference beyond privatism and preoccupation with the petty details of daily life.”37 She concludes from this need for purpose that work is the key to self-actualization: [T]oday the problem of human identity has changed. For the work that defined man’s place in society and his sense of himself has also changed man’s world. Work, and the advance of knowledge, has lessened man’s dependence on his environment; his biology and the work he must do for

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biological survival are no longer sufficient to define his identity. This can be most clearly seen in our own abundant society; men no longer need to work all day to eat. They have an unprecedented freedom to choose the kind of work they will do; they also have an unprecedented amount of time apart from the hours and days that must actually be spent in making a living. And suddenly one realizes the significance of today’s identity crisis—for women, and increasingly, for men. One sees the human significance of work—not merely as the means of biological survival, but as the giver of self and the transcender of self, as the creator of human identity and human evolution.38

As Friedan follows Maslow’s gaze up the hierarchy of needs, she draws a resounding conclusion: Rather than achieving selfactualization through men, women must achieve it through work. Work outside the home emerges as the only conceivable solution to women’s quiet suffering: [W]ork can now be seen as the key to the problem that has no name. The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self-realization, was taken from them.39

She is careful, however, to spell out that she does not mean just any work. “Busy work or punching a time-clock” will not fulfill women’s highest needs.40 “Honored and useful work” must be their goal, and she maintains that such work is “reserved for those who have made the effort, acquired the knowledge and expertise to become professionals.”41 While Friedan calls for women to enter the contemporary workplace, her perspective on it is not uncritical. Citing David Riesman’s and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s indictments of American corporations as conformist and dispiriting, Friedan acknowledges that men are already coping with the realization that a career is not enough to guarantee a fulfilling sense of identity:42 It does not come from just making a living, working by formula, finding a secure spot as an organization man. The very argument, by Riesman and others, that man no longer finds identity in the work defined as a paycheck job, assumes that identity for man comes through creative work of his own that contributes to the human community: the core of the self becomes aware, becomes real, and grows through work that carries forward human society.43

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Despite invoking Riesman, however, she does not share his ultimate aim of bringing the era of human work to an end.44 Nor does she manifest serious intent to transform the structure of the economy or the category of work itself. Instead, in the spirit of Maslow’s Eupsychia, her text sets out a program that would provide white, middle-class women with the opportunity to pursue careers that require “ability, responsibility, and decision.”45

“You Women Are Lucky” In the aftermath of the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the importance to the liberal Women’s Movement of women’s access to paid, prestigious work can scarcely be overstated. Most of the language of the “Bill of Rights” adopted by NOW at its first national conference, for example, concerned equal opportunity in employment. Of the eight rights this document demanded, five explicitly concerned employment, including an end to sex discrimination in hiring, maternity leave rights, tax deductions for working mothers, and day care centers.46 Deep concern with women’s relationship to work was also reflected in the extended battle for the Equal Rights Amendment. The imprimatur of this fixation on work as a means to women’s liberation is unmistakable in Russ’s text. At a number of moments throughout The Female Man, Russ uses set pieces to make it clear that whether or not women should be allowed equal access to the workplace is the defining issue of feminism in most Americans’ minds. Early in the text her narrative takes us on a careening tour through a series of conversational fragments at a Manhattan cocktail party. We “hear” the offhand remark, “You women are lucky you don’t have to go out and go to work” (35). Later in the same scene we are moved through the room to another snippet of conversation, in which a man asks Janet, who is a guest at the party, “What do you think of the new feminism, eh? . . . Do you think women can compete with men?” (43). After establishing that he regards feminism as a “very bad mistake,” the male speaker answers his own question: “You can’t challenge men in their own fields,” he said. “Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let’s. As I said, I’m all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you’ve got to remember, Janet, that women have certain

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physical limitations,” (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) “and you have to work within your physical limitations.” (43–44)

Russ’s comical flourishes here, as the male speaker’s own physical limitations are subtly communicated, should not detract from the larger function of this passage. The party motif allows Russ to distill to its essence the public understanding of feminism. In the form of “small talk,” the complexities of feminism are reduced to the struggle for “equal pay for equal work.” Later in the text, however, the seriousness with which Russ herself regards the issue of women’s right to work is foregrounded. In another set piece in which an anonymous man and woman discuss their life together, a more thoughtful and complex version of women’s work dilemma is offered: HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman? SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence—namely money. HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren’t making money at all. You can’t make money. Only I can make money. Stop working. . . . SHE: . . . Why can’t you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can’t we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can’t earn a living? Why— (117–118)

Despite its black-and-white theatricality, and an honesty in presenting motivations (“You can’t make money. Only I can make money.”) that is, again, almost comical, this scene finally takes very seriously the pain caused by women’s restricted access to “the life of the community” and “adult independence.” It not only echoes Friedan’s insistence that “ ‘Occupation: housewife’ is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin . . . ” (248); if possible it actually intensifies the tone of desperate defiance that Friedan’s text communicates in its discussions of society’s unjust conception of “women’s work.” Russ’s interest in liberal feminism’s claims regarding the selfactualizing potential of work is likewise apparent in the emotional struggles of her two most manifestly oppressed female characters. As

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both Joanna and Jeannine try to imagine happy lives for themselves, they repeatedly come back to a prestigious place in the workforce as the most likely means to this end. Jeannine, the most benighted of all, struggles feebly throughout the text to imagine some other role for herself than the one of wife-and-mother that she feels thrust upon her both by her family and her society. In one of the most complex and poignant moments in the novel, Jeannine agonizes about the course of her life and is counseled by that part of both Joanna and herself that has acquiesced to sexism: “Jeannine, you’ll never get a good job,” I said. “There aren’t any now. And if there were, they’d never give them to a woman, let alone a grown up baby like you. Do you think you could hold down a really good job, even if you could get one? They’re all boring anyway, hard and boring. You don’t want to be a dried-up old spinster at forty but that’s what you will be if you go on like this. You’re twenty-nine. You’re getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine.” (113–114)

Much of the force of this passage comes from its apparent truthfulness. While a reader invested in seeing Jeannine liberate and transform herself cannot help but resist the negative voice that whispers in her ear here, the text presents considerable evidence to corroborate the words of the nay-sayer. Jeannine’s world is so mired in sexism and economic torpor that she truly is precluded by complex historical forces from finding work that can sustain her. Later this taunting voice becomes even more strident as Jeannine’s resistance to marriage begins to slip away: Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it? And they won’t let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it? . . . I’m trying to talk to you sensibly, Jeannine. You say you don’t want a profession and you don’t want a man . . . so what is it that you want? Well? (122–123)

Ultimately, the effect of these passages is to bring work and its inaccessibility into focus as a key source of Jeannine’s sense of entrapment and despair. The jobs listed here, which are particularly associated with conventions of rational masculinity—the technology of airplanes and trucks, and the science of mathematics— reinforce the message that employment in her world has been carefully coded and mapped onto a gendered grid.

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As a successful professor of English, Joanna, the most autobiographical character in the text, has achieved the professional status that Jeannine can scarcely dream of, yet she feels torn between societal expectations that she be “feminine” and her intense pleasure in her work: I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully. . . . There’s only one thing wrong with me: I’m frigid. In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn’t think I’d survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, . . . live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don’t care, become stridently contentious. . . . I’m very badly dressed. But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck! (110)

Again echoing Friedan, Russ’s text suggests that professional work can open the door to self-actualization, and even intense sexual satisfaction. And although Joanna concedes that despite her Ph.D. and prestigious career, her colleagues do not respect her, treating her as though she wore a sandwich board that reads, “LOOK! I HAVE TITS!,” she never abandons her hope that the public workplace will be a site of further liberation in the future (133). Near the conclusion of the text, Joanna returns to the centrality of paid work to women’s identity: It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example: My doctor is male. My lawyer is male. My tax-accountant is male. The grocery-store owner (on the corner) is male. The janitor in my apartment building is male. . . . I think most of the people in the world are male. Now it’s true that waitresses, elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don’t see them again at all. I think it’s a legend that half the population of the world is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that

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there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly justifies making such a big fuss. It’s just that I’m selfish. My friend Kate says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and that’s why you don’t see them, but I can’t believe that. (203–204)

Persisting in Joanna’s last extended meditation on work is a sense that bringing women into the public workplace is a crucial aspect of asserting the equal significance of women in the world. As in Friedan’s text, public, paid work is equated with a visibility that will necessarily translate into self-actualization and liberation.

“Zero Work, Unwork” It is in the context of this feminism dedicated to the right to work that Russ’s engagement with New Left notions of post-scarcity becomes interesting. In fact, postindustrial, cybernetic technologies leave “women’s work” a deeply fractured and open category in Russ’s text. Despite the very fluid structure of The Female Man, Russ indisputably gives particular emphasis and detail to her account of Whileaway, the utopia from which Janet has emerged. While Maslow’s Eupsychia earns its status as a utopia because everyone performs self-actualizating work, Whileaway is largely defined by freedom from work. It relies on the sophisticated technology of the “induction helmet,” a cybernetic device that transmits brain waves directly to the controls of machinery without any physical exertion on the part of the user, making it “possible for one workwoman to have not only the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands” (14). Critic Tom Moylan, in his study of what he characterizes as the “critical utopias” of the 1960s, has discussed the extent to which The Female Man is a cultural artifact of the New Left’s interest in cybernetics. Moylan suggests that in her construction of Whileaway, Russ combines “post-industrial, cybernetic technology with a libertarian pastoral social system.”47 Indeed, Russ’s text bears the unmistakable mark of an element of New Leftist thought that is often forgotten. Today, when one mentions the American “New Left” the discussion is likely to turn immediately to protests against the Vietnam War. If the discussion broadens and deepens, a narrative takes shape that begins, alternatively, with Martin Luther King’s Freedom Walks of the mid-1950s or the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch-counter protest of 1960, and then stretches to those Vietnam protests across

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an expanse of middle-class student actions against the “multiversity.”48 Yet automation was a consistently recurring issue in New Left thought from the very beginning of the Movement. Indeed, documents of the “most representative organization of the Movement,” the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as those from other New Leftist groups, reflect a gradual embrace of automation as a route to utopia.49 As Massimo Teodori has suggested, in the early 1960s members of the newly formed SDS made America’s underclass their first cause.50 Appalled by the specter of poverty in an America where so many lived in luxury, student groups fastened particularly on the problem of unemployment. In reflecting backward from 1967 on the early days of the Movement, activist Todd Gitlin remarks that the students believed that “the issue of jobs or income might be a single decisive lever of change.”51 This campaign against unemployment was marked by a set of fears distinctive to the post–World War II era; according to Gitlin, the basis of the SDS’s fixation on employment was “some naive expectations about the pace and effect of automation.”52 In his description of the activities of one early SDS program, the Economic Research and Action Project (ER AP), Richard Rothstein explains that a crucial articulation of those expectations regarding automation was a 1963 manifesto entitled, “The Triple Revolution.”53 Written by a “coalition of liberals and radicals,” including Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Todd Gitlin himself, the manifesto claims that revolutions in cybernation, weaponry, and human rights demand radical changes in American society.54 In particular, the writers of “The Triple Revolution” consider “the cybernation revolution” the lynch pin for their own national revolution. Describing a “machines-and-man drama” in which American jobs are “disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines,” the writers reason that this domestic crisis makes the current economic system manifestly untenable.55 Rather than calling for limits on the automation of manufacturing, however, the authors of “The Triple Revolution,” like David Riesman before them, advocate “the encouragement and planned expansion of cybernation.”56 Tapping a vein of social thought with deep roots in Western history, these writers characterize the United States as a post-scarcity society, a society in which “sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone . . . . ”57 Contrary to liberal conventions that treated welfare as the safety net for the

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unemployed, this more radical phalanx believed that an “unqualified right to an income . . . would take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures” once the society was fully automated.58 Nor would this “right to income” be predicated on full employment of American workers. Instead, the manifesto writers seek to eliminate the “income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand—for granting the right to consume.”59 Soon, work itself would simply no longer be part of the economic equation: “The economy of abundance,” they write, “can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work.”60 While uncertain of the specifics, they call for a society in which “work” is replaced by “many creative activities and interests commonly thought of as non-economic,” by “new modes of constructive, rewarding and ennobling activity.”61 While Maslow and McGregor encouraged management strategies that would create these conditions in the workplace, many in the New Left located self-actualization outside the domain of work altogether. It would be inaccurate to suggest that “The Triple Manifesto” immediately “turned on” the rank and file of the New Left to a vision of a fully automated, work-free America. If anything, the elements of this document that had the most powerful effect initially were its dire warnings about short-term unemployment, which were echoed by another report in the same year that predicted unemployment of 13% by 1970.62 Subsequent writings of the SDS produced in the first half of the decade tend to dwell on the immediate “threat of automation,” to borrow activist Carl Wittman’s phrase, rather than its long-term promise.63 In the statement generated by their 1963 convention, “America and the New Era,” the SDS make this threat a central theme. The pamphlet describes a crisis in the workforce produced by “a new type of automated production” that allows manufacturers to “increase productive output by seventy per cent, with no increase whatever in the number of manufacturing workers.”64 Again in 1965, a group of older leftists active on the editorial board of Studies on the Left, allude to the threat of automation to American employment, writing that “discontent is widespread, the conditions of work continue to worsen and security will diminish steadily with the continued spread of automation.”65 In the streets and poor neighborhoods of America, too, students focused more on the short-term threat of automation, counteracting it with various projects meant to respark the force and energy of labor unions,

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generate employment and, in cases where job loss was unavoidable, improve the welfare system. Over the course of the 1960s, however, the more positive perspective on automation expressed by “The Triple Manifesto” gradually gained ground. By the end of the decade numerous New Left thinkers were weighing in with wholesale paeans to full automation. Marvin Garson; Dave Gilbert, Bob Gottlieb, and Susan Sutheim; Martin Sklar; and Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman all produced economic and social analyses of the United States that called for the full automation of the society.66 The notion of “work” itself, of course, did not disappear from every account. As late as 1972, Alan Adelson remarks that, when and if the revolution is actually achieved, student radicals have little idea of what sort of society should replace the current one.67 Adelson’s assessment was half true. Most student radicals looked toward some variation of a “post-scarcity society” as the goal of their revolutionary efforts. The place of work in such a society was open, however, to considerable debate. In Calvert and Neiman’s book-length call for full automation, A Disrupted History, for instance, they argue that “living without working is the potential of capitalist economic and technological development,” while at another moment they strategize for a “rational system of decentralized worker-controlled production and the creation of an ecologically sane environment.”68 Others stood by the importance of “work” as a source of personal fulfillment, maintaining that automation should replace only mindless manufacturing jobs. In 1966, for instance, activist Richard Flacks predicts “the use of technology to eliminate demeaning labor, [and] the development of new definitions of work and status based on humanistic criteria.”69 Despite such oscillations, there was unquestionably a new enthusiasm for a life without work. In summing up his overview of the New Left’s history and looking to the future, Teodori writes, “The society dominated by the work ethic is being replaced by one in which creativity and imagination can play an important role in the realization of human potentialities.”70 In their later reflection back on the end of the 1960s, the editors of Social Text likewise identify a new contempt for work: Zero work, unwork, the merging on the [assembly] line of work and play, this signaled a new politics of labor. It also created new space, cleared by freeing time normally subordinated to capital. This is no longer the unemployment of the economic crisis: it is workers turning

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away from labor itself, abjuring the income ineluctably tied to it. As capital aims to fill all spaces in the day with activity that produces surplus value, labor aims to free itself from these spaces, to create its own space inside the workplace. In the 60s, the anti-work ethic was thus introduced.71

Cybernetic automation underwrote these dreams of “unwork” and play, offering the possibility that men and women might soon be able to organize their lives not in terms of a regimented schedule of formal tasks, but in response to those highly personal desires revealed by the absence of the demands of production.72 Like Maslow, the New Left saw self-actualization as a utopian possibility. Yet, far from identifying the workplace as the primary domain of self-actualization, the New Left suggested that it was precisely the end of work that would permit personal fulfillment and growth.

“The Record of My Life Is the Record of Work” One would be hard-pressed to find a society that more completely replicates the spirit of the New Left’s vision of post-scarcity than Whileaway. The “induction helmets,” which represent Russ’s version of cybernetic automation, have produced in Russ’s utopia precisely the sort of eruption of creativity that the New Left made its goal: there is . . . under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world. (54)

It is such descriptions that have prompted Moylan to describe Russ’s vision of Whileaway as largely inspired by the “the deep changes advocated by the all-male new left of the 1960s.”73 Yet where I differ from Moylan and other critics who have discussed Russ’s text is in my resistance to reading this notion of post-scarcity as readily compatible with Russ’s feminist politics.74

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Russ’s mixture of New Left post-scarcity politics with her liberal feminist enthusiasm for work yields strange results. Despite its remarkable advances, Whileaway is a site that still has a number of social problems, and among these, one is given particular emphasis. No point is made about Whileaway with greater regularity than that the women of Whileaway work much too hard: Russ writes, “Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work” (54 italics original). In speaking of the hiatus from incessant toil Whileawayans enjoy during the five years in which they raise their young daughters, Janet explains: “There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so little after. . . . At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again” (15). Her interlocutor in Joanna’s continuum, taken aback by this characterization asks, “And this is considered enough, in Whileaway?” to which Janet replies, “My God, no” (15). Yet, where work is concerned Whileaway is a riddle. For we are also told that Whileawayans do not work more than sixteen hours a week, or for more than three hours on any one job (56, 53). While the recent advent of the induction helmet may have somewhat abruptly reduced what had previously been more constant labor (Russ does not make this clear),75 the repeated complaints about too much work are framed as a current issue, not one of the past. These enigmatic formulations allow for a number of possible interpretations. Critic Frances Bartkowski, untroubled by the apparent contradictions concerning work on Whileaway, implies that Whileawayans’ laments about their work reveal that even sixteen hours of formal employment have come to seem excessively burdensome within this postindustrial society.76 Yet one might also understand Russ’s treatment of work in her utopia to suggest the opposite, that every female activity, even those not formally understood as work, has been colored by a pervasive work ethic. Finally, it is possible that the text simply sets up separate, irreconcilable accounts of Whileaway, that the moments when Janet claims that Whileawayans work all the time and those when she claims they work only sixteen hours are meant to be two alternative visions of Whileaway, just as Russ occasionally allows different, contradictory accounts of certain events to coexist elsewhere in the text.77 I would push things a bit further here, however, and maintain that none of these readings is complete without being situated in the context of Russ’s extended engagement with liberal feminism’s celebration of the self-actualizing power of work. It is only in these terms that we can understand Russ’s persistent representation of

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“work” in a society so clearly modeled after the “zero-work” society being advocated by the New Left. It is not just any work that is happening in Whileaway, we must conclude, but a version of “work” that has its roots in the liberal feminist appropriation of this category in the 1960s, an appropriation itself informed by the new discourse of self-actualization. This women’s work, so brazenly out of place amidst the industrious circuitry of her utopia, demands that the reader interrogate whether “work” indeed should remain an important category for women when there is no longer an economic imperative to participate in it. In other words, looking forward from a point at which automation seemed to promise the end of work, Russ reexamines what a feminist notion of women’s work should be. Is “work” simply a means to achieving a state of leisure? Is it a concept that women should embrace as a source of self-actualization and economic power, a term that should become so permeable with the concept of feminism that the two become synonymous? Or is it possible that Russ, in her attention to the endless work that plagues life on Whileaway, is suggesting that by striving toward a life of work at the moment that the New Left was dismissing work as obsolete, women were fettering themselves to a confining rather than liberating set of practices—that they should disown and resist work? At least part of the answer lies with the character Janet, the emissary from Whileaway whose arrival in Joanna’s continuum in 1969 opens the novel. Janet’s work as an emissary is strictly temporary. Her regular work on Whileaway is as a “Safety and Peace” officer (1). Specifically, what she does in this job is to track down those who are “unable to bear the tediousness of [their] work,” and, if they cannot be persuaded to return to their job, to kill them (55). In other words, Janet, who stands in synechdochical relationship to utopia itself, is also that which forces women to work. To simplify that equation further, feminist utopia is in some sense epitomized by, even the equivalent of, the necessity to work. A different but not uncomplementary reading that the text makes available is that a conventional gender binary, with its categories of “man” and “woman,” is itself essential to the distinction between work and leisure. That is, Russ’s text allows for an interpretation in which, in the absence of men, all binary structures disappear, and the resulting, prevailing epistemology on Whileaway, spurred by the feminist drive to enter the public world of work, is one in which work becomes a totalized category.78 The women of Whileaway, “work all the time” because work has become tantamount to existence itself.

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Certainly the very public and private spheres that have traditionally defined male and female sites of work are abandoned in Whileaway. Janet remarks of Whileawayans at work: they work outdoors in their pink or gray pajamas and indoors in the nude until you know every wrinkle and fold of flesh, until your body’s in a common medium with theirs and there are no pictures made out of anybody or anything; everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside. (95)

While the elimination of binaries such as public/private and subject/object seem to signal profound liberation, Russ’s insistence that work has simply taken over the binary of work/leisure once again raises the question of the meaning of “work” in such a fluid sphere. I maintain that despite her sense that “work” was in the process of being evacuated of its original economic meanings in the late 1960s, Russ was convinced that women should not relinquish their new-found purchase on this concept. Both Janet’s role as an embodiment of the need to work, and the apparent absence of a meaningful alternative to work, suggest that, while Whileawayans complain about work, they also claim it as their ontology. Even as their lives move closer to complete freedom, their notion of themselves as workers bound to a collective future continues unabated. For Russ, the course on which women had set themselves in the early days of the second wave was inextricably connected with a notion of “work.” The female worker was, de facto, a feminist, and, conversely, the feminist was a female worker. It is precisely here, from within Russ’s contradictory utopia of automated feminist work, that we should place her text in dialogue with one of its theoretical progeny, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The distance between Russ’s complex notion of the continuation of work in an automated society as feminist and Haraway’s understanding of it as feminized suggests the contemporary relevance of Russ’s thinking about women and soft work. Reading Russ’s text at the intersection of New Left and liberal feminist politics begins to answer Mary Ann Doane’s implicit invitation to historicize Haraway’s contemporary notion of the “cyborg.” 79 Russ’s characterization of life on Whileaway as one without binaries, as an existence where “everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside,” is strikingly similar to what Donna Haraway describes as

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“the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone” in her contemporary meditation on cybernetics and feminism:80 Let me summarize the picture of women’s historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women’s lives by the distinction of public and private domains—suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms—it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory.81

In some senses, the superficial similarity between Haraway’s and Russ’s visions here is not difficult to understand. Haraway explicitly names Russ as one of the inspirations for her thinking about contemporary workers as “cyborgs.” Unlike Russ, who celebrates the evaporation of the public/private binary as part of her utopia, however, Haraway characterizes this “privatization” as part of a trend that she describes as the feminization of work. Both Russ and Haraway generate visions of societies that, despite their remarkably productive machines, still require extraordinary amounts of work from their human, and especially their female, populations. Yet the significance that this merging of women and work takes on in their respective accounts could not be more different. In her discussion of paid, postindustrial work as feminized, Haraway presents an ironic twist on earlier liberal feminist projects of ushering women into the workforce. Rather than work transforming the meanings of “woman” in American society so that it came to connote strength and independence, in Haraway’s account the binding together of work and woman has instead transformed the meanings of “work,” to a degree negating its positive valence or, in those cases where it was already regarded negatively, increasing that negativity. Certainly, both Russ and Haraway see the cyborg as a means to epistemological transformations that can empower women socially and economically. Jael, whose steel teeth and cybernetic claws mark her as an archetypal cyborg, is the character in The Female Man who most straightforwardly communicates the transformative power of work for women. In the future she inhabits, Manlanders have increasingly outsourced work to Womanlanders, producing an effect not unlike that which Haraway identifies with contemporary postindustrialism. Yet Jael perceives this trend not as a diminishment

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of the value of work, but a strengthening of women’s cause. Emphatically stating that, “Work is power,” Jael permits herself occasional moments of leisure, but finally she makes sense of her life as one of work (170, emphasis in original). She reflects, “Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work” (192). Near the conclusion of the text Jael reveals that her war efforts are part of the same historical continuum that will produce Whileaway—that her world and her work are necessary to achieve Janet’s utopia (211).82 Similarly, Haraway treats her “cyborg myth” as a vehicle for utopian politics, seeing the trope as a figure for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.”83 In Haraway’s account, however, it is unclear what status work would be assigned in the enlightened cyborg society she calls for.84 Would a proliferation of Haraway’s cyborgs redeem work or eliminate it? In her 1977 essay, “SF and Technology as Mystification,” Russ decries the tendency of academics to obscure the reality of human work and workers with “false abstractions.”85 She suggests that academics “are insulated from the solid, practical details of their own lives by other people’s labor; they therefore begin their thinking about life by either leaving such practical details out or assuming that they are trivial.”86 Russ’s intervention in the historical collision between self-actualizing discourse, liberal feminism, and New Left post-work politics enhances our current discussions of cyborgs, reminding us that the post-gender world of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” that these figures promise might well emerge from the “solid, practical details” of feminist work rather than feminized work. At first glance, Russ’s embrace of work qua work might seem anachronistic in our era of multinational capitalism, yet her insistence that we make work’s transformative effect on women part of our thinking about soft work could not be more timely.87 In its assertion of the self-actualizing potential of work for women, The Female Man hints at one of the great ironies of soft work. While Maslow’s theories had subversive potential to resist “the capitalist notion of Economic Man driven largely by material wants,” they have increasingly come to serve capitalist interests by infusing workers with a sense that they will only achieve a selfhood that they can show off to their neighbors if they commit maximum energy to their work.88

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Moreover, the perfect synergy (to borrow Maslow’s term) between these management ideas and liberal feminism has positioned more than a generation of women to be deeply attuned to the expectations of managers who demand such a commitment. We should not be surprised then, that, as the next chapter suggests, it is women, not men, who seem the ideal workers of the contemporary era, workers so motivated to give their whole selves to work that depictions of them as cyborgs, programmed with the imperative to work, and workaholics, addicted to the sense of fulfillment work lends their lives, become interchangeable.


CH A P T ER

4

A Cyborg’s Work Is Never Done: Programming Cyborgs, Workaholics, and Feminists in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It

In his utopian account of what he alternately calls “Eupsychian” or “Enlightened” management, Abraham Maslow explains, “We can learn from self-actualizing people what the ideal attitude toward work might be under the most favorable circumstances. These highly evolved individuals assimilate their work into the identity[,] into the self, i.e., work actually becomes part of the self[,] part of the individual’s definition of himself.”1 As he develops this argument, he surreally casts work as a new human organ: In self-actualizing people, the work they do might better be called “mission,” “calling,” “duty,” “vocation,” in the priest’s sense. This mission in life is actually so identified with the self that it becomes as much a part of the worker as his liver or lungs. For the truly fortunate worker, the ideally enlightened worker, to take away work (mission in life) would be almost equivalent to killing him.2

In its characterization of self-actualizing workers as dependent on their labor for spiritual and physical survival, Maslow’s metaphor invites comparison with several others that describe contemporary workers in the West. This chapter will examine three of these—the “cyborg,” the “workaholic,” and the “feminist”—as embodiments of the principles of self-actualization Maslow introduced to the arena of management in the 1960s. It will argue that Marge Piercy’s cyberpunk novel He, She, and It presents the technological components of the cyborg as a chimera, to borrow from Piercy’s own lexicon, a false surface behind which the distinctively contemporary

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epistemology known as “workaholism” resides as that postmodern construct’s essence.3 Locating in He, She, and It a complicating, liberal feminist impulse to empower women through access to public work, it will also consider how feminism is interfaced with workaholism in Piercy’s cyborg through the discourse of selfactualization. Finally, it will conclude with a review of other contemporary cyborg texts in which the transformation of the “human” into the “cyborg” can be reread as an internalization of unprecedented contemporary work imperatives.

“The Rack of Work” In 1971, a pastor named Wayne Oates embarked on a project not unlike Betty Friedan’s, giving a name to what he perceived to be a widespread but unrecognized problem. In Confessions of a Workaholic, Oates announces, “workaholism is a word which I have invented,” and he proceeds to define his neologism as “addiction to work, the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.”4 In Oates’s view, America was becoming increasingly reliant on such addicts; the “culture of which we are a part,” he comments, “breeds more and more workaholics.”5 Oates entertains a number of theories about the rise of this form of addiction. He writes, “The workaholic’s way of life is considered in America to be at one and the same time (a) a religious virtue, (b) a form of patriotism, (c) the way to win friends and influence people, and (d) the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.”6 His analysis serves as an archeological record of the layers of American labor history: in his invocation of Benjamin Franklin’s mantra, he gestures toward America’s creation myth of the self-made man; in his understanding of a complete commitment to work as a means of religious salvation, he refers to the Protestant work ethic’s lingering effects. His allusion to Dale Carnegie’s catchphrase, meanwhile, registers his awareness of the more recent associations of work with cooperation and social fulfillment institutionalized by human relations management philosophy.7 Citing Riesman, for instance, he presents workaholics as “other-directed”: An inner life provides an inner-directedness that selects or chooses out of the dreams made by others only what is consistent with one’s own personal identity, rejecting and filtering out what is not consonant with one’s real self. This element is missing in the workaholic. In seeking to please all others, he becomes overburdened and distraught and does not know who he is.8

A CYBORG'S WORK IS NEVER DONE

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Later calling on William H. Whyte, Jr.’s critique of human relations, he attributes contemporary workers’ lack of bearings to companies that cultivate the kind of “man or woman who has no value that is not subordinated to the ‘good of the organization.’ ” 9 It would seem from Oates’s excavation of various elements of the term “workaholic” that it has taken all of American history to produce this new kind of subject. Yet Oates’s conception of work as an addiction also reflects thinking about work that had only emerged in the decade before he wrote his exposé—the increasingly widespread view, popularized by Abraham Maslow, that work was something to be consumed to fill a psychological need. In its etymology of the expanding application of the suffix “aholic,” the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the ways that after a half century of applying only to addicts of alcohol, the term suddenly gained currency in America in the 1960s as a colloquial means of addressing a wide range of consumer fixations. Citing as examples the terms “sugarholic,” “golfaholic,” “hashaholic,” “carboholic,” “footballaholic,” “computerholic,” “newsaholic,” “bookaholic,” and, most tellingly, “spendaholic,” the OED offers a record of the ballooning dependencies of American consumer culture. In this popular notion of addiction, physiological need is secondary to psychological hunger, the yearning of what Nikolas Rose describes as “the desiring, relating, actualizing self [that] is an invention of the second half of the twentieth century.”10 Consistent with the shift from an emphasis on social relations to personal psychology that marks the transition from human relations to self-actualization, both Maslow and Oates underscore the fundamentally individualistic relationship between contemporary Americans and their work. On the one hand, Maslow sees the potential within “synergic” workplaces for the worker to transcend the self. He explains, “S-A work is simultaneously a seeking and fulfilling of the self and also an achieving of the selflessness which is the ultimate expression of real self.”11 On the other hand, as the very term self-actualization implies, Maslow also concedes that the pursuit he is endorsing is “a kind of self-love, or a kind of embracing one’s own nature.”12 It is this latter, highly individualistic preoccupation with the self that strikes Oates in his account of contemporary Americans’ overcommitment to work. “The typical workaholic,” he writes, “is as averse to admitting his dependent needs as is the alcoholic. As long as he has his work, he does not ‘need’ anybody—he has power, place, and things.”13 Yet in their emphasis on need and desire, both Maslow and Oates make it clear that the individualism in question is not the autonomous,

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implicitly masculine brand traditionally associated with the American worker. For Maslow, to be self-actualized through work is not a simple matter of performing a task, but instead requires “total commitment to doing well the job that fate or personal destiny calls you to do.”14 The need to work is an internal compulsion to which the worker capitulates. Similarly, Oates explains that addiction, among other things, is the “giving oneself up or over to as a constant practice.”15 Their reconception of work as a psychological need reflects a reversal, then, from an industrial model in which the worker acts on the world to a postindustrial one in which work acts on the worker. While Maslow and Oates identify similar trends in contemporary work culture, their perspective on the implications of these trends are vastly different. Indeed, the very behaviors that Maslow promotes as the means for human fulfillment, Oates views as pathological. On a personal level, Maslow celebrates the sense of usefulness that comes with a commitment to work, observing, “If you take into yourself something important from the world, then you yourself become important thereby. You have made yourself important thereby, as important as that which you have introjected and assimilated to yourself. At once, it matters if you die, or if you are sick, or if you can’t work, etc. . . . You are needed, useful.”16 Oates conversely sees this need to feel personally valued through work as a symptom of crippling insecurity: The workaholic is a slave with no memory of deliverance from the rack of work. His esteem for himself must be constantly refurbished with tangible results of his own work—money, production figures, prestige awards, and various other trophy substitutes. These take the place of being loved for his own sake and thereby free to work or not work as the occasion calls for it.17

Likewise, in the professional domain Maslow celebrates the inclination of the self-actualizing employee to “take upon his own shoulders all the responsibilities of the whole enterprise.”18 Oates inveighs against this tendency to conceive of oneself as crucial to a given workplace, presenting it as an essential part of the folly of workaholism. He confesses of his own past: Wrapped up in my own habituation to work was my self-sufficiency as a “doer” who trusts fully in my own work. Ensconced in my alwaysat-it work pattern was the hidden assumption that I was indispensable.


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The outfit for which I worked, I felt, could not really get along without me. I kept reinforcing this feeling with around-the-clock activity, as if the whole operation depended on me. This was not so. It was an illusion. I eventually admitted it.19

These arguments against Maslow’s perspectives, embedded in the populist prose of Oates’s self-help book, reflect the degree to which the discourse of self-actualization contributed to what became understood as workaholism. If it is instructive to read Oates’s anatomy of the workaholic as a critique of many of the notions of work that Maslow’s theory of selfactualization had propagated, it is also important to reflect on the degree to which Oates lost this battle. The triumph of self-actualizing discourse over denunciations of its debilitating effects is evident in the rise of “corporate culture” as the defining management theory of the late twentieth century. While I will give fuller attention to this school of management in the final two chapters of this book, here it is important to stress that Maslow’s thinking about self-actualization, and the synergy in which such self-actualization could occur hand-in-hand with corporate profit, provided the groundwork for this later management trend. In terms that reflect the centrality of both self-actualization and synergy to corporate culture, sociologist Paul du Gay explains: “Culture” has . . . come to be seen as a crucial means of ensuring organizational success because it is held that if you can effectively manage “meaning” at work, so that people come to conceive of and conduct themselves in such a way as to maximize their involvement in, and hence their contribution to, the organization for which they work, you are more likely to have a profitable, effective and successful firm.20

To convince workers that they will become more themselves through their work activities, managers committed to the notion of corporate culture strive to define work in terms that promise personal fulfillment. The merging of production and consumption that Lemuel Boulware pioneered in the 1950s has continued to be refined, as meanings of work are crafted to feature the particular brand of selfhood for which workers are in the market. Maslow prophetically describes Eupsychia, the utopia of self-actualized workers, as an organization in which workers assume a new attitude of ownership: All the experiments on enlightened management and humanistic supervision can be seen from this point of view, that in a brotherhood

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situation of this sort, every person is transformed into a partner rather than into an employee. He tends to think like a partner and to act like a partner. He tends to take upon his own shoulders all the responsibilities of the whole enterprise. He tends voluntarily and automatically to assume responsibility for any of the various functions of an enterprise which an emergency might call for. Partnership is the same as synergy, which is the same as recognizing that the interests of the other and one’s own interests merge and pool and unite instead of remaining separate or opposed or mutually exclusive. 21

Corporate culture has realized Maslow’s vision, distributing the responsibility of management of a company to every employee. One need only think of the “associates” who have replaced salespeople at many retail chains: Performance management and related techniques—individual appraisal and development—involve a characteristically “contractual” and “entrepreneurial” relationship between individual employees and the organization for which they work. This involves “offering” individuals involvement in activities—such as managing budgets, assessing staff, delivering services—previously held to be the responsibility of other agents—such as supervisors and personnel departments. However, the price of this involvement is that individuals themselves must assume responsibility for carrying out these activities and for their outcomes. . . . [P]erformance management and related techniques function as “responsibilizing” mechanisms, which are held to be both economically desirable and personally empowering.22

This investment in individual workers’ subjectivity as the primary focus of management efforts has led to a notable new conceptual interpenetration between work and the worker. Consuming work in the palatable form in which it is packaged by management strategists, the worker is asked to literally take ownership of the company’s mission—to both be in the company, and to be the company: The employees must act as if (thinking and feeling as if ) they were microcosms of the organization as a whole; as if they have internalized and adopted the objectives of the organization; as if they were small-business entrepreneurs within the larger organization. Employees become miniaturized enterprises—individually embodying the necessary functions and activities of the successful corporate enterprise. Just as corporations must market products and services, maintain customer relations, manage clients, ensure standards and quality, achieve profit


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and manage costs, so individual employees must also show mastery of these functions on an individual basis. They must be commercially sensitive, quality-focused, customer-focused, pro-active, cost-sensitive and responsible, capable of doing what is best and necessary without having to be told what this is; capable of acting without detailed regulation and instruction but in accordance with internalized demands and standards. Each employee in effect becomes his/her own firm. 23

As this rhetoric suggests, while human relations focused on group dynamics, corporate culture offers an atomized vision of striving individuals who have assimilated corporate mantras into their identity to the extent that they require minimal external management. As Du Gay puts it, following Gordon, each worker within corporate culture becomes an “entrepreneur of the self.”24 While workers both blue- and white-collar in the industrial era could leave their workplaces at the end of the day, the self-actualizing worker within America’s corporate culture carries the company within them. This merging of work into the human subject, a development that, according to Maslow, makes work “as much a part of the worker as his liver or lungs,” has spawned a number of figurative responses by contemporary authors. Here I will turn to the work of one such writer, Marge Piercy, who presents the selfactualized worker, not only as a workaholic, but also as a cyborg and a feminist.

“Cyborg Life” As I discussed in the previous chapter, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man confronts the ideological tangle between New Left aspirations of a post-work society and the liberal feminist drive to empower women through work, ultimately privileging the latter by advancing the cyborg as a symbol of the liberated working woman. In her eleventh novel, He, She, and It (1991), Marge Piercy picks up where Russ left off, focusing squarely on contemporary debates regarding the significance of the cyborg as an increasingly important cultural icon in the U.S. While Russ presents her cyborg from a 1960’s vantage point in which automation seemed to promise imminent freedom from work, Piercy’s vision is shaped by the work intensification of the corporate culture era. As in Russ’s novel, skepticism about a life entirely committed to work is balanced against hope that it can liberate women from restrictive gender conventions.25 He, She, and It consists of two interwoven narratives, one highlighting the oppression of Jews in Prague at the height of the

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Renaissance and the other exploring the near-future development of a breakthrough cybernetic “man,” a cyborg named Yod. Piercy does not hide her profound debt to Donna Haraway: “We’re all cyborgs,” insists Shira, the female protagonist and lover of Yod, unmistakably echoing Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (150).26 To date, however, those who have explicated Piercy’s novel have neglected her most distinctive contribution to the body of thought that poses the “cyborg” as the inevitable replacement for the time-honored but troubled concept of the “human.” If the essence of Haraway’s cyborg is often taken to be its mixture of human and machine parts, Piercy’s cyborg has less to do with machine parts than machine process.27 Although few of the critics who have debated the merits of the cyborg as a figure for the postmodern condition acknowledge the central place work occupies in Haraway’s manifesto, Piercy defies this trend. Contextualizing the cyborg within the soft work culture that Maslow pioneered, she presents it as a human form penetrated not only by technology, but by a totalized work ethic. In this reading, Piercy’s array of non-cybernetic characters are all “cyborgs,” not because they, like Yod, are profoundly integrated with technological systems, but because they “work” as a machine works, not as an occupation, but as the defining term for their state of animation in the world. For Haraway, cyborgs are “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”28 Although she acknowledges their military origins, she treats them as potentially utopian, and the “potent fusions” she attributes to them take place in a specifically economic context. Haraway’s socialist principles, evident in her commitment to praxis as well as theory, make her especially conscious of the interface between postindustrial technologies and workers. In the two sections of her essay entitled “The Informatics of Domination” and “The ‘Homework Economy’ Outside ‘The Home’,” she critically assesses the disempowered condition of the contemporary working class. Careful to attend to “the ‘multinational’ material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life” as well as “the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination,” Haraway balances her abstract theoretical discourse with concrete discussions of the economic stress that both male and female workers are experiencing in the United States and abroad:29 The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new


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technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive; e.g., office work and nursing.30

Female workers’ anxieties and pain are foregrounded by Haraway’s fine-grained analysis, making the stakes of high-tech multinational capitalism real and immediate: In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age.31

The dense and often playful style of Haraway’s manifesto, with its frequent recourse to the imagery of science fiction, might occasionally overshadow her concern with or awareness of the practical domain of work. In the above passages, however, the “intimate realities” of workers’ lives emerge as a central component of Haraway’s understanding of technology’s place in the contemporary world. It is workers whom Haraway hopes to liberate from the “integrated circuit” in which they find themselves, by reimagining what technology and the human are. In these terms, the cyborg, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” becomes the surrogate myth to which she suggests contemporary workers should entrust their futures.32 It is the springboard for a historical transformation in which workers’ encounters with technology would be free of the current, negative effects that she has diagnosed in her manifesto. While a comprehensive review of the interpretations of Haraway’s cyborg that other scholars have produced is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is safe to say that very few have recognized Haraway’s preoccupation with the demands of work as the crucial relay between the human and machine. A number of critics, including John R.R. Christie, Thomas Foster, Mary Catherine Harper, and Sharon Stockton, have foregrounded the ontology of fragmentation and hybridity that Haraway celebrates, then explored the lurking unities (or, alternatively, Cartesian dualisms) that continue to haunt contemporary cyborg identities.33 Others, including Chela Sandoval and Joseba Gabilondo, have broadened the signifying power of the cyborg, understanding it, respectively, as a centuries-old figure of

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subaltern resistance and as a marker of First World technological hegemony.34 While both Sandoval and Gabilondo generate fascinating accounts of the cyborg in a multinational context, the daily lives of postcolonial cyborgs—virtually all of which are constituted by work and the search for work—are not addressed. In their attempt to define the principles of “cyborgology,” Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera refer to work as one of several origins for contemporary conceptions of the cyborg, but they ultimately strive for a flexible definition of this rubric that, in its preoccupation with the place of cyborgs in “systems,” extends from individuals who interact with technology to whole corporations, and even whole national governments.35 Even more abstract is David Porush’s redefinition of the cyborg as the merging of the human and the utopian. “Every utopian inscription onto the human,” Porush writes, “produces a new and improved vision of a cyborg.”36 He distills the pure optimism of Haraway’s account and identifies it as the essence of the cyborg. Indeed, among the second-generation cyborg theories spawned since Haraway’s manifesto first appeared in 1985, it is only David Brande’s that, like Haraway’s, invites readers to regard work as elemental to any discussion of the contemporary interface between humans and machines. In the “Business of Cyberpunk” Brande defines the cyborg as “an effect of advanced capitalism’s restructuring of modes and relations of production and its corresponding transformations in ideological production.”37 He proceeds to critique most discussions of the cyborg and of its natural habitat, cyberpunk science fiction, as imprecise in their formulations of the cyborg’s economic context: With some exceptions (including commentary by Pam Rosenthal, Andrew Ross, and Larry McCaffery), critics often situate [William] Gibson’s work within the context of “postindustrialism” and occasionally praise it for its depictions of “late capitalism,” without defining these terms or saying exactly how his work embodies or works through them. While it is, perhaps, out of a healthy skepticism of “vulgar” base/superstructure models of economics and culture that leftist critics are wary of making deterministic claims about the connections between macroeconomic transformations and the appearance of the cyborgs, the social and economic conditions of the production of cyborg life nonetheless remain to be articulated. 38

Brande moves from this point of departure to offer a useful characterization of “the social and economic conditions of the


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production of cyborg life,” which focuses on large dynamics and “coercive laws” of capitalist markets.39 He finally argues that Gibson’s novels about cyborgs “stage the ideological fantasy that structures reality,” in which capitalist flows render the “rationalist citizen subject” a consumer-cyborg devoid of any trace of interiority.40 Yet, while Brande maps out the economic imperatives that determine the existence of cyborgs—and even the depthless quality those imperatives impart—the daily processes by which contemporary subjects function as cyborgs remain largely unexplored in his discussion. For that, we need to turn to one of Brande’s sources. En route to his theoretically rich, post-Marxist reading, Brande points to the matter-of-fact depiction of contemporary labor that Pam Rosenthal offers in her meditation on cyberpunk and post-Fordism. Rosenthal asserts that “the contemporary transformation of production and consumption is changing the way in which we experience our everyday lives,” and offers a material account of post-Fordism that encompasses blueand white-collar work alike:41 Post-Fordism . . . poses a whole new approach to time on and off the job: the hyped-up, insecure syncopations of workaholism and unemployment, the increasing employment of part-time and contract workers, and more layoffs as flexible transnationals decamp to avail themselves of cheaper labor overseas, or as they retrofit their plants with computerized automation technologies at home.42

While she alludes to Haraway only briefly, her analysis recuperates the concern with the working lives of cyborgs that Haraway’s manifesto sets out. Rosenthal’s reference to the workaholic impulses that shape those lives is borne out by Juliet Schor’s best-selling economic study, The Overworked American, which suggests that American workers of every description are sharing in a profound immersion in chronic work. Her research demonstrates that the number of hours Americans work has risen dramatically since the late 1940s—so much so that the average adult enjoys only sixteen-and-a-half hours of waking leisure time per week.43 The reasons she offers for the intensification of work culture in America echo Rosenthal’s, including the weakening of unions, global economic competition and, most centrally, escalating consumerism. Yet neither Rosenthal nor Schor gives significant attention to the ways that the management techniques of self-actualization and corporate culture have encouraged this epidemic of workaholism. In He, She, and It, the sorts of economic contingencies to which

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Haraway, Rosenthal, and Schor allude create a culture of desperation in which survival depends on constant work. In an extrapolation of current economic trends, Piercy depicts a world in which an enormous underclass toils, often illicitly, to fend off starvation, while members of small non-corporate communities labor tirelessly against the encroachment of vast multinationals. Yet, by equating her cyborg with a female workaholic who has embraced the feminist message of self-actualization through employment, she also gestures toward the overlooked contribution of management theory to the ideological origins of cyborg subjectivity.

“My Work, My Life” The central plot of He, She, and It concerns the efforts of Shira, a gifted computer scientist, to provide Yod, a cyborg of revolutionary technical sophistication, with sufficient understanding of human motives and behaviors that he may “pass” as a biologically conceived man. Shira flees her employers at the Yakamura-Stichen corporation (Y-S) after they grant custody of her son to her estranged husband, and returns to her childhood home, Tikva, a non-corporate “free town.” Yod has been designed to protect Tikva from the many corporate and non-corporate aggressors that threaten its existence in the violent, dystopic future that Piercy has imagined for this novel, a future with the trademark cyberpunk elements of wrenching class strife, environmental collapse, and global reliance on an internet enhanced by ever more convincing virtual reality technologies. The most conspicuous threat to Tikva is Y-S, one of the twentythree multinational corporations “that divide . . . the world among them” (3). In her portrait of these companies Piercy plays out contemporary corporate culture to its logical end point: each multinational has highly elaborated cultural practices, including an official religion, dress code, and system of etiquette. Standards of physical beauty are narrowly dictated, and ambitious employees submit to extensive plastic surgery to achieve the preferred aesthetic. Indeed, workers are expected to commit themselves to the “culture” of a given company to the degree that all but those who perform the most menial tasks are required to live on its premises. Likewise, the “contractual” relationship that is part of current corporate culture, in which the worker operates in accordance with “internalized demands and standards,” has become one in which


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workers are literally owned by the company that they work for. In selling themselves to the highest bidder, workers in Piercy’s future are giving themselves over to work in ways that Oates could not even have imagined. Yet they sell themselves not in order to reach self-actualization but instead to satisfy their most basic needs of food and safety, needs which multinational enclaves can guarantee in an otherwise destitute world. Tikva and other free towns represent the only alternative to life in a slum or in the highly controlled environment of a corporation, but their existence is constantly imperiled by multinationals with whom they compete for limited resources. Tikva is portrayed as the eclectic, democratic foil to Y-S’s uniformity and hierarchy; it is a human sphere, while Y-S’s regulations make its employees conspicuously machinelike. Yet Piercy implies that such distinctions are eroding: not only is Yod part machine and part human, but, by creating Yod, Tikva’s elders have conceived a being not unlike the interchangeable “employees” that the corporations claim as their own. Under pressure from the multinationals, the free towns are reluctantly adopting their practices, a trend that underscores Vonnegut’s observation in Player Piano that those who compete with machines—whom he likens to slaves— will become them. At first glance, these issues of work seem tangential to the central concern of the narrative: whether Yod can truly become human. Certainly, the text approaches this question from several angles. By borrowing heavily from romance novel formulas to portray a love affair between Shira and Yod, for example, Piercy explores sexuality as a gateway through which subjects embrace the “other” as themselves. Struggling with her choice to become sexually involved with Yod, Shira imagines women in the first human civilizations, turning to men for companionship: “Such a woman sought comfort in the embrace of a being like and unlike herself, as men were unlike women, intimate strangers surely just as exotic and peculiar to Shira as this machine in the form of a man who knelt before her, wanting at least to please” (239). Why not fit machines, Piercy asks here, within the already unstable rubric of the “human” that men and women have uneasily cohabitated for centuries? More interestingly still, Piercy parallels the history of anti-Semitism with the Luddite hostilities Yod inspires, inviting readers to regard his technology as constituent of a new ethnicity. Again, she capitalizes on the flexibility evident in the history of humanism—a flexibility that has meant the delineations of the human have constantly been in flux in response to changing

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cultural mores regarding race and ethnicity—to make the case that its meaning could be altered to accommodate the machinic. Given the logic that this latter comparison sets in motion, however, it may surprise many readers that at the conclusion of the novel, Yod is sent on a suicide mission from which he does not return, and the possibility of making others like him is resoundingly condemned. It is here that work again comes into focus in Piercy’s narrative, for it is Yod’s status as a worker that overrides the enthusiasm for alterity with which the text initially approaches its portrait of the cyborg. Yod’s incessant work exposes him to the critical gaze of the Tikva community and turns his supporters into critics of the larger plan under which he was conceived. “The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool—supposed to exist only to fill our needs—is a disaster” concludes Malkah at the end of the text, though an ardent friend and admirer of Yod (412). Shira repeats a nearly identical perspective, as does Yod in a communiqué released after his final act of self-sacrifice. Though most of Piercy’s text appears designed to promote complacent acceptance of Yod’s post-human inevitability, it finally rejects its own program on the grounds that Yod can never transcend an existence conceived as pure labor. Yod succeeds in “passing” as human for the better part of the text until, near its conclusion, Shira’s jealous ex-lover, Gadi, mischievously registers a complaint to the Tikva town council that Yod is receiving no wage for the highly visible security services he is providing the town. This act is the outcome of earlier discussion between Shira, Avram, who is Yod’s creator, and Gadi concerning Yod’s status as an unpaid worker. In these earlier debates, Gadi suggests that Yod’s life is currently one of “slave labor,” and Shira agrees, insisting to Avram that, “If you want him to pass as human, you must establish his economic identity . . . ” (212). These concerns that Yod’s entire existence is defined by unrewarded labor are reinforced when Yod reports that Gadi’s is not the only complaint about his apparent exploitation: “several people noticed that I patrol the Base during the day and the perimeter at night,” he announces. “They put in a complaint of overwork on my behalf” (364). It is this perceived injustice—all work and no pay/play—that is expressed in slightly more abstract terms in the repeated justifications at the conclusion of the text for discontinuing the sort of research in robotics and cybernetics that produced Yod. In choosing such a conclusion, Piercy forecloses on one or two alternative endings that would permit her cyborg, so appealingly compared to


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other oppressed minorities, to live on and flourish rather than being “terminated” or permanently “retired” to borrow the language of two classic cyborg films. Piercy could, for instance, have resolved the crisis of Yod’s identity as “slave labor” by staging a climax in which the town, after heated debate, assents to pay Yod, thus defining his life as only in part economically motivated and implicitly agreeing to provide Yod with time off the job—time for him to be “human” within the logic of this text. It is clear after a moment’s reflection, however, what a dilemma such a possibility would create for Piercy. A well-established leftist with deep loyalty to the working class from which she herself emerged, could she really promote the idea of giving paid work to machines?44 The outset of the text suggests that such an eventuality is conceivable to her, certainly. The first parallel she draws between Jews and future cybernetic beings is the shared economic threat to humans they pose as job-seekers. Of the Jews, Malkah, Shira’s grandmother, reflects: For centuries we had occupied a small, dishonorable but necessary role, because we were the bankers, the pawnbrokers, the exchanges, the source of loans; it was the work permitted us. But once Christians became bankers, Jews began trying to do the same work as everybody else, even though most trades were officially forbidden us. We had to make a living, and we couldn’t just take in each other’s washing. (20)

She later characterizes hatred toward robots in these terms: When robots were created with sufficient artificial intelligence to carry out complex tasks, a movement started in opposition, . . . circa 2040. . . . [P]eople found the first humanoid robots cute, fascinating and then quickly disturbing. Riots and Luddite outbreaks of machine bashing occurred. People were afraid that machines would replace them, not in dangerous jobs but in well-paid and comfortable jobs. Robots were sabotaged, and destructive riots broke out even in corporate enclaves—(48)

Piercy’s comparison of Jews and machines implicitly establishes the injustice of denying machines paid employment, presenting such an action as just as semiotically contingent, and thus arbitrary, as the decisions that forced Jews into ghettoes. From this beginning, Piercy develops her parallel narratives of the creation of a Golem in Renaissance Prague and of the contemporary struggle of Yod to

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enjoy human status in terms that return repeatedly to the message that machines’ relegation to the category of the subhuman is no more just than Jews’ mistreatment at the hands of Christians. Since she could never condone the bigotry of depriving Jews access to equal pay for equal work, it appears throughout much of the text that Piercy is prepared to extend the same rights to Yod and his kind. Yet she cannot, finally. Born in 1936, Piercy is a member of the first generation of Americans to face adulthood in an era in which manufacturing work was made almost entirely off-limits to humans by their robotic counterparts. This reallocation of work had a particularly negative impact on inner-city communities like the one in Detroit where Piercy herself was born and raised.45 Ultimately, Piercy’s political allegiance to working men and women apparently dispels the force of her theoretical musings on economic justice for machines. Perhaps realizing she has strayed into political territory that she wants no part of, Piercy never really entertains the possibility of Yod being paid in the final pages of her text. She does, however, open another possible route to the salvation of Yod. If the wrongness of the prototype Yod lies in his identity as a worker with no personal identity, why not create a cyborg that is not a worker at all, but instead, just a lover for Shira? Shira considers this possibility in the final chapter: Yod had said it himself: it was immoral to create a conscious weapon. She vehemently agreed. No, she would not create a cyborg to suffer from Yod’s dilemma. She was not intending to build a golem; she was going to build a mate. It might take her two years, it might take her five, but then she would have her lover. She would have Yod, but not a Yod who belonged to Avram: no, a Yod who belonged only to her. (426)

Shira imagines a being that will serve only her emotional needs, rather than any larger economic interests. Yet it is precisely this role of emotional servant that stymies Shira’s enthusiasm for the new plan. She quickly realizes that, “She could not manufacture a being to serve her, even in love,” and, braced by this newfound conviction, destroys the last remains of Yod’s circuitry (428). It is unimaginable for Shira that a machine could transcend its essential capacity to perform tasks. Piercy’s text implicitly maintains that technology is nothing less than labor concretized in material form—labor embodied—and that every piece of machinery can only work if it exists, can only exist if it works. Such a being, if it takes human form, is a slave, she concludes, and the


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symbolic rejection of such beings is unmistakable and definitive: Piercy kills off her cyborg, once and for all. This insight seems an important one to introduce into current attempts to theorize the cyborg as the most compelling contemporary icon of the post-human. Piercy’s text opens the way for an understanding of the cyborg not as a “myth” of the merging of technology with a passive, idealized human body, but instead as a metaphor for an intensification of exertion on the part of actual people produced by soft work culture. In so doing, it begins to illuminate the daily dimensions of cyborg lives in terms that more abstract discussions of the cyborg do not. By dramatizing cyborg identity as a nightmare of overwork, Piercy’s text raises the question of whether the common embrace of the cyborg as a promising exit from the vexed era of humanism is really a surrender of a longstanding fiction of the human self for an even more confining ontology. In this reading, the “human” residue in cyborg life is that part not disciplined by an internalized work regimen. As Christie has pointed out in his reading of Piercy’s novel, the repeated condemnation of Yod’s creation—that no being’s existence should be determined exclusively by the functions she or he performs for others—is a reiteration of Kant’s categorical imperative.46 This well-known principle of humanism states that each human must “[a]ct so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”47 In Piercy’s gradual exposure of Yod’s existence as a being defined by the tasks and goals he must accomplish, she rejects such a life as no life at all. What is perhaps most perplexing and remarkable about Piercy’s text, however, is that killing Yod does not solve the problem of the rest of the characters who, as Shira notes, are also “all cyborgs.” Near the end of the novel Malkah attempts to articulate the distinction between Yod and these human-born cyborgs. “It’s better to make people into partial machines,” she muses, “than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleaning robots” (412). Yet, Piercy more generally represents Yod as simply the extreme point of a continuum across which contemporary humans are stretching. At the key moment in which Shira identifies herself and the others of her world as cyborgs, she insists to Yod, “You’re just a purer form of what we’re all tending toward” (150). And, indeed, like Yod, Piercy’s other cyborgs are machines less in terms of technological components than in terms of an essential, unflagging commitment to work. While Piercy symbolically annihilates the talismanic figure of total work in the text, the condition itself persists in Yod’s absence.

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Most emblematic of this apparent paradox in the text is Malkah. In conversations in which Malkah counsels others, she is presented as the novel’s moral center, a sage whose perspectives on large ethical and philosophical questions have been honed by her long, daring life. Her advice to Shira constitutes a particularly substantial portion of the novel, and much of that advice concerns giving work the highest possible priority. Perceiving Shira as excessively preoccupied with her emotional attachments to others, Malkah pleads with her granddaughter to “work in the center and love to the side” (55). Indeed, Malkah’s dependence on her own identity as a worker is dramatized when, midway through the text, she is attacked while at her virtual work-station. Traumatized by this on-the-job assault, Malkah cannot at first return to work and sinks into a deep depression: “If only they had sent an assassin after me on the street,” she laments, “if only they had sent a fake message robot to blow up in my face. But to attack me in my work, that was a stroke of true genius. Now I fear my own creativity” (158). When at last she is able to recommence her work as a computer programmer, it as though her lifeless form has been reanimated, the cyborg has been reactivated: “I [am] free,” she reflects, “to reenter my work, my life.” Such avowals make Yod’s extermination a puzzling resolution to Piercy’s exploration of cyborg identity. Why, if Malkah lives to work, can’t Yod? Piercy introduces an array of other characters, from Yod’s “workaholic” creator, Avram; to Riva, a tireless data pirate; to Chava, a central figure in her Renaissance narrative, who all choose to “make work the center.” It is ostensibly Yod’s lack of freedom to change employment or employer that marks his work experience as unique in the workaholic culture that Piercy portrays. The many other workaholics that people her text are driven by conviction, by loyalty, by ambition—even by desperation—to work constantly, but not by programming. Yet at other moments, including the following passage in which Shira comforts Yod, Piercy communicates the artificiality of such a distinction, presenting Yod as simply another product of a society that treats work as the essence of one’s identity: “You were created to protect a vulnerable and endangered community.” “What were you created to do?” “I see your point. But once we grow up, we all have purposes, goals, functions in a society.” “Set by yourself.” Shira hefted a quartz paperweight, put it down. “Not necessarily. When I worked for Y-S, I governed little in my life. I certainly didn’t


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set my own goals at work, and I wasn’t in control at home. And now? Avram set up this project, and he’s my boss as much as he’s yours.” (150–151)

While this debate seems at first a sort of rhetorical flourish on the part of Shira, its validity is borne out in Piercy’s portrait of the near future. To a remarkable extent, “purposes, goals, [and] functions” are the essence of the human lives (now post-human?) that she depicts. Certainly, Piercy’s termination of Yod is in part a symbolic rejection of the larger socio-economic conditions of extreme wealth and poverty that are fueling the work culture she portrays. What better way to condemn a projected future of roiling slums and garrisoned corporate enclaves than to destroy the ultimate product of this economically polarized world? Yet ultimately, Piercy’s most apparent critique of these economic and social relations is a more explicit gesture toward the possibility of dramatic change within both the corporations and the slums. At the end of her novel, Y-S is violently fractured by a strategic assault by Tikva, and the subjugated citizens of the sprawling slums called the “Glop” stage a massive strike. Such narrative developments forcefully communicate Piercy’s desire for global economic justice.48 To fully comprehend why Yod’s creation is presented as folly while Malkah’s labor-intensive lifestyle is celebrated, I maintain that we must weigh her condemnation of exploitative overwork against her liberal feminist faith that women can experience self-actualization through lives wholly committed to paid, public work. Malkah’s characterization of her work echoes liberal feminist paeans to work running back to Betty Friedan: I have been a defender of my people. I am a small woman who has stood tall. I have been independent. I have relished my own company, and when I let a man into my bed, it was for my enjoyment only and the pleasure of his company—not because I needed any more from him than that mutual zest and exploration that used to be my best means of recreation. I have been protected by others, certainly, excused guard duty; my town has revered and celebrated me because I helped us all to stay free. . . . . . . . I have indeed been a proud creature, running in the wind of my own mind, free and driven at once. . . . . . . . In the image world, I am the power of my thought, of my capacity to create. There is no sex in the Base or the Net, but there is sexuality, there is joining, there is the play of minds like the play of dolphins in surf. In a

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world parceled out by multis, it is one of the only empowered and sublimely personal activities remaining. I have always known I was exceptionally blessed to be able to revel in my work. (160–161)

Malkah’s work in the Internet, although performed for economic ends, is, paradoxically, a “sublimely personal” act. This fusion of Malkah’s personal life with her work life makes her ontologically akin to Yod. Yet, in Malkah’s case, she feels empowered by this saturation in work. What distinguishes the work ethic of the machine from that of the liberal feminist here is the thin tissue of “selfhood” that contemporary humanism permits women such as Malkah to assume. In her emphasis on “the power of [Malkah’s] thought,” Piercy represents work as an escape from the conception of women as bodies, designed only for reproduction. When Malkah is attacked in her work, she perceives the assault as a rape, thinking, “I am a magician of chimeras, and now my magic is penetrated, undone . . . ” (160). This attack removes her from the realm of her mind to that of her body: “Now I am reduced to my aging body in my room, which is luxurious but insufficient as a world. At seventy-two, I knock against my limits constantly in the flesh. I cannot walk as far as I used to. My knees give way. I don’t sleep soundly. My body creaks and groans” (161). Work is the ultimate source of female empowerment and its loss a fall into vulnerable embodiment.49 This reading is amplified by Piercy’s inclusion of the character Chava in her narrative thread about the Renaissance. Piercy’s depiction of Chava seems inspired by the lengthy list of proto-feminist literary heroines who defy the pressures of domesticity to pursue lives of public work. Chava explains that she gave up care of her son after being widowed in order to pursue work as a mid-wife and as secretary to the famous rabbi, the Maharal. She reflects that during the years she was a wife and mother her life was a strictly embodied one: “For those four years, my life was what will we eat, is his shirt clean, feelings of the bed, pregnancy, then my son, Aaron, colic, dirt, feeding, seeing him grow and unfold. The flesh closed over me, and I drowned” (290). Having escaped this life of the flesh, she revels in her life of work: I can read and write, not just one language but seven languages. . . . Are there twenty women in all of Europe with whom I could converse about the matters that interest me? I like midwifery. I like to try my hand now and then at cooking and making nice. But my


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real life is going back and forth between women’s business of birthing and what men have made their business, the life of the mind, my studies. (290)

Between Malkah and Chava, then, Piercy creates an extended historical meditation on women’s struggle to free themselves from restrictive conventions of femininity through paid public work. And, indeed, the conclusion of the text continues this socio-political thread still further. Shira embraces the work patterns that Malkah has to this point in the text typified: “As soon as Malkah took an extended leave, Shira had been asked by the council to fill her grandmother’s seat as a Base Overseer. She found in herself a swelling power, an intensifying concentrated energy for work” (423). She joins the long, celebrated line of women in Piercy’s text who embrace lives of self-actualizing public work. By combining representations of women workers joyfully committed to lives of work with a bleak portrait of the cyborg as inescapably bound to such an existence, Piercy, like Russ, captures the historical conflicts that inhere in soft work. The paradox that Malkah feels “free and driven at once,” while Yod’s drives apparently prevent him from being free also brings into focus how Yod’s own construction as a gendered being—as a male cyborg—figures in the narrative. Given work’s historical role as an integral component of masculinity, it should not surprise us that Yod is himself at times empowered by work, his cyborg behaviors closely resembling those of an idealized masculine hero. While following his mandate to protect, for instance, he repeatedly rescues Shira and others in dramatic action sequences. His indefatigable performance as a lover similarly conforms to a male ideal. And later, when he assumes the task of protecting Shira’s son, he seems to promise fidelity as a father figure to rival what any human male could offer. It is Yod’s lack of agency in these acts that ultimately excludes him from traditional masculinity; a “real” man is historically understood to be one who is able, within certain economic parameters, to work or not at his own discretion. Yet, Piercy’s novel suggests that this traditional understanding of gender is no longer available in a work culture in which everyone must labor endlessly and according to mandates that they do not control. What is left for Yod to strive for is being a human being, a status the novel associates with receiving compensation for work. These negotiations of identity, then, communicate the equalizing force of the new work culture: paid work becomes the aspiration of both men and women in an economic climate in which the assertion

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of real agency is no longer a possibility. Ultimately, however, the resemblance between the work ethic of machines and liberal feminists casts this new equality in a questionable light. By countering Malkah’s celebrations of endless work with the grim fate of Yod, the novel recalls how Maslow’s euphoric portrait of the self-actualized worker was answered by Oates’s disturbing rendering of this figure as a “slave” strapped to the “rack of work.”

My Body, My Workplace A survey of other contemporary representations of the cyborg suggests that Piercy’s is far from the only text that understands the internalization of machine parts as a metaphor for an existence defined exclusively by work. These texts suggest a reciprocal relationship between contemporary technology and the work ethic promoted by corporate culture: workers are motivated to incorporate machine parts by a drive to be more productive, and the machine parts then intensify that drive still further. In Greg Bear’s Blood Music, for example, after ambitious scientist Vergil Ulam is fired from his job, he injects himself with the “biochips” he has designed in order to take his work with him. His body is overrun by these “microscopic logic circuits,” which then quickly spread to others, breaking down the boundaries between individuals to create a mass, visionary act of labor. The cells themselves explain this process in the following terms: Information is passed between clusters sharing in assigned tasks, including instruction and memory. Mentality is thus divided between clusters performing a function. Important memory may be *diffused* through all clusters. What you think of as INDIVIDUAL may be spread throughout the *totality*.50

Although the cells that “speak” here are behaving according to biological mandates that existed before Vergil’s experiment, it is only when they are transformed into “the world’s tiniest machines” that their work “culture” subjugates their human hosts.51 While, prior to the revolution Vergil triggers, the human body “worked” because of cell functions that human consciousness could not perceive, the modified cells that Vergil engineers radically revise the notion of a working body, reducing it to a mere medium for their “tasks” and “functions.” William Gibson’s novels are full of cyborgs whose assimilation of machine parts marks them as beings that have passed from an


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existence in which they live, to one in which they function, in which they work. Understanding Gibson’s archetypal rendering of the human-machine interface as a site of intensified labor, Rosenthal writes, “Cyberspace is an addiction, a neurological rush, and in part, an apt and biting parody of the cultlike workaholism of techies like the Silicon Valleyites who developed the Macintosh computer and wore T-shirts that said ‘working 90 Hours a Week and Loving It.’ ”52 Yet it is not only those who “jack in” to cyberspace who manifest this sensibility. Molly, the infamous “razor girl” of the Matrix Trilogy, has taken on the role of street heavy by acquiring a variety of cybernetic implants. Contrary to Piercy’s optimism regarding the self-fulfillment afforded women through a profound commitment to work, Molly’s work identity, signified by the implants, exists to the exclusion of some other, private self. “Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right?” she remarks to the data “cowboy,” Case. “You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”53 Her utilitarian, work-centered view of human existence precipitates her incorporation of highly visible technological parts, which help her to realize her commitment to be what she does. The character of Angie, who appears in the latter two texts of the trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, is involuntarily transformed into a global celebrity by the circuitry her father has implanted in her head. This technology makes existence as a “simstar” inevitable, inescapable. The technology performs a certain function, and her “self” becomes ancillary to the work capacity that inhabits her, or which she inhabits. 54 In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, perhaps the most graphic instance of the cyborg phenomenon as an inescapable compulsion to labor appears not in human but animal form. Stephenson’s baroque, ingenious “rat things”—part machine, part pit bull— represent the concretization of work protocols within the realm of the animal. Of the rat-thing, Stephenson writes, “[H]is job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do anything else.”55 This translation of the uncertain impulses of an animal into an utterly consistent work ethic is accomplished by the transformation of the dog into a cyborg. Doing one’s job and nothing else is the implicit credo of all of the cyborgs of Stephenson’s machine saturated future. Its hero and heroine, a “free lance hacker” and skate board-riding courier, are merely caricatures of the new flexible workforce whose willing embrace of advanced communication technologies ensure that they are always on the job; as with the other cyborgs, their bodies are their workplaces.

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As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, several films concerned with the post-human have also invited us to understand the cyborg as an icon of contemporary work patterns. The very euphemisms for cyborg death in Bladerunner and the Terminator films imply living is the equivalent of working in the ontology of the cyborg. If to be “retired” or “terminated” is to die, then mustn’t working be the entire extent of life? In Bladerunner, which invites elaborate parallels with American slave narratives, the replicants struggle toward a life beyond relentless work, while the labor of manufacturing and “retiring” them consumes their ostensibly human counterparts. As Sarah Connor points out in T2, the terminators never stop working. They are what they do, and, as becomes apparent when we meet the workaholic Miles Dyson in the director’s cut of the film, they are the result of similarly inexhaustible human industry.56 At the conclusion of her discussion of cyberpunk science fiction, Pam Rosenthal identifies what she regards as that genre’s chief lesson: “that the ideal of a final/original uncontaminated humanness is, at bottom, what is most clumsy, old-fashioned, and naive about outmoded images of technological society.”57 Such an admonition bears repeating here because I do not wish to offer this reading of the cyborg as a symbol of the penetration of a late-capitalist work ethic into the “human” as a way of recuperating “uncontaminated humanness”—a self purified of all traces of the demands of labor. As these texts illustrate, there is no “natural” state of perfect humanness from which contemporary subjects have strayed or to which they can retreat. On the other hand, the very different warning cyborg narratives offer is also compelling. They shift attention from what machines are, to what they do, confronting us with a picture of tireless industry in which we already see an unsettling reflection of ourselves. And it is perhaps as a caution to readers that the cyborg metaphor has the most potential to lead to an imaginative domain where men and women are freer than they are today. In Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy’s first novel about humans and cybernetics, human freedom is facilitated by quiet, unseen machines. It is only in the sections of her novel where she seeks to frighten her readers that those work activities coded in machine parts suffuse the human body, and the results are humans not liberated, but under control. Far from the penetrations contemporary technologies effect, the machines that generate her “post-work” society in Mattapoisett go about their business of pure work without getting under human’s skin. While in the 1950s Vonnegut presented the dynamic between men and machines as a zero sum game in which one or the other would


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triumph, the cyborg introduces a vision of interpenetration in which the instrumentality of machine work culture infuses human lives even as they attempt to project their humanity onto their machines. If the motif of slavery stretches back to Vonnegut, the fantasy of selffulfillment through work that both Piercy and Russ articulate in their cyborg narratives anticipates the obsessions of contemporary American corporate culture. The degree to which the liberal feminist credo that work is the avenue to fulfillment and psychological well being has become a mainstay of American working life for both men and women further underscores the gender complexities of soft work. Meanwhile, as I will explore in the final two chapters of this study, the racialization of contemporary conceptions of work, evident thus far in references to slavery, “Ghost-Shirts,” and economic discrimination against Jews, comes into full force in corporate culture, which increasingly positions racial and ethnic others as paragons of the deep and even metaphysical commitment to work that it promotes.


CH A P T ER

5

“Sleeping Beauty”: Corporate Culture, Race, and Reality in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun and Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor

Over the course of the previous chapters, I have traced the evolution of soft management theory from the birth of human relations as a reaction against Taylorism to Abraham Maslow’s work on selfactualization and synergy. I have explored the ways a range of writers and filmmakers have presented these theories and their implementation in the workplace as the occasion of significant shifts in the gendered meanings of work in America—shifts that find male workers recast as emotional consumers and female workers committed to a workaholic breed of self-actualization in the guise of liberal feminism. In the previous chapter I began to chart the outlines of corporate culture, the school of management theory that took hold in the 1980s, and which built on both the psychological insights of human relations and the emphasis on synergy and personal growth within the discourse of self-actualization. The remainder of this book examines depictions of corporate culture’s effects on American work, looking particularly at how the softness of this discourse has been presented as both a feminizing and racializing influence on American work and workers. The emergence of the notion of corporate culture occurred in concert with the economic success of Japan in the late 1970s and 1980s. America’s floundering automobile industry transformed formerly profitable industrial areas of the American heartland into an economically barren “rust belt” during those years, and Japan’s new stature as the most profitable automobile manufacturer in the world jarred against Americans’ patriotic identification with that industry. Japan’s

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success in computer development, meanwhile, suggested that it had not only triumphed in the industrial arena, but was also dominating the high-tech frontier of postindustrialism.1 In this respect, developments within management theory continued to unfold in relation to a shift in the economy from production to services driven by automated technologies. The workers of Vonnegut’s Player Piano are reframed as consumers both by human relations discourse and automated technologies that displace them from productive activity, and the cyborg-feminists of Russ and Piercy’s novels experience a double penetration of self-actualizing work and the next generation of these technologies into both their bodies and selves. The worker of the corporate culture era, meanwhile, faces ever-greater possibilities of both disenfranchisement and empowerment by still more sophisticated technologies. Ironically, while technological advances continue to intensify the threat of unemployment explored by Vonnegut, Russ, and Piercy, by the 1980s the capacity to build the best technology (including consumer electronics, automobiles, and computers) becomes the ultimate mark of the quality of a workforce and the gold standard of management. In the early 1990s, two of the most popular novelists in America, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, responded to widespread anxieties about Japanese economic power, each writing a thriller that took the economic tensions between the two nations as its starting point. Crichton’s Rising Sun and Clancy’s Debt of Honor are written not only to entertain but also to broadcast the grave consequences of America’s economic vulnerability to Japan.2 Those consequences focus on the threat to Americans’ sense of a stable, knowable “reality” over which its white male citizens can exert some control. Both authors suggest that the penetration of Japanese culture inside America’s borders threatens white patriarchal hegemony, the essence for them of America itself.

“Tribal Behavior” By the early 1980s business thinkers began to take the position that Japan’s economic gains were not the consequence of Japanese companies’ specific business practices but instead were derived from Japan’s distinctive national culture. In Theory Z, William Ouchi’s best-selling analysis of Japanese management, he argues that essential qualities of Japanese culture—“trust, subtlety, and intimacy”—result in their economic success.3 More broadly, corporate culture writers generalized that while “Westerners are individualistic, mobile, heterogeneous,

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with short-term horizons[,] Japanese are strong on collective consensus, highly stable, homogeneous and disciplined with longterm horizons.”4 Given this emphasis on “cultural difference,” between the two nations, elements of race and racism lurked just beneath the surface of discussions of the economic conflict between the United States and Japan. Salaman explains: While Corporate Culture solutions focus on the organization’s culture, the factors underlying organizational failure are often defined in terms of aspects of national cultures which are seen to have an impact on organizational cultures. Interest in organizational cultures is therefore situated within and arises from a conception of national threat from the “other.”5

By setting the stage for international competition in which the meanings of American work are framed in reference to those of “foreign” cultures, globalization spawned a management model that reframed the meaning of work in terms of race. In response to America’s economic slump, corporate culture management discourse paradoxically encouraged Americans to both emulate the Japanese and become ever more American. Corporate culture advocates urged American managers to develop an “approach based on the Japanese recognition of the importance of shared culture as the foundation of a successful organization,” and in many cases their praise went beyond Japanese business’s production of cohesive internal values to more specific cultural traits.6 Yet even in a text such as Theory Z, which represents Japanese management as superior to American management, Ouchi is careful to make it clear that the “Theory Z companies” on which he focuses in America are “uniquely American” and “have developed naturally in the United States” despite their similarities to Japanese firms.7 Corporate culture theory, then, increasingly became the occasion to patriotically seek within American culture elements that could match the cultural strengths of Japan. Salaman writes, “Corporate Culture offers to save America (or the West) from the dangers posed by foreign threat by rediscovering the real values of America and enabling these to be reasserted in the workplace.”8 While race figures unmistakably in the patriotic calls for America to marshal its indigenous cultural traits against those of the Japanese, less obvious but equally important to the modeling of the corporate culture workplace and worker are issues of gender. In Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos’s influential 1981 text, The Art of

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Japanese Management, for instance, the authors present the “7-S” model—a list of seven elements that they claim factor into corporate success. The seven “S’s” are strategy, structure, systems, staff, style, skills, and superordinate goals.9 “Superordinate goals” refers to culture, “the spiritual or significant meanings and shared values of the people within an organization.”10 In their critique of American business practices, Pascale and Athos maintain that while the Americans and Japanese approach the “hard-ball S’s”—strategy, structure, and systems—very similarly, “[Japan’s] culture gives them advantages in the ‘softer’ S’s because of its approach to ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection, and to interdependence as the most approved mode of relationship.”11 It is difficult to miss the gendered implications contained in the hard-soft distinction they lay out; while the hard S’s are achieved through the exercise of rational agency, the soft ones are associated with irrational and intuitive interpersonal dynamics. The association that they map between the Japanese and these soft traits suggests that corporate culture calls on discourses of both race and gender in its attempts to reconstitute the American worker. A year after Pascale and Athos’s book was published, Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence popularized the vision of indigenous American values as the source of economic salvation. Peters and Waterman build on the 7-S model by presenting American companies that embody “excellence.” They argue that excellent corporations allow their workers to both fit in and “stick out,”—an updating of the idea of synergy in which workers both contribute to the good of the company and derive a sense of personal prestige and growth from their work. Yet, like Pascale and Athos, they place particular emphasis on the superordinate goals, arguing that the most expedient way for corporations to achieve this level of worker commitment is by establishing a unique and vivid internal culture. They quote business writer Philip Selznick, who explains, “Institutional survival, properly understood, is a matter of maintaining values and distinctive identity.”12 They see such values, such “culture,” as most effectively disseminated not through “formal written procedures,” but instead “by softer means: . . . stories, myths, legends, and metaphors.”13 Race and nationalism figure importantly in Peters and Waterman’s theorization of corporate culture. “Business performance in the United States has deteriorated badly,” they concede, “at least compared to that of Japan.”14 While they are critical of the trend beginning in 1980 in which “U.S. managers, beset by obvious problems of stagnation, leaped to adopt Japanese management practices,” they

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concede that Japan has a “turned-on work force,” that it is dominating in the auto and computer markets, and that many of America’s most excellent companies “look very Japanese.”15 They are careful to distance themselves from what some critics had begun to characterize as an “escape into irrationality and mysticism,” joking that they are not advocating “mov[ing] Ford board meetings to the local Zen center.”16 Such disclaimers not withstanding, they ultimately advocate a “Zenlike” approach to business management.17 Yet, once again, gender also surfaces in their prescription for a new work culture in the United States. In their first attempts to characterize the management reforms that they are advocating, they turn to two famously female workforces, those of Tupperware and Mary Kay cosmetics: We hear stories every other day about the Japanese companies, their unique culture and their proclivity for meeting, singing company songs, and chanting the corporate litany. Now, that sort of thing is usually dismissed as not relevant in America, because who among us can imagine such tribal behavior in U.S. companies? But American examples do exist. For anyone who has not seen it, it is hard to imagine the hoopla and excitement that attend the weekly Monday night Rally of people who sell plastic bowls—Tupperware bowls. Similar goings on at Mary Kay cosmetics were the subject of a segment done by Morley Safer on Sixty Minutes. Those examples might be dismissed as peculiar to selling a certain kind of product. On the other hand, at HP, the regular beer bust for all hands is a normal part of each division’s approach to keeping everyone in touch. And one of us went through an IBM sales training program early in his career; we sang songs every morning and got just as enthusiastic (well, almost as enthusiastic) as the workers in a Japanese company.18

It is not only Japanese work culture that provides a model of corporate culture, then, but also American companies dominated by female workforces. If the “hoopla,” and “tribal behavior” that these women exhibit is the “sort of thing [that] is usually dismissed in America,” it is because the emotional and collective aspects of such behavior run counter to the model of rational, autonomous masculinity that has served as the defining archetype of white American identity. While Peters and Waterman counter the feminized image of cosmetics and Tupperware rallies with a “beer bust,” their discomfort with the very practices they are promoting is evident in the coy manner in which they confess their own participation in such group rites, and the parenthetical disclaimer they attach to that

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confession. The evasive rhetoric that the authors bring to this discussion suggests the uncomfortable implications they recognize in embracing rather than dismissing “that sort of thing” in the American workplace. Although In Search of Excellence concedes cultural ground to the Japanese, it also ambivalently registers the significant rupture the Japanese create in the association between work and masculinity through their reconception of work as the province of non-rational “culture.” Counter to the traditional association between instrumental rationality and masculinity, Peters and Waterman conclude that in the domain of work, “man is quite strikingly irrational.”19 They quote Stanford Business School professor James March, who argues that “[we] need to supplement the technology of reason with a technology of foolishness. Individuals and organizations need ways of doing things for which they have no good reason. Not always. Not usually. But sometimes. They need to act before they think.”20 Likewise, Peters and Waterman turn away from a central axiom of business that “size matters.” Near the conclusion of their text they argue that, despite the enthusiasm for mergers that was fast becoming a trademark of the 1980s business climate, “Smallness works. Small is beautiful.”21 They quote the chairman of an apparel company who explains “We want a series of plants where a man feels that ‘my wife and daughter can work here.’ ”22 Small and foolish and soft: these are the defining terms of the “corporate culture” Peters and Waterman helped to usher into life in America. Economic competition with Japan, then, produced a softening of work culture on two levels. First, the specific work culture that Japan modeled, with its commitment to “soft” interpersonal elements and “superordinate goals,” inspired proponents of the corporate culture school to promote non-rational approaches to American management. Interest in Japanese culture’s ostensible indifference to Western conventions of rationality continued throughout the 1980s. In The Enigma of Japanese Power, a book published in 1989 which Crichton credits in the bibliography of Rising Sun, Karel Van Wolferen cites “malleable realities” as a key aspect of Japanese culture, explaining, “It is socially acceptable in Japan for ‘reality’ to consist not so much of the results of objective observation as of an emotionally constructed picture in which things are portrayed the way they are supposed to be.”23 While “In the West ‘reality’ is not often thought of as something that can be managed, moulded or negotiated,” he goes on to assert that the Japanese understand truth to be “multiple and contradictory,” and take a “ ‘flexible’ approach to reality.”24

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Equally important, the new, global economic competition that Japan’s emergence introduced forced into relief the contingency and variability among all cultures, again shifting the emphasis within management away from hard numbers toward abstract cultural issues and social practices. In privileging “the ‘soft’, less tangible elements of life—signs, images, meanings and values—which are often assumed to be unable to offer clear, unequivocal and hence ‘hard’ knowledge,” theories of corporate culture make the workplace newly fluid.25 Rather than a place where truth is arrived at through traditional common sense or empirical reason, the workplace offers contingent and changeable precepts as the framework for both analysis and action. Truths are subject to revision as old assumptions are replaced by upgraded ones. In this respect, the new management techniques, “actively construct the ‘reality’ of work life,” requiring workers to adopt not only new social dynamics or selves, but new cultures, new values, new truths.26 Throughout this study, we have considered texts that present the softening of work culture with varying degrees of resignation, equanimity or enthusiasm. Yet, in their responses to the softness that the Japanese brought to the American business world, Crichton and Clancy understand “hard knowledge” as the essence of American masculinity, and treat the economic ascendancy of the Japanese as a national crisis. The economic conflict that Crichton and Clancy represent in their novels is waged over both race and gender; behind the material shifting of American wealth into Japanese hands, these writers imply, a more crucial resource is being siphoned away: white American masculinity. Their notion of this masculinity in the soft work era is not predicated on a warrior’s strength or even a financier’s wealth. Instead, they depict gender as contingent upon the ability of an individual or a people to lay claim to the “real” itself.

Sleeping Beauty By the 1980s, authors attempting to make sense of Americans’ economic experience began to give significant attention to the perceived economic strength and robust work culture of Japan. In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1987 Bluebeard, for example, a group of Japanese businessmen arrive at the home of Rabo Karabekian to examine his collection of abstract expressionist paintings. Their arrival serves as an opportunity for Vonnegut—who had, by the 1980s, made America’s shift away from industrialism toward soft work a career-long preoccupation—to rehearse the value of Karabekian’s collection and precipitates the

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critical moment in which Karabekian and his house guest Circe Berman face off on the crucial questions of gender and representation that undergird Vonnegut’s entire novel.27 In William Gibson’s futurist story, “The Winter Market,” (1986) we learn that gomi, a Japanese word, has become the universal term for garbage, as though Japan’s sovereignty in matters of production has extended itself all the way through the life cycle of a purchased good to its disposal—as though the only way in which to think of a commodity at any point in its existence is in Japanese.28 Again, in Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine (1986) and Room Temperature (1990), Japan is repeatedly invoked as the new leader in the industrial design to which Baker’s works are committed formally and thematically.29 Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It (1991), to which the previous chapter was dedicated, itself prominently features a multinational corporation with the partially Japanese moniker of Yakamura-Stichen, where the dominant aesthetic is “blond hair, blue eyes with epicanthic folds, painted brows like Hokusai brush strokes . . . . ”30 These moments collectively reflect a system of notation in which references to Japan become shorthand for massive accumulations of capital, intense consumer activity, global technological supremacy, and cultural domination. Yet it was not until the 1992 publication of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun that an entire novel was given over to exploring the possibility that America was on the brink of economic ruin at the hands of the Japanese. Laden with didactic expositions borrowed from the work of business writers and scholars, the novel offers statistics and rumors: the Japanese have sent 150,000 students to America annually to study American ways (24); they own 70 percent of downtown Los Angeles real estate (44); they are systematically buying out American ranch land (181); they hold meetings to plan the American economy (214); and they “own ten American colleges” (279), to name but a few.31 Crichton leaves no doubt about the premise of this novel: “We are . . . at war with Japan” (136), but it is a (pathetically) one-sided war in which, “we’re giving this country away” (18, italics in original). The narrative structure devised to support this weighty load of economic data and political commentary is a complex police procedural, in which Peter Smith narrates the events of two days in his career as the “Special Services Liaison Officer” of the LAPD. Called to the new Los Angeles headquarters of the Japanese corporation Nakamoto, Smith enlists the aid of a retired lieutenant, John Connor, who is a respected expert on Japanese culture. Upon their arrival they discover the apparently strangled body of a beautiful blonde woman, lying on the corporate boardroom only one floor above a gala celebration for

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the opening of the building. What follows is an examination of the Japanese “shadow world” that Crichton implies is engulfing the American landscape (63). Connor, a character modeled after Sherlock Holmes, leads the investigation with unassailable deductive powers and unfailing confidence. Smith watches and learns, playing an often baffled Watson to Connor’s Holmes. Ultimately, the centerpiece of the investigation becomes a series of tapes made by surveillance cameras in the course of the murder, an extended screening of which also becomes Crichton’s primary literary vehicle for discussing Japanese technological superiority. The doctored tapes lead the investigators to a series of suspects: first a Japanese playboy, then an American senator, and finally to the true murderer, a Japanese corporate underling attempting to advance his position in Nakamoto at any cost. In Rising Sun the new dominance of Japan’s workforce and its style of management is encoded primarily through references to its automated technologies, which Crichton depicts as vastly superior to America’s. At the beginning of the novel, Crichton introduces the Nakamoto corporate high-rise in which the action is centered as an anatomical chart of Japanese superiority in this domain. Its technology is “the most advanced in the world . . . the best fire alarm and fire prevention system. The best earthquake system. And of course the best electronic security system: best cameras, detectors, everything” (47). Likewise, the central vehicle of discovery in the text, the surveillance cameras, doubles as a reminder of American delinquency in research and development: “They have very sophisticated mapping software. It’s by far the most advanced in the world. The Japanese are becoming much better in software. Soon they will surpass the Americans in that, as they already have in computers” (306). The repetition of the phrase “most advanced in the world” here suggests the extent to which, in Crichton’s view, nothing short of global hegemony is to be lost or gained with the tides of technological development and manufacturing. Through a series of detailed dialogues, Crichton repeatedly warns of America’s new, intolerable second-rate status: “The most advanced Japanese video equipment isn’t available in this country. They keep us three to five years behind. Which is their privilege. It’s their technology, they can do what they want” (95–96). While Crichton ultimately generates a distinctive discourse of postindustrial gender around the digital images these technologies produce, he begins by deploying more conventional assumptions about gender to forcefully impart to his readers a sense of Japan as culturally alien and dangerous. For example, Rising Sun immediately

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portrays the Japanese as a feminized and feminizing threat to the masculine individualism that is at the heart of America’s historically gendered notion of citizenship. The first view the reader is afforded of the Japanese is as an undifferentiated mass: “The doors opened. We faced a solid wall of blue business suits, backs to us” (22). Later, this same gathering of Japanese businessmen depart, “wheeling away like a school of fish” (29). It is not simply a single corporation, or even the general business community, that we are expected to regard as a unit rather than a collection of autonomous individuals; it is the nation of Japan as a whole. The Japanese, Connor asserts, are a single family. He explains, “It’s the closeness that exists in America between a parent and child—a child often understands everything just from a parent’s glance. . . . It is as if all Japanese are members of the same family, and they can communicate without words” (218). This portrait of unbounded connection is explicitly contrasted with America’s devotion to a system of social relations in which each individual—especially each male individual—possesses a distinct and timeless self. Echoes of Van Wolferen’s claims about the Japanese’s flexible understanding of reality are conspicuous; noting that the Japanese do not feel that it is inconsistent to present themselves differently in the presence of different interlocutors, Connor generalizes that, “Americans believe there is some core of individuality that doesn’t change from one moment to the next. And the Japanese believe context rules everything” (59–60). Crichton stages this national conflict, then, as one in which an engulfing and unindividuated Japanese mass threatens to overtake what Janice Radway, after Daniel Boorstin, has referred to as “the heroic individual . . . the independent, idiosyncratic, autonomous American self.”32 By resorting to this vocabulary of fluidity and conformity, Crichton maps the “otherness” of Japan onto a schematic gender binary. Rather than simply suggest this distinction between the two societies, however, Rising Sun moves from this gendered discourse of difference to the even more ominous register of contamination. The masculine conventions of strength and independence that have defined the American way of life, the novel suggests, are already being eroded by Japan’s ability to out-produce and undersell its American competitors. “If we lose the ability to make our own products,” warns a protectionist senator in Crichton’s novel, “we lose control over our destiny. . . . That’s the problem. We’re now dependent on Japan—and I believe America shouldn’t be dependent on any nation” (109, emphasis mine). To render this image of Japan’s impact on America still more vivid, Crichton again resorts to a semiotics of gender;

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transforming contamination into penetration, he depicts the encounter between the nations as an act of rape. Specifically, America’s feminized state of vulnerability is embodied in the raped and murdered form of an American woman—an “American beauty long-stemmed rose” (42), found “flat on her back, right in [the] . . . boardroom” (9) of a Japanese corporate headquarters. Consistent with Crichton’s insistence that America’s own social and cultural corruption has made it ready prey for the Japanese, however, Cheryl Lynn Austin is no symbol of American purity soiled by an alien aggressor. She has prostituted herself to the Japanese just as the American businessmen and real estate brokers Crichton condemns compromise their nation’s economic integrity. In an apt metaphor for what Crichton takes to be America’s suicidal flirtation with economic ruin, Austin is represented as a “gasper”—a woman who becomes sexually aroused from near strangulation—who has now accidentally allowed herself to be strangled. Taking no chances that the reader miss this and similar analogies, Crichton states that “[i]n the name of free trade, [Reagan] spread our legs real wide” (229), and that the exchange between nations has gotten out of control. In this metaphor for the globalization of America’s economy in the 1980s, America gives up its power and concedes its cultural boundaries to an aggressive foreign body determined to dominate it. While these images of a national transformation suggest the centrality of gender to Crichton’s view of America’s economic position in the corporate culture era, it is in his depiction of the dynamics between his central characters that Rising Sun communicates the most profound loss America faces. The narrative of national disintegration brought about by feminine weakness and corruption is paralleled by a similar narrative of domestic, marital disintegration. In fact, while Crichton’s text may be viewed in decades to come as singularly venomous in its anti-Japanese sentiment, its misogynist depiction of contemporary women will doubtless appear consistent with that displayed in many mass-market publications of the 1990s. Much of this contempt for women is concentrated in Crichton’s portrait of Smith’s ex-wife, Lauren, a career-woman-with-an-attitude, who in many respects embodies the conservative critique of Betty Friedan’s feminist legacy. From Smith’s first reflections about Lauren, she is portrayed as a caricature of the fallen (working) woman, 1990s-style, a woman whose self-actualizing work is recast as unadulterated selfishness. “She looks like a dedicated mom. Actually, my daughter lives with me, and my ex-wife doesn’t see much of her. She doesn’t show up for weekend visitation half the time, and she misses child support

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payments” (8). In less than subtle strokes, Crichton renders an image of the American career woman as a mother of nightmarish incompetence and apathy, an indifference most graphically illustrated in an episode in which Lauren fails to provide basic care for their two-year-old daughter: “Lauren hadn’t changed her diapers often enough during the weekend. So I changed her, and there were streaks of shit in Michelle’s vagina. She hadn’t cleaned her own daughter properly” (294). In a broader context, Lauren is represented as hyperbolically capricious, spoiled, cold, and shallow. Yet her most fundamental flaw is one that is shared by virtually every woman in this text: Lauren is consistently represented as prone to fantasy and delusion. Smith offers a laundry list of his wife’s delusions and their negative consequences to their marriage and his life: She had these fantasies about things . . . . She thought I was a rough, tough detective facing danger every day . . . . Then when she got pregnant she didn’t want to have an abortion. She wanted to get married instead. It was some romantic idea she had. She didn’t really think it through. (80)

Arrogant and self-centered, Lauren has “the privileged person’s deep belief that whatever she happened to think was probably true. Certainly good enough to live by. Nothing needed to be checked against reality” (98). And in this text in which fantasy is conflated with specific gendered practices of consumption—in which, for instance, a female newscaster is represented as covering “fashion and fantasy” (90)—Lauren has fully internalized this association “try[ing] on ideas the way some women try on hats” (98). Cheryl Lynn Austin, the slain prostitute/symbol of America, likewise suffered from a detachment from reality. Her friend observes, “Cherylynn [sic] wants the ring on the finger and the kids and the dog in the yard. And this guy isn’t going to do it. She hasn’t figured it out” (69). Within Crichton’s narrative, her destruction represents the logical outcome of such a detachment from reality. From Lauren to the murdered Cheryl Lynn to Smith’s own young daughter who clamors to immerse herself in the fantasy of television cartoons or, more ominously, the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty, Crichton represents a pattern of delusion in which the myth-structures into which girls are indoctrinated produce deluded women who cannot locate “truth” or “reality.”

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Finally, it is from such a state of feminine fantasy that Crichton’s text most violently recoils. As the novel unfolds, the murder and rape of Cheryl Lynn, the original crimes of the Nakamoto Corporation, are overshadowed by a more elaborate and grievous crime enacted against American men: the Japanese lure them into a technologically-produced state of confusion in which they can no longer isolate truth or reality—in which they figuratively become both feminine and Japanese. The technologies that serves to represent the pervasive superiority of Japanese production techniques are surveillance cameras and video systems that allow recorded real events to be imperceptibly altered: now, with digital systems, they can be changed perfectly. Perfectly. And that’s something new . . . . Photographs always had integrity precisely because they were impossible to change. So we considered photographs to represent reality. But for several years now, computers have allowed us to make seamless alterations of photographic images. (209–210, emphasis in original)

A series of connections is woven here between Japan, women, and the disintegration of an American tradition of truth and reality. Like the Japanese culture from which they emerge, the digital systems undermine the stability of reality. In so doing, these technologies represent the same dangers to truth-perception, the same threat of corruption, that women and the feminine do. The fear, in this narrative that clings to and celebrates the conventional devices of deduction and discovery through investigation, is that these new technologies may simply take from Americans control of their traditional means of identifying reality, even their means of recognizing themselves. From Crichton’s perspective as a writer, and his affiliation with print culture, this anxiety is embodied in the binary he constructs between the “video” version of Smith’s testimony which he asks us to imagine in the first several pages of the text, and the written text which constitutes the “real” version of the story, a text that begins with the truth-signifying word, “actually.” America’s identity is inextricably linked with technologies of representation that rely on an ideological framework of the rational masculine subject, and to compete with the Japanese culture and workforce, to produce the context-driven forms of representation that their technologies facilitate, would mean to acquiesce to a feminized ideological regime incommensurate with the principles that Crichton imagines as essential to the continuity of America’s identity as a nation.

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Crichton, however, does not finally imagine a resolution in which such a regime is solidly in place. Instead he depicts, somewhat tentatively, the resurgence of a masculine order in the narrative development of Peter Smith, the American every man. In terms reminiscent of those in another Crichton cultural tour de force, Jurassic Park, Crichton addresses gender largely through questions of reproductive control in Rising Sun. Smith’s unplanned custody of his two-year-old daughter, while potentially introducing a narrative about male reproduction and the power of men to eliminate women from that project, instead renders him demasculinized and disempowered. Forced to abandon his detective work (truth-seeking masculine subject work) in order to be able to care for his daughter, he depends on his wife for her (unreliable) child support payments. Smith is a picture of emasculated dependence. Explaining his choice to work as a liaison to Connor, he reflects, “I mean, I can really use the money. I have extra expenses now, like Michelle’s day care. You know what day care costs for two-year-olds? And I have full-time housekeeping, and Lauren doesn’t make her child-support payments more than half the time. She says she can’t manage on her salary, but she just bought a new BMW, so I don’t know. I mean, what am I going to do, take her to court? She works for the fucking D.A.” (81)

In a spasm of anxiety about his uncertain future that seems particularly reminiscent of gendered stereotypes about dependent women, he laments that he is never going to be able to afford a house unless he remarries (110). Crichton engineers the possible salvation of Smith as rational male subject through two characters. Connor’s role in the narrative is to operate as a corrective to Smith’s emasculated state. The older man almost immediately defines their relationship as that between a sempai and kohai, explaining, “In Japan . . . a sempai is a senior man who guides a junior man, known as a kohai” (15). He goes on to explain that his role as sempai to Smith resembles that of a “fond parent” (15).33 Connor reintroduces Smith to the practices of detection he was forced to abandon when he took on full responsibility for his daughter, and in so doing, reacquaints him with masculine work in the form of an active pursuit of truth.34 Yet, in many respects, the relationship between Connor and Smith simply amplifies his uncertain gender position. He tags behind Connor, an eager student and accepting vessel for the enormous

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quantity of information Connor conveys to him. Connor in turn acts as the all-knowing “father figure,” patiently and sympathetically listening to Peter’s grievances about his ex-wife. But is Connor father or husband to Smith? This ambiguity coalesces in Crichton’s primary “action scene” in an otherwise remarkably actionless novel. Crichton presents a perfectly conventional scene in which the Japanese resort to armed violence. While the typical staging of such an attack would find the detective/hero rescuing the vulnerable mother and child, in Crichton’s version, Connor rescues a besieged Peter and his daughter, after Peter’s own incompetent defensive efforts leave him unconscious and utterly vulnerable. Upon Connor’s departure at the conclusion of the novel, however, Smith is represented as newly awakened to the threat of the Japanese achieving global economic power. The decay of the American landscape to which he has previously remained oblivious is now all too apparent to him. He notes, “The signs overhead had been spray-painted by gangs. I was aware of how uneven and bumpy the roadway was. To the right, the skyscrapers around Westwood stood hazy in smog. The landscape looked poor and decrepit” (387). Anticipating that his tutelage has motivated Smith to assume more autonomous and active identity in response to the looming Japanese threat, Connor asks, “What are you going to do now?” (387). Smith’s final act of the text is to resign his position as a liaison officer and to offer recommendations to the Chief of Police for reforms in departmental procedure toward Japanese corporations and the Japanese government. Confirming his new sense of agency, he explains: “It’s time for us to take control of our country again” (389). The rigorous training in detection and rational deduction has restored Smith, the American every man, to a state of masculine subjectivity. Yet Crichton strikes a less certain note with the introduction of Teresa Asakuma, a character who considerably complicates his schema of nationality, gender, and technology. At first glance, Asakuma, a disabled Japanese immigrant to America, functions simply as another thinly veiled conduit of Crichton’s condemnation of Japan. Though born in Japan, Asakuma loathes the Japanese, who brutally ostracized her for her disability and her mixed race (she is half African American). On the superficial level in which she serves as yet another accessible symbol in Crichton’s project of propaganda, Teresa is, as one critic has put it: . . . a useful character, because she represents the perfect target for Japanese bigotry. Her father was a black GI, and she has a crippled

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arm. She grew up in a small Japanese town where the tolerance for blacks and cripples was low. Her story offers an opportunity to expound a little on Japanese racism—even the notorious treatment of polluted outcasts, the burakumin, many of whom work in the leather trade, gets an airing. Not that any of this is implausible or wrong. Outsiders do have a hard time in Japan. But it functions as yet another stake driven through the heart of “they.”35

Asakuma’s role, however, is more crucial than that of the stock characters Crichton plants throughout the text to criticize Japan. Charged with the task of training Peter Smith how to penetrate the false images of doctored digital tape and find the “true image,” Asakuma is an apparent exception to Crichton’s systematic association of women and the Japanese with mystification. In fact, Teresa represents a sort of utopian fantasy of the clear-sighted working woman deploying American technology against the insidious technology of the Japanese. In other words, she is the antidote to the potential mystifications of the feminine, the Japanese, and their technologies. But Crichton finally fails to reconcile his own conceptions of femininity to his ideal of American technological power. This chafing of the feminine and the (American) technological is reflected in Smith’s responses to Asakuma: “She was dark, exotic looking, almost Eurasian. In fact she was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. She looked like one of those high cheek-boned models in magazines. And for a moment I was confused, because this woman was too beautiful to be working in some basement electronics laboratory” (203). Crichton can make sense of Teresa only by qualifying her identity as an American woman, writing her as both ethnically Japanese and physically disabled (one arm is underdeveloped, a “fleshy lump”). Her “Americanness” is diminished by the emphasis she places on minute details, which is coded as a Japanese cultural trait. Once Smith perceives her disability, moreover, he understands that she is not the “model” of femininity he imagined her to be, and his confusion about her seemingly incongruous presence in the laboratory—a classically masculine workplace—abates. Her facility with the digital equipment she works with renders the technology a prosthetic that, while it achieves a connection between the feminine and the technological that is of apparent benefit to the clear-sighted and independent America Crichton is rooting for, is also a symbol of her fall from a physical state of ideal womanhood. Yet, within the more abstract arena of gender relations in this text, her additional role as the potential love interest of Peter Smith opens

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the door for a potential reorganization of the national hierarchy that Crichton has imagined. What is remarkable and significant about this aspect of her character is the stark manner in which Crichton defies generic conventions by abruptly dropping the narrative thread of their potential romance near the end of the novel and never returning to it, as though an anticipated scene is simply missing, and a critical loose end has been left conspicuously exposed. Smith’s heterosexual preoccupation with Asakuma offers the possibility of a dynamic in which the American male worker asserts his role of autonomous agent, containing and objectifying the feminine and the Japanese. Furthermore, Asakuma’s participation in the technological project of investigation within the at least tentative context of her romance with Smith offers the possible recovery of American technology grounded in principles of rational subjectivity. Yet the unresolved state of their relationship instead contributes to the uncertainty with which Crichton suffuses the end of his novel. A conclusion in which Teresa rejects Smith would be consistent with Crichton’s extended representation of the emasculation of the male American worker-citizen, while a conclusion in which Asakuma consents to a relationship with Smith would effectively reassure American readers of the certain resurrection of the autonomous male agent in ways that would be counterproductive to Crichton’s mission of warning. Finally, Crichton ends his novel without containing or accounting for Teresa Asakuma, leaving her to float in the consciousness of the reader as the locus of possibility and dread. Dedicated to exploring an America that doesn’t “make things anymore” (217), Crichton’s pessimistic vision is of an America already economically and socially subjugated by “them,” the corporate culture “superpower,” Japan. Yet at the heart of this anxiety, in Crichton’s essential definition of “inferiority,” lies a narrative of gender that sees “soft” American workers as alienated from masculine agency by cultural practices and technologies that undermine the determinacy of rational discourse. In Crichton’s account, what the economic successes of Japan impose on American workers is the destabilization of an American form of masculine truth.

“America Is a Dream” In 1995, Tom Clancy followed Michael Crichton’s lead, writing the second best-seller that fixed blame on Japan for America’s postindustrial social upheavals. Like Crichton, moreover, Clancy resorts to a gendered narrative of conflict, this time importing the iconography

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of both World War II and the cold war. Yet in Debt of Honor Clancy heightens the stakes of what Crichton already imagines to be an intense conflict with Japan, resolving any shades of gray Crichton had conceded into pure black and white. While Crichton depicts Japan’s economic relationship to America as a covert trade war and cultural war of attrition, Clancy imagines Japan as an even more brazen aggressor, painting a sprawling canvas of real war with the Japanese, complete with submarine and air attacks. While the physical scope of the conflict Clancy narrates is more sweeping, however, the ideological stakes of the conflict are finally the same. As in Rising Sun, the underlying fear that Debt of Honor evokes is that in the era of corporate culture Japan will undermine Americans’ ability to determine reality itself. And, once again, the truth is depicted as an essential bastion of masculinity, a zone that, if sacrificed, would mark a loss of the core of America. Yet while Crichton concedes such change as an inevitable outcome of America’s shift from industrialism to the era of soft work, in Debt of Honor Clancy insists that Americans maintain nothing less than a completely stable and unassailable national identity. Diplomatic historian Walter L. Hixon has demonstrated the extent to which three of Clancy’s early novels, The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin popularized Reagan-era cold war rhetoric, selling to Americans dread of a faceless Communist Soviet Union.36 After 1989 (and before September 11, 2001), however, not only Tom Clancy but all writers of Western political thrillers had to cast about for a new raison d’être. In Clancy’s case that meant focusing in the 1990s on a number of separatist/terrorist/ criminal organizations, namely, Arab terrorists, Colombian drug kingpins, and the Irish Republican Army. Clancy also looked backward, to the days of another communist war in Without Remorse, setting his story in Vietnam during the 1960s. In 1994, however, Clancy isolated another nation to posit as the sort of threat to America’s “way of life” that the Soviets had once provided. In Debt of Honor, Clancy finds a new enemy in an old one, imagining a Japan bent on revenge for the horrors of World War II. Clancy’s enormous novel, almost 1,000 pages, weaves together more than ten subplots to produce a vision of war on a global scale. Briefly, Clancy imagines that the chairmen of Japan’s top corporations, or zaibatsus, under the sway of vengeful businessman Raiza Yamata, conspire to repossess the Marianas Islands, destroy the American economy through computer manipulation, disarm the American Navy by surprise attack, and subdue any lingering

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American resistance by launching nuclear missiles. Their ultimate goal is global dominance, achieved through an alliance with China and India, and fortified by the exploitation of Siberia as their new source of oil, America as their “grocer,” and Europe as their “boutique” (673). Yamata’s plot is foiled by the bureaucratic heroics of Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan. While Ryan’s earlier appearances have featured considerable personal physical contact with various enemies, he arrives at purely cerebral solutions in Debt of Honor, confronting “the most complex crisis in his country’s history” with a combination of financial maneuvering, strategic decision-making, and diplomacy (484). The novel then culminates in 200 pages of trademark Clancy pyrotechnics as American military forces defeat the Japanese on the water and in the air. Yet while the brief war with Japan ends in American victory, the novel is not over. Instead, Debt of Honor concludes with one final Japanese act of aggression, as a solitary Japanese airline pilot executes a kamikaze attack, obliterating the U.S. Capitol. As a literary device, the most obvious function of this coda is to elevate Jack Ryan to the position of president of the United States, setting the stage for Clancy’s next novel. More importantly, the pilot’s act of violent suicide also functions thematically to reinforce rather than dispel what Clancy has maintained throughout the novel as essential racial differences between Americans and the Japanese. Throughout Debt of Honor, Clancy resorts to many of the same stereotypes about the Japanese that Crichton had harvested from popular sentiment two years earlier. We are reminded again of the mythic work culture of the Japanese: that Japanese workers arrive for work two hours early (13) and that they are intensely competitive in their job tasks, regarding any lapse in performance with profound shame (20). Resisting the American discourse of corporate culture that celebrates Japanese productivity, Clancy repeatedly frames these Japanese habits in scornful terms, insinuating that such diligent work habits are only possible because of the innate limitations of the Japanese as a people. For example, the Japanese are consistently represented as one-dimensional and uniformly humorless; Yamata, we are told early on, is “like a little robot” (69). Clancy also calls on a conventional rejoinder to claims of superior Japanese efficiency, one repeated by corporate culture thinkers throughout the 1980s, and taken up gratefully by a demoralized and defensive American workforce: if the Japanese are the harder workers, Americans are the more imaginative ones. Ryan’s wife asks rhetorically, “why do you think they come here to train?” (196).

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Like Crichton, however, Clancy anticipates charges of racism and Japan-bashing, and attempts to derail them both by explicitly refuting the possibility that his novel is racist, and by channeling criticisms of Japan through characters who, “objectively,” should identify more closely with the Japanese than with Americans.37 Just as Crichton constructs Teresa Asakuma as one of the fiercest critics of Japan in Rising Sun, Clancy, in order to camouflage the xenophobia of his text, introduces an American character of Japanese descent who dislikes the Japanese. In this case, Chet Nomuri, the grandson of Japanese immigrants to the United States and an American CIA agent on assignment in Japan, studies the Japanese and finds their society “outrageous” (477) and realizes that “it would not be long, . . . before he started hating [Japan]” (478). What Nomuri objects to most is the “way [the Japanese] treated women” (119), and it is Clancy’s extended exposition of Japanese misogyny, achieved through Nomuri’s observations in the field, that opens the way for the metaphorics of rape that Clancy relies on most heavily to incite his readers to a state of deep suspicion and distaste toward the Japanese. Yet before outlining the particular strategies Clancy deploys to gender the struggle between Japan and America, I should note that, in general, Crichton’s and Clancy’s approaches to gender are quite different. While Crichton represents the contemporary working woman as an almost insanely dysfunctional corruption of the “feminine” in Rising Sun, Clancy has pioneered a unique ideological position for the 1990s reading market, a position I would term “patriarchal feminism.” From the superficial standpoint of achieving a respectable number of positive female characters, Clancy’s recent texts are unquestionably an improvement over Crichton’s. In fact, so aggressive is Clancy’s placement of women (and other minority groups, with the conspicuous exception of gays and lesbians), in positions of professional authority in his novels, that a number of critics have rather absurdly identified Clancy as the most “politically correct” best-selling author of his generation.38 Clancy represents women who occupy positions of authority, however, as having successfully assimilated into a world of work that remains entirely male-coded. Moreover, in Clancy’s novel, men can only comprehend the oppression of women as fathers. In instances where women suffer harm in the text, the men concisely express their consternation with the phrase, “I have daughters . . . ” (331). Indeed, it is through this language of fathers and daughters that Clancy raises the old specter of the alien yellow peril, of a male

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Japanese citizenry anxious to rape blonde, blue-eyed, American women. Like Rising Sun, Clancy’s novel uses rape both to vilify the Japanese as an alien threat, and, more abstractly, to explore the gendered stakes of economic and epistemological transformations produced by soft work. As in Crichton’s text, Japanese businessmen rape and murder a young woman. This time, the young woman is Kimberly Norton, the mistress of Hiroshi Goto, the ignorant, sexually violent politician whom Yamata and his colleagues elevate to prime minister during their assault on the United States. Goto’s sexual exploitation of Norton, along with Yamata’s ultimate order that she be murdered (an act which, when performed, includes her rape) activates the same (old) symbolic system used by Crichton. Yamata and his followers, in their attack on Norton, symbolically rape America itself. This imagery is reinforced when Goto remarks that he “love[s] fucking Americans,” and Yamata, speaking of their impending military actions, replies, “I am glad to hear that, my friend, for soon you will have the chance to do it some more” (229). It is the vision of Kimberly Norton’s murdered, raped body that in turn justifies the most merciless covert actions by Clancy’s favorite organization within the U.S. government, the CIA. Clancy situates two agents, Ding Chavez and John Clark, in Japan as the novel unfolds. Eventually called on to whisk Norton out of Japan, the agents arrive too late to stop her murder. They do find her body, however, which both realize bears “a passing resemblance to [Clark’s] younger daughter, Patsy,” the woman whom Chavez hopes to marry (310). It is the vision of her as raped wife/daughter that inspires them through the remainder of their violent covert mission in Japan. Clancy proves himself unable to extend his exploration of rape beyond its convenient symbolic application in matters of international conflict, however, without collapsing into an incoherent ideological tangle. Clancy’s novel includes another “rape,” one that occurs earlier within the chronology of the narrative. Near the outset of the novel we are introduced to an emotionally haunted woman, Barbara Linders, who bears the marks of physical and psychological deterioration produced by rape: [She] was thirty-five, and should have been slim, petite, and blonde, but instead her face showed the puffiness of compulsive eating and drinking, and her hair was barely presentable. What ought to have been fair skin was merely pale, and reflected light like chalk, in a flat grainy way that even makeup would not have helped very much. Only her diction indicated what [she] once had been. (31)

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Linders recounts to a therapist in detail her experience of being drugged and then coerced into sex by her boss, Ed Kealty, who is none other than the vice president of the United States. At first, this subplot appears to explore with some sensitivity the devastating impact of rape. Although characterized by the same patriarchal rhetoric to which I alluded above, Clancy’s aggressive insistence on rape as a very real social problem seems a more genuinely progressive element of the novel than his mechanical renderings of professional women.39 Ultimately, however, the Linders subplot proves to be a narrative device to eliminate the vice president, making way for Jack Ryan to assume this title en route to becoming president at the conclusion of the text. At the point where publicity concerning rape allegations has made resignation inescapable for the vice president, Clancy revises the terms of Linders’s experience, revealing that Vice President Kealty may not have drugged and raped her (520–524). The alternative explanation Clancy offers largely undermines his originally progressive treatment of rape. Kealty avers that Linders, “had been on a prescription medication that had acted with the brandy” Kealty offered her to heavily sedate her and make her vulnerable to his advances (868). Clancy’s original elaboration on the reality of rape is undercut, recasting it as a potential misunderstanding, or worse still, the subconscious desire of the victim. Moreover, Linders’s acquiescence to a self-defeating perspective, an understanding of herself as a “victim,” when another interpretation is possible—indeed, when another interpretation, that she was not raped, is treated as truth by the male investigators (868)—again foregrounds the degree to which women are associated with weakness and delusion in these novels. Crichton and Clancy, then, deploy metaphorics of rape to similar effect in their two novels, both translating economic and cultural competition into a language of sexual predation and psychological manipulation. Despite the similarity of their methods, however, the two authors’ ultimate perspectives on the destiny of postindustrial America prove to be very different. While Crichton views America as socially and physically degraded and vulnerable to manipulation in the era of corporate culture, Clancy’s rhetoric insists on a vision of America in which Americans are capable of resisting any threats to their control of their lives and reason. Repeatedly throughout Debt of Honor, Clancy stages confrontations in which the Japanese attempt to strip America of its confidence and self-possession, much as Barbara Linders’s presumed rape robbed her of hers, and America meets this challenge without wavering. In the economic realm, this conflict is played out when the Japanese

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loose a computer virus on the American computers that register stock market trades. While such electronic subterfuge is largely effective in undermining the efforts of detectives to discover the truth in Crichton’s novel, in Debt of Honor, Jack Ryan simply refuses to acknowledge the reality of the Japanese act, arranging that the historical period of confusion be collectively rejected and wiped from memory by the American and European financial markets. The Japanese plot to destroy America’s economic certainty is foiled through a sheer act of denial, an aggressive claiming of sovereignty over truth itself. While this act of computer sabotage is reminiscent of the manipulation of digital images effected by the Nakamoto corporation in Rising Sun, Clancy later seems to make an even more direct allusion to Crichton’s scenario of doctored tapes and their impact on American rationality. Once military conflict with the Japanese is underway, the Americans undertake “deception operations,” manipulating the Japanese into believing that the U.S. Navy is crippled by broadcasting stock video of damaged, docked aircraft carriers through the national media even as the actual vessels steam toward the island nation (929). Rather than entertaining the possibility of American men falling prey to digital manipulation, Clancy counters with precisely the opposite image, one of alert American strategists implementing a complex plan to dupe, and from Crichton’s perspective, feminize, the unsuspecting Japanese. Technologically driven international economic competition is again mapped onto a gender binary. Nor is this abstract ideological contest for dominion over truth a marginal aspect of the overall struggle with the Japanese. As the war escalates, Ryan precisely articulates the threat to a particular American reality that the Japanese are making and that he will not permit to be realized. Speaking of the issue of the repossessed islands, he argues: So we let a foreign country strip the citizenship rights of Americans because it’s too hard to defend them? . . . Then what? What about the next time it happens? Tell me, when did we stop being the United States of America? . . . We don’t have a choice. You can name any reasons you want, but it all comes down to the same thing: we have a debt of honor to the people on those islands who decided that they wanted to be Americans. If we don’t defend that principle, we don’t defend anything. And nobody will trust us, and nobody will respect us, not even ourselves. If we turn our back on them, then we are not the people we say we are, and everything we’ve ever done is a lie. (646–647, emphasis mine)

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Once again, Ryan proves himself to be in unshakable command of the truth in this speech, so much so that “any reasons” may be superficially articulated for it, but none are necessary. That truth concerns the eponymous “debt of honor” around which Clancy’s literary behemoth has been conceived. While the phrase “debt of honor” appears in a number of different contexts throughout the novel, here it appears that the debt of honor of Clancy’s title is the guarantee of selfdetermination the “imagined community” of America makes to its citizens. The critical word in Ryan’s characterization of this debt is “decided”: “The people on those islands decided that they wanted to be Americans.”40 America, Jack Ryan insists here, is in its essence, a collective “decision.” Yet that decision has been encoded here as a transcendent reality, from which there can be no deviance (“We don’t have a choice”). To betray the decision of the residents of the Marianas to become Americans would be, in Ryan’s formulation, to explode the American “reality” of self-determination, to concede that Americans are in fact prey to forces beyond their sphere of national self-making. Should such an eventuality be permitted, Ryan insists, the entirety of American history would prove to be nothing more than a false reality, a “lie.” Finally, at the conclusion of the novel, when what Clancy treats as a quintessentially Japanese act destroys America’s most crucial symbol of democracy, Jack Ryan, now president, again doggedly asserts America’s fundamental certainty of its identity: I’m afraid I’m too new at this to say it properly, but what I learned in school is that America is a dream, it’s—it’s the ideas we all share, it’s the things we all believe in, most of all it’s things we all do, and how we do them. You can’t destroy things like that. Nobody can, no matter how hard they might try, because we are who and what we choose to be. We invented that idea here, and nobody can destroy that either. (990)

These final words cast an odd new light on the term “American Dream.” Here the “dream” transforms from its typical meaning of the individual variants of a shared drive for material success, to a more totalized, eerie version suggesting a long, collective hallucination. Paradoxically, while Crichton frames his narrative of America’s failure of reason within the hyper-rational form of a Sherlock Holmes– inspired detective narrative, Clancy’s paean to America’s secure grasp on reality culminates in the phrase, “America is a dream.” Yet this “dream” in which Americans dwell is impervious to the assaults of aggressors in ways that Crichton’s America is not. Clancy concludes

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with a rousing reiteration of the central theme of his novel, that despite all of the historical evidence to the contrary, we Americans “are who and what we choose to be.”41 Finally, then, both Crichton and Clancy seize on America’s national anxieties by imagining icons of American power—white heterosexual males Peter Smith and Jack Ryan—assailed by the destabilizing influences of a Japanese culture determined to deprive them of their American sovereignty. While they invoke conventional, patriarchal social meanings of femininity in these metaphorics of international strife, their portraits of contemporary women do not conform to these gender norms. That is, on the one hand, they represent a weak and helpless America-as-woman, vulnerable to assault by more economically aggressive and technologically advanced nations. On the other, they generally represent actual American women as intensely competitive and career-oriented.42 In this slippage, the novels encode the mutual pressures between the meanings of “woman” and “America” that characterize discourses of soft work. Rising Sun and Debt of Honor are rejections of corporate culture, which at the end of the twentieth century presented Japanese culture as superior to America’s, lauding its comfort with ambiguity, collectivity, and irrationality. Crichton and Clancy depict the infiltration of these values into American society as a fundamental violation of American identity, a violation that they figure as both a rape and a strategic undermining of Americans’ grasp on reality. Yet international dynamics are only one part of the story of corporate culture. As this management philosophy played itself out on a global scale in the 1980s and 1990s through competition with Japan, within the United States the soft, irrational methods it privileged laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new cultural icon: the “management guru.” Self-styled visionaries, who utter prophecies, preach selfactualization, and, more often than not, promise miracles, gurus are in some sense the ultimate outcome of the soft tendencies within management culture that we have been tracing from the 1930s. While race figures prominently in corporate culture’s comparisons of America and Japan, the final chapter of this study reveals the subtler, but equally powerful, role of race in the rise of the management guru within American work culture. As in the novels by Crichton and Clancy, in contemporary narratives that represent encounters between gurus and members of the American workforce, anxieties about the emasculating softness of corporate culture are compounded by fears of a mystifying racial otherness.


CH A P T ER

6

Hoodoo Economics: On Management Gurus and Magical Black Men in Postmodern American Culture

Meaning is hot, and it’s getting hotter. This is the age of enchantment, and people are looking for an antidote to the masochism of work. Harriet Rubin, Executive Editor of Doubleday, publisher of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline1

One of the most striking developments attending the emergence of corporate culture management theory has been the proliferation of so-called management gurus. In contrast to management consultants, management gurus generally work alone, providing dramatic performances to audiences of managers for high fees.2 The term “guru” itself is telling: a Sanskrit word that first appeared in the ancient Hindu Upanishads as a synonym for “teacher,” it gained currency in the West in the 1960s as Eastern mysticism became popular.3 While it is now applied in many fields to individuals with exceptional knowledge, it retains its implication of supernatural forms of wisdom. As business scholar Brad Jackson explains: Compared to the drab scientism imbued in the term ‘expert,’ the word guru connotes a mystical dimension which implies that the expertise has been gained by other than conventional means and is, therefore, infinitely more interesting. Its links to the underground world of religious cults also lends the term a certain sinister power.4

Given the scientific approach to which Frederick Winslow Taylor claimed to adhere in the development of his techniques, it is not

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surprising that he is often referred to as an “efficiency expert.” Yet Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, is routinely called a “guru” because of the soft, abstract forces he attempts to marshal on behalf of American management. The spiritual emphasis within management has deepened with the emergence of corporate culture and its deployment of selfactualizing rhetoric, making the term “guru” a particularly logical fit for those who peddle these ideas. However, the term guru also reveals the reluctance of white men to fully lay claim to the nonrational approaches associated with corporate culture. Assigning those who traffic most publicly in these concepts a racialized term denoting “foreign” spiritual practices reflects a subtle cultural suspicion toward them. This chapter explores the connections between the phenomenon of the management guru and another contemporary icon, the magical black man who has become a staple of contemporary novels and films.5 It traces a genealogy from the domain of management to these contemporary narratives by locating the birthplace of both mystical figures in the discourse of the self-actualization movement. Central to this genealogy are two texts, Golf in the Kingdom, a metaphysical golf book written by Abraham Maslow’s friend and protégé Michael Murphy, and The Legend of Bagger Vance, which further racializes the earlier volume’s self-actualizing rhetoric.6 These texts suggest a continuum between the mysticism of contemporary management theory and recent books and films that treat black men’s magic as a remedy for white men whose masculinity is imperiled by the new economic order.

“The Lore of the Primitive Mind” The term “management guru” first appeared in the mid-1980s in concert with a dramatic increase in the frequency with which new management theories were introduced and discarded by American corporations.7 According to one study, between the 1950s and 1990s, twenty-six different management techniques enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States, and of those, roughly half were introduced in the late 1980s.8 These techniques have penetrated directly or indirectly to every corner of the American workplace. Perhaps the most notorious and highly visible of these “guru theories” was Michael Hammer’s Business Process Reengineering, which led to the “downsizing” of hundreds of thousands of American workers.9 Yet gurus’ influence can also be measured by the popularity in the 1990s

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of the comic strip Dilbert, which parodies the ephemeral and often incomprehensible management jargon to which contemporary workers are routinely subjected.10 The heightened visibility and influence of management gurus is attributable to the unease of American business in the new globalized economy.11 Following Thrift, Jackson states: Broadly, the new managerial discourse stresses the following themes: the fast-paced changes and uncertainty of the external environment; the need for organizations continually to learn to adapt by being constantly flexible and always in action; challenges to existing knowledge forms; and the creation of organizations that are made up of willing and willed subjects.12

The global scale of economic competition makes businessmen hungry for charismatic figures who offer unequivocal programs for success. In their personal dynamism, management gurus not only promote but embody the concepts of entrepreneurialism and enterprise that are central to corporate culture. These figures have infused American business with a fantastical quality that is a far cry from its traditional no-nonsense reputation. This surreal aspect is captured in an anecdote by business journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: AT&T . . . has long been a playground for the gurus, forever calling in consultants or sending staff members on management courses; indeed, the telephone giant is responsible for arguably the most baffling management slogan of all time—“Putting the moose on the table”—which had something to do with flattening hierarchies and empowering workers, and was one of several (disastrous) attempts to inject modern management thinking into AT&T’s NCR subsidiary.13

While it would be an overstatement to locate in the slogan “Putting the moose on the table” a Derridean gesture toward the impossibility of stable meaning in language, as a business mission statement it does sound like the sort of phrase that might have been volunteered by one of our more playful language poets—perhaps Harryette Mullen or Bob Perelman—should they have found themselves cornered at a meeting where ideas for such statements were being solicited. Of course the more sinister aspect of this seemingly whimsical deployment of language by management gurus and their followers is evident in the list of terms for termination that were cultivated during the height of the reengineering era: not

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only the ubiquitous “downsized” but also “ ‘separated,’ ‘severed,’ ‘unassigned,’ and ‘proactively outplaced.’ ”14 These linguistic mystifications are amplified by the unreal qualities of the gurus themselves. In his book-length study of management gurus, Jackson focuses on three of the most influential of these figures, including Hammer, as well as Stephen Covey and Peter Senge, whose personae are stranger than fiction. Michael Hammer’s name is improbably fitting for the man who “obliterated” workforces across America, boasting, for instance, of a company that had “achieved a 75% reduction in head count, not the 20% it would have gotten with a conventional program.”15 Characterized by a “barking, Rottweiler delivery,” Hammer expresses his merciless attitude about streamlining business with the well-known business axiom, “If you can’t change the people, change the people.”16 Equally larger-thanlife is the figure of Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which he has parlayed into an “effectiveness” empire.17 Calling on what Jackson describes as a “premodern,” and “by and large mythical, agricultural past,” Covey shows a video of farm life to his audiences and advocates that corporate employees live by the values of those who work the land.18 He extends this farm metaphor by referring to the Aesop tale about the goose that laid the golden egg, and, in a gesture that blurs the boundary between fairytale and business seminar, gives those who complete his program a golden egg as a memento.19 If Covey’s quasispiritual program is derived in part from Mormonism, Peter Senge’s new age vision of the “learning organization” is shaped by his training as a Buddhist and his interest in other forms of spirituality.20 He counsels managers to practice meditation and to use what he calls the “container”—“an imaginary receptacle into which all the participants in a meeting place their fears and frustrations.”21 In describing the dynamics of a learning organization, he uses the term “metanoia,” which “in the early (Gnostic) Christian tradition, . . . took on a special meaning of awakening shared intuition and direct knowing of the highest, of God.”22 Much of the mysticism and fancy that gurus have imported into American business practice is evident in their shift of emphasis from strategy to “vision.”23 Vision is a catalyzing myth to which members of a workforce are urged to subscribe based on “an idea of how the market will look (or could be made to look) in the future.”24 Rather than empirically supported knowledge, the “visions” promulgated by gurus are constituted by idiosyncratic wisdom intended to inspire and energize individual managers.25 In their discussion of this guru

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discourse, Clark and Salaman draw an analogy between it and the conventions of magic. Magic, they explain, involves a confusion of the “ideal” with the “real,” in which thinking something is supposed to make it so.26 Locating in guru seminars a significant component of such wishfulfillment, Clark and Salaman argue that their performances are akin to those of witchdoctors.27 Micklethwait and Wooldridge also make this comparison in their discussion of gurus’ claims to predict the future: In the witch doctor’s world one talent is prized above all others: the ability to predict and control the future. In the old days, soothsayers donned strange clothes, performed exotic gyrations, and sacrificed unfortunate animals . . . . Management theorists may not wear a feathered headdress or pore over the entrails of dead animals—at least not in public. But in their bid to predict and control the future they have developed exotic sounding techniques . . . and they have kept those techniques as mysterious as possible . . . 28

Claims of magical powers to predict or control the future are not exclusive to the African healers known as witchdoctors, and by analyzing management gurus in these terms, business journalists and scholars expose the racial assumptions they bring to their treatment of corporate culture’s irrational impulses. In detailing specific witchdoctor rituals, for instance, they allude to practitioners from central Africa, Melanesia, Haiti, Siberia, and Inner Asia.29 What they do not acknowledge, however, is that these witchdoctors are people of color, while management gurus are almost uniformly white. Through the remarkable omission of any reference to race in their analyses, they accentuate how unconscious the racial thinking with regard to management gurus remains. These studies highlight the degree to which gurus traffic in the soft aspects of contemporary management theory, stressing gurus’ “concern for, and an emphasis on, the irrational, emotional, and symbolic aspects of organization.”30 Their sense that non-Western mystics exemplify these qualities in their rituals suggests their presumption that the domains of emotion and irrationality are essentially foreign to the white men who constitute the vast majority of management gurus. The omission of questions of race from these analogies not withstanding, the racial origins of contemporary management theory in America are complex. For instance, Abraham Maslow’s interest in the notion of synergy, one of the core concepts from the self-actualization

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movement that has thrived in the era of corporate culture, was inspired by his observations of the conduct of the Blackfoot Indian Tribe, where, he claimed, “the people most respected . . . are the people who have given away most.”31 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the era of corporate culture management theory has also been largely motivated by a preoccupation with the benefits of the perceived irrationality and intuitiveness of Japanese culture. The irony that many of the management techniques that Americans construe as indigenous to Japanese culture were in fact introduced to Japan by U.S. management theorists Mary Parker Follett and W. Edwards Deming after World War II again demonstrates white Americans’ discomfort with fully owning these irrational practices.32 Other influential management thinkers turned not to specific nations or tribes to generate their discourse, but instead constructed generic racial “others” as symbols of irrationality and mysticism. A case in point of this sort of racialization is provided by Michael Murphy. In 1962, Murphy cofounded the Esalen Institute, a center in Big Sur, California, which remains an intersection between the human potential movement and “the frontiers of management theory.”33 In the early years of the Esalen institute, Murphy and his staff circulated Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being among its members.34 He subsequently hosted Maslow at Esalen, leading to a lifelong friendship that inspired Maslow to describe Murphy as “the son I never had.”35 In 1972 Murphy promoted self-actualization by writing a spiritual book about golf entitled Golf in the Kingdom. In the first half of Murphy’s odd hybrid of novel, sports memoir, and self-help guide, he narrates how, en route to India to study at an Ashram, he visited the small town of Burningbush, Scotland, and encountered a Scottish “golf professional and . . . philosopher,” Shivas Irons.36 The second half of the text is presented as an assemblage of Irons’s philosophical writings on golf and the achievement of the “higher self” (176, 195).37 Murphy’s Shivas Irons is a mystical being, who has about him an air of “unreality” and appears to possess both shape-changing and telepathic abilities. He counsels Murphy in the course of their round of golf to attend to his “energy” and swing with his “inner body” (85, 86). Steeped in Eastern philosophy, he presents golf as a route to transcendence and can be read as a figure of alterity on several levels. His Scottish ethnicity, which is underscored by his “shock of reddish untamed hair” and “resonant Scots dialect,” associates him with a rural, premodern society (15, 16). His name, as is discussed in the

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text, is reminiscent of “Shiva,” “the ancient Hindu name for the God of Destruction and Redemption, perhaps the oldest of all living words for Deity” (11). Yet the degree of Irons’s otherness is apparently insufficient within the narrative to explain his magical power. Instead, the novel introduces Irons’ teacher, Seamus McDuff, as the wellspring of its mysticism. Irons reflects of McDuff’s origins: He was the son of a wealthy Scottish merchant, who had made a fortune in the Africa trade, and a Voodoo priestess from the Gold Coast. His father had imagined himself a kind of Richard Burton bringing back the lore of the primitive mind, and in the course of his travels had met the clairvoyantly gifted black woman who eventually gave birth to Seamus. The youngster had been raised in his mother’s tribe, and tutored in British ways by teachers his father sent to the Gold Coast. He was then sent to Oxford when he was seventeen. His eventual fascination with the dark underside of modern science undoubtedly derived from his African roots. (118–119)

While Irons is depicted as studying the work of Eastern mystics, the ultimate domain of mysticism in the text is located in Africa—not in Eastern philosophy and yoga, but in voodoo. If Irons’s simple life in the small Scottish town has a premodern aspect, McDuff’s existence is positively primitive. He inhabits a cave in a ravine on the golf course, and uses a club—literally a club—for his own experiments with golfing in “true gravity” (90). Although Irons is the mouthpiece of various ideas concerning human potential and the higher self, it is McDuff who haunts the text, his face appearing to Murphy during a night outing to the ravine and again in the rafters of the Rheims Cathedral once he continues his travels. By including this “old wizard,” Murphy explicitly racializes the irrational aspects of the self-actualization movement (91). One legacy of Maslow’s thought, then, took the “swarthy” form of Seamus McDuff (119). Yet, remarkably, this was not the last of the black golf-pro gurus to be spawned by the self-actualization movement. Instead, in 1992, author Stephen Pressfield created a second mystical narrative of golf and self-actualization, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Pressfield’s novel is a rewriting of the Bhagavad-Gita, in which Krishna, God in human form, counsels the warrior Arjuna.38 In Pressfield’s adaptation, the battleground has become a golf course, Arjuna has become Ranulf Junah, a shell-shocked white Southern hero of World War I, and Krishna takes the form of a black caddy named Bagger Vance. When Junah is persuaded to participate in a

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golf match against two champions, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, Vance helps him discover his “Authentic Swing,” which is synonymous with his higher self.39 The novel is narrated years after the events took place by Hardison Greaves, who, as a boy, was enlisted to help persuade Junah to join the tournament and then to assist him and Vance during the competition. The racial politics of Pressfield’s novel are convoluted, to say the least. Why, for instance, Pressfield would elect to reinscribe the narrative of the Bhagavad-Gita in the context of the 1930s South is unclear. When the boy Greaves first encounters Junah, he is in the old slave quarters of his estate, drunk and fraternizing with a group of black men, including Vance. While the narrator and the other citizens of Savannah initially express shock at Junah’s camaraderie with Vance, the racism that would likely have been expressed toward Vance during his later interactions with Junah is omitted from Pressfield’s novel. Yet even as race is downplayed in Vance’s relationship to Junah, it is reintroduced by the framing narrative. At the outset of the novel, Greaves directly addresses the auditor of his story, Michael, a young man who has decided to give up both his medical studies and the game of golf. It is only revealed near the conclusion of the novel that Michael is himself black (148). Greaves uses the story of Bagger Vance to motivate Michael to recover his personal and professional momentum. This racial narrative is also obfuscated, however, when Greaves remarks that Michael’s confusion about his future is not caused by “the obvious demons of race or rage” (221). Given Pressfield’s refusal to engage with central questions of race, why reimagine Krishna as a black man? And why, in light of the racial dynamics of the South in the 1930s, should Vance want to help Junah find his “authentic swing?” The latter question is particularly vexing, given that Vance’s efforts to help Junah regain his sense of self are explicitly in the service of Junah winning a golf match that is meant to redress the “loss of national manhood” and restore the “manly pride and virtue” of the South, which, in Pressfield’s account, was stripped from it during the Reconstruction (42). The answers to the two questions are related: Pressfield, in reaching for an American version of Krishna turns to a black man, since American culture more readily associates African Americans with mysticism than their white counterparts. As for why Vance would help the cause of Southern whites, this plot element emphasizes the degree to which Vance embodies a dehistoricized version of blackness that functions exclusively as a marker for the issues of spirituality and irrationality Pressfield wishes to explore.

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In its reference to “manly pride,” The Legend of Bagger Vance also exposes the issue of masculinity as key to understanding the role of the gurus in these novels—and, I maintain, the function of management gurus more generally. While women are scarcely present in either Golf in the Kingdom or the Legend of Bagger Vance, they are markedly associated with a fallen, material existence rather than the spiritual self-actualization that the texts present as the most coveted state. In Golf in the Kingdom, it is a woman who draws Murphy away from Shivas Irons and Seamus McDuff. And once again, when he commences to have a spiritual encounter with a priest at Rheims, “there she was with her golden hair and twinkling eyes,” distracting him from higher concerns (129–130). While a romance is introduced into the film version of The Legend of Bagger Vance, in the novel women are again on the margins of the story. Indeed, before Junah’s restoration to selfhood, he is depicted at his most lost when Greaves discovers him the night before the tournament, “half naked on the bed, with two women pawing and grinding all over him” (59). Greaves reflects, “I had never witnessed a scene so degrading or so utterly devoid of dignity. Part of me wanted to throw up; another wanted to charge in and give all three of them the thrashing they so richly deserved” (59). Later, when Junah begins to play successfully, women descend on him “like quail, their silk-clad hind ends wriggling as they scurried through a fairway crossing in their covey,” only to abandon him when his game again falters (170). Ultimately, we learn that after his regeneration through the course of his match, “the pursuit of romance . . . seemed to have lost its luster for him” in the remaining years of his life (226). Clearly, Vance as Krishna leads Junah to a higher state, free from the temptations of the flesh. Both Golf in the Kingdom and The Legend of Bagger Vance, then, reveal that actualization and the betterment of the self can be understood as a purging of the feminine. As we’ll see, this element of misogyny within self-actualizing discourse resurfaces in the popular portraits of gurus in the corporate culture era. The guru-student dynamic also permits men a loving dynamic toward one another that mainstream white culture refuses. In Golf in the Kingdom, the wife of one of Irons’s friends gives voice to the notion that “Men lovin’ men, that’s what golf is” (63–64). She explains to her male listeners: “It’s the only reason ye play at all . . . . It’s a way ye’ve found to get togither and yet maintain a proper distance. I know you men. Yer not like women or Italians huggin’ and embracin’ each other. Ye need tae

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feel yer separate love. Just look—ye winna’ come home on time if yer with the boys, I’ve learned that o’er the years. The love ye feel for your friends is too strong for that. All those gentlemanly rools, why, they’re the proper rools of affection—all the waitin’ and oohin’ and ahin’ o’er yer shots, all the talk o’ this one’s drive and that one’s putt and the other one’s gorgeous swing—what is it all but love?” (63)

The golf course is indeed presented in both novels as a domain where men bond in the absence of women. This love takes an even more intense form between Bagger Vance and Junah, with Vance declaring, “Forget all else, Junah, but remember this: You are never alone. You have your caddie. You have me . . . . More devoted than a mother, more faithful than a lover, I stand by your side always” (185–186, emphasis in original). As I discuss below, critics have seen black-white buddy narratives in popular culture as a means of depicting same-sex desire with a difference, with black men assuming a feminized relation to their white male “partners.” The mystical elements of the bonds within these guru narratives further defuse the homosocial aspects of these pairings. Again, Murphy and Pressfield’s texts, which provide a segue between the early days of self-actualization and the contemporary era of corporate culture, offer interesting perspectives on the allure of the management guru—in this case, by suggesting the powerful male-bonding that guru performances authorize. Thus far, this chapter has demonstrated the centrality of management gurus to contemporary management culture and the degree to which these figures, as well as self-actualizing discourse more generally, have been racialized in both professional and popular narratives. Among professional accounts of management gurus, scholars have reached repeatedly for the analogy of witchdoctors to describe their function in contemporary work culture. In popular attempts to articulate the concept of self-actualization, African and Eastern elements have been called on, and the guru figure has been rendered as a black man who promises transcendence in part through liberation from women’s influence. Despite the shared origins of these “real” and fictional gurus in the self-actualization movement, it could be argued that actual management gurus and the fictional gurus produced by Murphy and Pressfield share this lineage and nothing more, that examining one can tell us little about the other. Yet there is significant overlap between the functions of these figures. As is made evident by texts like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which is routinely shelved at

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bookstores under “self-help” rather than “management,” the line between self-actualizing management discourse and more general self-improvement rhetoric has become very porous. This is a logical development, given the general fusion of work and home/leisure that the post-Taylorist era has ushered in. Murphy and Pressman’s golf gurus also resemble management gurus because among sports, golf occupies a special position in contemporary American work culture. While it would be an overstatement to view playing golf as an act of labor, it has become increasingly central to American business in the era of human relations and its progeny. As historian Richard J. Moss explains, by 1950 many American corporations had built golf courses for their employees.40 A classic instance of the sort of merging of work and play that typified the human relations era, these courses were “extensions of a person’s job; the corporations offered them as a device to create loyalty and enhance employee morale.”41 More than a perk, golf emerged as an ideal leisure activity during which work could be conducted. This trend has continued, with golf serving as a primary means for deal-making and networking in the American business world. “[I]n the age of email and teleconferencing,” a recent Fortune article explains, “golf remains the true communications hub of America’s business elite.”42 Nor is it only the elite who depend on golf to advance their careers; “business golf,” as it is known, is widely understood as a critical means of establishing “human relations” at all levels of business.43 Business golf has also been a highly visible arena in which issues regarding race, ethnicity, and gender in the workplace have been played out. While increasing numbers of professional women have taken up golf in an effort to penetrate the highest echelons of American business, the Augusta National Golf Course has made its notorious stand, refusing to admit women to its membership.44 Similarly, private golf clubs across America have continued to limit access to members of racial and ethnic minorities.45 With respect to these issues, texts like Golf in the Kingdom and The Legend of Bagger Vance are deeply implicated in American work culture: Both books have been and continue to be read primarily by the white American men who have made golf an extension of their professional work lives. At this point, however, I want to take this analysis a step further still, delineating a connection not only between the discourse of selfactualization, the early fictional renderings of self-actualizing gurus, and contemporary management gurus, but also between all of these

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phenomena and the projection of guru powers onto black men that we find in a variety of other recent texts that make the instability of white males’ position in the American economy their subject. In an editorial in Time Magazine entitled, “That Old Black Magic,” columnist Christopher John Farley notes that a spate of recent films, including the adaptation of Pressfield’s novel, have portrayed African Americans as magical figures. Farley nicknames figures like Bagger Vance “Magical African-American Friends” (MAAFs), and he reasons that blacks are represented in these terms out of a fundamental ignorance of African American life and culture. “MAAFs exist,” he suggests, “because most Hollywood screenwriters don’t know much about black people other than what they hear on records by white hip-hop star Eminem. So instead of getting life histories or love interests, black characters get magical powers.”46 Farley is not the only critic to notice the proliferation of black magical figures. Anthony Appiah has also explored screen depictions of black beneficence toward whites in his analysis of “the Saint as a black movie type.”47 Appiah offers several possible explanations for why saintly black figures, from Danny Glover’s Simon in Grand Canyon (1992), to the powerful psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost (1990), are conceived by what he self-consciously terms “ ‘white’ Hollywood.”48 He suggests that black characters are assigned saint-like goodness to balance out the racism that inevitably attends them. That is, a saintly black character is the moral equivalent of a “normal” white character. Or, he speculates further, perhaps “the Saint draw[s] on the tradition of the superior virtue of the oppressed.”49 Farley’s and Appiah’s points are well taken. What they both overlook, however, is the degree to which many of the films they discuss specifically concern white men whose lives as workers in some way require revision. Indeed, one of the highly “realistic” elements of the books and films that incorporate black magical men is their attention to the work lives of their white male characters. It is within this context that I would like to explore the black male characters’ magic, suggesting that in each film work and magic are intimately linked. Specifically, the black men’s magical powers become the means of recalibrating the relation between their white counterparts’ gendered identities and work roles. In this respect, I read these figures as doubles of the management gurus that have gained such prominence in the era of corporate culture. While the white American association between African Americans and non-rational modes of thought and belief predates the self-actualization

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movement, the cultural fantasy that black men might use their access to such domains to improve the working lives (and selves) of white men is a by-product of the larger shift toward racialized mysticism within corporate culture. The function of these black men as gurus is deeply complex, and even paradoxical. Although Bagger Vance is represented as allpowerful, as God-incarnate, the magical powers of the gurus in other contemporary films I will explore here—Unbreakable, The Green Mile, and Family Man—are conspicuously limited. The films’ recurrent focus on the status of white men underscores the central irony attached to the concept of magic in the films: the magical “power” of the black men is actually an expression of their economic vulnerability, a vulnerability that historically contextualizes these figures more than Murphy and Pressfield’s depictions. This weakness is expressed through the black men’s simultaneous reinscription as both children and criminals. Moreover, while Bagger Vance restores his white counterpart to mental health without exacting any sort of penalty from him, in these other contemporary renderings of the guru figure, the benefits the guru brings to the subject of his attention are far more questionable. Viewing the films through this lens suggests that the superficial understanding of the black men as “friends” to their white counterparts must be rethought; instead, the relations between white and black men emerge as far more equivocal.50 Though at first they seem to promise transcendence and a particularly masculine brand of self-actualization, the realms of fantasy and magic into which the gurus draw the workers—a white male security guard, manager, and executive respectively—instead leave them weak and vulnerable. In this respect, these contemporary films share the suspicion articulated in the novels of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy that I examined in the previous chapter: that the racialized mysticism of corporate culture threatens the very essence of white American masculinity.

To Know Your Place Given the otherworldly feel of M. Night Shyamalan’s second major film, Unbreakable, released in 2000, it is easy to miss its preoccupation with the role of white men in the contemporary economy. In dramatizing the efforts of a mystical black man to help a depressed and alienated white man find his “place” in the world, however, the film ultimately creates a narrative about the impact of both women and black men on white men’s relationship to work. Indeed, what we

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might call the “occupational subjectivity” of the main character, David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis, is defined first by his wife (Robin Wright), who requires that he abandon his career in order to act in accord with her values, and then by the mysterious black man, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who reasserts David’s difference from his wife in order to confirm a connection between himself and David. Equally important is David’s young son, Joseph; aligned as he is with Elijah in reimagining his father, Joseph becomes Elijah’s double, signaling the implicit status of Elijah himself as a child. The first two scenes of the film immediately communicate its preoccupation with gender, work, and self-actualization. In the first, set in 1961, we see a black woman who has just completed literal labor, having given birth not in a hospital, but in a department store. As the mother recovers from the delivery under the gaze of anxious store employees, a doctor arrives. The mother’s joy and relief quickly turn to horror as the doctor inspects the infant with an expression of shock. He demands to know whether the baby was dropped, then announces that the infant boy’s arms and legs are fractured. This preliminary image of a boy broken by having been contained in a woman’s body is perhaps the most graphic motif of a recurrent theme: men must struggle free of the influence of women, who threaten to “break” them. The next scene, set in the present day, again foregrounds the relationship of gender to power, this time in terms that bring work itself into clearer focus. David sits aboard a train from New York to Philadelphia after an unsuccessful job search. As subsequent scenes will reveal, he has long worked at a local football stadium as a security guard—one of the most notoriously disempowered and vulnerable positions in the service economy.51 The staging of this opening establishes the interplay of work and gender that has left him a hollow and profoundly depressed man. In the first minutes of the scene, a young, attractive woman selects a seat next to him. He quickly hides his wedding ring and attempts to arrange a liaison with her once they arrive in Philadelphia. David’s simultaneously mechanical and desperate affect during this failed seduction provides our first window into his melancholy state of mind. A young girl who watches with visible dismay from a nearby seat also helps to enforce the audience’s sense of David’s moral bankruptcy. Yet more telling is the brief conversation that he has with the woman, who proves to be a sports agent en route to meet a football star at Temple University. The woman’s youth underscores her extraordinary success in what was once a male dominated profession. Moreover, her intention to manage the young

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athlete’s career echoes the way that David’s own life was managed, at least tacitly, by his wife, who, we later learn, would only agree to marry him if he cast aside his dreams of being a professional football player. The accident that concludes this opening scene is especially telling: the train derails, just as David himself has been derailed from the personally fulfilling work he was meant to do. The extent of that “derailment” becomes evident in subsequent scenes. David is displaced even within his own home, sleeping in a separate room from his wife, Audrey, from whom he has grown increasingly estranged. He struggles with a nameless sense of unhappiness that has left his marriage on the brink of ruin. The apparent disarray of their personal relationship in turn begins to signal the nostalgic and conservative gender politics of the film. We learn that Audrey is a physical therapist and that she deterred David from pursuing a career in football because it is, as she explains, “the opposite of what I do.” As Susan Faludi’s recent scholarship highlights, football has long been a quintessential expression of American masculinity.52 In Unbreakable’s schematic treatment of the (work) “places” that those of different races and genders should occupy, it will ultimately become clear that while Audrey is in her proper place as a caretaker, David’s role as a man and a protector has been stymied by her insistence that he be like her. True to the current trend in Hollywood screenwriting, it is the black male character, Elijah Price, who becomes committed to restoring David’s life to its proper course. Although Elijah is not precisely magical, he is, as David remarks, “kind of a miracle.” We soon learn that it was Elijah’s birth with which the film opens and that he suffers from a rare disease, osteogensis imperfecta, leaving his bones so fragile that he has suffered scores of fractures. As the narrative unfolds, this apparent disability begins to take on a supernatural cast, if only because of the larger narrative of super powers with which it becomes associated. That central narrative is David’s discovery with Elijah’s help that he is possessed of superhuman strength. After David walks away from the train wreck unscathed, he is quickly contacted by Elijah, who begins to introduce him to a theory that he has developed from his dedicated reading of comic books (see figure 6.1). Elijah believes that comic books function as a mythology that communicates profound truths, namely the presence of both exceptional weakness and exceptional strength in the world. He reasons that if someone can be as fragile as he, then there must be those who are, as he puts it, “the opposite of me, at the other end [of the spectrum].”53 As a consequence

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Figure 6.1 David (Bruce Willis) and Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson) in Unbreakable (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, United States, 2000). The unbreakable and the breakable: David learns of his superhuman strength from Elijah, whose rare disease makes his bones fragile.

of David’s miraculous survival, Elijah believes he is such a person. Although David at first resists Elijah’s theory, he gradually discovers that, like his biblical namesake, he is in fact superhumanly strong, as well as psychic. At this point the film’s discourse regarding work and economic “place” again resurfaces. When David finally fully concedes his abilities, he consults with Elijah, who directs him to “go to where people are.” Attired in his hooded “Security” rain slicker, which suffices as his superhero costume, David wanders through a Philadelphia train station, experiencing clairvoyant responses to those with whom he comes into contact. After registering the crimes of several by-passers, he encounters a man who he senses has committed a particularly violent act.54 In his psychic vision, David sees the man, who works as a custodian at the station, staging a home invasion in an affluent neighborhood. David then follows the custodian to a house where he has indeed murdered a man and woman and is terrorizing their children. David kills the home invader and rescues the children, and

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when we next see him, he is carrying his wife to his bed, his sense of masculine selfhood restored. The next morning, the newspaper before him on his kitchen table touts the bravery of an unknown “hero” who performed a selfless rescue. This image of David, the service worker, rising up to become a protector of “the rest of us,” to use Elijah’s phrase, must be understood in relation to the specifics of the home invasion. In David’s vision, the custodian—another quintessential service worker— approaches the house, rings the doorbell, expresses his admiration for the residence to the business executive who answers the door, and then proceeds to kill him and abduct his family. In presenting this event, the film concretizes the issue of “place” with which it is centrally concerned. That is, the scene depicts a man consigned to the lowest rung of the economic ladder who steps out of his place to occupy one at the opposite socio-economic extreme. In its staging as a violent usurpation, such a redistribution of wealth is clearly condemned within the film’s narrative. The custodian is represented as purely sinister, and it is David’s first “heroic” act to kill him for his transgression. Indeed, instead of the direct demand for more wealth and status of which the custodian’s home invasion is a grotesque parody, what the film embraces as an “answer” for white men who find themselves in a place of disempowerment and vulnerability within the service economy, men such as David himself, is a leap into the imaginary reminiscent of the wish-fulfillment Clark and Salaman identify with management gurus. This is not to say that David himself is imagining his superhuman strength; while many of his exploits could be chalked up to coincidence (surviving the train wreck) or a delusional belief in his own strength (his fierce battle with the home invader), his physical ability to lift enormous weight and his clairvoyant vision of the precise misdeeds of the home invader are portrayed as material realities in the film.55 Yet, rather than conceiving of some solution to David’s alienated condition in similarly materialist terms, Unbreakable promotes a fantasy in which the downtrodden and dispirited worker discovers a magical capacity that will compensate for his poor wages and unfulfilled life without changing his work situation in the least: security guard by day, superhero by night. The degree to which his new status as a superman will not be especially remunerative is emphasized when, early in his process of self-discovery, David asks his supervisor how many sick days he has taken while working for the university. Misinterpreting this query as a tacit request for a raise, his supervisor offers him an extra $40 per week, hardly a life-changing sum. In

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celebrating David’s transformation while disavowing the custodian’s, then, the film assumes an ideological position in which a placebo of fantasy is privileged over the sort of material transformation the custodian’s brutal actions symbolize. It is in these terms that we must read Elijah’s role as the architect of David’s dubious transformation. Certainly, in his function of freeing David from the control of his wife, from whom David keeps his superhero identity secret, Elijah can be thought of in terms of the tradition of the “buddy film.” Cynthia J. Fuchs has described how the interracial buddy film has emerged as a visual space for the assertion of “ ‘hypermasculinity,’ a reaction against perceived incursions of the feminine.”56 Ultimately, however, Elijah’s association with the medium of the comic book provides our best way of understanding his complex relation to David. On the one hand, Elijah is apparently the most thriving figure in the economic organization of Unbreakable. He runs an elegant gallery specializing in collectible comic book art, drives a distinguished car, and wears expensive clothing. His escape from the lower reaches of the service economy to which so many black men are consigned is made explicit early when he points out to a potential buyer of one of his expensive illustrations that they are not in a toy store, and he is not wearing “a slender plastic tag clipped to [his] shirt with [his] name printed on it.” Yet, Elijah’s very need to defend his merchandise against this sort of misunderstanding also signals his strangely marginalized relation to the adult world of economics. As his last name suggests, the “price” or value he assigns things (and people) is highly unconventional. For instance, Elijah does not sell the print in this early scene because he determines that the prospective buyer does not fully appreciate the comic book as an art form; his own boyish love for comics is more compelling than the adult economic imperative to make the sale. Indeed, increasingly, Elijah’s actions align him with the world of childhood rather than an adult economy. This infantilization is particularly evident in his implicit affinity with Joseph, David’s young son. Joseph immediately embraces Elijah’s theory that David is a superhero. In scene after scene, Joseph attempts to confirm Elijah’s theory, wanting desperately for his father to be the great man Elijah describes. Yet the parallel between man and boy becomes most apparent when, at a point at which David briefly rejects Elijah’s theory, Shyamalan jump-cuts from a scene in which Elijah throws a tantrum in a comic book store to a scene in which Joseph sulks while playing with two superhero figures. At this point, the two characters’

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levels of emotional maturity, as well as their relation to fantasy, are explicitly equated. The film, then, presents a twist on the sort of “buddy” dynamic that Fuchs has described. Elijah’s function as a child, a figure detached from the demands of adult economic logic, is to usher David into a similar zone of make-believe. Yet Unbreakable’s economic discourse ultimately proves even more conservative. In its final moments, we learn that Elijah’s relation to David is far from one of loyalty or love. In the “surprise ending,” Elijah reveals to David that he has perpetrated several acts of sabotage, including the train wreck, in order to discover a person with David’s abilities. Elijah explains that he needed to find his place in the world, to be sure that he wasn’t a mistake. “The scariest thing,” he explains to David, is “to not know your place in this world.” Elijah cannot be the arch-villain, “Mr. Glass,” without a superhero antagonist against whom to scheme. In abstract racial terms, this plot twist disturbingly suggests that, as a permanently “broken” being, the black man needs a white man to be a hero so he has someone against whom to define himself. Elijah’s “place” is to do evil, and he needs David to regain his unequivocal status as a (super)powerful white man so that his own raison d’etre is not left in doubt. In economic and material terms, too, there are repercussions: up until the final moments of the film, Elijah has in fact enjoyed considerable economic prosperity and freedom. Yet the final sequence reveals that, as a result of the crimes he committed in his quest for David, Elijah is committed to an institution for the criminally insane. He sacrifices his own economic and social position to find his “place,” a place of exile from the superior material status he had been enjoying. On the surface, Unbreakable imagines a set of revisions to the social order in which white men whose conventional masculine role is compromised by the service economy regain power from the women and blacks who have implicitly taken it away. Yet, unlike the earlier portraits of black gurus produced by Murphy and Pressfield, in Shyamalan’s film blackness does not function primarily as a signfier of indigenous mysticism. Instead, it becomes a more complex factor in the narrative, linked not only to magic, but also to stereotypes of childishness and criminality—a set of associations that cast magic itself in a less positive light. And while Bagger Vance scatters his pearls of wisdom from an unassailable position of superiority that has nothing to do with the actual socio-historical relations of the world in which his story is set, Unbreakable reflects the racist assumptions of its era: It assigns its black protagonist a childlike relation to

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economic matters and spins a troubling fantasy that black men would gladly cede their own rare financial gains in order to be in a more certain, and nostalgic, relationship to their white counterparts—a relationship in which white men are always already heroes who have merely misplaced their capes/power. From this perspective, Elijah appears to enable David to find the sort of unlimited power so often promised by the management discourse of corporate culture. Yet that power is ultimately presented as useless with relation to his economic difficulties—David has no more economic means as a superhero than he did before, and he keeps his new status as hero a secret from his wife, suggesting that his reassertion of power can only happen furtively, or even invisibly. As Elijah’s name foretells, David also pays a very high emotional “price” for the discovery of this new power. At the conclusion David is left with the horrific discovery that his extraordinary strength was only disclosed to him at the expense of countless lives—lives for whom he must now assume a permanent burden of guilt. The relatively simplistic racialization of self-actualization we see in earlier narratives, then, gives way to a vision in which mystical solutions to economic problems are dangerously entangled with the mythology of race in America.

Death Row as Dream Job Of all of the recent Hollywood films that feature the magical black man, the most commercially successful and controversial was the 1999 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont. Many viewers understandably found the movie troubling because its portrait of the black death row inmate John Coffey, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, is an amalgam of racist stereotypes: he is simultaneously represented as profoundly ignorant, childlike, hypersexualized, and eager to pay with his life for the sins of others as a latter-day Uncle Tom/Christ. This film will almost certainly generate interest among scholars of race and film in these terms.57 In my own reading, however, I would like to explore the film’s racial thematics while focusing on it specifically as a drama of the workplace. The eponymous “Green Mile” is represented less as a horrifying holding pen for doomed men, than as a pleasant, even funfilled workplace for those who guard them. Given the obvious dramatic potential contained in the final days of a death row inmate’s life, one might anticipate that the film would concentrate most of its attention on its prisoners and their responses to their predicament.

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Yet on every level its narrative prioritizes the guards’ lives as workers over the inmates’ experiences. Not only does the film explore the daily existence of white working men, but, like the other films I discuss here, it also dramatizes these men’s negotiation of their gendered identity through their work lives. As in Unbreakable, the white male workers of The Green Mile experience femininity as an encroachment on their identities against which they rebel. While Unbreakable, counter to its title, represents David as a man who has been broken by his wife’s influence and who is ostensibly repaired by Elijah, The Green Mile imagines the white workers on death row as much more fully in command of their masculinity. Through much of the narrative, then, John Coffey serves less as a catalyst for change than as a conservative presence who merely helps to obstruct this imposition of the feminine. It is only after Paul Edgecomb helps put John Coffey to death that he finds that the very power the prisoner has enabled him to achieve is a curse that burdens and haunts him, again suggesting a complex and ambivalent relationship between guru and follower—between these black and white “friends.” Part of the film’s complex negotiation of issues of work and gender involves its historical setting. In one sense, by setting its action in the Great Depression, the film implicitly provides a rationale for the men’s choice of employment. That is, its recurrent visual and verbal allusions to the scarcity of jobs provide an excuse for the guards’ enthusiastic relationship to such morally questionable and dispiriting work. Yet its historical context within the Great Depression also makes the very notion of work itself a more defamiliarized one. Work is no longer a thing of relative certainty for these men, and so its meanings and significance to their identity is foregrounded. While its setting in the 1930s might make it seem irrelevant to a discussion of soft work, its exploration of job scarcity for white men in terms of gender and race dynamics ultimately makes it more of a reflection on contemporary work than a window into an earlier era. Even more crucial to the film’s exploration of work and white masculinity, however, is its depiction of Paul Edgecomb, played by Tom Hanks. Because it is organized as a recollection of events in his life, Paul must be viewed as its protagonist, despite its ostensible interest in the figure of John Coffey. In general, Paul is constructed as the consummate manager, masterfully supervising a team of other guards. Indeed, one of the most unsettling aspects of the film is the highly businesslike attitude Paul and his coworkers take to their specialty, putting men to death in the electric chair. In the first execution scene,

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we see the men carefully rehearsing the steps to the prisoner’s annihilation. While it is true that by maintaining their proficiency in the protocols of the death chamber, Paul and his team help to ensure the most humane death possible for the inmates, their rationalized approach to the process underscores the degree to which Paul and the others think of execution as a job in order to avoid confronting its moral implications. Certainly, here and elsewhere both Paul’s persona as a highly competent manager and the elaborate work protocols within the prison overshadow the prisoners’ experiences. There are virtually no female characters in The Green Mile, only brief appearances by the wives of Paul and the Prison Warden. As in Unbreakable, however, the film organizes its meditation on the workplace in deeply gendered terms. Interestingly, death row is depicted as a merging of the public and private spheres. The prison is a sort of home, a comparison that is first made evident when parallels are suggested between the nursing home in which a now elderly Paul dwells in the opening scenes and the Green Mile of his memory. In these scenes, set in the present, a black male orderly chastens Paul for his periodic absences from the facility, clearly inverting the dynamic between Paul and John Coffey that the film later explores: Paul is now on his own death row. Like this other sort of “home,” moreover, the Green Mile is a place where the inmates are both cared for and disciplined like children. In an early scene, Paul lectures a fellow guard, Percy Wetmore, that the prisoners should not be frightened. Percy retorts that they’re not running a “cradle school” although Paul and the others often behave as though they are. This conversation foregrounds the degree to which the male guards play a domestic role in relation to their infantilized prisoners. Later, for example, Paul and a coworker attempt to comfort Del, a prisoner who is about to be executed, by telling him a fairy tale about the fate of his pet mouse, Mr. Jingles. On still other occasions, the guards are victimized by a prisoner who plays a number of childish pranks on them. They, in turn, punish him by placing him in solitary confinement, in effect giving him a “time-out” for his bad behavior. And most importantly of all, the guards consistently treat John Coffey with care as he cries, expresses fear of the dark, and generally comports himself in the manner of a very young child. Despite—or perhaps because of—this apparent merging of public and private notions of work, however, the film suggests that certain threatening aspects of femininity must be purged from the Green Mile. Most central to this meditation on work and gender is the

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“sissy” guard, Percy Wetmore. Percy, whose name sounds like “Pussy” when uttered by his Southern co-workers, is the feminized “other” in this world of white male control and order. From his first introduction, when he enters the prison at the side of John Coffey, Percy is conspicuously smaller and weaker than his counterparts. While the other men earned their positions on the staff of the prison, it is quickly revealed that Percy is only working on the Green Mile because he is the nephew of the governor’s wife. If these associations with the feminine were not enough, Percy is later singled out by the unruly prisoner, Wild Bill, who notes that Percy is “soft like a girl” and threatens to rape him. Within the context of this male world of work, a world where work is “life or death” in ways few contemporary jobs are, Percy represents the chaos that results when the feminine is given power. On an abstract level, the danger he poses to male order is communicated by his repeated threats to use his influence to get his co-workers fired.58 He is also sadistically cruel from his first moment on screen, taunting John Coffey and attempting to kill the prisoners’ beloved Mr. Jingles. This cruelty culminates in the hideous centerpiece of the film, a botched execution of which he is in charge. Percy is presented in the scene as both vicious and incompetent—vicious because he intentionally fails to take a crucial step that will make the prisoner’s death in the electric chair less painful, and incompetent because omitting the step leads to a macabre spectacle that creates unexpected mayhem among the execution’s audience.59 Ultimately, Percy is rendered vegetative and committed to a mental institution, an appropriate form of containment for this figure of feminine hysteria. Importantly, it is John Coffey who renders him an imbecile, inflicting him with the brain cancer he has exorcized from the Warden’s wife. Coffey’s role in removing Percy from the masculine domain of work demonstrates that, once again, a black man with supernatural powers is assigned the role of negotiating the social relations of white men to gender and work. Indeed, John Coffey’s very “treatment” of the Warden’s wife has already established his role in preserving associations of public, paid work with masculinity and the domestic sphere with femininity. Importantly, for the Warden, the most disturbing element of his wife’s illness is her tendency to use vulgar language during episodes of madness. “I didn’t know she’d ever heard words like that,” he laments, implying that her life within the private sphere should have shielded her from this masculine, public discourse. His emphasis on the disjunction between the expletives she uses and her “sweet voice” further suggests the way that he

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perceives her femininity to be compromised by this more typically masculine language. By staging John Coffey’s healing of the wife within the home of the Warden (it is one of the few scenes not shot within the prison setting), the film underscores the degree to which Coffey is serving to restore the relation between the domestic and the feminine. Nor are these the only moments when Coffey serves to mediate the relation between identity and the separate spheres. Early in the film, Paul is suffering from a severe bladder infection, which manifestly compromises his ability to perform his job when an unruly prisoner resists being put in a cell. As Paul lies on the floor clutching his genitals, helpless to take command of the situation, a clear correlation between masculine potency and functioning in the workplace is suggested. It is at this moment that John Coffey’s ability to work “miracles” is first communicated. He calls Paul to his cell, reaches through the bars, and grasps Paul’s groin. As a result of this act, Paul’s bladder infection is healed. In her analysis of this section of the film, Tania Modleski has pointed out that John Coffey conveys a hypersexuality to Paul through this touch, as Paul goes home and has sex with his wife four times in the course of the night.60 Yet it is also important to note that this virility is implicitly correlated with his vigorous job performance in subsequent scenes. Such an act raises the question of John Coffey’s disposition toward his jailers. Clearly, his feelings toward Paul should be somewhat adversarial, and restoring him to optimal health does not increase his chances for freedom. Yet, on the Green Mile, even the prisoners are part of the work culture. Indeed, in the scene in which the prison is first introduced, we see a vast army of prisoners working on chain gangs around the facility. On death row itself, prisoners refer to their guards as “Boss,” implying that even they are workers in the job of their own deaths. And, most importantly, John Coffey himself constantly refers to Paul as “Boss,” indicating that, superficially at least, he understands himself to serve Paul’s interests in his actions. Equally crucial in understanding John Coffey’s relation to the white male workers who surround him, however, is his childlike quality. Like Elijah Price, John Coffey is a figure who reduces the world to simple, Manichean terms. There are good men and evil men, and good versus evil is a very clear-cut matter. While Unbreakable ultimately associates Elijah himself with evil, John Coffey, as his initials suggest, is a Christlike martyr. Yet whether good or evil, the functions of Elijah and John Coffey prove similar in that they both reify a construction of the white

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male worker as a heroic protector. On the most fundamental level, The Green Mile can be seen as a nostalgic celebration of an era when white men made the rules. The guards of the Green Mile are represented as astonishingly gentle and kind, a fact foregrounded by the actions of a soft-spoken guard named “Brutal”: his very lack of brutality is made conspicuous by his unusual name. Yet the guards can be gentle or stern as they like because they are in total control of their world. The uniforms they wear simply accentuate the power granted by their gender and race (see figure 6.2). For much of the film, then, John Coffey’s relation to Paul and the other white male guards involves preserving the status quo rather than producing radical transformations. The very structure of The Green Mile, however, invites us to see John Coffey’s presence on Paul’s cellblock as a transforming event in Paul’s life. The opening scene, in which a geriatric Paul bursts into tears at the memory of the events surrounding John Coffey’s life and death, confirms the lasting impact that the prisoner has had on his guard. In fact, Paul’s participation in

Figure 6.2 John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Paul (Tom Hanks) in The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont, United States, 1999). The uniforms Paul and his coworkers wear accentuate the power granted by their gender and race.

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the execution of John Coffey, who has been revealed as entirely innocent of the ghastly crime for which he was convicted, leaves him unwilling to continue to work on death row. He learns from his encounter with John Coffey that the work to which he has committed himself is wrong, that it threatens innocent lives, and that he needs to find a new career (indeed, we are told in his voice-over that after John Coffey’s execution, Paul left the Green Mile and went to work at a juvenile delinquent shelter so that he could help stop criminality before it started). The unjust execution of John Coffey near the film’s conclusion, then, could be understood to debunk Paul’s highly rational mode of management by privileging the more mystical powers of truth that John Coffey possesses. In this reading, the death chamber is a sinister expression of mechanical rationality, and the white male workers’ commitment to this epistemology culminates in the extermination of a wise, magical soul. Like Elijah, John Coffey provides a non-rational perspective that removes Paul from the symbolic order as it is exemplified by the Green Mile itself, into a more nurturing space. Such a reading again suggests the degree to which the black gurus in these films both liberate their white counterparts from the effects of the feminine while simultaneously ushering them into a visionary domain that is a departure from the conventions of masculinity. As in Unbreakable, this mystical realm conveys power beyond that conceivable within the symbolic order. Prior to his execution, John Coffey grasps Paul’s hand, desperate to share some of the suffering he has absorbed from those around him. “I gots to give you a little bit of myself,” he says to Paul, “a gift of what’s inside of me, so you can see for yourself.”61 Ultimately, it is revealed that this physical contact with John Coffey has imbued Paul with an unprecedented longevity. At the conclusion we learn that he is well over one hundred years old, and it appears he will live indefinitely. In this sense, Paul has clearly become “unbreakable” in ways not dissimilar to David Dunn. Once again, then, a black man’s magic imbues a white man with superhuman power. Yet as in the previous film, this “empowerment” is highly ambiguous. While David’s status as superhuman leaves him consigned to the economic no-man’s-land where he started, Paul experiences the power he has gained from his contact with John Coffey as a curse. In both films, the white male workers find themselves in an exaggerated state of embodiment: David develops superhuman physical strength; Paul wishes for his body to die but it will not, a fate that forces him to wait out his longevity and watch all whom he loves leave him behind. As

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before, this “surprise” ending complicates the “friendship” between the two men and suggests a critical view of the irrational aspects of contemporary work culture. Hyper-embodiment is a dilemma usually endured by women and black men, not white, middle-class men. In physical terms, then, Paul’s “empowerment” amounts to a punitive role-reversal. Given the guards’ role as caretakers of the childlike Coffey, this final development also seems a grotesque, if figurative, amplification of retrograde notions of the “white man’s burden.” Paul, that is, is too empowered by his contact with the apparently hapless John Coffey, empowered to the point where he wishes to disown the responsibilities that come with his role as white manager/ protector. However, we cannot overlook John Coffey’s agency in instilling this power-which-is-not-power in his white counterpart. While he initially vanquishes the feminine presence in their (nostalgically produced) world of male work, he ultimately infuses Paul with purposeless longevity, stranding him in an endless state of nonproductivity. In so doing, John Coffey replaces Paul’s former masculine competence with an existence of protracted embodiment from which he cannot escape. In this respect, The Green Mile, like Unbreakable, represents gurus as dangerous to white male power, and mysticism as a feminizing threat to American workers.

“I Choose Us” Compared to Unbreakable and The Green Mile, Family Man (2000), directed by Brett Ratner, wears its economic narrative on its sleeve. That is, as a film that transports an autonomous businessman into an alternative life in which he is enmeshed in domesticity, it overtly explores the tensions for contemporary white men between their selfconception as public workers and private husbands/fathers that exist only as subtext in the former films. What is perhaps most interesting about Family Man, however, is the degree to which it diverges, or at least wavers, from its own apparent agenda. Although it is packaged as a sentimental film that privileges love within the nuclear family over a life of materialism/consumerism, it so skews its own relation to these two ontologies that it can readily be understood to debunk the construct of the “family man” that it purports to celebrate.62 The magical black man who serves as the conduit between these public and private identities must be read in relation to this ambivalence. As in Unbreakable, the guru figure in Family Man is equated with a young child who facilitates the white protagonist’s transformation. On the other hand, the transformation the protagonist, Jack,

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undergoes more closely resembles that staged in The Green Mile than in Unbreakable: Jack is changed from an autonomous icon of masculine power to a domesticated, unindividuated, and economically disempowered figure. Yet finally the gender and racial dynamics within all three films are similar: rather than a guardian angel, the black magical man becomes a harbinger for, and facilitator of, the complications of gendered identity the white man is fated to suffer in the era of soft work. The premise of Family Man is that successful businessman Jack Campbell is afforded the opportunity through the magical intervention of a supernatural black man to see what his life would have been like if he had settled down with his girlfriend, Kate, thirteen years earlier. In the opening scene, the young couple is poised to bid farewell to one another at an airport terminal. Suddenly, however, Kate changes her mind and makes a plea that Jack not go to London to do a prestigious banking internship as they had agreed. She then declares, “I choose us,” a statement that determines the fundamental tension that will organize the remainder of the narrative, a tension that pits a model of masculine power associated with autonomy and economic prosperity against a vision of the feminine and the domestic associated with collectivity and economic disempowerment. When Jack counters that they must stick to their plan, Kate passionately asserts, “The plan doesn’t make us great, Jack; what we have together, that’s what makes us great.” The film then flashes ahead thirteen years to Christmas Eve, and its ambivalence regarding white men’s relation to gendered identity and work begins to emerge. We quickly discover that Kate’s dire predictions at the airport were correct; her relationship with Jack did not survive their separation, and in the subsequent years, Jack has become a wildly powerful and rich businessman. By not “choosing us,” Jack has achieved a remarkable degree of economic autonomy and social prestige. He lives in a spectacular penthouse apartment, drives a Ferrari, and is president of a Wall Street investment firm. Constantly singing and smiling, he appears to be a fulfilled and happy man. Nor is he unkind or ungenerous: he is depicted flirting playfully with an older tenant of his apartment building and giving stock advice to the doorman. Yet the film simultaneously insists that Jack is spiritually impoverished, a man in need of self-actualization. Openly flaunting his indifference to the familial traditions surrounding Christmas Eve, he chides one of his employees for his wish to leave the office and be with his family. He insists that his team of financiers work late on a

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major merger, stating that the only sort of holiday “giving” that he cares about is “giving everything I’ve got to this deal.” He openly emulates Peter Lassiter, the owner of the company, who proudly describes himself as “a heartless bastard who only cares about money.” When Jack learns that Kate has called him after so many years, he takes Peter’s advice and nonchalantly decides to ignore her request that he contact her. It is this ambivalent portrait of Jack’s identity as a worker that makes the guru role of Cash, played by Don Cheadle, more complex than it first appears. Released at Christmastime, Family Man is a loose adaptation of the Frank Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life. In that film, protagonist George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is a young man who is ambitious to leave his small hometown but is stopped by the local demands of love and family. Years later, at the point when he is almost certainly ruined emotionally and financially by his various responsibilities, he attempts suicide. He is rescued by Clarence, a childlike and bumbling angel, who casts him into an alternative universe where he was never born at all, so that George can understand the contributions he has made to the lives of those around him. On the surface, Cash, as an updating of the character Clarence, is the film’s answer to Jack’s spiritual emptiness. En route home this same Christmas Eve, Jack enters a convenience store only to witness Cash, a stranger clad in “gangsta” attire, get in an altercation with the shop owner. Cash has a winning lottery ticket, but when the Asian cashier doubts its authenticity on racist grounds, he pulls a gun. Jack approaches and offers to buy the ticket in order to defuse the situation. Cash accepts the deal, puts his gun away, and they leave the store together. If we understand Cash as performing Clarence’s function by staging the confrontation at the convenience store, he must be understood to be intervening in Jack’s ongoing spiritual suicide. And, indeed, after a brief conversation, Jack and Cash part company, Jack returns home, and he wakes up in an alternative universe where he stayed with Kate and had two children. Yet while Clarence is depicted as sweetly incompetent but well-intentioned, Cash is represented as menacing and punitive in his dealings with Jack. In their conversation outside the convenience store, Jack attempts to counsel Cash on how he might rehabilitate his apparently violent and wayward life. Cash scorns Jack’s implication that he needs to “be saved,” and, turning the tables, asks Jack what he needs. When Jack asserts, “I got everything I need,” Cash laughs, and ominously remarks, “I’m going to

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really enjoy this.” As he prepares to launch Jack into his alternative life, he chides, “Just remember that you did this, Jack, you brought this on yourself” (see figure 6.3). While Cash later explains that Jack is being given a rare opportunity, “a glimpse” of the life he could have had, it seems equally credible to read Jack’s experience as punishment for his arrogance and economic privilege. Indeed, while this “glimpse” into the life that Jack could have had is ostensibly meant to awaken him from his spiritual oblivion, it could as easily be understood as painful subjection to all he had heretofore escaped. Superficially, the film attempts to romanticize family life in the suburbs. Yet Family Man has already depicted Jack as ebulliently fulfilled by his exciting and challenging work. And, specifically, it has dramatized that his work provides him with the old-fashioned privileges of white masculine power. From his powerful car, to his elevated view, to his tailored suits, to his sexual claim on beautiful women, Jack has earned the comforts of masculinity through his paid, public work. His sense of autonomy is conveyed by his comments about his split with Kate. Explaining his decision to prioritize his career over his relationship, he remarks, “I took the road less traveled.” During his “glimpse” into his alternative life, the sense of individualism and agency he enjoyed through his powerful position is

Figure 6.3 Jack (Nicholas Cage) and Cash (Don Cheadle) in Family Man (dir. Brett Ratner, United States, 2000). Cash prepares to give Jack “a glimpse” of the life he might have had.

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replaced by the mass consciousness and conformity that characterize suburban life. From the moment he awakens in his new life, his tendency to act autonomously is policed by Kate. When he first discovers that he is in the suburbs, for instance, he immediately drives back to Manhattan to attempt to reclaim his old life. When he returns, despondent, to the house he shares with her, Kate chastens him for leaving without explaining where he was going. As the narrative unfolds, his life is merged with hers: he shares household responsibilities from diaper changing to walking the children’s dog. Even his job is an extension of their relationship, both because its only reward for Jack is the financial support it provides for the family and because he is working for Kate’s father. Early in the film, when reflecting on his past with Kate, Jack remarks that he was “almost married and almost a broker at E.F. Hutton,” a formulation that links marriage with becoming a generic part of a massive corporation. Once Jack actually experiences marriage, this erasure of his individuality is indeed striking and is particularly evident in his clothing. Jack’s distinctively tailored designer suits are replaced by a set of uniforms, from bowling shirts to his standardized work attire, which underscore the conformity that now defines his existence. As the film progresses, Jack is trained in this new life by his young daughter, Annie, who has taken on the role of teacher after deducing that Jack is in an altered state. Importantly, the film’s structure implies that Annie and Cash are doubles. During their second encounter, Cash offers Jack a small bell and explains that when Jack rings the bell, Cash will appear. Yet, on the first occasion that Jack attempts to summon Cash with the bell, it is not Cash, but Annie who materializes before him. At this point, Annie has become the “angel” who facilitates Jack’s domestication. As in Unbreakable and The Green Mile, then, the magical black man functions interchangeably with a young child. Yet here, the child’s female gender helps to foreground the ostensible difference in the black man’s role. On the surface at least, Cash is debunking rather than reinforcing fantasies of autonomous masculine heroics. Near the conclusion of Family Man, Jack sees an opportunity to return to the role of tycoon he had occupied before being propelled into this feminized existence. He interviews for a job in his old firm and, after receiving an offer, attempts to merge his old life with his new one. Kate resists passionately, however, again rebelling against Jack’s wish to act autonomously (“Don’t go get a new career without even telling me about it!” she exclaims). Kate then shares with him her domestic vision that they grow old together in their current house.

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While she ultimately, grudgingly concedes the possibility that they might be able to achieve the compromise that Jack proposes, her emphasis on their home suggests the degree to which Jack’s autonomy has been subsumed within a new highly domesticated and collective identity. Ultimately, Jack embraces this new mode of collectivity into which Kate has indoctrinated him. Once his “glimpse” is over, and he is returned to his life as an urban executive, Jack is deeply despondent that he is “completely and utterly alone.” To remedy this sense of loneliness and isolation, Jack seeks out Kate, hoping to resume the relationship that he had sacrificed to his ambition so many years earlier. Interestingly, when he finds Kate, he discovers that she is not the domestic figure he was married to in the alternative universe; rather, she is as ambitious, powerful, and self-sufficient as he has long prided himself in being. When he arrives at her home, she is preparing to leave for Paris to head up her law firm’s offices there. The very act of moving, tearing apart the order of the space she has apparently long inhabited, emphasizes that this Kate, the “real” Kate, has none of the domestic sentimentality of her counterpart in the life Jack has been visiting. Ultimately, then, Jack is in the position of advocating a more domesticated existence for both of them. The final scene of the film inverts the first: Jack rushes to the airport to implore Kate not to go to Europe, just as she had begged him to stay thirteen years earlier. “I choose us,” he says at the conclusion of a speech in which he lays out a vision of the domestic life they could share together. At this point, the ambivalence that haunts the film again emerges. Like Jack at the beginning of the film, Kate appears very excited and pleased with her current life. She has foregone marriage and children for the new economic power available to her, and as Jack implores her to settle down in the suburbs, what is most evident is not what she stands to gain, but what she will lose. Finally, then, while Ratner’s film superficially celebrates a new, more integrated social role for male workers, it also makes available a reading in which conventional notions of white masculinity are threatened by a collective ideology associated with femininity and blackness: an ideology that, by celebrating family and disavowing materialism, threatens to suck white masculine subjects—be they men or women— into a mass existence that effaces their distinction. Certainly, the “glimpse” to which Cash subjects Jack requires that Jack acquiesce to forms of economic disempowerment and emasculation with which black men have long been associated in the service economy, forms

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with which Cash himself is associated throughout the film. Cash’s name, like Elijah Price’s, draws attention to the economic relations in which he is embedded. Those relations are in turn illuminated by his desperate attempt to “cash” in a lottery ticket at the outset of the film and his later manifestation as a convenience store clerk. The punitive attitude with which Cash offers Jack his glimpse of another life suggests that, while collective social relations can certainly be rendered in positive terms, in Family Man they constitute the sort of diminishment of power and freedom that black men have suffered as a consequence of their socioeconomic position within the United States. As in the earlier films, the black guru’s magic is inflected by racial history, a history that associates mysticism, collectivity, and non-Western values with emasculation and disempowerment.

Black Magic, Black Markets, Black Men In each of the films that I’ve explored here, white men’s sense of masculinity is invested in work that is compromised or threatened by a feminizing presence. In Unbreakable, David’s emasculation is effected by his wife and redressed by the magical figure of Elijah. In The Green Mile, the obvious threat to conventions of masculinity in the workplace takes the form of Percy Wetmore, and is eradicated by John Coffey. In Family Man, meanwhile, Jack experiences his wife’s domestic regime as an assault on his sense of autonomous masculinity, and the black “angel” can be understood to orchestrate this process rather than standing in its way. While it at first appears that this latter black character’s role of facilitating rather than resisting the demasculinization of his white male counterpart is unique, a closer look at the other films suggests that in both Unbreakable and The Green Mile, the black figures promise a restoration of conventional masculinity, only to break that promise by ironically “empowering” their white counterparts through embodiment and irrationality, ways of being and thinking more commonly associated with the feminine. Certainly, in no case do the white male characters experience their black “friend’s” function as unequivocally positive. In Unbreakable, Elijah indoctrinates David and his newly discovered superhuman body into an epistemology of “place” that is guilt-laden and leaves his economic position as tenuous as ever. In The Green Mile, John Coffey teaches Paul the bitter lesson that one can have too much power by cursing him with excesses of life. In Family Man, Cash appears to punish Jack Campbell for his confident pleasure in his own socioeconomic power.

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At this point, we must come full circle and return to Farley and Appiah’s speculations regarding these Magical African-American Friends (MAAFs). If in some respects they are friends, or saints, they are also gurus, offering to members of the contemporary American workforce of every level the promise of self-fulfillment and transcendence. Like their counterparts in the domain of corporate culture, they convey this promise through the “visions” they impart to these working men. Yet the empowerment that they offer comes with a price that is represented as too high in every case. It is as though by accepting the terms of the reality that these African American gurus offer, the white male subject of each film suffers a contamination of otherness that leaves him mentally and physically compromised. The strange danger associated with these guru figures is a consequence of the degree to which the films fail to repress the larger historical issues that their prototypes, like The Legend of Bagger Vance, managed to overlook in their facile racializing of selfactualization. The black men in these films, in other words, are both gurus and ghosts—or, at least, tips of a historical iceberg jutting into the present. And, as such, they are provocateurs, forcing latent troubles into the light of day. The films themselves drip with nostalgia: nostalgia for the era of superman, for the “simpler” times when white men’s authority was less assailable, when Capra’s George Bailey could be sure he had made the right decision in foregoing his own dreams for his family and community. Yet along with this nostalgia is the haunting presence of another lingering history: black men systematically excluded from public, paid work because of the threat to white male hegemony that they might pose if they had economic power. That history has taken new and ominous forms in the era of soft work; while civil rights legislation and federal initiatives began to open the doors for black men to new domains of work in the 1960s, by the late 1990s in which these films were produced, black unemployment rates in America were “consistently two to three times those of whites.”63 So in these films black men emerge as if from another dimension, “magical” not only, as Farley suggests, because their daily lives are a mystery, but because their very means of existence are a mystery. What powers them must be magic, because it can’t be the simple dollars and cents that keep the rest of America moving. Or, perhaps, the films suggest, what powers them is crime. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, the black characters’ removal from the realm of the economic is symbolized by their association

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with childhood in each of the films. It is not inconsequential, however, that all of these black magical figures are also associated with crime and/or imprisonment. While a single character signifying both innocence and criminality appears paradoxical, the childlike and criminal aspects of these characters are two sides of the same coin (or lack thereof). As Hapke points out, in the late 1990s, “More black men were in prison than in college, one in three in their twenties was in trouble with the law, and the percentage of drug arrests involving blacks was even higher than the percentage of drug users who were black.”64 Hapke goes on to cite the research of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who contextualizes this “replacement of work by crime” in terms of “a disappearance of work owing to the collapse of a low-wage economy, global economic reorganization, and the abolition of non-‘off-shore,’ unskilled factory jobs.”65 The black men’s childlike quality serves as a mystifying aspect of their personae, suggesting that their position outside of the conventional economy is a consequence of their ignorance of the complexities of economics. The criminal subjectivities each of the black male characters assume at one point or another, on the other hand, counters this mystification with a more historically faithful portrait of real economic marginalization and its consequences. In this sense, magic, childhood and crime all function interchangeably to signal these black men’s remoteness from the legitimate channels of work and economics. If as Antonio Gramsci maintained, magic is the opposite of work, functioning as a force of stasis while work creates change by creating history, then crime is also the opposite of work.66 It was also this history of economic marginalization that inspired the African American tradition of the trickster, “a cultural cognitive model which enabled Afro-Americans to reflect on the moral dilemmas imposed upon them under conditions of servitude and economic bondage.”67 And, indeed, the relations between these black gurus and their white disciples perhaps come closest to the relation of trickster to “dupe.” Like older versions of the trickster, these black men are “power broker[s]”68 who interact with their white counterparts, not for selfless reasons, but to fulfill their own needs. Whether that need is to confirm of one’s own (wicked) identity, to share their burden of suffering, or simply to give a powerful white man his comeuppance, each of the transactions between black and white men that these films imagine is the sort of “exchange of value” that typifies a trickster encounter.69 Although these films initially seem to foreground conflicts around gender while suggesting harmonious and cooperative race relations,

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then, a closer consideration reveals that the films present white masculinity as beset from both fronts. The fantasy of a black man stepping in to bolster magically the crumbling fiction of autonomous masculinity only belies the deeper fears that the films reflect that that other construction, whiteness, might itself be equally tenuous. In this respect the suspicion with which these films treat the mysticism that is rife in the era of corporate culture may be a positive omen: perhaps the fear of the mystical serves as a measure of how dire the condition of both constructs is, and in that regard the ascendancy of the MAAF may indeed be good mojo.

Conclusion

Throughout this book, I’ve traced a range of responses to the soft management techniques that evolved in response to Taylorism. As Braverman has argued (and the era of restructuring demonstrated), the intense drive for efficiency that Frederick Winslow Taylor inaugurated is still part of America’s work processes and work culture. Yet the focus on workers’ feelings that human relations introduced, and the waves of self-actualization and corporate culture mysticism that followed, have created understandings of work that Taylor could not have anticipated. While he paid lip service to “friendly cooperation,” his perspective on the feelings of workers was generally limited to his conviction that they would be happier if they were paid more—an eventuality that he promised in exchange for an intensification of effort and obedience on their part. The larger range of human emotions that were bound up in the activity of paid labor were lost on Taylor. Yet management thinkers who came after him, including Lemuel Boulware, Elton Mayo, Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, William Ouchi, Thomas Peters, Robert Waterman, Peter Senge, and Stephen Covey, have mined the terrain of human emotion again and again, seeking the means of fully integrating workers’ selves into their work. The forms of the texts I’ve examined have varied greatly, including pastiche, hard-boiled realism, Broadway musical, Hollywood comedy, feminist utopia, cyberpunk science fiction, police procedural, political thriller and magical realism. The postmodern qualities of contemporary labor—its resistance to rationality, upending of old hierarchies, investment in culture, and contingent treatment of reality—are well suited for the deconstructed and irreverent narrative forms that have proliferated in the past half century. The pastiche of Player Piano, the playfulness of The Pajama Game and The Apartment, the fragmentation of The Female Man, the technological fantasy of He, She, and It, and the magical realism of the various guru texts I have surveyed all complement the thematic softening of work that they portray. Artists including Bissell, Clancy, and Crichton,

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meanwhile, deploy more masculinized discourse to put this same trend into relief. Another formal dimension of soft work fiction is its utopian and dystopian manifestations. While Player Piano and He, She, and It present soft management in paradigmatically dystopian terms and contexts, Joanna Russ generates a fictional counterpart to Abraham Maslow’s utopian fantasy of self-actualization at work. Even the death row of The Green Mile has an oddly utopian quality in its perfect management-worker harmony. The other texts I’ve discussed treat the prospect of utopia or dystopia more obliquely: the America of Crichton and Clancy’s novels is on the verge of a dystopian collapse; the work life of Jack in Family Man is replayed in corporate and domestic settings that each contain utopian and dystopian elements; and Bissell’s Sleep Tite promises a utopian work experience that is undercut by simmering labor unrest. In general, these texts remind us of the centrality of work to the tradition of utopian and dystopian narratives—that our ideas of paradise and of hell are largely predicated on the forms of labor that each might demand of us. As I suggested in my introduction, soft work is the outcome of not only soft management techniques but also software and soft bodies. Automation and cybernetics play a significant role in many of the characterizations of work this study has analyzed. In some cases, the effects of automation seem directly at odds with the agenda of soft managers. Player Piano and The Female Man, for instance, explore the tension between post-Taylorist management philosophies that encourage greater emotional commitment to work and developments in automation that might make work obsolete. In less stark terms, the novels of Crichton and Clancy map similar ground, dramatizing corporate culture discourse that paradoxically praises the Japanese work ethic even as it celebrates the job-threatening automated technologies that ethic has spawned. In every case, the obsolescence of work itself can be a promise or a threat. For Vonnegut’s laborers, the end of work has created lives without meaning. In Russ’s novel, on the other hand, the possibility of a post-work society is intermittently cast in the optimistic terms promulgated by the New Left. Crichton and Clancy reflect nostalgically on the American tradition of hard work, while treating its Japanese counterpart as both slavish and ruthless. More active distrust of automation also surfaces in many of the texts that treat this element of soft work culture. Vonnegut’s novel suggests that automation will enslave the human population by

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establishing a relentless work regime with which it must keep pace. In some sense, then, Vonnegut has written a cyborg text avant la lettre, for, as the character of Jael in Russ’s novel intimates, and the many characters in Piercy’s novel make plain, the more profound the interface of humans with cybernetic technologies, the deeper their interpellation of the instrumental epistemology that such technologies embody. Crichton and Clancy echo this fear of enslavement in more abstract terms, depicting digital technologies as a threat to Americans’ freedom to use their reason to arrive at truth. As Boulware’s remarkable formulation of “job customers” illustrates, consumption is another vital aspect of soft work, and it is taken up by many of the artists I have examined. Workers are sold work, not only in the early strategies of human relations, but also in the repackaging of work that takes place in self-actualizing management and through the “visions” and “missions” that are marketed to workers by corporate culture and its gurus. If workers are consuming work, management is in some cases depicted as consuming their workforce—“seeing” them with a devouring gaze that has been encouraged by human relations’ merging of the public and private spheres, and signified by the metaphor of prostitution in Wilder’s portrait of the manager-worker relationship. Meanwhile, in the critiques of contemporary work that are expressed in the figures of the workaholic and the cyborg, we see the worker consumed not by management but by work itself. On an even broader scale, corporate culture encourages American culture to “buy in” to the cultural practices of the Japanese—a relationship that Clancy and Crichton reinscribe as a “selling out” of American values. Again, images of prostitution surface, as America is presented as a once pure woman who has now sold her virtue. Whether workers are cast as consumers of their jobs or as products that are consumed, these exchanges modify the conventionally masculine connotations of work. While the disempowered, feminized, or even prostituted worker is one manifestation of soft work, another is the empowered liberal feminist. Bisell’s proto-feminist Babe; the work-focused liberal feminists of The Female Man, He, She, and It, and even, improbably, Debt of Honor; and Family Man’s post-feminist Kate, all reflect the strong and enduring connection between work and female empowerment that runs through contemporary depictions of American work culture. Yet, as with other dimensions of soft work, the connotations of these figures are somewhat ambivalent. Babe, for instance, is redrawn in the softer script and casting of The Pajama Game, while

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Joanna and company are all entangled with questions about the potential freedom from labor that cybernetic automation introduces. Debt of Honor balances its portrait of successful working women with its equivocal treatment of rape in the workplace. In its two renderings of Kate, Family Man presents stark extremes of selfsacrificing mothering and solitary careerism without granting the possibility of middle ground. In all of these texts, the activity of work has been reframed in ways that foreground conventionally feminine aspects of human subjectivity. Not only emotion, but instinct, intuition, irrationality, and spirituality have been cultivated in workers, while reason, system and science have been demoted to secondary concerns. Soft work fiction explores how the gender identity of male workers is reconstituted when they engage in a work culture that privileges this feminine ontology. Paul Proteus moves into a “softer” gender position through his embrace of abjection, and Sid Sorekin and C.C. Baxter depart from the conventions of masculinity modeled by their superiors as a consequence of the emotional and sexual dynamics produced by human relations management. The male protagonists of Crichton and Clancy’s works as well as the guru books and films struggle against the feminizing trends they perceive in their work lives; yet among, them, only Clancy’s Jack Ryan appears unsoftened by the global effects of corporate culture. The experiences of the white male protagonists of Unbreakable, The Green Mile, and Family Man bring us full circle, as these workers are assimilated into visionary worlds by their black gurus that represent a more totalized variation of the non-rational state endorsed by Paul Proteus’s Ghost Shirt Society. Ghost Shirts and Gurus remind us that gender is not the only element of soft work subjectivity that these texts emphasize. In some instances, racial others provide models for ways to negotiate the demands of soft work—Paul Proteus’s embrace of the Ghost Shirt Society and Baxter’s commitment to be a mensch are salient instances of this. In other texts, racial and ethnic minorities are compared (favorably or unfavorably) to machines. The historical narrative concerning Jews in He, She, and It, for instance, emphasizes their intense work ethic, a perspective that provisionally equates them with cyborgs and invites both groups to be seen as hard-working minorities who deserve equal pay for equal work. However, the novel later retreats from this comparison as it disavows the extremity of cyborg work culture. America’s love-hate relationship with workaholism is again evident in corporate culture’s admiration for the

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intense work ethic of the Japanese; when Clancy depicts the archetypal Japanese businessman as “a little robot,” we see again how laboring machines have set the standard for what human workers promise—or threaten—to become. Yet, even as the Japanese are depicted as machine-like, they are also assigned soft qualities of mysticism and irrationality. It is these qualities that are amplified by the management gurus who have become the icons of corporate culture. Their mysticism, like that of the Japanese, is cast in overtly racial terms, leading to a series of contemporary Hollywood renderings of economic revitalization achieved through the interplay of black magic and white masculinity. While these texts reflect our recent past, it is helpful to consider where the future may lead. In economist Guy Standing’s fascinating analysis of global labor patterns, he demonstrates that what he characterizes as the global feminization of work is a two-fold process: the relative percentage of women in the global workforce is increasing as male participation is declining, and work across the world is increasingly taking forms historically associated with women’s work, offering low pay, little long-term security, minimal chance for advancement, and few rights and entitlements.1 How does this story of “feminization” relate to the “softening” of work I have been tracing throughout this study? As Scott Adams’ brilliant satire of corporate culture in his comic strip Dilbert reminds us, the insistence that workers’ flexibly embrace ever-shifting ideologies in the workplace is often the insult added to the more substantial injury of downsizing that has plagued American workers in the new globalized economy. Workers are increasingly asked to commit their whole selves to a company’s “vision,” but they may be abruptly and ruthlessly “terminated” if the vision changes or ceases to encompass them. In this way, the softening of work can be understood as a smoke screen, obscuring the hard realities of globalization and keeping workers complacent until they are no longer needed. Yet the films, novels, and other media that have depicted the emergence of soft work suggest that this phenomenon also opens new, more hopeful, horizons. In a number of texts, the breakdown of the binary of rationality and irrationality blurs oppressive gender conventions, allowing for new forms of subjectivity. The insistence on work as a complex human social interaction is also depicted as spawning new forms of accommodation and compromise, in which women exert more power, and men adopt social roles that merge public and private modes of being. Although the promise of self-actualization

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can be seen as a snare for women to embark on a workaholic commitment to career, feminist authors also credit this sensibility with new forms of female empowerment. The emphasis on mysticism within self-actualization and corporate culture has been the occasion for the rehearsal of essentialist associations between both feminized and racialized subjectivities and irrationality. Both contemporary popular fiction and Hollywood film has trafficked in associations between women, “racial others,” and worlds of fantasy and faith. “Reality” is presented as the domain of white men, beset by destabilizing forces from both abroad and within. While these popular texts have tended to react against such forces, either imagining them in collusion against white men or playing out scenarios in which group of “others” might be used to control one another, the panic in these texts registers an erosion of white male hegemony through the new authority assigned to non-rational epistemologies. Finally then, if “soft is hard,” post-Taylorist management also has the potential to provide workers a soft place to land.

No tes

Introduction 1. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Brad Jackson alludes to its best-selling status in Management Gurus and Management Fashions (London: Routledge, 2001), xiv. 2. Peters and Waterman, xxii. 3. In describing eight tenets of good management in the first paragraph of their preface, for instance, Peters and Waterman write, “Some readers may say that the findings are motherhoods, but that’s not true. Each finding in and of itself may seem a platitude . . . , but the intensity of the way in which the excellent companies execute the eight . . . is as rare as a smog-free day in Los Angeles” (xv). 4. Ibid., xxiv. 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Ibid., 60. 7. For a discussion of how domestic work has been constructed as primitive, see Francesca Sawaya, Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004), 1–18. 8. Peters and Waterman, 144. 9. Ibid., 222, xxiv. 10. Ibid., 11, 319. 11. Ibid., 319. 12. Graham Salaman, “Culturing Production,” Production of Culture/ Cultures of Production, ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1997), 236. 13. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318. 14. See Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993); James F. Knapp, Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988); and Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992). Both Banta and Seltzer consider Taylor’s influence on not only realism and naturalism, but also romance. To these, Banta also adds melodrama and sentimental fiction. Knapp has demonstrated the intersection of Taylorism and literary modernism.

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NOTES

15. Seltzer, 159, emphasis in original. Martha Banta, like Seltzer, understands Taylorism as a system of representation. “What is Taylorism,” she asks, “but an extended narrative structure and discourse system, one that extends far beyond the factory floor to encompass every aspect of cultural existence?” (4). 16. Banta is particularly interested in the relationships between scientific management–as-narrative and subsequent narratives that attempted to promote or resist it. 17. Seltzer, 152, emphasis in original. 18. Banta, 5. Seltzer argues, “One way of allaying or monitoring . . . a linking of persons and machines is by way of its ‘localization’ (for example, in the scandalized representation of the mechanism of the feminine, that is, the female as machine)” (79, emphasis in original). According to Banta, “The masculine-feminine question is sometimes hidden, sometimes exposed, in the narrative productions of the culture of management, but it is always there. Males are expected to bring rational practices to an industrialized, mechanized, business-oriented society while females are designated as one major source of that potentially uncontrollable energy surge subsumed under the all-purpose term ‘the human element’ ” (12). 19. For accounts of the development of these management philosophies, see Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 55–119; and Andrea Gabor, The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business—Their Lives, Times, and Ideas (New York: Random House, 2000). 20. Rose, 103–119. 21. Two recent studies have made such direct links between twentieth-century work and literature, in each case arguing that experimental form is a response to changes in the nature of work, and that this formal innovation in turn proves that, contrary to common opinion, the group of writers in question should be understood as socially/economically engaged. Knapp argues that “Taylorism’s fragmentation of the human subject, and modernism’s equally radical dislocations of literary form . . . might be brought together in ways which call into question the view that modernist writing tended to suppress historical reference and engagement”(14). Hoberek, meanwhile, claims that “postwar authors’ stylistic revolts” can be understood as “responses—however displaced—to the expansion and ultimate proletarianization of mental labor, [which] give[s] the lie to our understanding of the era’s novels as rejecting political and economic concerns in favor of individual and psychological ones” (The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White Collar Work [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005], 25). 22. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991); and David Harvey, The Condition of

NOTES

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). Jameson, xix and 38. In my effort to resist Jameson’s totalizing account of multinational economic dynamics, I join a number of other critics, including Andrew Hoberek in “The ‘Work’ of Science Fiction: Philip K. Dick and Occupational Masculinity in the Post– World War II United States,” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997): 382–385; and Fred Pfeil, in Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture (London: Verso, 1990), 97–98. Although they do not address Jameson’s work specifically, industrial geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham also offer a compelling argument against contemporary Marxism’s persistent treatment of capitalism as a monolith in their essay, “Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism While Working at Home in Your Spare Time,” in Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, ed. Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 193. Jameson, 48–49. Laura Hapke, Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001), 322. Ibid., 321. Ibid., pp. 322, 332, and 322. Rose explains: “The primary economic image offered to the modern citizen is not that of the producer but of the consumer. Through consumption we are urged to shape our lives by the use of our purchasing power. We are obliged to make our lives meaningful by selecting our personal lifestyle from those offered to us in advertising, soap operas, and films, to make sense of our existence by exercising our freedom to choose in a market in which one simultaneously purchases products and services, and assembles, manages, and markets oneself. The image of the citizen as a choosing self entails a new image of the productive subject” (103). D. Crimp as quoted in Harvey, 55. For discussions of the reconceptualization of works of art as texts, see Jameson, 77–79, and Harvey, 55–58. Rose, 104 Ibid., 112. For a particularly trenchant overview of the debates surrounding this term, see Howard Brick, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” American Quarterly 44 (1991): 348–380. Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 10. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs,

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NOTES

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 168. Ibid., 166. For a remarkable exploration of the global picture of the feminization of work that Haraway gestures to, see Guy Standing, “Global Feminization through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,” World Development 27 (1999): 583–602. Haraway, 149. Pfeil, 101–102. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 129 and 112. Ibid., 101 and 102. Ibid., 97–125. Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class, 8. Although he does not examine the specifics of human relations management, Hoberek discusses the “feminized nature of white-collar work” produced by “organization-man discourse” in his essay, “The ‘Work’ of Science Fiction,” 380–381. Jameson, 54.

. “No Good to Anybody” 1. In his explanation of how early “player piano” automation worked, Larry Hirschorn writes, “[A]n electrical contact mechanism sensed perforated patterns in a tape much like a videotape. Amplified, the resulting signals activated the table holding the workpiece and the cross slide (which moved perpendicularly to the length of the machine tool) or the drill head. Because the tool could move in three dimensions, very complex instructions could be coded using this system. This was the player-piano principle” (Beyond Mechanization [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984], 47–48). 2. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Delta, 1998); Sirens of Titan: An Original Novel (New York: Dell, 1988); and Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Laurel, 1968). 3. Howard P. Segal provides the most comprehensive exploration of Player Piano’s relation to both the dystopian and utopian traditions in “Vonnegut’s Player Piano: An Ambiguous Technological Dystopia,” No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983), 162–181. Briefer assessments of Vonnegut’s relation to these movements, with particular emphasis on his debt to Orwell, Zamyatin, and Huxley, also appear in Leonard Mustazza, “The Machine Within: Mechanization, Human Discontent, and the Genre of Vonnegut’s Player Piano,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 25 (1989): 99–113; David Y. Hughes,

NOTES

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

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“The Ghost in the Machine: The Theme of Player Piano,” America as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer (New York: Burt Franklin, 1981), 108–114; and Stanley Schatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1976). Hughes offers the most thorough catalog of Player Piano’s allusions to Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics (n. 4, 113). Schatt and Segal along with Richard Giannone (Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels [Port Washington, NY: National University, 1977]) and Thomas P. Hoffman (“The Theme of Mechanization in Player Piano,” Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, ed. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas B. Dunn [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983], 125–135) all decode Vonnegut’s allusions to Greek mythology. Segal and Hoffman identify a host of other symbols and references to both historical figures and contemporary phenomena in the novel, as well. “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” Interview with Joe David Bellamy and John Casey in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, ed. William Rodney Allen (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999): 157. Other interviews in which Vonnegut discusses Player Piano as an account of his time at GE (General Electric) include those with Charles Reilly (“Two Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut,” Allen, 196–229); Robert Scholes (“A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” Allen 111–32); and David Standish (“Playboy Interview,” Allen, 76–110). According to Robert Slater, GE introduced the slogan, “More Goods for More People at Less Cost,” during the Depression (The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution [Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1993], 10). Ronald W. Schatz reports that in 1946, Charles Wilson used the same phrase to describe “the secret of the firm’s success” (The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983], 170). For Vonnegut’s claim that he was responsible for the demise of Association Island, see Scholes, “A Talk,” 113. Schatz, 6. Thomas F. O’Boyle, At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit (New York: Vintage, 1999), 243. Schatz, xiii. Herbert R. Northrup, Boulwarism: The Labor Relations Policies of the General Electric Company, Their Implications for Public Policy and Management Action (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1965), 21. Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 37–38. Lemuel Boulware, The Truth about Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1969), 100. Ibid., 162 and 163. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, second edition (London: Free Association Books, 1999), xxix.

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NOTES

14. Rose, 72. 15. David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 82, 91. By highlighting GE’s concern that any representation of worker collectivity might encourage Communism, Nye’s work serves as a reminder that the emphasis on cooperation and group adjustment within human relations shared some ground with the ideologies and organizations it sought to defeat—a point that resurfaces in my discussion of Richard Bissell’s novel 7 ½ Cents in the next chapter. 16. Ibid., 91 emphasis mine. 17. According to Evans, during the late phases of collective bargaining negotiations, employees received between two and four written communications a day from Boulware’s staff, adding up to more than one hundred written communications during these periods of intense contract negotiations (46). 18. As quoted in Schatz, 11. 19. In 1949, for instance, Fortune magazine featured Boulware’s program in a lengthy article about new management techniques (“The Management of Men,” Fortune [February 1949: 104–160]). In an article announcing that Boulware had been “relieved of” his employee relations position, the New York Times described Boulware as “the author of the most controversial labor-relations program in a major industry” (“Boulware Loses GE Labor Post,” New York Times September 11, 1957: 16). 20. Schatz, 168–169. 21. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Delta, 1980), 7–8; hereafter cited in the text. 22. Nye, 72. Nye provides two compelling examples of such photos (93). 23. Boulware, 49. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Ibid., 43. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. This passage was reprinted in Playboy in December 1973 under the title, “Vonnegut: General Electric News Bureau News Release,” 229. 28. Robert Scholes, “Kurt Vonnegut and Black Humor,” Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Robert Merrill (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1990), 74. Scholes’s characterization of this destabilized form of satire is akin to Frederic Jameson’s description of pastiche as “blank parody,” a postmodern genre produced by “a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed” (17). 29. As James Knapp points out, fears of workers being transformed into machines stretch back at least as far as the nineteenth century, and were intensified by Taylorism’s “scientific” transformation of work into “the

NOTES

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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performance of mindless mechanical function” (Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work [Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988], 7–9). While Vonnegut’s critique here is in some sense a continuation of that of scientific management, it is particularly concerned with the new management strategies that seek not to suppress the worker’s mental function (as in the tradition of scientific management), but to manipulate and co-opt the mind through marketing strategies. Standish, 93. T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 16–17. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 18. Boulware, 21 emphasis in original. As qtd. ibid., 21, emphasis in original. Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 26–28. Ibid., 31. Janice Radway, “On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female” South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994): 871–893. This passage highlights the lingering presence of Fordist impulses in Vonnegut’s near future. As Martha Banta explains, “up to the 1920s the Ford Sociological Department insisted upon the tight fit between laborer, citizen, and homeowner, although it stopped short of sending ready-made Ford houses through the assembly line. It was the designers of ready-made houses who aspired to emulate Ford’s formula for the rapid assembly of standardized components rolling off the line on a mass scale” (Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993], 215). Not coincidentally, this passage is also one of several that reflects Vonnegut’s cold war context. Earlier, the Shah of Bratpuhr identifies the system as Communism, and here the highly centralized and homogenized lifestyle of workers resonates powerfully with the state-run economy of the Soviet Union. Lears, 27. Ibid. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 58. Ibid., 55. Mustazza, 101. Ibid., 103. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 65 and 5.

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NOTES

49. Hughes compares this image to those of animals in We, Brave New World, and 1984, suggesting that in each “the spontaneity of these creatures is testimony that the will to freedom is aboriginal” (111). Schatt sees the cat as a symbol of the “efficient, utterly inhumane,” nature of the system (19). Lawrence Broer, likewise, sees the incident as signifying that “the omnipresent machinery of Paul’s society is deadly to living things, and the possibility of escaping its influence is slight” (“Pilgrim’s Progress: Is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Winning His War with Machines?” Clockwork Worlds, 140). 50. Kristeva, 4. 51. Ibid., 2 and 3. 52. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Body of Signification,” Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990), 86. 53. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark, 1984), 115. 54. Ibid. 115 and 121, emphasis mine. 55. Kristeva, 67, emphasis in original. 56. Elizabeth Grosz, “Kristeva, Julia,” Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 198. 57. Boulware, 54. 58. Ibid., 24. 59. For more on Taylor’s aversion to what he regarded as sentimental welfare programs, see Banta, 80–112. 60. Grosz, “Kristeva,” 198. Perhaps GE’s own most sobering reminder of the impossibility of escaping abjection was the scandal that began to haunt it in the late 1970s after it was revealed that the company had dumped PCB-laden waste from its manufacturing facilities into the Housatonic River, which, in turn, contaminated the Hudson River. 61. These references to hands are another trace of Vonnegut’s engagement with Taylorism and Fordism, given that both Taylor and Ford characterized workers as “hands” who needed to be governed by the “heads” of management (Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines [New York: Routledge, 1992], 95, 130). 62. Kristeva, 68. 63. John Lechte, Kristeva (New York: Routledge, 1990), 157. 64. Kristeva, 70. 65. Ibid., 64. 66. Grosz, “Body,” 87. 67. Lechte, 204, 201–2. 68. Association Island was purchased by GE in 1911 and used as a retreat for managers for decades before Boulware took up his employee relations post at GE; I have discovered no source suggesting what use, if any, Boulware made of it in his own work training managers.

NOTES

215

69. Giannone lends a mythological spin to this reading, stating “Like Kronos, the king in the first golden age, Kroner presides over the rites of obedience” (18). 70. Grosz, “Body,” 89. 71. Boulware, 83. 72. Graeme Salaman, “Culturing Production,” Production of Culture/ Cultures of Production, ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1997), 251. 73. Ibid., 252. 74. Schatt, 23.

. Soft Soap, Snow Jobs, and Apartment Keys 1. “The Management of Men,” Fortune (February 1949): 108 and 160. 2. As part of his critique of the emergence of human relations in Organization Man, William H. Whyte, Jr. remarks despairingly on the surge in the popularity of “personnel” as a vocation after World War II. In response to the refrain by one college student after another that he wants to become a personnel director because “he likes people,” Whyte reflects that, although in actuality remnants of Taylorism—including “time study” and “stop watches”—linger in the new realm of “personnel,” these students believe that working as a personnel manager will amount to being “a combination YMCA worker, office Solomon, and father confessor to the men at the lathes” (The Organization Man [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956] emphasis in original, 74). 3. Andrea Gabor, The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business—Their Lives, Times, and Ideas (New York: Times Business, 2000), xii. 4. “The Management of Men,” 108. 5. Ibid, emphasis in original. Importantly, this statement ends with the following coda: “—without bypassing the union if one existed” (108), an addendum that, despite the goodwill it implies toward unions, underscores that human relations management competed directly with unions for worker loyalty—a phenomenon graphically illustrated in the discussions of Boulwarism in the previous chapter and taken up again later in this one. 6. Joan Acker and Donald R. Van Houten provide one of the only studies that explores the degree to which a human relations experiment was affected by the gender of the work groups on which it was conducted. Yet in their analysis of Elton Mayo’s research at the Hawthorne Plant, they do not extrapolate on the implications of this gender differential for the implementation of human relations techniques across the American workforce (“Differential Recruitment and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations,” Administrative Science

216

NOTES

7.

8.

9. 10.

Quarterly 9 [1974]: 152–163). Martha Banta alludes to the gendered nature of human relations more generally, identifying its emergence with a moment in which “managers decided that human nature was perhaps more female than male, that is, more intuitive than rational, more social in its needs than self-absorbed” (Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993]: 160). Catherine Jurca, for instance, understands Whyte and Riesman (The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character [New Haven: Yale UP, 1961/2001]) primarily in terms of the “massification of the middle class” and the alienation of white-collar workers (“The Sanctimonious Suburbanite: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,” American Literary History, 11 [1999]: 85–86). Similarly, Andrew Hoberek reads Riesman and Whyte in terms of the narrative of class transformation they encode, without reference to the emergence of human relations management (The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005]). Nikolas Rose is the exception to this tendency, at least in the case of Whyte, when he remarks, “For Whyte, the psychology of human relations had much to answer for; it was the scientific counterpart of, and managerial justification for, this celebration of organizational conformity at the expense of individual imagination” (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, second edition [London: Free Association Books, 1999]: 109–110). While my reading stresses the equation The Apartment makes between male and female employees, a queer reading of the same-sex seductions it figuratively enacts is also possible. For a discussion of the real worker, Henry Noll, on which Taylor based his archetypal worker “Schmidt,” see Gabor 25–28. The first pioneer of the human relations movement was arguably Mary Parker Follett, who, while largely forgotten by the generation of management theorists who came immediately after her, was enormously influential at the height of her career in the 1920s and was rediscovered by the Japanese during their postwar reconstruction. Gabor explains, “If Taylor was the father of scientific management, Follet was the mother of a more behavioral, postscientific approach to managing human organizations” (46). Although she was a member of the Taylor society, she resisted the simplistic tendency of scientific management to reduce workers to mechanical functions stating, “the study of human relations in business and the study of operating are bound up together” (as qtd. in Pauline Graham, ed. Mary Parker Follett—Prophet of Management: A Celebration of Writings from the 1920s [Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1995]: 27). She placed emphasis on entrusting workers with responsibility for productivity and argued for a model of corporate organization that

NOTES

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

217

“exploded notions of hierarchy and traditional command-and-control authority,” a model that helped to shape later concepts of corporate culture. Management scholars Mary Runté and Albert J. Mills have observed that “prior to the mid-1970s, gender was virtually absent from theories of management and organization . . . , particularly within the North American context” (“Cold War, Chilly Climate: Exploring the Roots of Gendered Discourse in Organization and Management Theory,” Human Relations 59 [2006]: 695). In fact, Mayo’s first experiments, which were conducted in a factory in north Philadelphia, were on men. In her account of Mayo’s work, Gabor writes that this early effort “turned out to be something of a fiasco” (102). “While the workers’ response to Mayo was initially welcoming,” she writes, “few came to him for help since they assumed, probably correctly, that he was there to promote management’s interests, not their own” (102). His work in a second factory, Continental Mills, which had a more “labor-sensitive culture” was more successful (102). There, working again with male factory hands in the spinning department, he showed an “uncanny knack for getting his subjects—whether they were workers or executives—to open up to him” (103). These instances serve as a reminder that not only gender, but the related issue of preexisting union-management relations, figured in the responsiveness of workers to human relations techniques. F.J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939/1970), 21. Roethlisberger and Dickson’s text is a remarkable resource for those desiring a glimpse of factory life at this time. Its portrait of the professional and personal lives of both male and female employees at the Hawthorne Works deserves more detailed attention than I can provide here. As qtd. in Roethlisberger and Dickson, 14. Ibid., 17. Roethlisberger and Dickson list five reasons that relay assembly, a task performed by women, was chosen for study: it was repetitive; it required each worker to perform identical movements; it was executed rapidly; it would be necessary at the plant for an indefinite period; and it was manual rather than requiring a machine (20). The last of these criteria would likely have guaranteed that those under investigation were women, but I am suggesting that an additional, unconscious or unacknowledged factor in their selection of the relay assembly was that it was performed by women. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 86. In Whyte’s critique of Mayo’s work, he claims that Mayo found what he was looking for in the Hawthorne experiments. He

218

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

NOTES

writes, “Mayo and his group were evangelists as well as researchers. He had come to quite similar conclusions many years before, and for him the Hawthorne experiment did not reveal so much as confirm” (35). Ibid., 135. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 251. Ibid, 398. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 34. Gabor, 167–168. For an overview of this experiment, see Lester Coch and John R.P. French, Jr., “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” Human Relations 1 (1948): 512–532. Alfred J. Marrow, “Participation: How It Works,” The Failure of Success, ed. Alfred J. Marrow [New York: Amacom, 1972]: 85. Whyte, 7. Ibid. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37, emphasis in original. Ibid., 127, emphasis in original. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 147. Both Whyte and Riesman express concern about the loss of autonomy that the new work culture has generated, but their solutions to this problem are diametrically opposed. While Whyte expresses nostalgia for an older work ethic and celebrates an unadulterated commitment to work, Riesman looks forward to a post-work era produced by automation. Ibid., 134, emphasis in original. Despite the remarkable similarities between the two studies, Whyte only mentions Riesman twice very briefly in his 400-page study. A third reference comes in the acknowledgments where he thanks Riesman for reading early drafts of the book. Todd Gitlin, “Forward by Todd Gitlin,” The Lonely Crowd, xii. Riesman, “1969 Preface,” The Lonely Crowd, xxiv. Riesman, “1961 Preface,” The Lonely Crowd, emphasis mine, xlii. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 127. Riesman, “1961 Preface,” xlii. Ibid., xlviii. Ibid., 111 and 132.

NOTES

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

219

Ibid., 135 and 136. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 264–265. Ibid., 266. Ibid. Riesman’s preoccupation with glamour, along with Whyte’s attention to film in his analysis and Bissell’s many references to the ways Hollywood informs the behavior of the characters in his narrative, invite us to consider the ways that Hollywood has structured not only the individual self-conceptions of workers, but also the relationships between labor and management more generally. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 268. Ibid. While it is beyond the scope of this project, the degree to which human relations management philosophy created a work culture that was particularly conducive to sexual harassment is a topic worthy of further consideration by labor historians. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Mineaola, NY: Dover, 1998), 21. In The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor insists that workers at Bethlehem Steel viewed their bosses “as friends who were teaching them and helping them to earn much higher wages than they had ever earned before,” yet there is little evidence in the historical record that Taylor was concerned with the “close, intimate cooperation” he claims that scientific management cultivated (35, 75). Indeed, according to Gabor’s characterization of his time at Bethlehem Steel, “By some accounts, Taylor was so deeply hated by the men that he had to walk home under armed guard for fear of an attack on his life” (3). She explains, “Throughout his career, he was reviled by workers and had repeated fallings-out with his clients. In his confrontations at work, Taylor proved himself to be stubborn, vindictive, and confrontational” (31). Gabor claims that Bissell actually modeled his pajama factory narrative on the experiments by Lewin at Harwood Manufacturing, but this appears to be an error (169). Lewis Nichols, “Talk with Richard Bissell,” New York Times, September 26, 1954: BR22. John Brooks, “Heart Throbs in a Pajama Factory,” New York Times, May 24, 1953: BR4. Richard Bissell, 7 ½ Cents (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1953): 10–11; hereafter cited in the text. Given the Hawthorne researchers’ use of ice cream to bribe the Relay Assembly Test Room women into submitting to medical examinations, one begins to feel that a separate study of the place of this dairy product in the history of labor relations needs to be undertaken. Riesman, 218.

220

NOTES

67. Whyte, 37–38. 68. “The Management of Men,” 109. 69. Fulton Lewis, Jr., was a staunch critic of New Deal policies during the Roosevelt administration and later became an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s aggressive campaign against Communists. He is mentioned by name several times in the novel, always in conjunction with Hasler’s embattled relationship to the union (see, for instance, 22 and 228–229). 70. “The Management of Men,” 108. Certainly, this phrase was not new; Taylor insisted early in The Principles of Scientific Management, that “mutual confidence . . . should exist between a leader and his men, the enthusiasm, the feeling that they are all working for the same end and will share in the results” (8). Yet these emotional concerns overtook technical issues as the central preoccupation of human relations. 71. Riesman, 132. 72. Calta, Louis, “Richard Bissell, 63, Was Playwright,” New York Times, May 5, 1977: D24. 73. As qtd. in Banta, 121. 74. Riesman 266. 75. Ibid, 265. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 266. Riesman explains that he bases his observations about the Sun-Times on “a variety of columns” concerning career girls (265). Given the vagueness of this characterization and the relative inaccessibility of archival records of the Sun-Times, I focus my analysis here on the Tribune’s “White Collar Girl” column, which was compiled into a book at the end of its first year of publication in 1941–42, and published in 1943. It is the columns in this compilation that I analyzed for this project. 80. Ruth MacKay, White Collar Girl (Chicago: Tribune, 1943): 4. 81. Ibid., 22. 82. Wilder, of course, is known for his transgressive treatment of gender in films such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. 83. Riesman, 261. 84. For an extended analysis of the thematic significance of The Apartment’s mixture of comedy and melodrama, see Celestino Deleyto, “The Dupes Strike Back: Comedy, Melodrama, and Point of View in The Apartment,” Atlantis 14 (1992): 37–61. 85. Jewishness also plays a role in Bissell’s portrait of the garment industry, where, as Sid remarks, “There aren’t more than a half dozen gentiles in the whole club, whether it’s piece goods, machinery, or manufacturing” (84). Sid’s tolerant view is contrasted with Hasler’s anti-Semitism and other employees’ use of the ethnic slur “Kike.”

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86. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, twenty-fifth anniversary edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998): 307. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 61–62 and 236. 89. As a consequence of these claims, Braverman’s name has become synonymous with the term “deskilling” although he does not actually use it in Labor and Monopoly Capital. 90. Ibid., 26–27. 91. Ibid., 60. 92. Ibid., 27. 93. Rose, 7. 94. Ibid., 102. 95. Ibid., 119.

. Automating Feminism 1. Andrea Gabor, The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business—Their Lives, Times, and Ideas (New York: Times Business, 2000), 130–151, and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, second edition (London: Free Association Books, 1999), 95–100, describe the ascension of empirical and “bean-counting” methods of management as part of the backlash against human relations. 2. As qtd. in Gabor, 127. 3. Rose, 103–104. Gabor regards the self-actualization movement as a continuation of the human relations school of management, while Rose, more persuasively, presents self-actualization as sufficiently distinct to be regarded as a new, separate development. 4. For discussions of Friedan’s debt to Maslow, see Edward Hoffman, The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow (New York: McGraw Hill), 75, 260, and Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 290–292. 5. Rose, xxix. 6. According to sociologist Juliet Schor, the average American worked 163 hours more per year in 1987 than they did in 1969—over an extra month of work per year (The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure [New York: Basic Books, 1992], 29). 7. Joanna Russ, The Female Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986), 22; hereafter cited in the text. According to Samuel R. Delany, fragments of what would resurface in Russ’s novel as the feminist utopia, Whileaway, were first developed in 1966, as she began writing the short story, “When It Changed” (as qtd. in Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination [New York: Methuen, 1986], 219, n. 3). Marilyn Hacker has indicated that

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Russ began writing the novel itself in the spring of 1969 (as qtd. in Moylan, 57). 8. For accounts that situate The Female Man in relation to specific feminist currents and/or critics, see Susan Ayres, “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man,” Science-Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 22–34; Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989), 17, 49–78; Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russ’s The Female Man,” Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 87–111; Moylan 55–90; and Sally Robinson, “The ‘Anti-Logos Weapon’: Multiplicity in Women’s Texts,” Contemporary Literature 29 (1988): 105–24. For discussions that assume Russ’s feminism as their starting point, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 182–84; Catherine L. McClenahan, “Textual Politics: The Uses of Imagination in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man,” Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 70 (1982): 114–125; Judith Spector, “The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy, and LeGuin,” Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 197–207; and Kathleen L. Spencer, “Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ,” Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 167–87. Only one critic, Marilyn J. Holt, has explicitly resisted contextualizing Russ in terms of the development of second-wave feminism, insisting that Russ’s text is “more understandable if it is viewed as preceding, rather than proceeding from, the feminist movement” (“Joanna Russ,” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, ed. E. F. Bleiler [New York: Scribner’s, 1982], 488). Admittedly, Holt’s reminder to us that because Russ completed her book in 1971, “she owes many fewer debts than the 1975 publication date indicates” (488), is not without some value in helping us to historicize The Female Man. Yet the critic’s statement that “Russ invented the modern feminism and the dialectics she wrote” (488), overlooks Russ’s own explicit acknowledgment of her debts to “Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest” in the final chapter of the novel (213). 9. Most critics, that is, identify Russ’s politics with Women’s Liberation, as opposed to the Women’s Movement. The Women’s Movement emerged in the early 1960s in response to the almost simultaneous publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the findings of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and was comprised largely of middle-aged, professional women. Women’s Liberation, on the other hand, emerged in the late 1960s as a result of the frustration of female members of the New Left with the blatant sexism of that movement (Maria Lauret, Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America, [London: Routledge, 1994], 52–64;

NOTES

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

223

Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present, third edition [New York: Franklin Watts, 1983], 309–17). Sara Evans has documented the details of the emergence of Women’s Liberation from the New Left (Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left [New York: Knopf, 1979], 156–211). For discussions that foreground the tensions as well as points of intersection between Women’s Liberation and the older Women’s Movement see Evans 19–23, 217–218; and Ryan 309, 312–317. Robinson, 115. Robinson’s essay, which analyzes the “multiplicity and heterogeneity” of Russ’s text, among others, to demonstrate “the affinity . . . between French theory and American fictions” is an interesting example of how a postmodern perspective can be effectively brought to bear on The Female Man (115 and 122). “A Dialogue: Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ on Science Fiction,” Interview with Charles Johnson, Callaloo: A Journal of AfricanAmerican and African Arts and Letters 7:3 (1984): 29. Russ first explored this way of understanding science fiction in her 1973 essay, “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction,” To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. Joanna Russ (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 15–25. Alice Echols, “The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–83,” Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, second edition, ed. Carole S. Vance (London: Pandora, 1992), 50. Ayres’s essay, “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man,” offers the most thorough analysis to date of the ways that “gender roles are indeterminate and contingent” in Russ’s novel (32). Tom Moylan has discussed the link between Russ’s novel and the separatist wing of the feminist movement (75–76). Gardiner specifically contextualizes Russ’s use of anger in The Female Man within the history of “radical feminists who focus on women’s united need to confront and attack male dominance and patriarchal institutions” (104). A number of critics have identified the general importance of anger in the text; Moylan (74–90) and McClenahan (118–125) characterize it as an essential, and positive, element of the liberation Russ is enacting. Russ herself has corroborated this interpretation in a 1993 interview with Donna Perry (Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. Ed. Donna Perry [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993], 291); Bartkowski, on the other hand, associates it with a dangerous “false future” (61). Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, second edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 37. Ibid., 46 emphasis in original. Ibid. In light of the connections between postmodernism, gender, and labor I am charting, it should be noted that Maslow’s thought was shaped significantly by existentialism. As he reminds us in

224

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

NOTES

Motivation and Personality, his characterization of self-actualizers is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s call to “Become what thou art!” (150). Given the degree to which Maslow’s research in turn came to influence the way work has been done in America, a second noteworthy influence was Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novels, which first inspired him to commit his life to the effort of social reform (Gabor 156). Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). Ibid., 40. Ibid., 33. Hoffman, 248–249. Abraham Maslow, Maslow on Management, new edition of Eupsychian Management with Deborah C. Stephens and Gary Heil (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 1. Hoffman, 239–240. Maslow, Maslow on Management, 22–23. Taylor articulated an early version of this idea of synergy when he wrote of workers and management that “it is possible so to arrange their mutual relations that their interests become identical” (The Principles of Scientific Management [Mineaola, NY: Dover, 1998], 1). Yet Taylor’s sense of workers’ selfinterest focused primarily on their desire for higher wages rather than their needs to optimize their sense of selfhood. McGregor, meanwhile, uses the term “integration” to define “the creation of conditions such that the members of the organization can achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts toward the success of the enterprise” (49, emphasis in original). Hoffman, 260. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, tenth anniversary edition (New York: Laurel, 1983), 43. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 326. Ibid. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 324. Ibid. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 333. Ibid., 334. Ibid. Friedan’s text addressed two groups of middle-class women, both of whom she felt were selling themselves short: women who stayed home and did no paid work, and women who had accepted work in industry that required no “training, effort, [or] personal

NOTES

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

225

commitment” (186). In the case of the former, Friedan’s occasional references to “canning plants and bakeries” as well as automatic household cleaning devices suggest she felt that domestic work could be outsourced and automated (254, 216–217). As to who would take over factory work, Friedan does not say. While Daniel Horowitz has argued persuasively that Friedan’s early leftist activism and journalism place her, and hence liberal feminism, further to the Left politically than has been previously acknowledged, I maintain that Friedan shows little concern for or interest in the working class in The Feminine Mystique (“Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America.” American Quarterly 48 [1996]: 1–42). Friedan, 335 and 348. Friedan’s agreement with Whyte’s and Riesman’s critique of the conformity enabled by human relations discourse underscores the degree to which the rhetoric of self-actualization was a departure from the human relations thought that preceded it. Ibid., 334. Riesman writes, “Objectively, the new situation surrounding work permits a reduction of hours; subjectively, it permits a withdrawal of the concern work demanded in the earlier era and the investment of this concern in non-work” (The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character [New Haven: Yale UP, 1961, 2001], 263). As Howard Brick has noted, Riesman’s ideas regarding automation and work would eventually contribute to the visions of a post-scarcity America promoted by the New Left (“Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” American Quarterly 44 [1992]: 350–62). Friedan, 252. “NOW Bill of Rights,” Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), 512. Moylan, 67. I do not mean to imply that these forms of action were not crucial to the history and identity of the New Left. When I refer to the “New Left” throughout this section of my discussion I allude specifically to the American political movement that emerged in the late 1950s, a movement comprising both liberals and radicals that departed from the American “Old Left” in its resistance to the “hierarchical party structure and systematic ideology of the Communist Party” (Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies 5 [1979]: 434). I find Howard Zinn’s characterization of this movement as a “loose amalgam of civil rights activists, Black Power advocates, ghetto organizers, student rebels, [and] Vietnam protestors,” quite appropriate (“Marxism and the New Left,” The New Left: A Collection of Essays,

226

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

NOTES

ed. Priscilla Long, [Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1969], 56). It is my interest here, however, to demonstrate the underlying fascination many of these activists shared in the cybernetic technologies that were proliferating throughout the 1960s. Massimo Teodori, “Historical and Critical Notes,” The New Left: A Documentary History ed., Massimo Teodori (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 53. I am indebted to Howard Brick’s essay, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s” for first leading me to many of the sources I cite in my discussion of the New Left’s interest in automation. Brick treats 1967 as the date after which the New Left largely lost interest in the concept of postindustrialism, remarking that by 1967, “antiimperialist perspectives were more salient on the Left than postindustrial ones” (351). I maintain that, despite the increased attention directed to Vietnam after 1967, visions of a fully automated postscarcity America continued to flourish among New Leftists through the end of the decade. Teodori, 25–29. Todd Gitlin, “The Radical Potential of the Poor,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 138. Gitlin, 138. The degree to which New Left expectations about “the pace and effect of automation” were actually naive is, of course, very open to question. For an account that underscores the dramatic and frightening effects of automation on production workers, see Charles Denby, “Workers Battle Automation,” New Left, ed. Long, 151–71. For a more skeptical account of the New Left’s ideas about automation, see Alan Adelson, SDS (New York: Scribner, 1972), 251. Richard Rothstein, “Evolution of the ER AP Organizers,” New Left, ed. Long, 275. Ibid. Dave Gilbert, Bob Gottlieb, and Susan Sutheim define “cybernation” as “the automated control of automation” (“Consumption: Domestic Capitalism,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 426). For discussions of the impact of “The Triple Revolution,” see Rothstein, 275; and Brick, 353–354. “The Triple Revolution,” New Left, ed. Long, 340. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 342. First and foremost, this view was articulated by Karl Marx, who, as David Harvey suggests, understood that “[r]evolutions in technology . . . had the effect of . . . opening up the capacity to liberate society from scarcity and the more oppressive aspects of nature-imposed necessity” (The Condition of Postmodernity [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], 110). In the United States, as Andrew Ross has demonstrated, the notion of a technologically enabled post-scarcity state was entertained as early as the World’s Fair of 1939 where, “technology’s potential to create a postscarcity culture out of machine rather than human labor” was one of the “principal elements of the

NOTES

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

227

Fair’s philosophy” (Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits [London: Verso, 1991], 128). Yet while the Fair was billed as “the first fair in history ever to focus entirely on the future” (128), and its conception of post-scarcity was framed in these terms, the students of the New Left believed that the technologies were already available to make their vision a reality. “The Triple Revolution,” 348. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 348. Ibid. In this regard, the neo-Marxists of the New Left were updating Marx’s own view that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. . . . Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom” (as qtd. in Harvey, 111). Rothstein, 275–276. Carl Wittman, “Students and Economic Action,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 129. Students for a Democratic Society, “America and New Era,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 174. Editors of Studies on the Left, “Up From Irrelevance,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 214. See Marvin Garson, “The Movement: It’s Theory Time,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 380–384; Gilbert, Gottlieb, and Sutheim; Martin J. Sklar, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of PoliticalEconomic Society,” Radical America 3:3 (1969): 1–41; and Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1971). Adelson, 119. Calvert and Neiman, 86–87, emphasis mine; 137 emphasis mine. Richard Flacks, “Is the Great Society Just a Barbecue?” New Left, ed. Teodori, 195. Teodori, 83. Sohnya Sayres et al., “Introduction,” The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 3. Given the centrality of the concept of labor to the notion of the human itself in Marx’s thought, the forms of activity that arose in a post-scarcity society would still be understood as labor from a Marxist perspective. Yet, clearly, this version of human work departed dramatically from the paid, public activities being touted by liberal feminists. My interest, then, is in how Russ fuses these apparently incompatible modes of work in her feminist project. Moylan, 66. Moylan, for example, suggests no conflict in Russ’s portrayal of “the use of an advanced technology in the service of a female humanity” (72). Nor does Bartkowski isolate such tensions between the feminism

228

75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

80.

81. 82.

NOTES

and leftism of The Female Man, despite her reading of such tensions in another text of the same period, Woman on the Edge of Time (63–64). The helmet is represented as currently “turning Whileawayan industry upside down” (14). Bartkowski, 73. For a discussion of such contradictory moments, in which “the sequence of events makes sudden and disorienting leaps, back and forth, across time probabilities wherein some of the events never happened or happened differently,” see Moylan 84–85. This theory seems to be supported by the fact that the only period in which women enjoy leisure on Whileaway is when they tend their children during the children’s infancy. This is the period when there is an “other,” another kind of identity distinguished from their own. It is merely distinguished in the register of age rather than sex. Mary Ann Doane writes that “The cyborg is born all at once, fully developed, a full-fledged member of the work force. . . . Haraway’s aim is to detach the cyborg from a past and an origin—effectively to dehistoricize it” (“Commentary: Cyborgs, Origins, and Subjectivity,” Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. ed. Elizabeth Weed [New York: Routledge, 1989], 210). Later, Doane admonishes that, “Originary narratives are not the only way of conceiving of history” (211). What I offer here is not the originary narrative of the cyborg, but one of many. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 168. Ibid., 170. The most feminized “worker” in Russ’s novel, on the other hand, is the one to whom the term “work” is never attached in any way. Late in the text Russ graphically describes a sexual encounter between Jael and her cyborg, Davy. Generated in a lab from monkey DNA and outfitted with cybernetic components, Davy most directly embodies Haraway’s characterizations of the cyborg; he is literally part human, part animal, and part machine. Perhaps the strongest message Russ’s text offers about postindustrial “women’s work” is through its presentation of a male cyborg who is socially coded in a traditionally “feminized” sense by his identity as Jael’s sex toy. Obediently dwelling in her house, where he plays, exercises, and awaits Jael’s commands, Davy represents everything Russ’s text refuses to signify as feminist work—although it was, during the years Russ was writing, very recently activity condescendingly characterized as “women’s work.” What Davy does is not “work” in the sense in which Russ intends this term; and what he represents is not what women should be. Rather than feminizing the meanings of work, Russ expunges an

NOTES

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

229

outmoded notion of femininity and reserves the term “work” for the empowering activities of Davy’s contemporary, Jael. In so doing, the text associates weakness with automated leisure and projects both onto the only male body portrayed in any detail in the text. Haraway, 154. In the first chapter of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women Haraway identifies with the Marxist view that “the labour process constitutes the fundamental human condition” 10). Yet if for Haraway “labor is the humanizing activity that makes man,” as she says in the “Cyborg Manifesto,” it is less clear how labor figures in the future of the “disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self” that is her cyborg (“Manifesto,” 158, 163). Joanna Russ, “SF and Technology and Mystification,” To Write, 35. Ibid., 34. While a host of contemporary books document the crises of postindustrial labor, two of the best are Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, ed. Steven B. Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and the economic study by Schor. The increasing centrality of work to American women’s lives is demonstrated most graphically by the latter, which indicates that the number of hours the average American woman works annually has increased by 305 hours since 1969 (29). Gabor, 160.

. A Cyborg’s Work Is Never Done 1. Abraham Maslow, Maslow on Management, new edition of Eupsychian Management with Deborah C. Stephens and Gary Heil (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 1. 2. Ibid., 38. 3. Marge Piercy, He, She, and It (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991). Hereafter cited in the text. 4. Wayne E. Oates, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction (Nashville, TE: Abingdon Press, 1971), 1. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. Ibid. 7. Dale Carnegie, who published the blockbuster How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon and Schuster) in 1936 and had been conducting public speaking courses for two decades prior to the book’s release, offered a homespun variety of self-help advice for workers that dovetailed with the academic discourse of human relations in its emphasis on the importance of interpersonal communication and trust in the workplace. 8. Oates, 14. 9. Ibid., 15, emphasis in original.

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10. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, second edition (London: Free Association Books, 1999), xxx. 11. Maslow, 9, emphasis in original. 12. Ibid., 14. 13. Oates, 22. 14. Maslow, 8. 15. Oates, 4. 16. Maslow, 10–11. 17. Oates, 26. 18. Maslow, 86. 19. Oates, 3. 20. Paul du Gay, “Introduction,” Production of Culture/Cultures of Production ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1997), 1. 21. Maslow, 86–87, emphasis in original. 22. Paul du Gay, “Organizing Identity: Making up People at Work,” Production of Culture, 303. 23. Graeme Salaman, “Culturing Production,” Production of Culture, 256, emphasis in original. 24. Du Gay, “Organizing Identity,” 301. 25. Piercy was among the members of the New Left who agitated for a drastic change in the nature of work during the 1960s. In a piece from that period that she co-authored with Bob Gottlieb, she calls for the creation of “alternative jobs, alternative ways of living in the society” (“Movement for a Democratic Society, Beginning to Begin to Begin,” New Left, ed. Teodori, 408). Yet, in terms that anticipate both her long-standing feminist commitments and her portrait of the worker-as-cyborg, the essay also stresses that, “we must take into account the degrees to which a person identifies with his work” (408). 26. Haraway’s declaration in the opening section of her manifesto that “we are cyborgs,” initiated an ongoing debate about the degree to which cybernetic technologies have transformed or even eclipsed contemporary assumptions about the “human” (“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women [New York: Routledge, 1991], 150). 27. As Isaac Asimov reminds us, the term “robot” is derived from the Czech word meaning “compulsory labor” (“Introduction: The Story behind the Robot Novels,” The Caves of Steel [New York: Bantam, 1991], vii). 28. Haraway, 150. 29. Ibid., 165. 30. Ibid., 166–167. 31. Ibid., 166. 32. Ibid., 163.

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33. John R. R. Christie, “A Tragedy for Cyborgs,” Configurations 1 (1992):171–196; Thomas Foster, “Meat Puppets or Robopaths?: Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment,” Genders 18 (1993): 11–31; Mary Catherine Harper, “Incurably Alien Other: A Case for Feminist Cyborg Writers,” Science-Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 399–420; Sharon Stockton, “ ‘The Self Regained’: Cyberpunk’s Retreat to the Imperium,” Contemporary Literature 36 (1995): 588–612. 34. Joseba Gabilondo, “Postcolonial Cyborgs: Subjectivity in the Age of Cybernetic Reproduction,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera (New York: Routledge, 1995), 423–432; Chela Sandoval, “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed,” in Handbook, 407–421. 35. Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, “Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms,” in Handbook, 1–14. 36. David Porush, “Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash,” Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Markley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 122. 37. David Brande, “The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson,” in Virtual Realities, 79. 38. Ibid., 79–80. 39. Ibid., 88. 40. Ibid., 96, 99. 41. Pam Rosenthal, “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism,” Socialist Review 21 (1991): 81. 42. Ibid., p. 89. 43. Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 1. 44. For an autobiographical account of Piercy’s working-class origins and history of political activism, see, “Marge Piercy,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 1. ed. Dedria Bryphonski (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1984), 267–281. 45. For a discussion of the impact of automation on America’s inner cities, see Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1993). 46. Christie, 187. 47. This translation comes from Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (1918, New Haven: Yale, 1981) 248, and is quoted from Tony Davies, Humanism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 120. 48. Piercy’s particularly intense awareness of the changing social and economic relations of the late twentieth century is evident in the transformation her thinking about work and technology has undergone from her first full-scale treatment of this topic in Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976), where she optimistically

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49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

anticipates a fully automated, post-work society engendered by a national shift toward egalitarian socialist politics. He, She, and It updates the possibilities and threats of automation in the context of the contemporary realities of multinational corporate capitalism, capitalism of a scale that Piercy could only imagine fleetingly, in a brief, nightmarish dystopic sequence, in 1976. This passage suggests that the model of self-actualizing work embraced by liberal feminism hearkens back to Braverman’s account of skilled, pre-industrial labor more than to the human relations-informed version of work that immediately preceded it. Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985, New York: Ace, 1996), 164. Ibid., 13. Rosenthal, 90. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 50. William Gibson, Count Zero (1986, New York: Ace, 1987); Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Ace Books, 1988). Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992), 444. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982; James Cameron, Terminator 2, 1991. Rosenthal, 99.

. “Sleeping Beauty” 1. For historical accounts of this reversal of American fortunes in the 1980s, see I.M. Destler, “U.S. Trade Policy-Making in the Eighties,” Politics and Economics in the Eighties, ed. Alberto Alesina and Geoffrey Carliner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 258–264; Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 137–154; Robert Kuttner, The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1991); and Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992), 113–151. 2. Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993); hereafter cited in the text. Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor (New York: Berkley, 1995); hereafter cited in the text. 3. William G. Ouchi, Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 10. The connection between self-actualization and corporate culture is reflected in Ouchi’s explicit debt to Douglas McGregor’s concepts of Theory X and Theory Y (69). 4. Graeme Salaman, “Culturing Production,” Production of Culture/ Cultures of Production, ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1997), 247. 5. Ibid., 245 emphasis in original. 6. Ibid., 248. 7. Ouchi, 14 and 69.

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8. Salaman, 245. 9. Richard Tanner Pascale and Anthony G. Athos, The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives (New York: Warner Books, 1981), 125. 10. Ibid., 126. 11. Ibid., 330. 12. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 282. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 41. 15. Ibid., 4–5, xxii, and 126. 16. Ibid., 41–42. 17. Ibid., 69. 18. Ibid., xx. 19. Ibid., 86. 20. Ibid., 107. 21. Ibid., 272, emphasis in original. 22. Ibid., 273. 23. Karel Van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York, Vintage, 1990), 8. 24. Ibid., 8 and 9. 25. Paul du Gay, “Organizing Identity: Making Up People at Work,” Production of Culture, 286. 26. Ibid., 295. 27. Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Delacorte, 1987). 28. William Gibson, “The Winter Market,” Burning Chrome (New York: Ace Books, 1987), 117–141. In fact, Japan plays a prominent role in all of William Gibson’s work. His first novel, Neuromancer, opens in “Chiba City,” which Gibson imagines as an international center of (often illegal) technological innovation. The “decks” into which Gibson’s various protagonists “jack” are consistently represented as Japanese products, reinforcing Japan’s preeminence in the development and production of high-tech consumer items (New York: Ace, 1984). In the Matrix Trilogy this trajectory culminates in Mona Lisa Overdrive, where Gibson’s main character is a young Japanese woman, and a central organizing principle of the novel is the contrast between England and Japan as past and future economic superpowers. 29. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (New York: Vintage, 1990), and Room Temperature (New York: Vintage, 1990). 30. Marge Piercy, He, She, and It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 2. 31. For a detailed list of Crichton’s sources, see his “Bibliography” (397–99). 32. Janice Radway, “On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994): 875.

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33. It is interesting that Crichton evokes both the Sherlock Holmes and Watson relationship, and the Japanese tradition of sempai and kohai in his portrait of Connor and Smith. While this gesture might seem to symbolize a reconciliation of Japanese and Western cultures, Connor’s deployment of Japanese mores seems to be primarily in the service of the Western values the novel celebrates. 34. Smith explains to Connor that he stopped working as a detective when he took custody of his infant daughter, opting instead for the better pay and flexibility of the Special Services division for which he now works (81). In his capacity as a liaison, Smith is a liminal figure, both male and female, both American and Japanese. 35. Ian Buruma, “It Can’t Happen Here,” The New York Review of Books, April 23, 1992: 3. 36. Walter L. Hixson, “ ‘Red Storm Rising’: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security,” Diplomatic History 17 (1993): 599–613. 37. At the midpoint in the novel, Jack Ryan itemizes the ways that Japanese culture is “fundamentally different from ours.” When his colleague suggests that this is racist, Ryan responds “Those are all facts. I didn’t say they’re inferior to us” (542). 38. Christopher Buckley, in an otherwise scathing review of Debt of Honor, remarks, “With this book, Mr. Clancy stakes his claim to being the most politically correct popular author in America, which is somewhat remarkable in such an outspoken, if not fire-breathing, right winger as himself. Practically everyone is either black, Hispanic, a woman or, at a minimum, ethnic” (“Megabashing Japan,” New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1994: 29). Similarly, Sean French insists in his review of Debt of Honor that while he doubts “that Gloria Steinem is a fan, . . . by traditional standards, Tom Clancy is a radical feminist” (“Radical Feminist Tom Clancy Deserves to be Taken Seriously,” New Statesman and Society, September 2, 1994: 34). 39. Dan Murray, the FBI agent in charge of the Linders rape case is represented as “her knight-errant” (315), and the distraught Linders squeezes his hand “as a child might with her father” (316). 40. One cannot help but recall George W. Bush’s” claim to the title of “the decider,” when reading this passage in Clancy’s book, particularly given Bush’s similarly willful insistence on his, and by extension America’s, ability to impose an unequivocal version of truth on the country of Iraq. 41. In invoking the American Dream, Clancy’s novel reminds us that Americans “invented” the idea of self-determination through faith in “stories, myths, legends, and metaphors,” complicating the distinction between Japan’s soft culture and America’s hard reality that the novel generally maintains. 42. In Crichton’s case this economic and social assertiveness is represented as a new and distressing development; Clancy treats the concept of the career woman as an entirely timeless American concept.

NOTES

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. Hoodoo Economics 1. Brad Jackson, Management Gurus and Management Fashions: A Dramatistic Inquiry (London: Routledge, 2001), 122. 2. For more on this distinction, see Timothy Clark and Graeme Salaman, “The Management Guru as Organizational Witchdoctor,” Organization 3:1 (1996): 86–88. 3. Jackson, 9. 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Christopher John Farley, “That Old Black Magic,” Time, November 27, 2000, 14. 6. Michael Murphy, Golf in the Kingdom (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1997); Steven Pressfield, The Legend of Bagger Vance (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995). 7. Jackson, 10. 8. Ibid., 13–14. 9. According to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige, in 1994 alone, “corporate America saw its profits rise 11 percent, yet it also eliminated 516,069 jobs and spent $10 billion on restructuring charges” (The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus [New York: Times Books, 1996], 30). 10. For examples of the razor-sharp parody of guru discourse in the Dilbert comic strips, see Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads and Other Workplace Afflictions (New York: Harper Business, 1996), 37, 88, 101, 196, and 224. 11. Jackson, 23. 12. Ibid., 26. 13. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 10. 14. Ibid., 9. 15. Michael Hammer, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Harvard Business Review 68 (1990): 104–112. 16. As qtd. in Jackson, 75 and 84. 17. Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic (New York: Free Press, 1989). 18. Jackson, 102. 19. For Covey’s complex explanation of the significance of Aesop’s tale to his management philosophy, see The Seven Habits, 52–54; Jackson, 103. 20. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency, 1990). 21. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 124. 22. Senge, 13. 23. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 133, 142. 24. Ibid., 133. 25. Clark and Salaman, 89.

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26. Ibid., 97, 101 27. Ibid. For purposes of simplicity, I am spelling the term “witchdoctor” as one word, as do Clark and Salaman. 28. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 141. 29. Ibid., 85–86, 96, 103, 105. The Zande witchdoctors with whom Clark and Salaman begin their discussion live in an area stretching across Zaire, the Central African Republic, and Sudan. 30. Clark and Salaman, 104. 31. Abraham Maslow, Maslow on Management, new edition of Eupsychian Management with Deborah C. Stephens and Gary Heil (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 23. 32. For more about Mary Parker Follett’s influence on Japanese business practices, see Andrea Gabor, The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business—Their Lives, Times, and Ideas (New York: Times Business, 2000), 45, 63; for more about W. Edwards Deming’s relationship with Japan, see Gabor, 192–192, 207–211. 33. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 304. 34. Edward Hoffman, The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, revised edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 257. 35. “Interview with Michael Murphy,” Maslow on Management, 193. 36. Murphy, 117; hereafter cited in the text. 37. While taking on such a lofty topic via the game of golf might seem an improbable undertaking, there was some precedent: in 1908 a Canadian writer named Arnold Haultain published a book called The Mystery of Golf, which understood the sport as a profound enactment of a fundamentally human struggle for survival. For an overview and analysis of Haultain’s book, see Richard J. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club (Urbana: University of Illinois P, 2001), 54–59. 38. For a book-length analysis of the relationship between Pressfield’s novel and the Bhagavad-Gita, see Steven J. Rosen, Gita on the Green: The Mystical Tradition behind Bagger Vance, New York: Continuum, 2000). 39. Pressfield, 65; hereafter cited in the text. 40. Moss, 147. 41. Ibid., 148. 42. David Rynecki, “Golf and Power: Inside the Secret Refuge of the Business Elite,” Fortune, April 14, 2003, 164+. 43. On the phenomenon of business golf, see Paul Rogers, “Mixing Business and Golf: It’s not Whether you Win or Lose but How you Mind your Manners,” Business Week, Nov. 18, 2002, G30+; and Shari Missman Miller, “Business and Golf: The Right Approach Can Put you on the Leader Board,” Office Solutions, July 2000, 32+. 44. For a discussion of the Augusta controversy, see Bill Saporito, “Getting Teed Off: A Women’s Group is Targeting Top CEO’s who are Members of All-Male Augusta National Golf Club,” Time, Sept. 16, 2002, 50+.

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45. For a discussion of this issue, see Moss, 154–170. 46. Farley. 47. Anthony Appiah. “ ‘No Bad Nigger’: Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the Movies,” Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1993): 81. 48. Ibid., 79. Appiah defines “white” Hollywood movies as those that “we understand, in the complex way we construct the authors of movies, as authored by whites.” 49. Ibid., 83. 50. Other films, including What Dreams May Come, City of Angels, and The Matrix Trilogy, also feature some variation on the theme of black men as magical friends. In the former two films, the Magical AfricanAmerican Friends (MAAFs) are explicitly presented as angels, however, and the films’ thematic concerns with Christianity and the afterlife overshadow their representations of material conditions in American society. In the Matrix films, Morpheus is more prophet or apostle than witchdoctor. Nonetheless, the film’s opening sequences, which posit Neo as a despondent corporate drone whose realityshaping powers are illuminated by the faithful efforts of Morpheus, invite some comparison with events in the films I’m exploring here. 51. Elsewhere I have discussed how the boredom and low pay associated with working as a security guard have been dramatized in another recent film obsessed with postindustrial work, Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (“Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work,” Colby Quarterly, 36 [March 2000]: 48–59). 52. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Perennial, 1999). 53. By explicitly stating that David has the unfulfilled potential to be the “opposite” of both his wife and Elijah, the film clearly signals its trajectory toward reinstalling white masculinity in its “place” in a set of unambiguous binaries: man/woman, white/black, strong/weak. 54. Interestingly, one of the violent acts that David perceives but chooses to overlook is a race crime. As he brushes against a stranger in the train station, David experiences a psychic vision of the man randomly striking a member of a black family with a bottle, shouting, “Go back to Africa!” Once again the issue of staying in/returning to one’s “place” is foregrounded, and David’s choice to forego pursuing this man subtly but disturbingly downplays the severity of this act, if not actually affirming its appropriateness. 55. From this standpoint, we might understand Elijah to be indoctrinating David into the imaginary in the psychoanalytical sense. That is, David is accessing heretofore unimaginable powers by following Elijah’s lead outside the terms of the symbolic order and into an irrational, non-oedipal domain of possibility and empowerment—an achievement of hyper-masculine power through non-oedipal means. Yet the film’s reliance on magic also calls to mind Antonio Gramsci’s

238

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

NOTES

view that belief in magic and superstition produce a sense of powerless stasis that prevents people from pursuing historical change through work. For a discussion of Gramsci’s understanding of the relationship of work and magic, see James F. Knapp, Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988), 14–16. Cynthia J. Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993): 201. Fuchs borrows her definition of hypermasculinity from Lynne Joyrich, “Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity,” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990): 156–172. Although the film’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is generally very faithful, it is less political than the novel, both in its treatment of race and capital punishment. While King raises the issue of racial discrimination in relation to the administration of the death penalty several times in the course of his novel, the film avoids addressing the historical reality that men of color were far more likely to be executed than their white counterparts. Similarly, while King’s novel seems in part a statement against capital punishment, culminating in a passage in which Paul reflects on the practice of execution as “folly” and “horror,” the film avoids taking an explicit position on this issue (The Green Mile [New York: Pocket Books, 1996], 510 emphasis in original). Percy’s potential to displace the male workforce is particularly evident in King’s novel, where Percy repeatedly threatens that Paul and the others will find themselves on the “breadlines” if they cross him. The degree to which The Green Mile is about work and gender, more than about the moral issues that attend capital punishment, is again evident in the scene that follows this grisly episode. As Paul grills the other guards about what went wrong, Paul’s own superior arrives to demand similar answers. At this point, Paul again becomes the consummate middle manager, generating spin control in which he emphasizes that the job was done properly because the prisoner is now dead. The horror of the death is subsumed by the discourse of the prison as a workplace and inflicting death as a job well done. Tania Modleski offered this analysis in a talk entitled, “Hollywood Men,” at Bryn Mawr College on February 21, 2000. Paul’s sexual vigor in response to John Coffey’s touch is an element introduced by the filmmakers; the novel does not include any reference to sexual antics between Paul and his wife in the wake of his cure. This moment in the film is another point of divergence between the novel and its Hollywood adaptation. In the novel, John Coffey is presented as oblivious to the power he is transferring to Paul when he grasps his hands, an act apparently motivated simply by affection. As

NOTES

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

239

Paul feels the surge of energy, he reflects that “this time [John Coffey] didn’t know he was doing it” (491, emphasis in original). John Coffey confirms this when he remarks that he “wasn’t thinkin” when he clutched Paul’s hands (493). In the film, on the other hand, Coffey grasps Paul’s hands in part to transfer a specific vision to him of the details of the crime for which he was wrongly committed, explaining this gesture in terms of his need to share what is inside him with Paul. In this respect, the film assigns John Coffey more agency than the novel in his transformation of Paul. A number of critics who reviewed the film upon its release, for example, felt that the life Jack is meant to embrace in suburban New Jersey appears considerably less desirable than the glamorous, if superficial, existence he enjoyed in New York. In a review entitled, “Here for the Holidays,” Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, for instance, remarks that Jack’s new life “seem[s] pretty boring,” and that once she becomes his wife, Kate is “more killjoy than dream girl” (December 22, 2000). Christy Lemire, writing for the Associated Press, observes that Ratner “can’t decide whether to condemn suburbia for its domestic banality, or celebrate it for its comfort and reliability” (December 18, 2000). Laura Hapke, Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001), 327. Ibid. Ibid. For Gramsci’s views on work and magic, see Knapp, 14–16. Michel Foucault suggests this opposition between work and crime when he posits that the main function of the police is to force people to work (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason [New York: Vintage, 1988], 57). Jay Edwards, “Structural Analysis of the Afro-American Trickster Tale,” Black American Literature Forum 15 (Winter 1981): 160. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 160.

Conclusion 1. Guy Standing, “Global Feminization through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,” World Development 27 (1999): 583–602.


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Inde x

Abbott, George, 71 see also Pajama Game, The abjection, 9, 11, 204 in Player Piano, 11, 16, 33–6, 38–40, 41–3, 44, 214n. 60 Academy Awards, 11, 47, 77 Acker, Joan, 215n. 6 Adams, Scott, 205, 234n. 10 addiction, work, see workaholism Adelson, Alan, 104, 226n. 52 “aholic”, 115 American Dream, 162–3, 234n. 41 anti-Semitism, 125, 127–8 Apartment, The, 11, 47, 77–83, 86–7, 201, 216n. 8, 220n. 84 feminization in, 80, 83 home-workplace fusion in, 79, 83 human relations management in, 77–8, 83 identity formation in, 78–80, 82–3 Jews in, 77, 82–3 masculinity in, 77, 80–1, 82, 83 mench in, 77, 82–3 sexual seduction in, 44, 77, 78, 86–7, 216n. 8 virility in, 79–81 white-collar girls in, 77, 79 Appiah, Anthony, 176, 198 Art of Japanese Management, The (Pascale and Athos), 141–2 Asimov, Isaac, 230n. 27 Athos, Anthony, 141–2 AT&T, 167 Augusta National Golf Course, 175, 236n. 44

automation, 8, 85, 123, 202–3, 226nn. 52, 54, 231nn. 45, 48 fears of, 212n. 29 in The Female Man, 105, 107, 119 at General Electric, 22–5, 36 New Left view of, 91, 102–5, 204, 218n. 40, 225nn. 44, 49, 52 in Player Piano, 15, 23, 26–7, 37, 39, 43, 210n. 1 rationality and, 10 in Rising Sun, 147, 151, 161 see also cyborg Babbage Principle, 84–5 Baker, Nicholson, 146 Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment, at Hawthorne Works, 51 Banta, Martha, 4, 207n. 14, 208nn. 15, 16, 18, 213n. 41, 214n. 59, 215n. 6 Bartkowski, Frances, 106, 221n. 8, 223n. 15, 227n. 74 Bear, Greg, 134 Beatty, Clyde, 66 Benedict, Ruth, 94 Bhagavad-Gita, 171–2, 173, 236n. 38 Bissell, Richard, 10, 11, 47, 59, 60, 64, 69, 71, 73, 74–5, 77, 86, 201, 202, 212n. 15, 218n. 54, 219n. 61, 220n. 85 see also 7 ½ Cents Blackfoot Indian Tribe, 170

252

INDEX

black men, 172, 177, 191 in buddy narratives, 174, 184 economic position of, 182, 196, 197, 198, 199 imprisonment of, 199 see also magical black man black-white buddy narrative, 174, 182, 183 Unbreakable as, 182, 183 see also magical black man Bladerunner, 136 Block, Fred, 8 Blood Music (Bear), 134 Bluebeard (Vonnegut), 145–6 Book-of-the-Month Club, 29, 47, 59 Boorstin, Daniel, 148 Boulware, Lemuel, of General Electric, 11, 18, 19–25, 27–32, 36–8, 45, 60, 117, 201, 203, 212nn. 17, 19, 214n. 68 Boulwarism, 18, 20, 61, 86, 215n. 5 Brande, David, 122–3 Braverman, Harry, 84–6, 210, 220n. 89, 231n. 49 Brick, Howard, 224n. 44, 225n. 49 Broadway, 11, 47, 59, 71, 201 Buckley, Christopher, 233n. 38 Buddhism, 168 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 32 Bush, George W., 234n. 40 Business Process Reengineering, 166 Cage, Nicholas, 194 Calvert, Greg, 104 capitalism, 19, 209n. 23 advanced, 122 industrial, 9 late, 5–6, 122 multinational, 110, 121, 231n. 48 Capra, Frank, 193, 198 Cardinal of the Kremlin, The (Clancy), 156 career girl, 75, 220n. 79 Carnegie, Dale, 114, 229n. 7

casual fridays, 56 categorical imperative, 129 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut), 15 Cheadle, Don, 193, 194 Christie, John R. R., 121, 129 Civil Rights Act (1964), 58 Clancy, Tom, 12–13, 139, 140, 145, 155–63, 177, 201–5, 234nn. 38, 41, 42, 46 see also Debt of Honor Clark, Timothy, 169, 181 cold war, 156, 213n. 41 comic books, 179–80, 182 Communism, 211n. 15, 213n. 41 Confessions of a Workaholic (Oates), 114–17 Connor, Sarah, 136, 148 consumer, 70 cyborg as, 123 of job, 19, 44, 62, 203 male worker as, 3, 16, 27, 29, 30–2, 33, 37, 139, 140 women as, 1, 85 consumer culture, 27, 30, 31–2, 43, 44, 115 consumerism, 7, 13, 43, 123, 191 Braverman on, 85–6 General Electric and, 16, 17, 22 human relations management and, 7, 85–6 Japan and, 146 in Player Piano, 29–33, 44 self-actualization and, 7, 209n. 28 in 7 ½ Cents, 60–1 workaholism and, 115 consumption, 7, 16, 21, 31–3, 117, 123, 150, 203 self-realization through, 27–8, 209n. 28 therapeutic, 27–8, 31, 32 work as, 5, 16, 117 corporate culture, 2–3, 4–5, 11, 12–13, 43, 134, 155–7, 160, 163 American, 142–4

INDEX

in Debt of Honor, 156, 157, 160, 163 emergence of, 139–40 female workforce and, 143–4 gender and, 141–2, 143–4 golf and, 175 gurus and, 165–7, 201–6 in He, She, and It, 124–5, 146 irrationality in, 142, 143, 144, 170; see also management guru Japanese, 141–2; see also Debt of Honor; Rising Sun masculinity and, 145, 156 nationalism and, 142–3 race and, 141, 142–3, 145, 157–8 reality and, 144, 145 in Rising Sun, 149, 155 self-actualization and, 117–19 7-S model and, 142 synergy and, 142 technology and, 140 Count Zero (Gibson), 135 Covey, Stephen, 168, 201 Crichton, Michael, 12–13, 140, 145–55, 177, 201, 202, 203, 204, 233nn. 31, 33 vs. Tom Clancy, 156, 158, 161, 163, 234n. 42 see also Rising Sun crime, 177, 198–9 vs. work, 238n. 66 cybernation, 102, 226n. 54 see also automation cybernetics, 38, 56, 101, 109, 126, 136, 202, 210n. 3 cyberpunk, 113, 122, 123, 124, 136, 201 cyborg, 9, 12, 91, 203–4 in Bladerunner, 136 in Blood Music, 134 in The Female Man, 109–10, 119, 228n. 82 gender and, 109, 140

253

Haraway on, 9, 91, 108, 109, 110, 120–1, 228n. 84, 230n. 26 in He, She, and It, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126–9, 133 in Matrix Trilogy, 135 in Snow Crash, 135 in Terminator, 136 theories of, 121–3, 230nn. 33, 34 as workaholic, 9, 12, 109, 111, 140, 227n. 79, 228n. 84, 230n. 25 “Cyborg Manifesto, A” (Haraway), 8–9, 12, 120–1, 123, 228n. 84, 230n. 26 The Female Man and, 108–9 Darabont, Frank, 184 Day, Doris, 71–2 death row, see Green Mile, The Debt of Honor (Clancy), 12–13, 140, 155–63, 203, 204 American Dream in, 162–3 corporate culture in, 156, 157, 160, 163 gender construction in, 13, 156, 158–9, 163 Japanese culture in, 157 masculinity in, 156 “patriarchal feminism” in, 158–9 race in, 157–9, 162 rape in, 158, 159–60, 234n. 39 reality, construction of, in, 156, 160, 161–2, 163, 234n. 41 technological confrontations in, 156, 160–1 Deming, W. Edwards, 170 Detroit, 128 Dickson, William J., 48, 50, 51, 217nn. 13, 16 Dilbert, 167, 205 disability in Rising Sun, 153–4 in Unbreakable, 179 Disrupted History, A (Calvert and Neiman), 104

254

INDEX

Doane, Mary Ann, 108, 227n. 79 domestic realm, 8, 70, 82, 83, 187, 188, 191, 195–6, 202 domestic work, 2, 79, 83, 132, 186, 207 Donen, Stanley, 71 Douglas, Mary, 35 downsizing, 166, 168 Du Gay, Paul, 117, 119 Duncan, Michael Clarke, 184, 189 dystopia, 15, 202 Echols, Alice, 92 Economic Research and Action Project, 102 Edison, Thomas, 16 Eminem, 176 Enigma of Japanese Power, The (Van Wolferen), 144, 148 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 58 Equal Rights Amendment, 97 Esalen Institute, 170 Eupsychia, 94, 97, 101, 113, 117–18 Eupsychian Management (Maslow), 94 executive, female, in Family Man, 196 executive, male in The Apartment, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 in Family Man, 192–3, 194, 196 Riesman on, 56, 83 in Unbreakable, 181 Whyte on, 55, 56 existentialism, 223n. 18 factory worker, 48, 58, 59, 74, 84 false personalization, Riesman on, 56–7, 64, 75 Faludi, Susan, 179 Family Man, 13, 177, 191–7, 202, 203, 204 child imagery in, 195 domesticity in, 191, 192, 195–6, 197, 238n. 62

female executive in, 196 feminine in, 192, 196 magical black man in, 177, 191–2, 193–4, 195, 197 masculinity in, 192–3, 194, 196–7 race in, 193–4, 196–7 reviews of, 238n. 62 fantasy corporate culture and, 177, 181, 182–4, 200 cyborg as, 123, 137, 201 race and, 177, 181, 182–4, 200, 206 utopian, 154, 202 women and, 150–1, 206 Farley, Christopher John, 176, 198 feeling, 85–6 see also human relations management Female Man, The (Russ), 12, 90, 97–101, 105–10, 119, 201, 202, 203, 221n. 7 “A Cyborg Manifesto” and, 108–9, 110 automation in, 105, 107, 119 critical interpretations of, 91, 92, 221n. 8, 222nn. 9, 10, 223n. 15 cyborg in, 109–10, 119, 228n. 82 female workers in, 97, 101, 106–8, 109–11 feminism in, 92–3, 97–101, 106–7, 221n. 8 leisure in, 106, 107–8, 110, 227n. 78 radical feminist reading of, 92, 223n. 15 self-actualization in, 90, 98–100, 101, 106–7, 110 utopia in, 91–4, 105–10, 117, 221n. 7 work in, 106–8, 109–11 female workers, 3, 8, 139, 228n. 87 in The Apartment, 80

INDEX

false personalization and, 56–7, 64, 75 in The Female Man, 97–101, 106–8, 109–11 glamour and, 57, 64 Haraway on, 120–1 Harwood Pajama Factory experiments with, 51–3 Hawthorne Works experiments with, 47–51 in He, She, and It, 130–4 historical increases in, 8 human relations movement and, 46 of Mary Kay cosmetics, 143 in The Pajama Game, 59, 71–2, 73–4 Peters and Waterman on, 143–4 rationality and, 10 Riesman on, 57–8, 75–7 in Rising Sun, 149–51, 153–5, 163 self-actualization and, 90–1, 95–6, 106–7 in 7 ½ Cents, 59, 64–6 of Tupperware, 143 “White Collar Girl” column on, 75–7 Whyte on, 54 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 87, 90, 94–7, 224n. 40 feminism in The Female Man, 97–101 in He, She, and It, 114, 119, 131–4 liberal, 12, 87, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98, 106–7, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 119, 131–4, 137, 139, 203–4, 224n. 40 patriarchal, 158–9 radical, 92 work and, 5, 90, 97–101, 111; see also self-actualization femininity in The Apartment, 80 Friedan on, 95

255

in The Green Mile, 185, 186–8, 190, 191 ideological construction of, 8–9 vs. masculine irrationality, 2 in The Pajama Game, 71–2 in Rising Sun, 147–8, 153–5 feminist, 9, 203, 227n. 72 radical, 92, 223n. 15 self-actualization and, 113 as workaholic, 119, 132, 134 as worker, 87, 90, 108 feminization in The Apartment, 80 of work, 5, 8–9, 109, 205, 210 Figueroa-Sarrier, Heidi J., 122 Flacks, Richard, 104 Follett, Mary Parker, 170, 216n. 10, 235n. 32 football, 115, 178–9 Ford Company, 213n. 41 unionization at, 62 Whyte on, 54 Fortune Magazine on Ford Company unionization, 62 on golf, 175 on human relations management, 45, 46, 53, 67–8, 212n. 19 Foster, Thomas, 121 Foucault, Michel, 4, 238n. 66 fragmentation, 5, 92, 121, 201, 212n. 28 Franklin, Benjamin, 114 French, Sean, 233n. 38 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 43 Friedan, Betty, 12, 87, 90, 94–7, 98, 100, 101, 114, 131–2, 149, 221n. 4, 222nn. 8, 9, 224n. 40, 42 Fuchs, Cynthia J., 182, 183, 237n. 56 Full Monty, The, 236n. 51 Gabilondo, Joseba, 121–2 Gabor, Andrea, 46, 89, 216nn. 10, 12, 219nn. 60, 61, 221nn. 1, 3, 235n. 32

256

INDEX

Gantt, Henry, 63 Gardiner, Judith, 92, 221n. 8, 223n. 15 Garson, Marvin, 104 General Electric Company, 11 Association Island of, 16, 40 automation at, 22–5, 36 Charles Wilson of, 17–18 history of, 16–18 human relations management at, 18, 19–20 Lemuel Boulware of, 18, 19–20, 22, 27–8, 36–8 nine-point job at, 27, 28–9 paternalism at, 17 PCB scandal of, 214n. 60 photography at, 19, 21 productivity promotion at, 22, 23, 24, 37 Research Laboratory of, 20 Schenectady headquarters of, 11, 15, 16, 20 strikes at, 17–18, 42 unions at, 17–19, 20, 22, 36, 37 Vonnegut at, 16, 17, 20–1, 25, 26 see also Player Piano “GE Theater”, 20 Ghost, 176 Ghost Shirt Society, 44, 137, 204 Gibson, William, 122–3, 134–5, 146, 232n. 28 Gilbert, Dave, 104, 226n. 54 Gitlin, Todd, 102, 225n. 52 glamour, 57, 59, 64, 69, 73–4, 75, 218n. 54 globalization, 4, 7, 120, 141, 149, 167, 205 Glover, Danny, 176 Gnosticism, 168 Goldberg, Whoopi, 176 golem, 127, 128 golf, 115, 174, 175, 235n. 32, 236n. 43 in The Legend of Bagger Vance, 171–2

Golf in the Kingdom (Murphy), 166, 170–1, 172, 175, 236n. 44 guru-student dynamic in, 173–4 masculinity in, 173 self-actualization in, 170–1 women in, 173 Gottlieb, Bob, 104, 226n. 54, 229n. 25 Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 199, 237n. 55, 238n. 66 Grand Canyon, 176 Gray, Chris Hables, 122 Great Depression, 91, 185 Green Mile, The, 13, 177, 184–91, 195, 197, 202, 204 child imagery in, 184, 186, 188–9, 191 femininity in, 185, 186–8, 190, 191 historical setting of, 185 home-workplace fusion in, 186 hyper-embodiment in, 190–1 magical black man in, 187–90, 197 masculinity in, 185, 187, 188, 190 mechanical rationality in, 190 mystical realm in, 190–1 race in, 185, 189, 237n. 57 white male workers in, 185–6, 188–91 Grosz, Elizabeth, 34–5, 39 group dynamics study, 4, 47, 51–3, 60, 87, 119 guru, 165–6 see also management guru Hammer, Michael, 166–7, 168 Hammett, Dashiell, 60, 64 Hanks, Tom, 185, 189 Hapke, Laura, 6–7, 199 Haraway, Donna, 8, 10, 12, 91, 108–9, 110, 120–1, 123–4, 210n. 37, 227n. 79, 228nn. 82, 84, 230n. 26 Harper, Mary Catherine, 121

INDEX

Harrington, Michael, 102 Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program of, 19 Hawthorne Works experiments and, 49 Harvey, David, 5, 209n. 30, 226nn. 57, 61 Harwood Pajama Factory, group dynamics study at, 47, 51–3 Haultain, Arnold, 235n. 37 Hawthorne Effect, 49 Hawthorne Works, 18–19, 215n. 6, 217nn. 13, 18, 219n. 65 Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment at, 51 interview-based study at, 50, 54 male worker experiment at, 50–1, 52 Mica Splitting Test Room experiment at, 49–50 photography at, 48, 50, 51, 52 productivity experiments at, 47–51 Relay Assembly Test Room experiment at, 47–8, 49–50, 51 Hayden, Tom, 102 He, She, and It (Piercy), 12, 113–14, 119, 124–34, 201–4, 229n. 3, 231n. 48, 233n. 30 corporate culture in, 124–5, 146 cyborg in, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126–9, 133 female workers in, 130–4 humanism in, 125–6, 129 Japanese references in, 146 Jews in, 119–20, 127–8, 132–3, 137, 204 liberal feminism in, 131–4 self-actualization in, 124, 125, 131–2, 133, 134 sexuality in, 125, 128, 131 slavery in, 126, 128, 134 workaholics in, 12, 119, 124, 130 workaholism in, 114, 123, 130–1

257

hierarchy of needs, 89, 93, 94, 96 Hirschorn, Larry, 210n. 1 Hixon, Walter L., 156 Hoberek, Andrew, 10, 208n. 21, 209n. 23, 210n. 44, 216n. 7 Hollywood, 76, 176, 179, 184, 201, 205, 206, 218n. 54, 236n. 48, 238n. 61 Holmes, Sherlock, 147, 162, 233n. 33 Home-workplace fusion, 175 in The Apartment, 79, 83 in The Green Mile, 186 Haraway on, 109 Riesman on, 78, 79 Horowitz, Daniel, 224n. 40 Howe, Irving, 102 humanism, in He, She, and It, 125–6, 129 humanity, 37, 57, 129, 137, 227n. 74 abjection and, 43 vs. rationality, 10 human potential movement, 170 human relations management, 4, 5, 11, 139, 201–4 in The Apartment, 77–8, 83 Braverman on, 83–6 consumption and, 85–6 Elton Mayo and, 18–19 emotion and, 7, 46, 69, 86, 140, 219n. 70, 229n. 7 at Ford Company, 54 Fortune Magazine on, 45–6, 67–8 gender and, 11, 46, 47–51, 65, 74, 215n. 6 at General Electric Company, 18, 19–20, 37, 211n. 15 Harwood Pajama Factory experiments and, 51–3 Hawthorne Works experiments and, 47–51 Kurt Lewin and, 51 Mary Parker Follett and, 216n. 10 as prostitution, 77, 80, 81, 86

258

INDEX

human relations management— continued public/private realms and, 56–7, 75, 78, 79, 83, 87, 175 Riesman’s critique of, 55–9, 61, 64, 70, 75–7, 114, 216n. 7 as seduction, 11, 47, 59, 60, 68–9, 70, 71, 86 vs. self-actualization, 89 in 7 ½ Cents, 60–1, 62, 65, 66–8, 69 unions and, 215n. 5, 217n. 12 Whyte’s critique of, 10, 46, 53–5, 61, 115, 210n. 44, 215n. 2, 216n. 7, 224n. 42 Human Side of Enterprise, The (McGregor), 93 Hunt for Red October, The (Clancy), 156 Huyssen, Andreas, 32 individual, 19 America and, 148 corporate culture and, 118, 119 Riesman on, 57 self-actualization and, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 113 Whyte on, 53 worker as, 19, 46 individualism masculine, 115–16, 148, 194–5 rational, 10 rugged, 53, 55 industrialism, 84–5, 145, 156 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman), 1–3, 142–4, 166 irrationality corporate culture and, 1–2, 5, 142, 143, 144, 163, 170; see also management guru gender and, 1–2, 8, 32, 197, 204, 205 in Player Piano, 30–1, 33, 44 race and, 169–70, 172, 176–7, 205, 206

Whyte on, 53–4 It’s a Wonderful Life, 193, 198 Jackson, Brad, 165, 167, 168, 207 Jackson, Samuel L., 178, 180 Jameson, Fredric, 5–6, 13, 14, 209nn. 23, 30, 212n. 28 Japan, 7, 203, 204–5 bigotry in, 153–4 corporate culture and, 12–13, 139–45, 235n. 32 in Debt of Honor, 155–63, 234n. 41 literary depictions of, 145–6, 232n. 28 malleable reality in, 144, 148 national culture of, 140–1, 170 in Rising Sun, 145–55 Jews in The Apartment, 77, 82–3 in He, She, and It, 119–20, 127–8, 132–3, 137, 204 in 7 ½ Cents, 220n. 85 “Job Relations Training” program, 46 Jurassic Park (Crichton), 152 Kant, Immanuel, 129 King, Martin Luther, 101 King, Stephen, 184, 237nn. 57, 58 see also Green Mile, The Knapp, James, 8, 207n. 14, 208n. 21, 212n. 29, 237n. 55, 238n. 66 Kristeva, Julia, 34, 35, 38–9, 40 labor-management relations, 17 Boulwarism and, 20 marketing approach to, 18, 19–20, 22–6, 28–9, 36–7 in The Pajama Game, 72–3, 74 in Player Piano, 22, 25–7 sabotage and, 42, 71, 72, 74 in 7 ½ Cents, 61–2, 63, 67–8, 69–70 see also unions

INDEX

labor narrative, 6–7 Lacanian theory, 41 Lamarr, Hedy, 75, 76 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 27, 28, 31, 32 Lechte, John, 40 Legend of Bagger Vance, The (Pressfield), 13, 166, 176, 177, 183, 198, 236n. 38 guru-student dynamic in, 174 masculinity in, 173–4, 175 race in, 171–2 women in, 173 Lewin, Kurt, 11, 47, 48, 201 group dynamics study of, 47, 51–3, 60, 87, 201 T-group training of, 87 Lewis, Fulton, Jr., 63, 72, 219n. 69 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 46, 55–9, 215n. 7 Luddite, 22, 38, 44, 125, 127 MacLaine, Shirley, 80 magic, 44, 57, 76, 132, 169, 199, 237n. 55, 238n. 66 “Magical African-American Friends”, 176, 198 magical black man, 13, 166, 175–7, 236n. 50 Appiah on, 176, 198 childhood and, 182–4 crime/imprisonment and, 177, 198–9 in Family Man, 177, 191–2, 193–4, 195, 197 Farley on, 176, 198 in Golf in the Kingdom, 170–1 in The Green Mile, 187–90, 197 in The Legend of Bagger Vance, 171–3 trickster and, 199 in Unbreakable, 179–81, 182–4, 197 white masculinity and, 177 see also management guru magical realism, 5, 201 male workers, 188, 204

259

as abject, 16, 39 as consumers, 27, 29–30, 33, 139 economic difficulties of, 13 vs. the feminine, 155, 185, 196 in Hawthorne Works experiment, 50–1, 52 human relations and, 77 as job customers, 11, 21, 60 self-actualization and, 90 Maltese Falcon, The, 64 management guru, 163, 165–9 Golf in the Kingdom and, 170–1 language of, 167–8 The Legend of Bagger Vance and, 171–3, 198 magical black man and, 13, 166, 176–7, 197, 198, 199, 204 male-bonding and, 173–4 mysticism and, 44, 169, 181, 205 race and, 169–70, 174, 175 vision of, 168–9 as witchdoctor, 169 see also magical black man Management Relations Program, of Ford Company, 62 manufacturing automation of, 8, 102, 103, 104, 128 eclipse by services, 64 at GE, 18 group dynamics and, 51 in Rising Sun, 147 in 7 ½ Cents, 60, 65, 220n. 85 marketing, 17, 85, 86, 212n. 29 “average man” and, 30 labor relations and, 18, 19–20, 22–6, 27, 28–9, 36–7 Marketing Executives Society, 28 Marrow, Alfred, 52 Marsh, James, 144 Marx, Karl, 226nn. 57, 61, 227n. 72 Mary Kay cosmetics, 143 masculinity, 47, 204–5 vs. abjection, 34, 39 in The Apartment, 77, 80–1, 82, 83

260

INDEX

masculinity—continued corporate culture and, 2, 144–5, 177 cyborg, 133 in Debt of Honor, 145, 156 in Family Man, 192–3, 194, 196–7 football and, 179 in Golf in the Kingdom, 173–4 in The Green Mile, 185, 187, 188, 190 gurus and, 173, 190 irrationality and, 2, 32, 34, 44, 54 Japanese and, 144, 145 in The Legend of Bagger Vance, 173–4 in The Pajama Game, 71, 73 in Player Piano, 21, 29, 32–3 race and, 13, 166, 182, 190, 197, 200, 237n. 53 rationality and, 2, 13, 29, 53, 99, 143 Riesman on, 55, 58, 74 in Rising Sun, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 155 in In Search of Excellence, 1–2 self-actualization and, 95 in 7 ½ Cents, 63–5, 71 skill and, 84, 86 truth and, 56 in Unbreakable, 179, 181–3 Whyte on, 53–4, 55 work and, 8, 87, 90, 133 Maslow, Abraham, 12, 87, 89–90, 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 101, 103, 105, 110–11, 113, 115–18, 119, 120, 134, 139, 166, 169–70, 171, 201, 202, 221n. 4, 223n. 18 Matrix Triology (Gibson), 135, 236n. 50 Mayo, Elton, 11, 18–19, 53, 61, 85, 201 productivity experiments of, 47–51, 53, 61, 85, 201, 215n. 6, 216n. 12, 217n. 18

McCaffery, Larry, 122 McCarthyism, 72 McGregor, Douglas, 93, 94, 103, 201, 223n. 19, 224n. 25, 232n. 3 McNamara, Robert, 89 melodrama, 4, 207n. 14 mensch, in The Apartment, 77, 82–3, 204 Mentor, Steven, 122 Mezzanine (Baker), 146 Mica Splitting Test Room experiment, at Hawthorne Works, 49–50 Micklethwait, John, 167, 169, 234n. 9 Misogyny, 158, 173 in Debt of Honor, 158 in Rising Sun, 149–51 modernism, 4, 208n. 21 Modleski, Tania, 188, 238n. 60 Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson), 135 Mormonism, 168 Moss, Richard J., 175 motherhood, 1, 32, 38–9, 97, 99, 132, 150, 178, 204, 207n. 3 Motivation and Personality (Maslow), 93 Moylan, Tom, 101, 105, 223n. 14, 227n. 74 Mullen, Harryette, 167 Murphy, Michael, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 183 see also Golf in the Kingdom Mustazza, Leonard, 33, 210n. 3 Mystery of Golf, The (Haultain), 235n. 37 mysticism African, 169, 171, 174 corporate culture and, 5, 44, 143, 166, 168, 170, 177, 197, 200, 201, 206; see also management guru Eastern, 165, 170–2, 174 gender and, 191, 197

INDEX

in Golf in the Kingdom, 170–1 Native American, 44, 204 race and, 183, 197 nationalism, corporate culture and, 142–3 National Labor Relations Board, 20 National Organization for Women, 90 Bill of Rights of, 97 naturalism, 4, 207n. 14 Neiman, Carol, 104 New Deal, 17, 18, 22, 63, 219n. 69 New Left, 101–2, 225n. 48 automated post-work society and, 12, 90, 91, 101–5, 225nn. 44, 49, 52, 226nn. 57, 61, 229n. 25 The Female Man and, 106, 107, 108, 110, 119, 202 self-actualization and, 103 Women’s Liberation and, 222n. 9 Non-Linear Systems, 94 Nye, David, 19, 21, 211n. 15, 212n. 22 Oates, Wayne, 114–17, 125, 134 object relations theory, 9 oedipality, 9–10 Organization Man (Whyte), 46, 53–5, 215n. 2 other-directedness Oates on, 114 Riesman on, 55 Ouchi, William, 140–1, 201, 232n. 3 Overworked American, The (Schor), 123 Oxford English Dictionary, 115 Pajama Game, The, 11, 47, 71–4, 86, 201, 203–4 female workers in, 59, 71–2, 73–4 femininity in, 71–2 masculinity in, 71, 73

261

rape in, 59, 77 sabotage in, 71–2, 74 scientific management in, 73 sexual seduction in, 47, 59–60, 73–4, 86 unions, 71–4 see also 7 ½ Cents Pascale, Richard, 141–2 pastiche, 5, 201, 212n. 28 paternalism, 17, 27, 57 patriarchy, 8, 9 people skills, in 7 ½ Cents, 64–5, 78 Perelman, Bob, 167 personnel, 45, 46, 65, 67, 75, 78, 81, 85, 118, 215n. 2 Peters, Thomas J., 1–3, 5, 43, 142–4, 166, 201, 207n. 3 Peterson, Peter, 2 Pfeil, Fred, 9–10, 32, 209n. 23 photography at General Electric, 19, 21 at Hawthorne Works, 48, 50, 51, 52 in Rising Sun, 151 Piercy, Marge, 12, 87, 113–14, 119, 124, 140, 229n. 25, 231n. 48 see also He, She, and It Player Piano (Vonnegut), 11, 21–43, 125, 140, 201, 202 abjection in, 11, 16, 33–6, 38–40, 41–3, 44, 214n. 60 automation in, 15, 23, 26–7, 37, 39, 43, 210n. 1 consumerism in, 29–33, 44 critical response to, 15–16, 210n. 3 femininity in, 38–9, 40 Ghost Shirt Society in, 44 irrationality in, 30–1, 33, 44 masculinity in, 21, 29, 32–3 Oedipal dynamics in, 42–3 prose style of, 26 sabotage in, 42 sexuality in, 39–40 slavery in, 26, 30, 125 technology in, 25, 26–7, 125 waste in, 16, 34–6, 37–8, 42

262

INDEX

police procedural, 146–7, 201 Porush, David, 122 post-Fordism, 123 postindustrialism, 7–8, 45, 140 gender and, 9–10 Haraway on, 109–10, 120–1 Japanese, 139–40 New Left view on, 90–1, 101–5 postmodern form, 5, 6, 7, 15, 26, 33, 44, 90, 94, 222n. 10 postmodernism artistic productions of, 7, 13–14 critical distance and, 6 work and, 2, 5–6, 7, 201 post-scarcity society, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 225n. 49, 226n. 57 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Kristeva), 34–5 Pressfield, Stephen, 171, 183 see also Legend of Bagger Vance, The productivity, 2, 4, 15, 18, 38, 45, 78 General Electric promotion of, 22, 23, 24, 37 Harwood Pajama Factory experiments on, 47, 51–3 Hawthorne Works experiments on, 46, 47–51 human relations management and, 45, 216n. 10 illumination and, 49 Japanese, 157 Riesman on, 56 in 7 ½ Cents, 67, 69 Whyte on, 53 professional-managerial class, 10 prostitution, 203 human relations as, 77, 80, 81, 86, 203 in Rising Sun, 149, 150 Protestant work ethic, 27, 53, 55, 63, 114 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 35 race corporate culture and, 141–3, 145, 157–8, 163, 169–70

in Debt of Honor, 157–9, 162 in Family Man, 193–4, 196–7 golf clubs and, 175 in Golf in the Kingdom, 171 in The Green Mile, 185, 189, 237n. 57 irrationality and, 169, 170, 172, 176–7, 205, 206 in The Legend of Bagger Vance, 171–2 management guru and, 169–70 masculinity and, 13, 166, 182, 190, 197, 200, 237n. 53 in Rising Sun, 153–5 saintliness and, 176 in Unbreakable, 179, 237n. 54 see also magical black man racism, 141, 154, 158, 172, 176 Radway, Janice, 29, 148 Raitt, John, 71 R AND Corporation, 89 Rape, 163, 204 in Debt of Honor, 158, 159–60, 234n. 39 in Green Mile, 187 in He, She, and It, 132 in Pajama Game, 59, 77 in Rising Sun, 149, 151 scientific management as, 59, 77 rationality, 34, 201 America and, 144, 161 gender and, 10 masculinity and, 2, 11, 13, 29, 32, 53, 99, 143 Peters and Waterman’s view of, 2, 144 Whyte on, 53–4 Ratner, Brett, 191 Reagan, Ronald, 20, 149, 156 realism, 4, 16, 33, 201, 207n. 14 reality, construction of corporate culture and, 144, 145 in Debt of Honor, 156, 160, 161–2, 163, 234n. 41 in Japanese culture, 144, 148 in Rising Sun, 148, 150–1

INDEX

Red Storm Rising (Clancy), 156 Relay Assembly Test Room experiment, at Hawthorne Works, 47–8, 49–50, 51, 217n. 16, 219n. 65 Riesman, David, 46, 55–9, 60, 61, 64, 69, 70, 74, 75–7, 78, 79, 83–4, 96, 97, 102, 114, 216n. 7, 218nn. 40, 42, 54, 220n. 79, 224nn., 42, 44 Rising Sun (Crichton), 12–13, 140, 144, 145–55, 163 automation in, 147, 151, 161 corporate culture in, 149, 155 digital technology in, 147, 151, 154, 161, 203 female workers in, 149–51, 153–5, 163 femininity in, 147–8, 153–5 gender in, 147–55 Japanese culture in, 148 masculinity in, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 155 race in, 153–5 rape in, 149, 151 reality, construction of, in, 148, 150–1 sexuality in, 149, 154–5 Robinson, Sally, 92, 221n. 8, 222n. 10 robot, 127, 128, 129, 130, 157, 205, 230n. 27 Roethlisberger, F. J., 48, 50, 51, 89, 217nn. 13, 14 romance, 4, 207n. 14 Room Temperature (Baker), 146 Rose, Nikolas, 7, 8, 18, 87, 89, 90, 115, 208n. 19, 209n. 28, 216n. 7, 221nn. 1, 3 Rosenthal, Pam, 122, 123–4, 135, 136 Ross, Andrew, 122, 226n. 57 Rothstein, Richard, 102, 226n. 54

263

Russ, Joanna, 12, 87, 90–2, 119, 133, 137, 140, 202, 203, 221n. 8 see also Female Man, The sabotage in Debt of Honor, 160–1 in He, She, and It, 127 labor-management relations and, 42, 71, 72, 74 in Pajama Game, 71–2, 74 in Player Piano, 42 in Unbreakable, 183 Safer, Morley, 143 Salaman, Graeme, 43, 141, 169, 181, 235n. 29 Sandoval, Chela, 121–2 satire, 15, 16, 26, 30, 33, 43, 47, 78, 205, 212n. 28 Schatt, Stanley, 44, 211n. 3, 213n. 49 Scholes, Robert, 26, 212n. 28 Schor, Juliet, 123–4, 221n. 6, 228n. 87 science fiction, 92, 94, 121, 122, 136, 201, 222n. 11 scientific management, 3–4, 45–6, 49, 54, 59, 63, 73, 74, 219n. 60 vs. human relations management, 4, 45–6, 49, 54, 59, 62, 85, 212n. 29, 216n. 10 as narrative, 208n. 16 in The Pajama Game, 73 as rape, 59, 77 in 7 ½ Cents, 62–3, 73, 74 see also Taylorism self-actualization, 4, 5, 11–12, 13, 44, 87, 201–6, 221n. 3, 231n. 49 consumption and, 7, 27 corporate culture and, 117–19, 123, 174, 232n. 3 in Family Man, 192 in The Female Man, 90, 98, 100, 101, 106–7, 110 feminism and, 9, 12, 139, 231n. 49 Friedan on, 95–7, 224n. 42

264

INDEX

self-actualization—continued in Golf in the Kingdom, 170–1, 173 gurus and, 166, 173, 174, 175, 177 in He, She, and It, 124, 125, 131–2, 133, 134 individualism and, 115–16 in The Legend of Bagger Vance, 166, 173 Maslow on, 89, 90, 92–5, 110–11, 113, 115–18, 169, 223n. 18 New Left view on, 103, 105 synergy and, 94 in Unbreakable, 178, 184 work and, 90, 93–4, 95–6, 98–101, 106–7, 140, 149 Seltzer, Mark, 4, 207n. 14 Selznick, Philip, 142 Senge, Peter, 168, 201 sentimentalism, 4, 5 service economy, 8, 25, 54, 178, 181–3, 196 7 ½ Cents (Bissell), 11, 47, 59–74 consumerism in, 60–1 female workers in, 59, 64–6 human relations management in, 60–1, 62, 65, 66–8, 70 Jews in, 220n. 85 masculinity in, 63–5, 71 people skills in, 64–5 scientific management in, 62–3, 73, 74 sexual seduction in, 47, 59–60, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72 “soft soap”communication style in, 68–9 unions in, 59, 61–3, 65–70, 219n. 69 see also Pajama Game, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The (Covey), 168, 174–5 7-S model, 142 sexual harassment, 58–9, 219n. 58

sexuality, 9, 39, 69 in The Green Mile, 188 in He, She, and It, 125, 128, 131 in Rising Sun, 149, 154–5 sexual seduction, 5, 47, 58–9, 86 in The Apartment, 47, 77, 78, 86–7, 216n. 8 glamour in work and, 57, 64, 75–6 human relations management as, 11, 47, 56, 58, 59, 75, 86 in The Pajama Game, 47, 59–60, 73–4, 86 in 7 ½ Cents, 47, 59–60, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72 in Unbreakable, 178 “SF and Technology as Mystification” (Russ), 110 Shyamalan, M. Night, 177, 182, 183 see also Unbreakable Silicon Valley, 121, 135 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 15 Sixty Minutes, 143 skill, 45, 52, 84–6, 231n. 49 in The Apartment, 78 corporate culture and, 142 in Player Piano, 29, 30, 34, 38 Riesman on, 57, 75 Whyte on, 54 Sklar, Martin, 104 Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), 15 slavery, 136, 137, 172, 202–3 in He, She, and It, 126, 128, 134 in Player Piano, 26, 30, 125 workaholic and, 116 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 135 “social ethic”, 10, 53 Social Text, 104–5 Soviet Union, 156, 213n. 41 Standing, Guy, 205, 210n. 37 Stephenson, Neal, 135 Stewart, James, 193 Stockton, Sharon, 121 Students for a Democratic Society, 102, 103

INDEX

Studies on the Left, 103 Sun-Times, 75, 220n. 79 superhero, in Unbreakable, 180–2, 183, 184 Sutheim, Susan, 104, 226n. 54 synergy corporate culture and, 117, 142 Maslow on, 94, 115, 117, 118, 139, 169–70 Taylor on, 223n. 25 T2 (Cameron), 136 Taft-Hartley Act, 17, 18 Tarzan, 32–3 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 3–4, 11, 37, 45, 46, 47, 59, 63, 65, 67, 74, 85, 86, 165–6, 201, 207n. 14, 214n. 61, 216n. 9, 219nn. 60, 70, 223n. 25 Taylorism, 3–4, 37, 139, 201 Braverman on, 84–5 effects on art and culture, 3–5, 207n. 14, 208n. 15 vs. human relations management, 37, 45, 46, 139, 201 lingering impact on work culture, 212n. 29, 214n. 61, 215n. 2 in The Pajama Game, 73 in 7 ½ Cents, 62–3 technology, 7, 25, 128, 140, 144, 226n. 57 cybernetic, 38, 104, 231 cyborg and, 120, 121, 122, 125, 129, 134, 135 Japan and, 151 masculinity and, 99 women and, 109, 153–5, 227n. 74 Teodori, Massimo, 102, 104–5 Terminator, 136 terrorist organizations, 156 text, vs. “work” of art, 7 T-group training, 87 Theory X, 93 Theory Y, 93 Theory Z (Ouchi), 140–1

265

therapeutic ethos, 27, 28, 31, 32, 43 see also consumerism Thin Man, The, 64 Time Magazine, 176 time study, 52, 62, 67, 71, 73, 215n. 2 Toward a Psychology of Being (Maslow), 170 Tribune, 75, 220n. 79 trickster, 199 “Triple Revolution, The”, 102–3, 104, 226n. 54 Truth about Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily, The (Boulware), 18, 22 Tupperware, 143 Unbreakable, 13, 177–84, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 204 child imagery in, 178, 182, 183 magical black man in, 179–81, 182–4, 197 masculinity in, 179, 181–3 race in, 179, 237n. 54 self-actualization in, 178, 184 service economy in, 178, 181, 182, 183 superhero in, 180–2, 183, 184, 190 women in, 178–9 unemployment automation and, 140 black, 198 Boulware on, 36 New Left on, 102–4 Rosenthal on, 123 unions, 17 Ford Company and, 62 at GE, 17–19, 20, 22, 36, 37 Haraway and, 120 human relations management and, 215n. 5 New Left and, 103 overwork and, 123 in Pajama Game, 71–4

266

INDEX

in 7 ½ Cents, 59, 61–3, 65–70, 219n. 69 Taft-Hartley and, 17, 18 Taylor and, 217n. 12 Whyte and, 61 see also labor-management relations United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 17 Utopia, 4, 154, 201–2 cyborg and, 120–2 in The Female Man, 91–4, 105–10, 117, 221n. 7 Maslow and, 94, 113, 117 New Left and, 101–2 Van Houten, Donald R., 215n. 6 Van Wolferen, Karel, 144, 148 Vietnam War, 156 virility in The Apartment, 79–81 in The Green Mile, 188 vision, of management guru, 4, 168–9, 198, 203, 205 Vonnegut, Kurt, 10, 11, 15, 77, 125, 136–7, 140, 145, 146, 202–3, 210n. 3, 212n. 29, 213n. 41, 214n. 61 at General Electric, 16, 17, 20–1, 25, 26, 211nn. 4, 5 see also Player Piano voodoo, 171 War Production Board, 18 waste in Player Piano, 16, 34–6, 37–8, 42 in Taylorism, 4, 37 in “The Winter Market”, 146 Waterman, Robert, Jr., 1–3, 5, 43, 142–4, 201, 207n. 3 Welch, Jack, 17 Western Electric Company, 18–19

productivity experiments at, 47–51 “White Collar Girl” newspaper column, 75–7, 220n. 79 White-collar girls, 57, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79 white-collar worker, 57, 58, 215n. 7 Whyte, William H., Jr., 10, 46, 53–6, 61, 65, 71, 77, 83–4, 96, 115, 215nn. 2, 7, 217n. 18, 218nn. 40, 42, 54, 224n., 42 Wiener, Norbert, 15 Wilder, Billy, 10, 11, 47, 77, 82, 86, 203, 220n. 82 see also Apartment, Thes Willis, Bruce, 178, 180 Willmott, Hugh, 43 Wilson, Charles E., of General Electric, 17–18, 211n. 5 Wilson, William Julius, 199 “Winter Market, The” (Gibson), 146 witchdoctor, 169, 174, 235nn. 27, 29 Without Remorse (Clancy), 156 Wittman, Carl, 103 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 136, 227n. 74, 231n. 48 Women’s Liberation, 221n. 9 Women’s Movement, 1, 5, 97, 222n. 9 women’s work, 90, 98, 101, 107, 205, 228n. 82 Wooldridge, Adrian, 167, 169, 234n. 9 workaholics, 9, 111, 113, 123, 130, 136, 203 in He, She, and It, 12, 119, 124, 130 Oates on, 114–17 Riesman on, 56 Whyte on, 55 women as, 139, 206 workaholism, 90, 114, 203, 204–5 cyborg, 123–4, 126, 129

INDEX

expense account and, 56 in He, She, and It, 114, 123, 130–1 Oates on, 114–17 Rosenthal on, 123 Schor on, 123

267

of Silicon Valley, 135 working-class literature, 6–7 World War I, 8, 19, 171 World War II, 2, 3, 8, 12, 24, 60, 91, 102, 156, 170, 215n. 12 Wright, Robin, 178

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