Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

by Michaels, F. S.

  The economic story also says that corporate citizenship needs to be justified in economic terms. A healthy psychological workplace is worth developing — not because we value mental health at work, but because it improves organizational performance.13 Work/family balance programs are worth setting up — not because we believe in helping employees manage work/family conflict, but because the programs increase employee commitment to the organization.14 Worker wellness programs are worthwhile — not because we value health in and of itself, but because healthy workers are productive workers, and the company’s Medicare costs have to be reduced.15

  Even the concept of sustainable development has been reframed. In the economic story, sustainable development no longer refers to corporate activity that’s sustainable in terms of the environment, but to activity that’s sustainable in terms of the corporation. Sustainable development is about doing what’s required to sustain corporate growth and profits. The economic story, in other words, reroutes that triple bottom line back to the economic bottom line.

  So what happens when ethics doesn’t pay? What happens when acting ethically costs us? Whistleblowers are typically fired for reporting corporate wrongdoing. They rarely get their jobs back and often never work in the field again. “An average fate,” says scholar C. Fred Alford, “is for a nuclear engineer to end up selling computers at Radio Shack.”16

  Still, the economic story insists that you can have your cake and eat it too, that the trade-off between ethics and profits is just an illusion. As a Royal Dutch Shell sustainability report states, “We hope, through this report and by our future actions, to show that the basic interests of business and society are entirely compatible — that there does not have to be a choice between profits and principles.”17 No one has to make a decision between going one way or another when all roads lead to Rome.

  For many, though, that conflict between profits and principles still exists. Management professor Peter Pruzan facilitated a workshop for the executives of a company known for hierarchical control and an emphasis on shareholders, not stakeholders. Pruzan gave these executives, flown in from eight Western countries, a list of ‘values’ like success, love, professional competency, honesty, trust, wealth, creativity and power and asked them to reflect on which ones were most important in their personal lives. They were to discuss their selections in small groups and then list the group’s top five personal values. Later that day, the executives were asked to reflect on the company’s most important values — not the ones officially promoted, but the implicit ones underlying decisions about hiring and firing employees, entering and leaving markets, advertising, lobbying, or negotiating with unions.

  When the groups compared their lists of personal and corporate values, everyone realized that within each group, the two sets of values were completely different. The executives’ personal values tended to include terms like ‘good health,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘beauty’, ‘love,’ and ‘peace of mind,’ and the organizational values included words like ‘success,’ ‘power,’ ‘competitiveness,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘productivity.’

  Pruzan noted that after that consulting experience, he began to picture the “strongly shareholder-oriented manager” as someone who puts aside his or her personal values at work for the sake of managing, shaping, and organizing, then collects those personal values again at the end of the day and goes home to enjoy beauty, love, friendship, and peace. The gap between a leader’s personal values and the values he or she promotes at work is so extreme, Pruzan said, that leaders have unconsciously developed a modern form of schizophrenia, threatening the health of both the leader and the organization.18

  Employees and executives alike might wish the gap between their personal values and the values of their company were more aligned, but who can be sure value alignment is going to be different anywhere else? Employees learn to keep their heads down and lower their expectations about job security. They start keeping an eye on the door. They think seriously about developing portable skills that can walk out that door with them in case the company sheds them to become more competitive and efficient.

  Employees also find themselves working more hours than they once did. In the economic story, it’s cheaper for a company to have a worker put in longer hours and do more with less than it is to hire more people; every new hire represents an additional overhead expense. Seventy-seven percent of American workers now work more than 40 hours a week, and less than half of them are “very satisfied” with working conditions in their main paid job. Compared to the countries of the European Union, North Americans report the highest incidence of working at a high speed “all the time,” contributing to stress and burnout.19 The Japanese have a word for “sudden death from overwork”: karoshi.20 In China, the word for “overwork death” is guolaosi; 600,000 people are estimated to die of it every year.21

  In America, working long hours used to be the fate of the lowest-paid workers. But by 2002, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the highest-paid workers were twice as likely to work long hours as their lowest-paid counterparts.22 Lawyers are a prime example. When the billable hour was first introduced in law firms (before that, lawyers billed by the task, not the hour), lawyers were expected to bill between 1,200 and 1,500 hours a year. Today they’re expected to bill 1,800 to 2,000 hours a year; almost half of practicing lawyers in the United States bill at least 1,900 hours annually. Too, every billable hour involves administrative hours that can’t be billed out, so 2,000 billable hours actually translates into 10-11 hour days, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year.23

  In addition to having long workdays, lawyers also have four times the depression rate of the general public and twice the substance abuse rate. Two-thirds to three-quarters report high stress, and a third say work stress is hurting their physical and emotional health.24 But for better or for worse, being willing to work long hours is often about survival in the firm. As the American Bar Association’s introductory book Making Partner explains to young associates, “If a firm expects a minimum of 1,850 hours, and two associates do equally good work, the associate who bills 2,000 hours will be more valuable to the firm than the associate who bills 1,850 hours. By doing more to help the firm’s bottom line, the associate who works harder is demonstrating that he or she is thinking like an owner.”25

  Lawyers aren’t the only highly-paid workers facing overwhelming hours. In an interview, Robert Devlin, former president, chairman and CEO of insurance giant American General Corporation, said: “I’m often working eighteen-hour days. I rarely get more than four or five hours a night of sleep. And the way I view it, and I tell the guys, my senior staff, you know, these are seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day jobs. I mean, now, obviously we have our time off and I encourage people to take it. But the fact of the matter is that if a situation pops up and we have to burn up a Saturday or a Sunday and go into, you know, the wee hours of the morning we do so — I mean, I’ve been in sessions — particularly when you get into mergers and acquisitions where we’ve walked out of a place at four-thirty in the morning. You kind of have to be prepared to do whatever it takes. If not, you should find something else to do with your time.”26

  Still, working all the time makes it hard for people to keep up with things like childcare, eldercare, house maintenance, cooking, and relationships with friends, family, and significant others. When employees put family ahead of work, they hear about it at work, and when they put work ahead of family, they hear about it at home. Some people are no longer sure they even have time to start a family or add to it.

  The economic story, though, says that time crunch, along with your non-work obligations, are your problem as an individual — not your company’s problem, or society’s problem. It’s something you need to solve yourself, however you can. That’s so even though, researchers say, the majority of families today are dual-career households and jobs are still being designed as though employees have uninterrupted decades to devote to a career and someone at ho
me full time to look after the domestic side of life.27

  Chances are, you don’t have that kind of time or that kind of life, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

  That’s how the story goes.

  YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

  AND THE NATURAL WORLD

  In our extremely individualistic society we have come to see isolation and loneliness as akin to ‘the human condition,’ instead of as by-products of a certain kind of social arrangement.

  —ROBERT SOLOMON

  The leaves at the top, because they are water-stressed, are not doing as much photosynthesis per unit mass…In essence, the plant is investing a certain amount into those tissues but they’re not providing as much return on that investment.

  —PHYSIOLOGICAL ECOLOGIST, BBC NEWS

  WHETHER YOU FEEL CONNECTED to the world or adrift in it, you can’t help but be tangled up with other people and the environment. You’re born into a family and maybe have one of your own — a significant other, children, parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — people you’re connected to whether you like it or not. Your friends, as they say, are the family you choose for yourself. You’ve got neighbors too, whether you wave at them or pretend you don’t see them, people who live around you, or who you run into regularly at the post office, the grocery store, the gym, online. Then there are your colleagues, the people you work with directly and the people you know indirectly through work. You’re somehow tied to strangers too by virtue of your shared humanity, those unknown people on the bus or on the other side of the world. Past all of those relationships, you’re then related to your physical environment, to wind and water, sun and rain, in urban or rural settings, because wherever you are, you exist in physical space, shaping it and being shaped by it.

  Let’s start with family. Your kin relationships were once the glue that held society together. Friendships were considered luxuries, but kin relationships were about survival in an uncertain world. Kin were the people who were obligated to help you and who you were obligated to help when catastrophe struck. Being a member of a family meant you had lifetime membership among that group of people, and legal and cultural rights and responsibilities that came with that membership.1 You were expected to be loyal to your family and they were expected to be loyal to you. Cooperation and trust among family members mattered. In the family, you were judged based on what you needed as a family member and in terms of your intrinsic value — your right to sit at the family table simply because you were a member of the family. You belonged.2

  Though families and markets have been intertwined throughout history (unless families managed to be completely self-sufficient, which was rare), both were considered separate spheres of activity — so much so that in the 1950s, from a business perspective, family relationships were considered a hindrance to a market mentality and to corporate development.3 In the Western world, markets were based for the most part on the traditional breadwinner model of the family: a man was paid for working outside the home and a woman wasn’t paid for working inside the home. At one time, most families were breadwinner families; in 1900, 94 percent of married American women stayed out of the paid workforce.4

  In the larger community, your relationships with people were based on values like respect, love, and a willingness to put others first — all of which kept your more self-oriented tendencies in check. Yes, you developed economic relationships through buying and selling with others, but those economic relationships were tempered by the fact that everyone involved in the transaction was considered part of civil society, and civil society was characterized by a basic level of trust and solidarity. Your community, as a group, helped people in need because those struggling were deemed to have inherent dignity and self-worth no matter what their economic situation was like. The goal of the community was to help the destitute become healthy and self-sufficient and to build and strengthen our relationships with each other so we could all function successfully in society together.5 That’s what gave families and communities a higher moral stature than markets.6

  Nature enjoyed a high moral stature too. Some people valued their relationship with the physical world in terms of their own humanity, believing nature was worth caring for because it contributes to human health, is aesthetically beautiful, or plays a role in shaping their identity, since where people come from can shape who they are. Others valued nature for its own sake, believing they should care for it because other sentient species had a right to live too, or because they respected all life whether it was sentient or not, or for God’s sake, because nature represented God’s order, God’s creation.7

  Then the story changed.

  The economic story says that among your own kind, competition matters more than cooperation, and that you’re motivated to look after your own interests, constantly calculating what’s in it for you, just like everyone else. Being a member of a group no longer means that you are part of something bigger than yourself. You participate in different groups not for the sake of the group, but to further your own interests. In turn, the group you’re part of objectively judges you based on your performance and your worth to them, not on your needs or your intrinsic value as a human being.

  Now you’re only as good as your last contribution to the team. Your performance or lack of it is what makes you relevant or irrelevant to others. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the phenomenon in terms of reality television: “More than anything else, the…most popular [reality] television shows are public rehearsals of the disposability of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story. No one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of the joint effort just because she or he has added at some point to their growth, let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard game for hard people. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your most recent duel. Each player at the moment is for herself or himself, and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must first cooperate in excluding the many who block the way, only to outwit in the end those with whom one cooperated.”8

  Remember, the economic story says you live in a world of markets. As a buyer or seller in those markets, your worth among others is based on your potential or actual ability to contribute to the economy by spending or making money. For the world of markets to operate effectively, you also have to be able to make choices, process information on which to base those choices, and be able to make a new choice if you want to; those hindered by something like a learning disability are therefore “deemed to be of only marginal economic value.”9 The more you drive the economy by making money or spending it, the more desirable you are to others. Your relational ties are primarily economic ties, and so your relationships are transactional. You learn to shun long-term commitments, no longer obligated to anyone past the transaction at hand.

  By 2000, 61 percent of married American women worked outside the home for pay, turning the breadwinner model of the family on its head and making dual-earner couples the rule, not the exception.10 Today, whether you’re single or part of a couple, chances are there is no one at home to look after your domestic life, which means you’re almost certainly struggling to keep up with everything that’s involved in keeping a career and a home going as you work longer and longer hours.

  In the meantime, markets keep developing for what used to happen at home for free. You realize you can hire people to cook your meals, care for your children, look after your aging relatives, clean your house, do your tax return, walk the dog, mow the lawn, and prune the shrubs. Outsourcing domestic life helps you cope with the time pressures you’re under. Researcher Arlie Russell Hochschild says, “As time becomes something to ‘save’ at home as much as or even more than at work, domestic life becomes quite literally a second shift; a cult of efficiency, once centered in the workplace, is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at h
ome. Efficiency has become both a means to an end — more home time — and a way of life, an end in itself.”11

  As work and home demand more and more of your time and energy, you may find your significant relationships becoming secondary. It’s not that you want to drift away from your spouse, family and close friends, but without spending time and energy on those relationships, they’re in danger of fading.12 In the economic story, rewards in society are based on your performance in your paid job, after all — not on what’s going on in the rest of your life.

  Even family obligations can weigh on you. Among all of the reasons people give for having fewer children, including religion, ideology, and lifestyle preference, one of them continues to be “time famine.”13 Many think twice about having children or having more of them. Researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett notes that the typical childless executive woman at midlife has been subject to a “creeping nonchoice” despite the fact that almost 90 percent of high-achieving women want a family. Hewlett explains, “Think of what a 55-hour week means in terms of work-life balance. If you assume an hour lunch and a 45-minute round-trip commute (the national average), the workday stretches to almost 13 hours. Even without ‘extras’ (out of town trips, client dinners, work functions), this kind of schedule makes it extremely difficult for any professional to maintain a relationship.”14

  In the economic story, children in particular come to represent a real economic risk and cost. Choosing to have a family begins to look like choosing economic vulnerability.15 “It’s not just that people sacrifice their live relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers,” says philosopher Charles Taylor. “Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it.”16