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competitive self-management

the new way to control your knowledge workers

Two facts of the new world:

Many quotes are from the following PDF: Engineering Consent: Overwork and Anxiety at a High-Tech Firm, a paper by Ofer Sharone, a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, May 2002. In it, he analyzes a software company which he aliases as MegaTech.

The term competitive self-management refers to a relatively new strategy of control for 'employers who must cede greater discretion to their employees'. Since the middle-class is not acknowledged as the serfs that they in reality are, there is a pretense of flexibility in the absorbing game of work.
Developing and reconstructing Michael Burawoy's theory regarding the intensification of work effort through the organization of work into an absorbing game, I argue that MegaTech engineers' long work hours are primarily the result of their participation in a high-stakes competition generated by the rules of competitive self-management that keeps them perpetually insecure about their relative performance. While the work game described by Burawoy was embedded in the relatively stable postwar manufacturing economy, competitive self-management creates a work game that is emblematic of the "new economy" and reflects a new strategy of control for employers who must cede greater discretion to their employees. Competitive selfmanagement enables MegaTech to boast of its "flexibility" and respect for worker autonomy while simultaneously producing anxiety about professional competence that propels the engineers in my sample to self-impose an average 67 hours of work per week.
From Engineering Consent: Overwork and Anxiety at a High-Tech Firm (Page 1)
This new strategy of controlling your high-tech peons enables you to: Rejoice my American Brothers! You have been honored:
In 1999, American workers surpassed the Japanese to earn the dubious distinction of working the longest hours in the industrialized world.
From Engineering Consent: Overwork and Anxiety at a High-Tech Firm (Page 2)
If you really are free and have flexible hours, then why do you work so much, my dear software engineer?
In discussing their work hours, the engineers emphasized their autonomy, frequently pointing out that though they may work long hours, it is ultimately "up to the individual." Yet, no individual engineer chose to work less than 50 hours per week. Why do the engineers "autonomously" choose to work long hours? My findings suggest the main reason is competitive selfmanagement.
From Engineering Consent: Overwork and Anxiety at a High-Tech Firm (Page 7)
Understanding competitive self-management, as in the understanding of any artifact, allows one to know how to deconstruct and reconstruct such artifact:
The explanation of any social phenomenon provides direction to those interested in changing it. The findings of this study suggest that change requires focusing on the structures of workplace organization and particularly the mechanisms for determining professional competence. Although profit-seeking employers who benefit from spiraling and anxious competition among workers can be expected to make the recognition of competence scarce, standards of competence do not have to be monopolized by employers. Professional associations, or other worker-controlled institutions, can reclaim from corporate management the standards for competence and value and define these in a manner that allows for useful economic production while also preserving the well-being of the communities and families currently under assault by rising work hours.
From Engineering Consent: Overwork and Anxiety at a High-Tech Firm (Page 25) Emphasis Mine.

So just what is competitive self-management?

Competitive self-management is the name of the management strategy that allows the firm to both profess flexibility and simultaneously push its engineers to wholly devote themselves to work.

Engineers typically have tight deadlines, often unrealistic and with a high human cost. Families, friends, loved ones all bear the brunt of a management strategy that is inhuman and unjust.

But why do engineers, most of which are highly intelligent people, consent to such ridiculously short deadlines? How does management coerce people, who in other spheres of life are careful, cautious, and aware, to lay down their lifeblood for corporate profits?

The trick to bleeding your employees with overwork lies in making them self-impose tight deadlines.

Self-Imposed Unrealistic Deadlines

The only way, in this brave new world of employee autonomy coupled with indentured servitude, to impose such strict deadlines as to require 67 hour work weeks as routine for months on end, is with self-imposed deadlines. The psychological meanderings that lock your mind into accepting unreasonable demands run deep from the soul of the own engineer's self-image of professionalism and competence.

The genius behind recognizing that the professional competence that engineers are so proud of can so easily be turned against them is one that has been used over and over again to destroy families, landbases, and communities.



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