What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice – whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies they found there was no profit advantage to it but it’s just so important to keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don’t do anything but get in their way.
This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people.
In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of déformation professionnelle due to their different job concerns.
In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.
Not to take away from your point because I think it holds, but I've read this "Forces of Production" book. It mischaracterizes what the true struggle was. It was CNC vs. "playback" technology (where it recorded the XYZ axes movements by a trained machinist) - the latter produced inferior parts and was very laborious to reprogram (you had to start over, not change a variable, etc.).
There were a lot of points / quotes in the book with management talking about reducing / commodifying labor, but I'm not sure this book is the best to cite as support for this. I suspect Chomsky is taking Nobel at his word, but the book is noticeably biased toward Marxist thinking in thinking everything is a class struggle whereas the technology actually was superior.
Funny enough the operator-programmer lines are blurring today as CNC code is now generated on essentially a compiler/debugger that simulates the machine. Machine programmers are scarce and now (even sans unions) are actually able to demand high prices in the same way a web developer can in our business.
I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "objective" (those claiming to be objective generally don't analyze the dominant ideologies they promote), but at least Noble is clear about his perspective.
I think you can see some of the struggles even in programming. I've spoken with managers who are honest about wanting replaceable coders, and won't willingly choose a technology which swings the balance of power away from them. (Which means they'll likely prefer Java over certain other contenders, even if they actually happen to believe this replaceable-cog strategy costs them more time and money, thereby lowering profits.)
(That's why many are attracted to startups; some of these counterproductive constraints are relaxed, due to the sheer difficulty of success.)
Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle.
I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so.
From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code.
In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.
First, it's important to note that this isn't Prof. Chomsky's analysis. You are actually quoting Chomsky quoting David Noble.
Going a bit further, the concern you raise regarding the plausibility of worker self-management is absolutely a valid one. There are a number of people doing work on the matter. I'm familiar with only a fraction of it, but enough to assure you that the problem is quite nuanced and more involved than you could intuit. There are at least hypotheses about what causes the problems you gesture to and there are proposed solutions. If you're interested, I can point you to Michael Albert's work on the subject.
It isn't formatted as a quote. It may be Noble's idea, but it's Chomsky saying it, in his own voice, so at the very least he agrees with it.
When you say a solution to the problem I raise, what do you mean? I don't regard it as a problem if the idea of overthrowing management only makes sense in some contexts and not in others.
Regarding your first point, Chomsky does agree with it, but you said "his analysis." I was pointing out that it isn't his analysis and also wanted to stress that he's referring to a much larger volume of work (a book), rather than making an off-the-cuff remark, so there would be a lot of material for you to study if you wanted to critique the analysis. It's usually unwise to do so only having read a summary.
With regard to your second point, you merely asserted that the plausibility of worker self-management is influenced by cultural variables. Here again I was implying that you ought to refrain from speculation before having studied the matter thoroughly, as I know there are a lot of other factors to consider. It is possible that your intuition is correct, but very unlikely unless it's informed by all the prior work on the subject.
Basically, on both counts I'm advocating humility and avoidance of speculation, which are principles that apply to almost all statements by everybody. I'm not interested in arguing for or against your points because I don't have the knowledge to do so in a reasonable way. My problem is that in your comment you betrayed evidence that neither do you, so I wanted to put a word of caution in there.
Speculation is the order of the day here. Maybe you're the one who knows the most on this subject amongst all the folks on Hacker News, and you should just go for it. No one's going to pull Noam Chomsky from the bushes.
Regarding your first point, Chomsky does agree with it, but you said "his analysis."
And you said he was "quoting David Noble." Let's call it a draw and try to stick to more interesting questions.
you merely asserted that the plausibility of worker self-management is influenced by cultural variables
I didn't mean to address the plausibility of self-management so much as the desirability of it. I didn't say it directly, but what I was questioning was the imperative to "get rid of the bosses," which seems to rest on the notion that management, as a class above and condescending to the workers, enjoys an undeserved superior status. Chomsky says they "don't do anything but get in the way," but of course that is rarely the case, which is why we talk about "worker self-management" instead of "workers and no management." If I see management as necessary work, if I do not feel demeaned relative to managers by my status as a non-manager, if I see management simply as a job that I find less attractive than my own, and if I want to exercise power over a very slim subset of management concerns (pay, working conditions, benefits) then where does my motivation to take over management responsibilities come from?
I think there's a very strong motive present in some cultures much more than in others, which is related to giving and receiving orders. For some people, giving and receiving orders means that the person giving orders is higher and better than the person receiving them. For others, giving and receiving orders simply means that the person giving the orders is exercising a certain limited authority inherent in his or her job responsibilities, and neither party is demeaned or elevated by the exchange. If management authority implies superior moral worth, and we deny that one person can be worth more than another, then management hierarchies are immoral and must be abolished. If giving and receiving orders is just a matter of people playing roles that help the business function efficiently, then two people can be utterly equal even though one has the authority to give certain orders to the other, and a hierarchical business structure does not shame or elevate anyone. It is merely effective or ineffective at serving the needs of the people who serve it, so a deep, shallow, or democratic management structure can be chosen according to which one allows the business to run most effectively.
I'm taking it for granted, by the way, that if non-management workers have the power to completely overthrow management, then they also have the power to force management to treat them fairly, and they choose between the two alternatives. If they somehow had the power to do the former but not the latter, then I suppose they would exercise the power they had.
Basically, on both counts I'm advocating humility and avoidance of speculation, which are principles that apply to almost all statements by everybody.
You're right; I know virtually nothing about this, and I am always happy to see someone more knowledgeable than me share what they know. However, if your contribution to the discussion is to point out my ignorance without attempting to remedy it, cite the existence of learned arguments that you don't care to share, and advocate deferring the point to authority instead of discussing it, then I don't think you're in a position to pass judgment on my contribution.
There's obviously little point in continuing this further. I originally wanted to point out that you were making some bold assertions. I also admitted ignorance, but I pointed you to Michael Albert's work, who both theorizes about and follows experiments in self-managing workplaces, where you'll be able to read that what you've pointed out is a valid concern and how they propose you get around it. Also, if you read it carefully, you'll also see some other small inaccuracies in your summary of Nobel's argument.
I didn't think I was being flippant or rude and I'm sorry that I've come across that way. If I did have knowledge or an informed opinion about this, I would've shared it. If I could've stated my opinion better, I would've. I shared what I knew. However, you also have a certain responsibility, if you want to be taken seriously, to study at least partially the material you criticize.
Yes, but you're leaving the managers in the same place in the power hierarchy.
Imagine instead a company where the manager had roughly the same responsibilities: coordination, planning, assigning work. BUT hr shit like hiring, firing, raises, etc was done by a quorum of workers/employees/machinists.
That is to say keep managers as a job but remove their real power over workers, put managers in the position of employees instead of employers.
They can wear their managerial hat but it's now much much more difficult for them to take as much control as they can get without any regard to costs and benefits.
It's (theoretically) one of the features of a worker's co-operative.
Interestingly, you see very anarchic power structures in some of the world's best software companies. Facebook, for instance, has very little hierarchy, and nearly all the manager are engineers. Valve has literally zero hierarchy, workers choose what they work on and decisions are made by consensus.
I'm reading your line of reasoning and coming to the opposite conclusions.
In the North Korean power structure, superior authorities need to be depended on to improve the "helpless" masses, and a takeover would not be believed to be an improvement because the new leaders would be, at best, equally as strong and wise as the old.
But in more egalitarian societies, the idea of "do it yourself" and "fixing the system" is taken seriously, and the corresponding societal myths reflect this - "The Emperor has no clothes", for example.
Yep, both cultures reinforce and stabilize themselves. That's why new cultural perspectives can be revolutionary. If Americans came to believe leadership should be based on superior personal virtue, then they might reject democracy, a la Plato and Confucius. If North Koreans came to believe that there is not a single "virtue" that makes a person superior at everything, that different people can be good or bad at different things, such as good at seeking power and bad at ruling justly, then they might demand institutions to protect themselves from the weaknesses of their leaders. They might decided that executive leadership is just a job that should be done by someone who is good at that particular thing, and that ordinary citizens are as qualified to choose their leaders as anyone else.
> If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats
Maybe the distinction is between ownership and non-ownership and also having the ability to control corporation. Have a say in the future direction and also being compensated proportionally to the total profit made. I think that's the distinction, not as much talking about middle managers per se.
I think you're right. Control is what people are after, and ownership is the right way to get it. Getting rid of management is a just knee-jerk reaction against management that isn't accountable to the interests of all employees. Nobody really wants to face the horrifying complexity of running a business without management and hierarchy, unless the business is extremely small. Allocation of personnel and resources among departments, choosing which business opportunities to pursue, choosing vendors, deciding to ax one product line in favor of another, performance reviews, hiring, firing, promotion, salary adjustment, how in the world would all that get done democratically? The first thing any democratic assembly of employees would do is start delegating authority so that decisions could be made in reasonable time and people could do their jobs instead of sitting in the assembly all day. What's the point of dissolving one bureaucracy if you're inevitably going to create another to replace it?
What workers want is ownership. The idea of kicking the bosses out is a holdover from the days when ownership and management weren't divorced, as they typically are today. Management serves at the pleasure of the owners, and if the workers are really able to "take over the factories," then management serves at their pleasure, which is a much simpler way of making management accountable to employees.
> You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.
"Boss" and "worker" are social roles. You're not abolishing 'management' you're abolishing 'managers,' which is a subtle but important difference.
Autonomy over your own destiny is important to humans. How many people want to 'do a startup' because it allows them to 'be their own boss'? Same basic need here.
This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people.
In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of déformation professionnelle due to their different job concerns.
In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.