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Keywords

The New Language of Capitalism

John Patrick Leary

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29 quotes

political-science

fm 6

  • When Marx and Engels wrote of capitalism’s conquest of social relations in the Communist Manifesto, they were diagnosing its relentless drive to expand across boundaries both territorial and spiritual; the latter conquest is one way to understand WeWork’s impulse to monetize children’s imaginations.Nov 18 2023 1:33AM

Chapter 1

  • Accountability is a technocratic ideal of justice, limited by the authority and prerogative of the bureaucracies to which one is held accountable. My own sense, as a teacher, has been that administrators only really begin counting things when they need to justify getting rid of them. When it combines the moral sense of duty with the bureaucratic zeal for quantification, accountability encodes the fiction that moral obligations can be measured, calculated, and, of course, valued financially.Nov 25 2023 3:01PM

Chapter 2

  • Like most jargon, the meaning of best practices comes as much from its literal signification as from the belonging that its use indicates: by using the phrase, one signals one’s place in a professional class and one’s knowledge of its attendant ideas.Nov 18 2023 1:44AM
  • The parent concept of best practices is “benchmarking,” which Camp defines as “the search for those best practices that will lead to the superior performance of a company,” and the pursuit of a standard of performance that “removes the subjectivity from decision-making.”Nov 18 2023 1:44AM
  • Part of the appeal of best practices lies in the antiseptic technicality with which it dispatches these fears. An organization pursuing best practices endeavors to follow what one encyclopedia calls “the most efficient or prudent course of action,” which makes it admittedly hard to argue with. What teacher, banker, crossing guard, or bus driver doesn’t want that? What alternative could there be—merely fine practices?Nov 25 2023 3:02PM

Chapter 3

  • One of the obvious contradictions in life coaching is the genre’s celebration of boldness on the one hand and its actual conformity on the other. You are advised to think outside the box, but of course there is no phrase more inside the box than “outside the box.”Nov 25 2023 3:08PM
  • “Collaboration Rules,” which urged managers to nurture work environments that generate “cheap, plentiful interactions” between workers as a way of breaking down organizational barriers and “silos.”Nov 25 2023 3:09PM
  • This way of working has been championed by the consumer-focused research consultancies that have proliferated over the last two decades, which speak an abstract and expensive argot of “innovation,” “strategy,” and “insight.”Nov 19 2023 11:37PM
  • Skills tell you what an employee does; competencies assess something more elusive: [S]kills don’t give us the “how.” How does an individual perform a job successfully? How do they behave in the workplace environment to achieve the desired result? Competencies provide that missing piece of the puzzle by translating skills into on-the-job behaviors that demonstrate the ability to perform the job requirements competently.Nov 25 2023 3:11PM

Chapter 3a

  • The problem here is not that there are clever engineers who take sanitation and toilet design seriously; rather, it is that in design thinking these solutions are unmoored from a political program that might address the inequities that make them necessary in the first place. This is a perspective encouraged by imagining resource problems as design problems. It’s a perspective that depoliticizes scarcity, treating it as a technical problem rather than one of resource inequality or exploitation.Nov 25 2023 3:19PM

Chapter 4

  • Excellence, in other words, is the pursuit of excellence. A common thread among terms like accountability, innovation, and resilience is this tendency to tautology. This is because such terms often have no independent meaning outside of the approving circles of their own circulation. Their meanings “float,” intelligible in terms of themselves or some synonym. As a result, excellence is often accused of being an empty platitude when it is not derided as a form of undercover elitism. In the former instance, it has suffered what linguists call “semantic bleaching”— the weakening of its meaning over time.Nov 25 2023 3:26PM

Chapter 5

  • Austerity culture seems to demand a sort of embodied moral discipline, like that of the ascetic in the wilderness: trimmed of excess bulk, devoted to a single task, scornful of leisure that might detract from it.Nov 25 2023 3:28PM
  • Flexibility means freedom through “versatility,” a quality said to inhere in the private market and in the digital technologies that often serve as a proxy for it. Besides versatility, the ability to do anything, flexibility also suggests capriciousness, the willingness to bend and yield as required.Nov 25 2023 3:28PM
  • A nimble organization maximizes productivity while minimizing labor costs, but it also requires flexible employees who can bend into as many different shapes as possible. The body-talk of contemporary capitalism imagines corporate businesses as bodies in virtually every way except as a group of overextended or underpaid ones. Those who invoke flexibility in earnest typically imagine themselves as great pragmatists, quantifying competencies wherever and whatever they may be. Less moralistic than nimble and less prophetic than innovation, the always ill-defined concept of flexibility celebrates a class-bound versatility. With flexibility and the right software, our bosses can conquer time and bend it to their will—and bend us, their subordinates, as well.Nov 25 2023 3:29PM

Chapter 6

  • In fact, Duckworth’s grit is a combination of Alger’s grit and pluck: unusual firmness as well as heart.Nov 20 2023 2:15AM

Chapter 7

  • There is no entry in this book for “labor.” This is because when people who speak the language of late capitalism want to refer to it, they say “human capital.” “Investing in human capital” is a tried-and-true phrase favored by financial institutions, policy-wonks in mainstream US politics, and the global elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.Nov 25 2023 3:30PM
  • As the Marxist economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis concluded pithily in a 1975 critique of the then-novel term, human capital doesn’t mean much on its own terms, but it does make “a good ideology for the defense of the status quo.”Nov 25 2023 3:31PM

Chapter 8

  • In a 2011 reflection on the late Apple computer executive Steve Jobs, probably the archetypal hero-innovator of our time, a San Francisco Chronicle author praised his “constant desire to innovate and take chances.” Here, the verb is used intransitively, in the more modern sense—that is, there is no direct object—but it lacks even the faintest hint of a reference. Jobs is no longer innovating on or upon anything in particular, which can make “innovate” sound like a kind of mantra.Nov 25 2023 3:34PM

Chapter 9

  • One thing we can conclude from all of the above is that like many other corporate keywords in this volume, leadership means very little, but it offers quite a lot. What it offers is a sense of control and a sense of justice. To underpaid subordinates lost in bureaucracies, the populist model of leadership offers a sense of agency, the possibility of advancement and appreciation. Leadership courses taken by those already born on third base, meanwhile, might offer the comforting confirmation that they deserve their advantage. And for those who are already in charge, the fetish for leadership only enhances their value. TNov 25 2023 3:37PM
  • To borrow a phrase that Blum uses to describe the twentieth-century self-help literature from which it springs, leadership is “secularism with benefits.” In its anxious repetitions, it borrows the sound of a mantra, and in its gestures to abstract principles and “Eastern” faiths, it approximates the depth and wisdom of liturgy, but always with the expectation of material reward: all the benefits of a faith without any of its harder demands—reckoning with doubt, for example. As Jack Welch says somewhere, doubt is not a leadership quality.Nov 20 2023 2:13AM

Chapter 10

  • America’s meritocracy is a rhetorical point of consensus that “undergirds our debates,” he writes, “but is itself never the subject of them.” For Lauren Berlant, American meritocracy is a fantasy of “being deserving,” a form of “cruel optimism” that sustains the belief that those who are cleverest and try hardest will surely be judged worthy—an ostensibly egalitarian sheen for a mean class system.Nov 25 2023 3:38PM

Chapter 12

  • Another problem with outcomes is the timescale on which they work: the phrase “learning outcome” can often be synonymous with a day’s or week’s “lesson plan,” as Hussey and Smith write. But in scaling up from a particular module to a semester-long class or a course of study, learning outcomes cannot help but be general, even rote recitations of general ambitions, rather than measurable tasks.Nov 25 2023 3:41PM

Chapter 13

  • These elements of a passion are elusive and not easily commodifiable—if they were, Phoenix newspapers would not run regular articles bemoaning Arizona fans’ lack of passion. This dilemma has not stopped marketers and management scholars from developing metrics for measuring passion, though. One scholar, a true romantic named Michael Lewis, calls passion “fan equity.” Passion, therefore, is a pillar of late capitalist ideology, but passion is also a social feeling that lives on the edge of what can be captured by the market: passion is, as it has always been, mysterious, dangerous, and somewhat unmanageable. In other words, you can never really bottle and sell it, try though you might. And many do try: passion is the “secret sauce” for success, according to more than a few business writers, their metaphors for life’s deepest mysteries apparently limited to McDonald’s condiments.Nov 25 2023 3:42PM
  • In Trump, though, the shallowness of the concept is laid bare. He is regarded either as a thoroughly fabricated TV character, incapable of authentic conviction, or a thoroughly authentic person who “says what he thinks.” So his pivots could only ever be either insincere or self-incriminating. If you’re a malleable blowhard, then all you do is pivot; if you are capable of authentic conviction, then any pivot is a betrayal. When someone politically pivots, they change appearance while staying in one placeNov 25 2023 3:44PM
  • The pivot is like a beginner’s magic trick: turning around in a circle, hiding the rabbit, and hoping your audience is fooled.Nov 25 2023 3:43PM

Chapter 14a

  • Second, the rise of solutions, as with best practices and competencies, exemplifies the increasing separation in corporate culture (and everything shaped in its image) of practices and technologies from their products and effects. This presumption of technological value-neutrality is only enhanced by the soporific blandness of “solutions.”Nov 20 2023 2:04AM
  • While much business jargon, like jargon of any kind, appears meaningless to outsiders, the real meaning it produces is not always in the words themselves, but in the disguise it creates—that is, the group identity the words create among those who know and use them. But, also like a mask, jargon often hides its meaning. So, what is business synergy hiding?Nov 18 2023 1:40AM
  • McKinsey executive who cut to the chase by admitting that “synergy in most cases is another name for head-count reductions.” (“Head-count reductions,” of course, is another name for “you’re fired.”) This is where synergy enters the vocabulary of late capitalism. Unlike lean, flexible, and nimble management, which are ways of dressing up the vulnerability and disposability of workers in a language of efficiency, synergy dresses up the vulnerability of executives in a language of unity.Nov 18 2023 1:41AM

Chapter 15

  • Thought leadership has more in common with the older phrase, “men of industry.” That is, thought leadership broadcasts the elitist impulses that leadership, entrepreneurship, and innovation often conceal behind a democratic front of accessibility. David Sessions reads the thought leader as the organic intellectual of the one percent: that is, a figure who gives this class a sense of its purpose in society. This thought leader’s mission, Sessions argues convincingly, is “to mirror, systematize, and popularize the delusions of the superrich: that they have earned their fortunes on merit, that social protections need to be further eviscerated to make everyone more flexible for ‘the future,’ and that local attachments and alternative ways of living should be replaced by an aspirational consumerism.” And while thought leadership has the hackneyed air of an overused recent coinage, it is, like innovation, an old concept that thinks it is utterly new.Nov 18 2023 1:36AM

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