A chapter first written to appear in D. Pym and M. Guirdham (Eds.) “Essays in Emancipation from Organizations.” London Business School, 1982 (Never in fact published), updated, 30^th Dec, 2003.

THE MANUFACTURE OF PERSONHOOD,

AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MUTUAL HUMILIATION

                                                                                John Shotter

Emeritus Professor of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH 03824-3586

U.S.A.

Abstract: Currently, scientific knowledge is privileged as being true knowledge. Because it has been arrived at by systematic inquiry supported by evidence, we think of it as being more certain and reliable than our ordinary, everyday, common sense understandings of things. Consequently, many feel justified in substituting scientific modes of thought, along with their associated ways of talking, judging, and acting, in as many different spheres of our everyday lives as possible. For surely, they say, such ‘true’ understandings should lead to better lives for us all? This article disputes this claim. It is not just that a mechanical, cause and effect way of thinking is central to many scientific forms of thought at the moment, but that they all support a tendency to analyse the events and circumstances they treat as problematic, into separately existing, self-contained parts which can be measured, counted, or weighed, and thus numerically evaluated. What can easily be lost or forgotten in this process, however – in which people are also treated as separately existing, self-contained individuals, owing nothing to the others around them for their nature – is our spontaneous, living relations to each other. Yet this unnoticed background provides us with the everyday, pre-scientific understandings upon which, in fact, our supposed scientific understandings depend. Indeed, rather than underlying our everyday understandings, crucial terms in our social theories are often in fact derived from them. Thus it is no surprise to find that present theories of our own inner workings provided us by cognitive science, have their earlier origins out in the larger world of business and manufacture. But for us consistently to react to each in this supposedly ‘scientific’ way, as if we are merely numerical elements in a great process of manufacture, and not the unique individuals we are, is not just for us to treat each other as ‘out of the ordinary’ in some way. It is, as the article makes clear, for us to degrade and to humiliate each other (Garfinkel, 1956). Adopting methods of ‘scientific management’ and ‘the market’ into all our relations with each other, can lead us into becoming dominated by our own techniques of domination, the loss of our free agency. Do we really want to live like this?

Keywords: Scientific management, cognitive science, Taylorism, the market, domination, humiliation.

“We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may conquer them” (C.S. Lewis, 1978, p.43).

“Instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a practical philosophy can be found by which... [we can] make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes, 1968/1631, p.78).

A first version of this paper was written back in 1982, against the background of what then worried me greatly as a worker in academic Psychology. For it then seemed to me that, not only was there the development of a mechanical, cause and effect way of thinking that could lead to the dehumanizing of people, the treating of people as merely numerical entities, but also of a disrespectful and degrading way in which expert researchers related themselves to those whom they were researching into. They related to them only through thoughts and theories, not in a living responsive way. Both the way of thinking and ways of relating, I thought, could easily spread out from academic Psychology into society at large. Indeed, in an earlier work (Shotter, 1975), I had quoted Sigmund Koch’s (1964) comments on the dangerous tendencies he saw at work both in the world at large, and how academic Psychology was failing to resist these tendencies. As he then saw it: “... the mass dehumanization which characterizes our time, the simplification of sensibility, homogenisation of experience, attenuation of the capacity for experience [currently at work in our societies] continues apace. Of all fields in the community of scholarship, it should be psychology which combats this trend. Instead, we have played no small role in augmenting and supporting it” (p.37).

              I originally wrote this paper precisely in response to Koch’s lament. A while ago, I mentioned its existence to Werner Fricke, the editor of this journal, and he asked to read it, and was then keen to publish the article as it then stood. I felt, however, that it was too obviously still situated in the 1980's and that I needed to update at least some aspects of it. Although the main themes seem to me (and I guess to Werner Fricke also), perhaps even more relevant now than twenty years ago: in an age in which quantification, spread-sheet administration, has spread into every aspect of our lives. Although not, I hasten to add, due to the great success of academic Psychology colonizing the rest of its surroundings, but due to the general growth of the administered society (Habermas, 1979), and to the spread of the market and to the measured relations it introduces into every crevice of our lives both in our relations to each other, and, perhaps even more importantly, in our own relations to ourselves. I mention this to make clear why so many of the citations are from twenty years ago, and are not, so to speak, up-to-the-minute although, to repeat, to the extent that our ends are in our beginnings, we can find in these beginnings many of the tendencies that are now coming to realization in the violent, distrustful relations everywhere prevalent in our time.

              Memorable for me at the time of its original writing, and influential in the title of this paper, was a newspaper image from one of the anti-Vietnam marches in New York in the late 60's. The punched cards for IBM machines used to have printed on them: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR BEND, and a marcher, naked except for having encircled himself in a large, punched card-like piece of cardboard, had written on his costume: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR BEND, I AM A PERSON. He was reminding us that we are more than just living organisms to each other, we are persons, and persons have a very special status in their relations with each other. They cannot just be reduced to numbers, to patterns of punched holes for a digital machine. It is that the degradation of that status that I wanted then, and want now, to examine in this article. 

              Written just as the Postmodernist movement was beginning, the article began and continued as follows : People used to believe in Progress: that human toil and poverty could be eliminated; that improved manufacturing processes, communications, and transport would make available to many what had been available only to a few; that people’s increasing ability to be (as Descartes put it at the inception of the modern age) the masters and possessors of Nature, would lead to increasing knowledge, power and wealth for all. At least, that was the vision offered in the rhetoric of modernity which motivated the frontiersmen of industrialization. Although it was opposed and is still opposed in Britain by establishment elites who dream of peace and stability (and of their own privileges) within a pastoral idyll (Weiner, 1982; Darendorf, 1982) many nonetheless identified with it; and all willy-nilly became enthralled by it, unable to resist its apparently all encompassing rationality.

              Belief in progress of that kind, however, drawing upon the resources of science, now seems to be collapsing, to be turning in fact, into a nightmare. We feel at the end rather than at the beginning of an age; rather than new opportunities appearing on the horizon, even those we already have seem to be slipping from us (Lasch, 1980). Something is happening: instead of masters we seem to be becoming victims once more -- all of us. The attempt implicit in our productive ways of life to dominate Nature, has led in fact to us becoming dominated by our own techniques of domination: thus we find ourselves becoming increasingly objective and detached, even in relation to ourselves; required always to program our actions before executing them, we feel unable to act immediately and spontaneously, to decide what to do in the course of doing it the idea of an inner game (Gallwey, 1974), of acting in an appropriate way spontaneously, comes as a revelation to us. We have become divorced from our feelings and intuitions; unsure as to what we ourselves want and what we can claim by right, we feel we can only justify our claims by reference to proven facts. Indeed, if we do attempt to do anything to alleviate our distress, we seem simply to reproduce it in an intensified form -- iatrogenic diseases mount, education seems to fail, our professions disable us (Illich, 1975, 1976). We feel helpless and disempowered, as if assailed on all sides by a world which is alien to us.

              If we are to understand what is actually happening to us (what in fact we are doing to ourselves), if we are to understand the social conditions which determine people’s unhappy experience of themselves at present, then we require (a) an account of what actually is to be a person, and (b) an account of how we currently account for ourselves to one another, how we rationally justify and legitimate the ways in which we treat one another -- to compare it with (a) to see to what extent our current ways of relating ourselves to one another fall short of those required if we are to experience ourselves actually as persons, in the fullest sense of that word.

                                                                    What is it to be a person?

Before turning to that task, I must first point out that if we are to give a full and proper description of what it is to be a person, then what we require is neither a theory, nor a model of persons: we must not talk about them as really being something else, as entities which require an unusual description in special theoretical terms; nor must we talk about them as being to an extent like something else which, in other respects, is not actually like a person at all. Both these ways provide only partial views; and our task is to talk about persons actually as persons. Thus, we must simply collect together in an orderly and systematic manner, what persons already know about what it is to be a person, what all competent persons must know in being able to conduct themselves as they do. What we require is an account of personhood in the ordinary sense of that term, as simply a report or description of a circumstance or state of affairs. Something which in its telling moves us this way and that through the current terrain of personhood, so to speak, sufficiently for us to gain a conceptual grasp of the whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it. What we in fact require, is an understanding of what, in our ordinary everyday lives (when not functioning as an expert with a special purpose in mind), it means for us to treat each other as persons.

              This is the special power of Wittgenstein’s (1953) later philosophical investigations: to bring to our attention in the concrete contexts of their occurrence, the myriad small but different details that are of importance to us in our many different dealings with each other, in addressing each other personally. Central to his approach, that makes it very different from all previous philosophical approaches based, as they are in ways of thinking, is his emphasis on our ways of acting. Indeed, his primary emphasis is not on what we do deliberately and voluntarily, but on what we do spontaneously, in immediate, unthinking response to events in our surroundings. For it is only in these detailed circumstances that the meanings in terms of which we conduct our daily lives together are revealed. By emphasizing the use of our words, our utterances and other expressions, in relation to their concrete surroundings, Wittgenstein retains what is lost in analyses in the behavioral sciences: for they analyze our living activities into separate elements, they divorce them from their surroundings, and re-insert them into a theoretical schematism of a mechanical kind, thus to gain control over them. But to re-describe them in this way, is to lose what it is about people’s expressions that makes them meaningful to us: their spontaneously responsive relations to events in their surroundings.

              I shall not discuss in any detail here all the different ordering devices which might be produced to systematize the knowledge we all have as to what persons are, about how we individuate them and distinguish them from all the other things that there are. A number of such systems of differences, some of them highly technical, have already been produced (see Davis, 1981, 1982, as well as Saussure, 1911). Below, it will be sufficient simply to indicate some crucial distinctions we must make in recognizing persons as persons.

              As anthropologists point out, wherever human beings exist in a group, within a social totality, they exist as persons (Geertz, 1983a); that is, they exist as beings aware in some sense of the character of their social order, and they are able to take responsibility, i.e., be accountable (Mills, 1940, Scott and Lyman, 1968), for its continual reproduction in their everyday activities. Persons possess, we say, a common sense and render what they do and what happens around them intelligible and account for it in its terms B even utterly untoward events are eventually made sense of in the terms it provides. Unlike a scientific theory, such a common sense cannot be upset by events which seem to contradict it B even though in the history of a culture it can slowly be transformed. For, quite literally, people do not know how to doubt it; the formulation and expression of intelligible doubts requires people to use as appropriate the very categories they want to question B doubts about them may be mooted, but they cannot be expressed with any logical force, hence the apparent ultimate status of such categories. Yet the common sense of one social order can be very different from that of another, and what are facts within one order can seem ridiculous conceits in another B for instance, the idea that we have minds and memories which mediate between us and our world, is a notion alien to some African peoples; what we attribute to processes within us, they attribute to agencies in the external world, to ghosts and spirits, etc. (Leinhardt, 1961). Clearly, although we have no experience of our hand in its making, our common sense is produced and reproduced by us in our daily social activities.

              Besides a shared or common sense, what is also necessary to human existence within a social order is the possession by all its members of a unique identity: everyone must know their momentary place or position within it, and a knowledge of rights and duties that their place affords them. Unique identities are necessary, for if a social order is to be self-maintaining and self-reproducing, then departures from it must be recognized, identified, and repaired; whereabouts in the totality they occurred must be located, wrong-doers must be individually identified. And in our individualistic culture, it is the specific individual who must be condemned and attempt to make restitution (and be thereby redeemed); whereas in other more communal cultures than ours, once the wrongdoer has been identified, the restitution of the social order can be done in a communal ritual: “something must be wrong with us,” they may say, “such that our brother or sister has strayed” (Lutz, 1988).

              To qualify as a person, then, as a competent autonomous manner of a society, individuals must be able (if asked to do so) to answer for themselves and their conduct; that is, they have to be able to indicate in a way which makes sense to others, who and what they are (i.e. where in their society they are placed), and what they are trying to do. In other words, they have to be able to fulfill a certain duty: they have to be able, even when all alone, to be able to monitor and evaluate their experience of their own action, in terms they share with others in their community, i.e. in common sense terms. But along with that duty goes a right: persons can expect most of what they do and say to be taken seriously and responded to without question, as meaning what they intend it to mean. They will only have to justify or explain their action if it is puzzling, suspicious, or enigmatic in some way. They must show how, in fact, what they did can be explained in the basic, taken for granted terms in which the reality of everyday life is understood -- thus reaffirming those terms.

              But, they will not have to justify everything that they do; indeed, that is impossible: it would be as if, after having justified to someone that 12 X 12 = 144 (by reference, ultimately, to the fact that 1 X 1 = 1 and 2 X 1 = 2, etc.), that someone was then to say “Now justify to me in the same way that 1 X 1 =1.” That would be to doubt, not just a particular result within the social practice of doing arithmetic, but the very possibility of doing arithmetic at all. For 1 X 1 = 1 is one of the taken for granted paradigms, the canonical forms, upon which the practice is based, and into which we have all been trained as children. A social practice provides the framework within, the background against which particular results within that practice can be evaluated, but the practice itself cannot be evaluated in the same terms -- which is just to repeat Kuhn’s (1962) central point in other words: that scientific theories are grounded ultimately in the practices they work to inform, guide and explain, and do not have a determinate sense apart from them.

              To describe the nature of personhood in this way, in terms of reciprocally linked rights and duties, privileges and obligations, invitations and rebuffs, etc., is to describe it as a status, as the genus to which all the other statuses available to people: man, woman, father, mother, child, judge, policeman, etc., are the species. All can be described as different locations, places, or positions within a socially structured environment. In other words, according to their status, different people may experience their social environment as offering them different opportunities for action. And what they do by their actions, moment-by-moment, is to change that status; they change their momentary position in their society in relation to others: they assert, for instance, a right to entertain a certain mode of relationship, while at the same time, perhaps, committing themselves to various duties it entails. For example, saying to someone “I love you,” is not so much to give a retrospective report upon a state one finds oneself already to be in, as prospectively to create a new situation in which one commits oneself to the person in the hope of certain rights of access to their person in the future; the difference between these two kinds of utterance being, the difference between a 3^rd-person report, and a 1^st-person telling. Where it is only through their 1^st-person tellings, their expressions, that we get to know another person’s inner life, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and judgments, i.e., how their world is for them.

              Thus in this view, the everyday world of social activity can be seen as an ever changing sea of rights and duties, privileges and obligations, and enablements and constraints. But there is one outstanding right: one’s 1^st-person right to express oneself, and to be taken by the others around you seriously B if, that is, one can account for, or answer for oneself. And one can only learn to do that, if one has had the developmental opportunities, in one’s social environment to develop the appropriate forms of common sense skills; without those opportunities, one cannot fulfill the duty required to qualify for the right of self-expression and self-determination.

              The point to be drawn from the descriptive analysis of personhood provided above is this: the tabula rasa theory of human nature, and the theory of possessive individualism which flows from it -- the theory that “the individual (is) essentially the proprietor of his (or her) own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (Macpherson, 1964, p.3) -- must be rejected. People cannot be treated as being simply persons in themselves; they owe their personhood to others. And they can only be a person if treated as such by the others around them, and children can only develop from dependent persons into autonomous ones if given the developmental opportunities as they grow up to do so (Shotter, 1974; Shotter, 1984; Shotter and Newson, 1982) . Personhood is a status conferred upon one by others, and if others do not take one’s expressions of self seriously, if they do not respond to your utterances and other expressions as you intend, then you are being denied your opportunity to be a person -- you are being degraded and humiliated.

              In this view, then, what people take their selves to be is not something they simply find within themselves, as a fact of nature, and which they express this way and that as best they can, given the opportunities provided them in their environment. What they take themselves to be -- how they perceive, their forms of experience, and their ways of talking about themselves -- are all produced and reproduced in the continuous flow of human activity (constituting their social order) within which they grow from children into adults. Hence, we experience ourselves as being very much the kind of person we are treated as being even to the extent, sometimes, of thinking of ourselves as being stupid, bad, or wicked people, who deserve to be treated as such by others. But our current forms of psychological analysis, in analyzing all our living activities into separate elements divorced from their surroundings, prevent us by their very nature from understanding the source of our own bad feelings about ourselves. Thus, even if we feel a sense of lack, an inadequacy within ourselves, the only disquiets about our lives we can intelligibly express, are ones which reproduce in their expression the very practices about which we would like to raise a doubt. In other words, they reproduce in their expression the same separation or exclusion from the relations with the others around us that we wish to criticize. Legitimately, we cannot discuss such disquiets because we cannot account for them logically, i.e., within a rational scheme of things in which proofs are possible. To that extent, our accounts lack rational force; others can dismiss them as simply untrue where’s our evidence, where’s our proof?

              Later, I shall argue that we have in fact adopted a mode of rationality which leads us to treat ourselves as we treat entities within a manufacturing process. We act as if we are related to one another (and to ourselves) as puppets or robots, moving only according to external forces, controlling ourselves as if by pulling our own strings or pressing our own buttons. We act as if we were a machine within a machine, a mental machine, within a bodily machine. We treat ourselves and others like this because, when we reflect upon ourselves and our actions, the systems within which we think about and talk about ourselves, allow the articulation of views only of a certain kind: theoretical (and thus partial) views supported by the facts produced by their application. These are the only ways of talking which we can rationally justify within our current version of what it is to be scientific in our claims to truth. But with respect to our everyday activities, our living relations with each other, this entails re-situating and re-formulating our accounts of our open, dialogically-structured activities in terms of closed, single, systematic orders of connectedness -- thus to render them as scientific truths, rather than as merely possibly understandable activities within a particular living context. Such systematic, scientific ways of talking, however, suggest that we talk about ourselves in a cause and effect way, in a way which does not allow us to describe the special, noncausal (intentional) processes making us truly human. Consequently, whenever we act on the basis of plans or policies formulated within this framework, we humiliate each other, we treat people as less than human. As Marx pointed out, we produce within ourselves a false consciousness : we confront ourselves as being other than what we actually are, and in particular, we experience ourselves as helpless in the face of what seem to us alien forces, external to human influence, the supposed ‘technological imperatives’ of our time.

              In the next section, I shall turn to a discussion of psychological research, and argue that it is very largely Taylorism (i.e. an application of the principles of “scientific management”) in disguise. In its current “cognitive phase,” it is concerned to analyze all intelligent human activities in such a way, that they can be broken down and down into a hierarchy of sub-activities so that finally, a level is reached when each activity can be performed by a machine. Here, however, I want to point out why a critique of this way of talking about intelligent activities in psychology is of crucial importance to us at this moment in time. It is crucially important, because all the other social and behavioral sciences rest upon the more basic science of psychology; they turn to psychology for an account of what it is that makes for an action into both an intelligent and an autonomous action. That is, we need to understand what it is that makes an action into an action that is, on the one hand, a considered or reasoned action that takes into account the surrounding conditions within which it must be performed, and on the other, what it is about an action that makes it into an action of our’s and not an action under the control of others, so that we become a mere pawn in the realization of their desires. Economics, politics, government, jurisprudence, business management, etc., all make assumptions about the nature of people’s processes of reasoning in the conduct of their own affairs. But, to the extent that these disciplines leave to psychology the task of explaining how and why people reason as they do, if psychology is wrong in its account of people’s intelligent behavior, then these sciences will be ill-founded. In the next section I will turn to an examination of the account currently offered, i.e., in 1982, by psychology of such behavior.

The scientific management of psychological (mental) processes:

hierarchically structured processes of manufacture

Control mechanisms: Since its inauguration as a science 100 years ago, one whole main stream of psychological research has been concerned with mechanisms within us said to be mediating our activities: mechanisms of perception, motivation, learning, and memory, etc.; where such mechanisms are presented, in fact, as doing our seeing, and reasoning, etc., for us. And we have often used this vision of such a form of order, to organize and structure of relations with each other in our work organizations. In this section, however, I want to be critical of such mechanical forms of order, especially for how they in fact exclude what it is in our own human activities that makes them intelligent, and allows us to creatively respond to the many different contingencies occurring in our surroundings.

              We can begin with Neisser’s (1967) views, whose book coming after Miller, Galanter and Pribram’s (1960) Plans and the Structure of Behavior, was taken generally as marking the start of the “cognitive revolution” in experimental psychology that I want to be critical of here. While committing himself to what he called “the program analogy” in describing psychological processes, he made it clear that this was not to claim that machines themselves were intelligent: “It is true,” he said, “that a number of researchers, not content with noting that computer programs are like cognitive theories, have tried to write programs which are cognitive theorists” (Neisser, 1967, p.9). But for Neisser himself, the task of a psychologist trying to understand human cognition is, he said, “analogous to that of a man trying to discover how a computer has been programmed” (p.6). And this is how psychologists in general do see their goal in their doing of their science, and the nature of the phenomena with which they must deal -- they now want to discover the underlying rules they see as governing what we do.

              I want to show that, even if one does inveigh, as Neisser does, against the view that people are machines, the pursuit of the program analogy in our understanding of ourselves is still nonetheless degrading, and leads us within our current hierarchical conceptions of organizations, to treating ourselves willy-nilly as machines. I would like to begin simply by quoting a passage from Adam Smith’s (1947/1776), Wealth of Nations:

              “In the progress of the division of labor, the employment of the far greater part of these who live by labor, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations...has no occasion to exert his understanding... He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” (pp.781-782).

Adam Smith extolled the division of labor for “the great increase in the quantity of work...the same number of people are capable of performing” (p.771).

              But, for F.W. Taylor (1947), there was another reason for the division of labor: “All possible brain work should be removed from the (work) shop and centered in the planning or layout department,” he said (p.25), because (and here I quote Braverman’s (1974) summary of Taylor’s conclusions):

              “Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip upon the actual processes of labor. So long as they control the labor process itself, they will thwart efforts to realize to the full the potential inherent in their labor power. To change this situation, control over the labor process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the control and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance” (p.100).

Thus, Taylor introduced into the analysis of the work process the aims of both centralizing control, and rendering the work process independent of craft, tradition, and the worker’s skills.

              As Andrew Ure (1835) put it in his book The Philosophy of Manufactures: “The grand object of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercises and dexterity... appropriate to a child.” And this is what, by applying the intellectual resources of science to the interests of capital, Taylor in his system of scientific management achieved.

              It will be instructive now, however, to see how these aims were also present at the inception of the so-called cognitive revolution in academic Psychology. Although here, they were not presented in a business or commercial context, as the kind of analysis required if managers are to get control of the production process to direct it in the most profitable manner. They were presented as a philosophically respectable analysis of what intelligent action in actual fact is. Daniel Dennett (1979), who was then seen by many academic psychologists as a philosopher supportive of the current “information processing” view of cognitive abilities, outlined the “remarkably fruitful research strategy” of the artificial intelligence (AI) programmer thus:

              “His first and highest level of design breaks the computer down into subsystems...into a committee or army of intelligent homunculi with purposes, information and strategies. Each homunculus in turn is analyzed into smaller homunculi, but, more important, into less clever homunculi. When the level is reached where the homunculi are no more than adders and subtractors, by the time they need only the intelligence to pick the larger of the two numbers when directed to, they have been reduced to functionaries ‘who can be replaced by a machine’” (pp.80-81).

Dennett produces here an account as a description of what intelligent activities are , but in so doing, he executes a philosophical sleight of hand which, apparently, diverts even his attention from the main point, never mind ours: for what is intelligent here is not the product, the program for the activity produced by the programmer, but the process by which it is initially produced by the programmer. Plan-following, as Dennett himself says, can be done by a machine; whereas, plan-creating, program-creating, is a different kind of activity altogether (see Ryle, 1949) -- it requires judgment as to what should be the features in our surroundings that have significance for us as embodied beings.

              Nonetheless, what Dennett presents here is a philosophical argument, not a commercial one. Yet, I think it is worth noting, that the computers that inspired the cognitive revolution, were first developed in a business context. IBM does, after all, stand for International Business Machines, and the very development of the Difference Engine, the forerunner of the modern computer which is now offered as the model of mind by workers such as Dennett, was undertaken by Charles Babbage within the context of automating and controlling processes of manufacture. In his 1832 book, The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Babbage, 1963), he begins where Adam Smith left off, with a detailed, seven page analysis of pin-making. In other words, Babbage’s concerns were not purely mathematical; he in fact was concerned with commerce and manufacture.

              But I do not want to argue in any crude sense, that because computers had their origins in commercial life, that accounts such as Dennett’s represent the result of a conspiratorial union of science and capital; not in the least. It is not necessarily people’s commercial concerns which lead them to theorize as they do; the form their theory takes can arise entirely as an unintended consequence of the fact that the theories people produce must reflect the ways in which those who produce them account for their experience of their reality intelligibly, in ways that make sense to other people in their society. That they see it as working in terms of hierarchies of domination along mechanical lines should come as no surprise, for that is how most of our social institutions have been structured for some long time now.

But let me just add here (with the 2003 hindsight gained since 1982 ) three further points: (1) One is that we are now, gradually, becoming much more aware of the difference between those conditions of our lives which we (without any awareness of our own agency in the process) make between ourselves and to which we then subordinate ourselves -- e.g., our cultural traditions (Geertz, 1983b), the grammars (Wittgenstein, 1953) and syntax (Chomsky, 1965) of our language, our systems of accountability (Mills, 1940, Scott and Lyman, 1968) -- and the other aspects of our lives over which we have (as yet) no control whatsoever. We might call these two different conditions, the humanly constructed , and the natural conditions of our lives. We have remained unaware of our own agency in the humanly constructed conditions of our lives until recently, because they are the outcome of joint, collective, or dialogically-structured activities (Shotter, 1984, 1993) occurring between us. In such collective activities, when someone acts, their actions cannot be accounted as wholly their own, for each individual’s acts are partly shaped by their acting in response to the acts of the others around them . Thus in such conditions, our actions are neither your’s nor mine; they are truly our’s, collectively. This, however, means that we cannot account for them in terms of any prior events, i.e., their supposed causes, or in terms of the reasons or intentions of any identifiable individuals -- in other words, in terms of our current ways of making sense of people’s activities, they are, so to speak, rationally invisible to us, mysterious and unaccountable.

              It is Wittgenstein’s (1953) great achievement, not only to bring the existence of these otherwise unnoticed background activities to our attention, and the way in which all our expressions only have their meaning when embedded within them, but also to provide us with some methods of practical inquiry enabling us to recognize the many fleeting but crucial points within them when our agency is at work (Shotter, 2001) thus to enable us to become aware of our own role in their construction, and of the fact that there are other roles that we might play. In other words, our currently taken-for-granted ways of relating ourselves both to each other and to the world around us our forms of life, as Wittgenstein (1953) calls them could be different.

              This leads me on to my next additional point: (2) above, I mentioned Dennett’s (1979) philosophical sleight of hand, in which he diverts our attention away from the fact that what is intelligent in a computer program is not the program itself (as a product of the programmers’s art), but the process by which programmers produce it . In other words, in the light of Wittgenstein’s methods, we can now see that the Tayloristic kind of analysis exhibited in Dennett’s account of intelligent human activities, is both (a) after the fact and (b) beside the point. (a) It is after the fact in the sense of that it looks back on already successfully completed events with the aim of finding an order or pattern in them that can be instituted mechanically, unthinkingly, according to rules or recipes. But if we do want to understand our own role in our collective activities, (b) it is beside the point, for we need to focus, not on the form of their ultimate outcome, but on the particular, moment-by-moment, unfolding, concrete details of their performance, the detailed contingencies to which, as agents, we must be responsive in the performance of our actions. It is precisely these contingent details and the judgments we must as agents make in coping with them that are ignored in such Tayloristic analyses. Indeed, to try to represent such loose-textured, temporal, disorderly processes in which many possibilities are considered but few are chosen as an already orderly and coherent process, is to hide from ourselves the character of the social negotiations, navigations, and struggles productive of its order. In other words, such analyses are only of use to us when trying to replace people by machines. But they are useless to us if we want to come to a deeper understanding of our own actual role in our own intelligent activities, the unique judgments we each must make at every moment in the actual local context of our actions.

              It is thus no wonder that, not only is there always a seeming reservoir of still untapped ‘tacit knowledge’ left behind in the attempt to apply such methods of work-study to people’s activities, but also, that such methods, in excluding agents’s own judgments in the execution of their own actions, create resentments and resistances in those to whom they are applied.

              This brings me to my third extra point, (3) which is to do with our sense of being a free agent in our actions, and our reasons for the intensity with which we are prepared even to fight for such a freedom: As living beings, we cannot help but be responsive in some way to events in our surroundings. In an Afterword to this article, I will comment further on Klaus Peters’s (2001) brilliant analysis on what it is to have autonomy in our actions, in contrast to acting heteronomously, and how it is that new methods of management being instituted at the present time, i.e., around 2000 which seem to give more freedom of action to employees in fact work in a hidden way to give less. But let me note here, that crucial in his analysis is the difference between being able oneself to act in response to calls from one’s surroundings (whether from other people, or from natural events), and having to act in ways which are imposed upon one by another person, particularly if one’s way of acting is to their advantage. This difference, however, is a rather subtle one to make clear, for, to the extent that we must always be responsive to the others around us in some way, we will always be acting to an extent heteronomously.

              To appreciate what is at stake here, let us consider, say, simply being in conversation with friend. We talk in response to their talk. Thus clearly, we can never be completely autonomous agents in our talk with others; we also act heteronomously in two senses, with our talk being partially determined not only by their actual talk, but also by us both being required to talk by the shared ways of talking with currency in our speech community. Yet, even with having to meet all these requirements, we still do not feel ‘dictated’ to by others in what we say. We still sense ourselves as free agents in our talk. What makes us feel that we ourselves are wholly responsible for what we say is, that in the gaps between their talk and our responses to it, we can still act completely in terms of our own judgments and skills. But what would it be like if, even in these small gaps (through a radio ear-piece, say), the voice of another was at work in us, trying to tell us what to say next? First, our conversational partners, if they found out, would feel outraged at having been cheated, at having being misled into responding to our talk as if it was our talk, when it was in fact the talk of another. Our disturbance, however, would be greater. Not only would we suffer disorientation and confusion with the other trying to command us to talk in ways unrelated to our own sensing and judging as to what was best for us in each moment, as we related ourselves to the changing nature of our circumstances. But above all, we would feel great anger and resentment. For at the very heart of our precarious living out of our lives as beings continually vulnerable to unforeseeable events in our surroundings, is our being able to act, and having the right to act, in ways related to our own sense of what matters to us as the unique persons we are.

              In other words, being a free agent is basic to our being able to sustain ourselves as organized, integrated, unitary wholes, i.e., retain our integrity, even in the face of many perturbing events destructive of our identities as such. In their attempts to usurp one’s right to do this for oneself, others are attempting to insert themselves, along with their own interests and desires, into the very activities that are central to us maintaining ourselves as the living beings we are. No wonder that (if one becomes aware of the other’s influence in one’s own life) such attempts provoke such an intense, deeply felt resistance!

              To return now to my concerns in the 1982 version of this article: To repeat what I said above, the fact that people currently see their lives as working in terms of hierarchies of domination along mechanical lines should come as no surprise to us, for that is how we have arranged the relations between us for some long time now. But what are the consequences of thinking of all our social relations in this way? To what kind of politics, to what kind of ethics, and to what kind of social inquiries, does such a view of our relations to each other lead?

Sub-systems of dependence, and hierarchies of domination: Conceptualizing mental activity on the model of a hierarchically organized society or social group has a very long history, dependent no doubt upon notions of kingship and other such orders in history. A classical example of such theorizing can be drawn from Hughlings Jackson (1840), the renown neurologist, in his theorizing about the evolution and dissolution of processes in the nervous system: “The higher nervous arrangements evolved out of the lower,” he says,

              “keep down those lower, just as a government evolved out a nation controls as well as directs that nation. If this be the process of evolution, then the reverse process of dissolution is not only a ‘taking off’ of the higher, but is at the very same time a ‘letting go’ of the lower. If the governing body of this country were destroyed suddenly, we should have two causes for lamentation: (1) the loss of services of eminent men; and (2) the anarchy of the now uncontrolled people. The loss of the governing body answers to the dissolution in our patient” (p.662).

From his position in the world, given his undeniably high status, this no doubt was how the social world did appear to him, and the incapacities and anarchic tendencies of the ‘lower orders’ was (and still is) no doubt a real phenomenon but whether that is their natural state is another matter altogether, and it cannot be proved to be so, simply by observing their current behavior. As a model, however, it exerted a selective (and productive!) influence upon Jackson’s thought, perception, and action, suggesting certain important lines of investigation to him. However, it precluded other forms or styles of order, e.g., heterarchical, or coalitional styles of organization, in which coalitions reconstitute themselves according to contextual and situational requirements. And only recently have such forms of organization begun to be investigated (Kelso and Tuller, 1981) in the nervous system.

              The ideology of Taylorism within the context of a hierarchy of domination, was also transparent in Eysenck’s psychological theorizing . In his article, The Technology of Consent (Eysenck, 1969), he outlined aspects of our current forms of life that he thought of as worrying:

              “...society is getting more and more closely knitted together, due to our advancing technology: production is nearing the point where it is nationwide... In other words, there is a greater and greater dependence upon co-operation between very large groups of people... Yet if even a small section within one of the co-ordinated complexes fails....the whole nexus breaks down, and far-reaching consequences are experienced over a wide area” (p.688).

What is required, in the terms in which he conceived of human beings, their social relations, and society at large, is “a technology of consent which will make people behave in a socially adapted, law-abiding fashion, which will not lead to a breakdown of the intricately interwoven fabric of social life...a generally applicable method of inculcating suitable habits of socialized conduct into the citizens (and particularly the future citizens) of the country in question or preferably the whole world” (p.688).

              The terms in which he conceives of human beings, and the terms in which he proposes we should plan our social policies and treat disorderly conduct, are revealed in the theories of ‘conditioning’ he offers. He agrees with the common sense notion that socialized patterns of behavior are in fact largely mediated by conscience. But then, rather than attempting to describe what we know conscience to be, in a way which does not do violence to the term as we know it, he simply states that it is:

              “...nothing more than the accumulated sum of conditioned rewards and punishments, produced by childhood upbringing, and later adolescent experience” (p.689).

Thus implying, of course, that because no one can, scientifically, say what conscience is, he is quite at liberty, being an accredited scientist, to tell us what it is -- according, so to speak, his ‘discoveries’ in his science. Thus immunized, he goes on to illustrate how such a notion of it as “nothing more than the sum of conditioned rewards and punishments,” can be used to produce the results he advocates. And he reinforces his claims by describing experiments on children and puppies which show that they avoid repeating actions for which they have been punished however, as history is full of brave adults struggling on in the face of continual punishment, doing what their conscience demands of them, he is prudently silent about the everyday heroics of quite ordinary adults.

              Eysenck attempts to mislead us here in a way in which Neisser does not: to treat something as being like something else in order to find a way of manipulating it, is not to prove that it in fact is that something else. Aspects of what we call our conscience may very well be like the model he proposes, but it is not at all identical to it. Why Eysenck prefers his model is that its elements can be described clearly. But what it is a model of? That seems to remain as indeterminate as before, as indeed does everything when reflected upon in common sense terms; because the terms we make use of in our common sense dealings with the world are only given a determinate sense in the course of their use.

              Many writers in academic Psychology, however, with views similar to Eysenck’s, see this as intolerable, and advocate the abandonment of that framework altogether, for being too vague and too ambiguous. Science is only possible in this sphere if we substitute for all the vague terms we use in our everyday dealings with each other, clearly describable models. For instance, Broadbent (1969, pp 40-41) in discussing the ‘bias’ in ordinary common sense terms towards presupposing people possess a personal identity and act in terms of it, points out that:

              “... the traditional terms...give us grave difficulty when we try to apply them to detailed experimental analyses of the way people work... There is no obvious and clearly correct way of identifying the traditional with the experimental concepts.”

This does not mean, however, that it is the experimental concepts which are inadequate in any way. On the contrary; it means that:

              “One needs therefore to abandon the older mental terms, and rather to generate new technical languages for considering particular psychological problems. One such language is that of information processing...”

And this, in very large part, is what has occurred in modern psychology, which is now almost wholly given over to the information processing or cognitive approach, in individual, social and in many parts of developmental psychology. The cognitive phase that was just beginning when this article was originally written, is now all but totally hegemonic throughout the entire discipline.

Cognitive and Ontological Taylorism: Manufacturing our Selves

To recapitulate: In section 2, I suggested that we come to experience ourselves very much as we treat ourselves as being. And that because of that, not only how we treat ourselves as being in our daily lives, but also how we treat ourselves in our psychological investigations, and the possible discrepancy between the two, is very important to us. For it is in our talk with the others around us that we legitimate our actions, and plan our future. Indeed, the authority of academic experts in our scientific culture can easily tempt us to over-ride our common sense notions of ourselves, and to use their talk about ourselves in planning our social policies for the future. But as we have seen above, such expert talk about ourselves is often couched in terms derived from mechanistic theories, and such theories provide only a partial view of people’s nature how we must see people if we are going to cause them to behave in ways predictable by us. The partialness of our theories is easily ignored, however, for it is not their adequacy that is in question. In science, it is their truth that matters -- and theories are proved true if one can, by applying them, achieve the results they predict.

              Above, I have questioned this, and in line with Wittgenstein’s (1953) philosophical investigations, I have tried to outline a more adequate account of what it is to be a person and to bring into view the fact that the spontaneously expressed, responsive relations between us (that are rendered rationally invisible in our academic theorizing), are crucial to our personhood. In Section 3, I attempted to show that in academic Psychology at the present time, mechanistic theories of psychological processes could, nonetheless, often be successfully be applied to our current human activities, because from Adam Smith’s time to the present day, an increasing proportion of our daily activities have in fact become organized in ways which parallel such manufacturing processes no wonder theories modeled upon machines invented for the control of industrial processes seem applicable to our psychic processes.

              To continue: If our theories about the nature of human activity arise out of our experiences of it, which arise in turn from our participation within it, then one might surmise that by 1900, the division and organization of labor had advanced sufficiently for F.W. Taylor to see in it the possibility of it being ‘scientifically managed’. And it should come as no surprise to find that, after having lived a major part of our lives under with such ‘managed’ activities, the theories we formulate to describe the nature of our psychic lives have a similar structure to them. Taylorism is, in fact, deeply embedded, not just in the manufacturing processes we conduct out in our factories, but within many other activities in our lives. They too have become organized as efficient, hierarchically structured and controlled processes of manufacture. Two forms of psychic Taylorism can be identified: cognitive and ontological forms, the second, ontological form, being more pernicious than the first.

              By cognitive Taylorism, I mean the procedures by which people’s conduct of their own mental activities their thought processes, their perceptual abilities, their skillful planning, their remembering, etc. are studied, regularized, and appropriated, i.e., taken from them, so that eventually they may be replaced by machines. By ontological Taylorism, I mean our being (mis)lead into controlling our own responses to people to such an extent that, instead of reacting to them in a spontaneously responsive way, as one living being to another, we react to them mechanically, according to prior formulae, or checklists, or other rational schematisms devised and imposed on us by others. In the rest of this section, I will explore the effects of cognitive Taylorism further, and turn to the effects of ontological Taylorism in the next section.

              There is now much ‘research’ afoot, in which understandings currently shared out amongst everyone in the community (which have been transmitted to us in large part from previous generations) are being extracted and expropriated by ‘scientific’ experts, and re-presented to us as (in fact, costly) commodities, as something supposedly ‘discovered’ by them in their studies of our nature. Furthermore, they are re-presented to us as something only seeable by 3^rd-person external observers, by outsiders the view required by a manipulator but not by a participant, a view of our own understandings that renders us as ordinary persons even more helpless in relation to them than before. Our 1^st-person, insider’s understandings, are at best trivialized in this approach, and at worst rendering invisible and irrelevant.

              But it is not just our everyday understandings of ourselves and our everyday lives that is under attack in this way. Behavioral experts are continually studying what they take to be the ‘problems’ we face in society. Social difficulties that we all should participate in alleviating, are thus also appropriated and removed form democratic consideration and even if they then try to give away (Miller, 1969) the knowledge they have appropriated, in its 3^rd-person observer form, it is still a form of knowledge that renders people dependent upon them, the experts. It is not in a form that is of any help to practitioners, to those needing to respond to events in their own local circumstances. Current versions of cognitive psychology are now a central contributor to this process.

              While studies in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) can clearly contribute to the development of ‘intelligent’ and flexible manufacturing systems, and I have examined these applications above, they are mostly presented as neutral, scientific studies with an independent philosophical basis. They are presented as if being the ‘findings’ of disinterested intellectuals for our democratic consideration. But they have, I think, some immediate psychological consequences of a less democratic kind.

              Take, for example, studies by psychologists of problem solving behavior. In such studies, people (called subjects) are presented with problems invented by psychologists (a professional elite), and they develop solutions to them. Given the requirements of their science, these solutions are theorized by psychologists as consisting of recognizable elements, lawfully related and regularly repeated to produce predictable results. Thus theorized, the strategies used in solving the problems, which have been created by the subjects, are presented as the psychologists’ ‘findings’. Such studies are, perhaps, innocuous enough, for contrived problems in the laboratory may not have much relevance to everyday life, for they will have little market value. In the early 1970's, psychologists clearly began to sense this, and many became “applied psychologists,” and turned away from the laboratory to the study of behavior in everyday life (Broadbent, 1971). The move was sufficiently extensive for Howarth (1981) to remark, with respect to the study of problem-solving, that “this neglect of naturally occurring strategies is now a thing of the past” (p.151).

              Psychologists are parvenus upon this scene, however. Frank Winslow Taylor (1947) had already realized the value of ‘naturally occurring strategies’:

              “The ingenuity and experience of each generation -- of each decade, even, have without doubt handed over better methods to the next. This mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principle asset or possession of every tradesman...which is not in the possession of the management” (p.32).

But this state of affairs can be remedied: by applying the principles of scientific management in which, the managers assume “...the burden of gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae…” (p.36). Because: “... all the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of his personal experience, must of necessity under the new system by done by the management in accordance with the laws of science...” (p.36). Thus, through the application of scientific methods (but not to scientific ends), all this ‘naturally’ occurring knowledge can be quarried, excavated, and fashioned into a marketable product. But the process can be applied also to the management as well, as Taylor realized, in the form of ‘functional management’:

              “‘Functional management’ consists of so dividing the work of management that each man from the assistant superintendent down shall have as few functions as possible to perform. If practicable the work of each man tin the management should be confined to the performance of a single leading function” (p.99).

And this completes the circle. Management itself becomes subject to a process of manufacture, and can be ‘packaged’ and marketed as a commodity.

              This is cognitive Taylorism, in which the communal stock of knowledge is plundered as a natural resource, and fashioned by the knowledge industries as a commodity in the market economy. While such a procedure influences the legitimacy of people’s claims to (their own) knowledge, and tends to disqualify them in favor of experts, it does not bear upon their claims to their social identity, their claims to their status as persons. The application of the techniques of scientific management in such areas as jurisprudence, politics (see Eysenck’s ‘clockwork orange’ suggestions above), psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work and child-care, can of course change all that. For if it is true that we only become what we take ourselves to be, and that the processes within which we perceive, experience, and generally make sense of ourselves to ourselves are produced and reproduced in our daily social activities, then what we are to ourselves reflects the character of that activity -- and if that activity is ‘scientifically managed’, than our very being will become fragmented, separated into hierarchically ordered elements, and amenable to external control.

              Lasch (1980) charts some of the effects of this process of this separation and fragmentation: in the so-called ‘awareness movement’, for instance, he points out how the emphasis upon the centrality of the self and the emphasis on people’s own decisions in determining their identity, has in fact intensified both the ‘isolation of the self’ and people’s sense of their own helplessness -- for people cannot, of course, simply re-make themselves by their own actions. Others have to afford them the opportunities they require. The ‘therapeutic outlook’ ignores this, however, and it has worked to transform, as he points out, “collective grievances into personal problems amenable to therapeutic intervention.” As a result, politics degenerates into a struggle, not for a restructuring of social institutions, but for self-realization. For people come to perceive their social position, not as a reflection of their position in an institutional structure, but as due to their own capacities and abilities; and they blame themselves for the injustices inflicted upon them.

              Such a perception of life in the everyday world gives rise, Lasch suggests, to a special kind of personality type adapted to cope with it: the “narcissistic personality.” Such people are centrally concerned, as one might imagine, with issues to do with dependency and self-worth. Wholly responsible to themselves for who they are and for their ‘problems’ they no longer dream of overcoming any real sense the problems they face -- for the problems are ‘in the system’ and cannot be located and solved by individuals. Such a perception encourages a survival mentality: ‘How are you today?’... ‘Oh, surviving thanks’ And to survive, they must be able to look after themselves; which is much easier if one is young, rich, handsome, intelligent and single. Hence the obsession with old age, dependency, with ‘travelling light’, and with ‘being cool’. As actual performances count for less than the recorded, tabulated indicators of them people come to prominence more by ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1967) than by real achievement. They are concerned with ‘style’, with the indicators of success – designer clothes, (in 1982) a company car with electric windows, (now, in 2003) $1,000.000 per year stock options -- rather than with success simply in itself.

              The effects are apparent in psychopathology too, as Lasch notes: whereas in Freud’s time, the hysterias and obsessional neuroses carried to extremes the personality traits of the capitalist social order in the earlier stages of its development -- acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. In our time, preschizophrenia, borderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself. “Today’s patients by and large,” writes Beldoch (1972),

              “do not suffer hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions; instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they must scrub and re-scrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean” (p.136).

These patients suffer from, he says, “pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep disturbance of self-esteem” (p.138).

              In other words, what we have here with cognitive Taylorism, is the completion of the process begun by the ‘scientific management’ of commodity production. Having expropriated the worker’s knowledge, and concentrated production in the factory, industrialists broke down production into its component parts. Keeping the knowledge of the process as a whole to themselves, they assigned to each worker a specific function, a status within ‘the system’ of passive dependency. Eventually, industry organized management itself along industrial lines; and it too became essentially a manufacturing process. Producing the knowledge required to do this became an industry in its own right; and people’s claims as to the adequacy of their own practical knowledge, were deprived of their legitimacy. The ‘knowledge industries’ used as a natural resource, the knowledge people produce and re-produce in their coordinated daily activities in relation to one another. Introducing ‘scientific management’ into this process of production, into the processes by which people reproduce, not only their knowledge of the world, but also their knowledge of their selves, structures even the social processes productive of persons as a manufacturing process and produces within ‘the system’ people who exist as passive dependents in their very being.

Daily Life in a Technological Society: A Self-reproducing ‘Status Degradation Ceremony’.

Let me now turn the even more pernicious effects of ontological Taylorism, the kind of Taylorism that can become institutionalized into our very relations with each other and eventually, into our own relations with ourselves. For this, it seems to me, is how we can institutionalize between ourselves a way of acting in which we can come to humiliate and degrade each other as a matter of routine, without realizing what it is we are doing to each other, and ourselves.

              As I indicated above, a central feature of our current ‘scientific’ approach to human behavior, the ‘cognitive’ approach, is that people’s behavior seen as issuing only from an ‘inner’ plan or program, an ‘inner’ representation or picture of an outward situation, with their thinking being a matter of ‘symbol manipulation’. In such a view as this, their bodily activities are ignored. Our spontaneous reactions to other people must always be of a cognitive kind. In such circumstances, we must always think how we will react to them, and how we will react is continually a matter of interpretation, choice, and calculation. But to react to people in this way, is to ignore the ‘involvement obligations’ (Goffman, 1967) we have in our everyday interactions with them. It is to treat them as ‘out of the ordinary’ in some way. And this is not just to treat them differently; it is in fact to degrade them, to humiliate them.

              Garfinkel (1956) defines a ‘status degradation ceremony’ as any communicative work between people, whereby the public identity of an actor is transformed into something looked upon as lower in the local scheme of social types. And he sets out a number of requirements which must be met, if such ‘ceremonies’ are to be successful:

1.    First amongst them is, that “the victim should be removed from the realm of their everyday character and be made to stand out as ‘out of the ordinary’” (p.422), which a description of them in ‘scientific’ terms, of course, clearly achieves.

2.    Secondly, what is unique and utterly idiosyncratic about them should be ignored, and they should be presented as an instance of a type; this, of course, is to ignore their own idiosyncratic expressive-responsive reactions to their circumstances, the expressions in terms of which we get to known their own, 1^st-person ‘inner lives’.

3.    Thirdly, as instances of a type, they should be presented as a dialectical counterpart to a preferred type as indeed, entities which are caused to move by influences unknown to them, are, when compared with those of us who, as unique individuals, act in accord with our own judgments and sensitivities to our own local circumstances.

4.    Fourthly, the denunciation must be done not by private but by public persons, by those who can speak with the supra-personal values of the community (apparently) in mind, and have been licensed by the community so to speak -- as again, the ‘social and behavioral scientists’ in our scientific culture have been licensed to so act.

5.    And finally, the denouncers must distance themselves from those to be denounced, so as not to degrade themselves which the adoption of an objective, 3^rd-person external observer stance achieves.

In other words, to institute amongst ourselves a ‘scientific’ way of treating each other, is to institutionalize amongst ourselves, mutually degrading and humiliating relationships.

              If the Tayloristic tendencies I have depicted in the previous two sections continue, and all everyday practical activities yield to the techniques of ‘scientific management’ -- a goal currently legitimated by the empirical ‘findings’ of a supposedly neutral psychology seen as a natural science -- then that is what will happen. We shall have succeeded in transforming all our social institutions into self-reproducing status degradation ceremonies -- except that within them there will be no denouncers and denounced. ALL will be denounced as unintended consequence of ‘the system’ because it, of course, will come first. For it will have become institutionalized into our everyday relations with each other.

              Indeed, as Taylor (1947) himself put it: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first” (p.7). And to the extent that Taylor’s prophecy has come true, instead of the majority living under the domination of the few, all of us will live under the domination of ‘the system’ dominated by our own techniques of domination .

              What psychologically might be the effects of this? Price (1967) has explored the relation between mental illness and positions (and changes in position) in dominance hierarchies. He points out, that for maintenance of their stability, hierarchies require certain behavior patterns from their members: irritability towards inferiors, anxiety towards superiors; and elation on going up the hierarchy (to increase one’s self-assurance, thus to maintain one’s position) and depression on going down (to decrease one’s confidence, thus to prevent one ‘fighting back’). His main thesis (which I think is mistaken) is that this dominance hierarchy behavior is now a vestigial and useless heirloom, and is no longer of any advantage to us -- for, he seems to imply, such person-to-person dominance hierarchies no longer exist. Yet, interestingly, his account of the experiences of those displaced downwards in a hierarchy, seems nonetheless to be of contemporary relevance.

              Price drew his account of hierarchical processes from, mainly, his study of other people’s work on monkey colonies. Every social interaction between monkeys (and undoubtedly between people too) is affected by their relative status (as I argued in section 2). Superiors act with implied threat, irritability, aggression and snappiness towards inferiors; while inferiors are disturbed by their presence, and avoid the, hesitating to invade their personal space, and so on. those at the top of the hierarchy are calm and self-assured, while those at the bottom have a ‘hen-pecked’ depressed appearance. Such hierarchical social orders provide then, a differential set of opportunities for, and barriers against, action, according to one’s ‘position’ or status within them. And it is stable, presumably, when its disadvantages (in terms of the capacities wasted by those in the lower orders who are denied the opportunities they require to develop them) do not exceed its advantages, i.e., (a) the provision of everyone within it of a stable social identity, (b) an intelligible place in the group’s scheme of things, and thus (c) a degree of purchase at least, upon a communally shared reality.

              Price also discusses the character of behavior produces by changes in the hierarchy; and it is his discussion of depressed behavior, that I want to mention here. He points out the way which depression works to prevent individuals from attempting to regain their former, higher status: they withdraw, suffer losses of appetite and libido, and feel generally uncertain, unworthy, and inferior. Now one does not have to buy Price’s socio-biological, evolutionary basis for his arguments, to accept that here is a function which can work toward the stabilization of the social order. For the fact is, if one has been degraded, i.e. properly degraded in a full-blooded status degradation ritual, then there is no simple way in which that can be wiped away without transgressing the social order oneself, and occasioning all kinds of further negative sanctions. Redemption is possible, one can make amends, but it is not easy. Depressed individuals tend to withdraw and not to respond to new opportunities even when readily available as Seligman’s (1975) studies on learned helplessness suggest. The defensive strategies developed to minimize the worst effects of one’s aversive environment, preclude the striking out into uncertainty required if one is to explore new opportunities. Thus it is not surprising that, as Jahoda (1982) points out: “Several studies on job enrichment or participation have demonstrated that those most in need of an improved working environment low-skilled workers in repetitive jobs are least likely to avail themselves of offers of new opportunities... the humanization of work is demanded by the intellectual elite, not be alienated workers” (p.188) -- or at least, so claims Jahoda, but see Fricke’s (1983) findings outlined in the Afterword below.

              Now, one does not have to buy Price’s sociobiological arguments, to accept that what is at work here is a process which can function to stabilize a social order. For the fact is that, whether one has been down-graded in a full blown ‘status degradation ceremony’ or simply informally by a passing insult, there is not simple way of ‘answering back’ except by transgressing the social order and by being rude oneself, etc., and running the risk of incurring further negative sanctions. What is at work here may not be an evolutionary, biological necessity, but it is an ecological necessity; something which is required if the important set of social processes constitutive of both our selves and our reality are to be maintained as stable processes. Hence, even those victimized by a social order often still act to reproduce it, rather than risk loss of their selves, by attempting to break down the structure victimizing them. Yet, it is a stability that has been bought at a price: the price of excluding from our relations with each other our mutually responsive, spontaneous bodily reactions to each other. This is to exclude, not only those expressive-responsive reactions in which we, as 1^st-person, express our selves to each other, but also, to exclude the creative potentials that are created between us in the dialogical relations to which such mutually responsive reactions can give rise (Gustavsen, 1992; Shotter, 1993).

                                                                        Concluding remarks

Let me now attempt to draw together into one place all the component parts of the view I have tried to present above. My main concern has been with the nature of human social orders. As they are not produced or maintained instinctually, if they are to endure and not fall into disorder, they must be maintained by the activities of the people within them. Transgressions and deviations must be recognized, the transgressors identified, and the social order repaired and re-instituted. Central to this process, are the accounts people give of what they are doing and why they are doing it (Mills, 1940; Scott & Lyman, 1968). To reproduce their social order in their reactions, in their spontaneous bodily reactions to each other, people must be able to relate what they do to their place, position, or status within it. Indeed, an implicit morality is thus at work all our interactions with each other: 1^st-person actors and speakers have a moral right to expect the others around them to value them and to treat them in ways appropriate to who they are, appropriate to their identity (as long as they observe a moral duty to be sincere in whom they present themselves as being). Whilst the 2^nd-person-others around them also have a moral duty to treat 1^st-persons as the 1^st-persons they are, unless there are reasons to believe that they are being dishonest in whom they present themselves as being -- then, but only then, do such 2^nd-persons have the moral right to challenge them, and refuse to accord them their status as the 1^st-persons they are (Goffman, 1959). Not to be taken seriously as the person one is, not to be accorded the right to express oneself, one’s self, is to be humiliated, degraded, not to be accorded the respect one deserves -- and in such circumstances, people express anger and resentment, and try to remedy in some way what seems to them to be an utterly wrong state of affairs.

              Such events are memorable, the resentments they cause run deep, sooner or later, those humiliated will get their revenge!

              How does all this relate to the processes of research and manufacture outlined above? It relates directly because it is precisely this spontaneously present, interactional morality, that is being ignored. What happens to those subjected to both processes, is the ignoring of their spontaneous, living, bodily responses to the conditions to which they are subjected. The central aim in the ‘scientific management’ of processes of manufacture was, originally, to separate ‘brain-work’ from ‘muscle-work’, and to place the ‘muscle-work’ of the lower orders in control of the ‘brain-work’ of those at the top of a dominance hierarchy. However, such procedures are now being applied to ‘brain-work’ as well, and this downgrades even those at the top, and puts, as Taylor says, ‘the system’ in control of us all. The psychological effects of this are predictable, and resemble those produced in the victims of status degradation ceremonies.

              While person-to-person dominance hierarchies (monarchic systems, military systems) although productive of a stable social order (if a threat of force is also readily available), clearly have their disadvantages, but replacing them by impersonal systems of domination, has its disadvantages also. To change our relations to each other in our daily lives to resemble those in processes of manufacture, can result in us being the kind of entities produced by manufacturing processes - entities amenable to measurement, to numerical assessment, rank ordering in terms of efficiency and/or effectiveness, etc. We can easily become merely entries on a spreadsheet. But if this does occur, then our circumstances will be such that, quite literally, it can be said that we have lost touch with each other, and as a consequence, become opaque to each other... and perhaps even to ourselves for our ‘inner lives’, as we noted above, are only revealed in those of our expressive-responsive activities that occur spontaneously out in the world between us.

              As Vico (1968) described it in 1744, in such circumstances as these, in which people have succeeded in institutionalizing their own mutual humiliation, then, “no matter how great how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice” (para.1106). Although I think that there is no emancipation to be had from systems as such, for we can never be developmentally self-sufficient, in the sense of drawing all our psychological resources solely from within ourselves alone, the quest for ways to transform ‘the system’ under which we currently live must now be enjoined by all (including those currently at ‘the top’). And that, it seems to me, can only be achieved by a move from systems conceived of as ‘logical’ or as ‘rational’ by a special elite of researcher-theoreticians, to new dialogically structured practices within which all of us as ordinary people become our own research-theoreticians (Brulin, 1998; Gustavsen, 1992; Shotter and Gustavsen, 1999; Greenwood, 2002; Palshaugen, 2002). Otherwise, we all run the risk of becoming members of the same democracy of misery in a continuing round of mutually humiliating attempts to ‘solve problems’ by the application of supposed ‘scientific’ methods by professional elites.

                                                                           A 2003 Afterword

Seligman’s (1975) research on learned helplessness, conducted in a non-participatory, objective, scientific manner, was originally conducted on individual and isolated dogs (the individualistic, non-conversational nature of these studies was not, at the time, thought to be of importance). As I intimated above, when extended to human beings, it seemed to lend support to the paradoxical conclusion, voiced by Jahoda (1982), that those most in need of an improved working environment (low-skilled workers in repetitive jobs) were least likely to avail themselves of offers of new opportunities. But now with hindsight, with our understanding of the differences between human behavior as viewed by 3^rd-person non-participant, outside observers, and as experienced by 1^st-person, inside participants, we can, perhaps, begin to appreciate what might have been missed in such studies. The findings may not be as paradoxical as they seem. To begin with, whose opportunities were on offer? Were they opportunities proposed to those in repetitive jobs by outsiders on a take-it-or-leave it basis, or were they opportunities seen and appreciated from within their own circumstances by the workers themselves? We can turn to Fricke’s (1983) work to bring out what seems to be at stake here.

              He and his colleagues approached representatives of the employees in a machine and screw factory, with the offer of a then, i.e., in 1975, much more participatory approach to work-life research than was usually the case. The offer was accepted, and among a group of machine operators working at unskilled jobs on a piece-work basis, over a period of four years, a number of different forms of participation were initiated.

              First, in collaboration with the researchers, workers described the problems of their department as they saw them. They then developed possible solutions to them, while taking all aspects of the problem and the interests of all workers into account (thus coming up with much more comprehensive and multi-dimensional solutions that the partial ones usually proposed by outside experts). Action-programs for implementing some of the proposed solutions were then developed in one-week seminars held twice a year outside the factory. When worker’s proposals resulted in productivity increases, the works council negotiated with management for the worker’s share of the benefits in the form of new personnel and production policies, training wages, and other QWL issues. The forms of participation instituted were such, as Fricke (pers. comm) comments, that even after decades of work under extreme stress and unskilled working conditions, the workers “found and used opportunities to reflect on their work and working conditions, to design alternative solutions (technical, organizational) and to think about possible futures, unfolding their ‘subjective, innovative qualifications, as we called it. It was surprising and very moving, how these workers (so called unqualified workers working in a screw factory with very poor working conditions, i.e. under extreme time pressure, high noise, very fragmented work with cycles of 12 seconds at minimum, high work load, some of them moving six tons per day etc) developed their abilities to reflect, to design alternatives, to participate in working groups and dialogues, to insist in and use their democratic rights etc.”

              In other words, in accord with the comments above as to why being a free agent is basic to our being able to maintain ourselves as the living beings we are, we can suggest that there is in all people, both an undestroyable urge, and an ability, to organize their work according to their own interests, their own needs. But if this is the case, why is it that this urge and this ability find expression so infrequently? How can the paradoxical situation described by Jahoda (1982) arise?

              For at least the two following reasons: (1) One is suggested by Fricke’s (1983) work. He suggests that the ‘innovative qualifications’ of workers often remain unrealized because of the many different kinds of obstacles they face that they cannot, by themselves as isolated individuals, overcome. Among such obstacles are the hierarchical command structure organizing work in the enterprise, the Taylorization of work, the influence of outside experts, and the isolation of workers by piece work and work distribution. There is no space to set out in detail the character of all these obstacles. But it is not difficult to see that they all, to an extent, work to position almost everyone in the work organization as 3^rd-person, outside observers. For mostly, only expressions from this position will be acknowledged as of significance. Only those right at the very top of the organization can influence each other’s actions by their 1^st-person ‘tellings’, and convey in their expressions of their personal feelings, attitudes, and judgments, their sense of what matters to them (as the supposed personification of the whole organization). All the others in the organization must replace their own sense of what matters to them, in their own unique circumstances, with ‘commands’ arising out of these expressions from the top.

              What is excluded in such a structure of human relations (whether hierarchical or not), is the possibility of people’s local, living, spontaneously responsive connections with each other, mattering. In other words, what is excluded are all the creative potentials occurring in the dialogical relations to which such mutually responsive reactions can give rise (Gustavsen, 1992; Shotter, 1993).

              When considered in this light, the waste of local knowledge, the waste of employee’s ‘innovative qualifications’, the degree resentment and anger generated amongst them at being ‘robbed’ of their rights as free agents to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives, and their relations with others of their kind , must be enormous. What might our world be like if such energies, such knowledge could find appropriate arenas for its expressions? One can only conclude that many manufacturers must in fact be more concerned with manufacturing (i.e., reproducing) present forms of social order and personhood, than with the actual products of their factories.

              Indeed, if we now turn to a second reason why it is so hard for employees to exert their rights as free agents to determine their own conditions of work, we now begin to find an even more subtle reason, one that masquerades as in fact giving us the very freedom we seek. (2) As Klaus Peters (2001) shows, we can still feel autonomous and to be acting as a free agent, even when acting in response to the actions of those around us, if, at the moment of our acting, we have some leeway (to use Peter’s term), i.e., some personal choice, in how we act. In other words, as I put it above, we can have a sense of being a free agent, if we can exercise our own choice as to how we act, in the gaps between another’s behavior and our response to it. New management techniques, that try to reproduce the performance dynamics of self-employed entrepreneurs amongst their employees by embedding them in ‘a market’, are aimed at creating this sense of free agency. But, as Peters (2001) shows, this feeling of autonomy can be illusory.

              He leads us into his account of how this can be so, by asking us to consider our relations to our parents, and the ways in which we learn from them, although we are free to act as we please while out, what is entailed in our being home on time. To the extent that they are not continually (through a radio ear-piece, say) issuing us with actual commands, we must learn to anticipate their reactions to our times of arrival home. If we do, then their external commands can come to be replaced by our own internal anticipations, and they will not need to explicitly issue us with any more commands. But our parents control over us, which is now exerted in us by the guilt we feel if we stay out late, can be, and often is, resented, and we seek as soon as possible to free ourselves from them. The crucial move in new management methods noted by Peters (2001, pp.156-157) is the replacement of the actual supervisors in a hierarchical command system, in which supervisors function like parts of a machine in explicitly telling subordinates what to do, with ‘the market’ or ‘a market’, so that, instead of employees being penalized by another actual person if they make a mistake, they must now, like self-employed entrepreneurs, ‘take the hit’ themselves. They have now only themselves to blame for their mistakes.

              In such circumstances, instead of employees being able to locate the actual people responsible for the injustices in their treatment, and aim their resentments and demands for change accordingly, we now arrive at the bewildering situation in which all our failings are seemingly our own. We now, as Peters (2001) puts it, have the seemingly paradoxical figure of the “dependent independent employee.”

              Let us be quite clear here about what has actually happened: where in the past we had been able to act freely in the gaps between another person’s actions and our responses to them, we now find ourselves having to respond to the seemingly impersonal requirements of’ ‘the market’ or ‘a market’. Thus the employee is independent in the sense of not being subject to the commands of others, but is dependent in the sense of being subject to the dynamics of the ‘market’ conditions governing his actions.

              But these ‘market’ conditions are not ‘natural’ conditions, equal for all; they are ‘unnatural’ conditions, dictated by ‘invisible’ others. The independence and autonomy of employees is not restricted by natural conditions at all, but by other people who place themselves between those taking action and the true problems they face. Who in fact sets up the ‘prevailing conditions’ so that a ‘partially autonomous unit’ performs well by itself? Who actually chooses, and imposes, the market segment, the personnel mix, the financial and material resources, etc., that are made available to each supposedly autonomous work unit in the company, the so-called ‘internal market’ within which it must operate? As Peters (2001) notes, such a ‘market’ is “man-made and is really nothing but a form of reciprocal human behavior between people” (p.151).

              What is new here, really new, is that those who create and organize the ‘market’ are now exerting a quite new form of control over us, not explicitly as in the past, in the same way as someone controls a machine or the department of a company organized under an hierarchical command system, but in a quite different way. The paradox of arranging the control of a self-controlling process, is not a matter of technology but, says Peters (2001) of “biotechnology... The company of the future is, in fact, something quite like a living organism, not machine-like” (p.157). In other words, control over individuals’ behavior is being achieved here, not consciously and cognitively, through ideas, instructions, or explicit commands, but by structuring those aspects of their surroundings to which they are spontaneously responsive in their immediate bodily reactions. As Foucault (1979) notes, this is not a politics of ideas, but a bio-politics. And, as every nook and cranny in our relations both with each other, and with our selves, is now being ‘commodified’, is now being measured, counted, or weighed, thus to be ‘costed’ and made ‘accountable’ in spread sheet terms, so we now all become complicit in the destruction of our own free agency. The mutual humiliation of all by all continues, but not now by the intention of any identifiable individuals, but due to the general conditions of life we have all agreed to impose on ourselves. Do we really want to go on like this?

                                                                          Acknowledgement

I must express my most heartfelt thanks to Werner Fricke, first, for his interest in this article in its earlier form, and for his continual encouragement to update it. And then for his close attention to certain details within first attempt at that updating, and the lengthy suggestions he then made for its further improvement. I am deeply grateful.

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