Out of time

by reestheskin on 13/11/2019

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The following is from Janan Ganesh of the FT. The title of the article was “The agony of returning to work in September”.

A personal ambition is to reach the end of my career without having managed a single person.

It seems to me a very sensible ambition, one which used to be the lot of many academics — usually the better ones. He goes on:

Friends who have been less lucky, who have whole teams under their watch, report a quirk among their younger charges. It is not laziness or obstreperousness or those other millennial slanders. It is an air of disappointment with the reality of working life. They will be among the people described in Bullshit Jobs by the anthropologist David Graeber….

A generation of in-demand graduates came to expect not just these material incentives but a sort of credal alignment with their employer’s “values”. The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it.

At one time the words ‘manager’, ‘management’, or worst of all, ‘line-manager’ were alien to much of medicine or academia. Things still got done, in many ways more efficiently than now. It is just that our theories of action and praxis have been ransacked by Excel spreadsheet models of human motivation and culture. It is the final line from the quote that those controllers of ‘managers’ should be scared of:

The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it.