The Managerial Caste and the Knowledge Worker

            In the past few months, I’ve noticed the term “knowledge worker” more and more, though I had come across it well before. Every time I would see the word “knowledge worker” in an article I’d get this little prick of irritation, hence this rant. Why the prick of irritation? It started sounding ever more and more dishonest to me, that’s why. Not dishonest in that there is a difference between the work of our hands, of making things in the real world, as opposed to the world of words, scribes, bits and bytes. It has struck me as dishonest, intellectually, because we already have a word for people whose work is in the more abstract realm of thoughts as opposed to things: that is, the intellectual.

            How could intellectuals themselves allow the word that describes them to be swapped out with the bland term “knowledge worker” in the first place? I think it has something to do with ensuring they have a place in the limited positions available for brainiacs in an economic system that has been reduced to service industry wage slavery.  In thinking about this so-called “knowledge work” I wondered about where the term came from in the first place. The least I could do would be an internet search to see what the Artificial Idiocy of our ever-weaker search engines came up with for an answer.  

According to the patterns spat up by the machine learning on tap, it seems we have the infinite wisdom of Peter Drucker to lay the blame on for this blunder of a term. As a key architect of so-called management education, it looks like Drucker can be a useful scapegoat for much of the crumbling edifice of the professional managerial caste at large. I guess if they are the knowledge workers, their work has left a lot to be desired.

            It incenses me because mere management requires doesn’t require extensive knowledge beyond making a schedule and being a middleman between the admin and the peons below. Nor do most managers seem to really work that much either. If they did, they wouldn’t be managing other workers, but working alongside them.

            The term itself came from Drucker’s 1959 book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow. As such, it seems to belong to a hauntological past, a Disneyworld that will soon become a ruined wonderland beneath a swamp full of gators in our not-too-distant futures. The ghosts of J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World will be kayaking above fighting off the anacondas and pythons that people have released into Florida’s humid wilderness. The real Landmarks of Tomorrow will be Epcot center golf ball floating in a mire of turpitude. The carousel of progress is rusted and there is a lot of gunk in its gears.

            Drucker thought of his word coinage as a descriptor for a new white-collar class of citizen, seated in an office, engaged in deep thought, providing his expertise for the greater good of the company. In 1959 it was for the most part, his expertise, after all. These ideations weren’t in service to ideas so much as they were to the corporate boardroom, because the principle objective of the knowledge worker was to bring “value” to the organization.

            This kind of corporate bullspeak has now trickled down into collective consciousness, much to our own detriment. It has colonized our mindscapes with the kind of coldly calculated minimalism as seen on television shows like Severance. Part of the reason why that show is such a hit, I think, is because corporate work really is actually so dulling to the mind that you have to get some kind of cybernetic lobotomy to be able to go in every day. That, and you have to cut off the part of your brain that thinks about the effects corporate work is having on the world and its many beings. Perhaps, rather than sever ourselves into two parts, corporate American’s could adopt the same kind of drinking culture as Japan. After a hard day grinding on some dumb widget designed to collect data from cell phone users, or something worse, they go get absolutely sloshed together after the long day in order to tolerate the stress. Americans just tend to binge drink at the bar in an empty bowling alley. 

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Peter Drucker was a smart guy himself though and the consequences of his vision might not have been malicious. He was born Vienna in 1909 when the Austrian-Hungarian empire was still a thing. Having grown up as a Jewish intellectual during the rise of the Third Reich, and leaving for England once the Nazis were in power, his main drive came to be the creation of a “functioning society.” He knew what a nonfunctional society looked like, and it wasn’t all that great.

While in England, Drucker became something of a disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes, a regular attendee of his lectures at Cambridge. It would be no mistake to consider Drucker a Keynesian. Keynes taught his students to look at the behavior of commodities as part of his economic theory. But Drucker was a people person and his interest was to look at the behavior of individuals. This led his work to becoming a cornerstone of management theory in the twentieth century. As such, the professional managerial caste can be seen as part of his legacy.

Towards the end of the 1930s Drucker had moved to the United States. In 1939 his first book was published, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism which traced the rise of fascism in his time. In 1942 he followed it up with The Future of Industrial Man: A Conservative Approach. This garnered him attention from the bigwigs of business. His obsession with how authority and control were used in Europe led him to a friendship with Donaldson Brown, who was vice chairman of the board of General Motors between 1937 to 1946. Brown was able to give Drucker access to the inner workings of GM for his next study which resulted in the Concept of the Corporation. This was followed in turn by The Practice of Management. After all, a corporation has to extract as much as it can from its “human resources.” Now might be a good time in this essay to cue up your copy of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report.  

It might not have been Drucker’s direct goal to help elevate corporations to new levels of power. He was well aware of their power, and he thought, that if they were managed correctly by intellectuals, er, I mine, knowledge workers, there would be less of a chance of them going down the path of fascism he had seen overshadow Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

With his influence spreading this Fordist capitalism version of knowledge-workers would soon spread its dark wings over an increasingly corporatized landscape. It might be useful to think that the process was completed when Bill Gates turned people into what author Douglas Coupland has called, “microserfs.” In Coupland’s book the characters work on a variety of projects at Microsoft where it feels like they are the serfs in a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the kingly technolord.

If the “knowledge worker” is the manage than the microserf in the cubicle is really just that, a serf, a peasant, someone given a pittance, while all the resources they produce are extracted. Such strategies have made the platforms promoted by Silicon Valley rich. We provide the content, the harvest the capital. They also spit what we make back at out at us, through the simulacra, flattening imagination and creativity. One things Drucker did correctly predict how the incoming information economy would erase many blue-collar jobs. In reality, it just off shored them, so the producers of American consumption were no longer visible.

            The stuffy stuffed shirts at Forbes magazine define a knowledge worker as “someone who generates value through their knowledge” and the more reliable Oxford English Dictionary defines an intellectual as a person “possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.” Is that what the people in these office jobs are doing? I’m not convinced.

It seems to me a knowledge worker is just a defanged intellectual with a severed head. An intellectual was a person who thought long, deep and hard on a certain set of subjects. A knowledge worker is just another kind of pusher of bytes, to a person whose job it is to just shuffle bits around, whether that is information (itself not actually knowledge) or people.
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            I’d see these kinds of people have the potential to “generate value” from their activities if they were given a space for them. But the place of the intellectual has been brushed aside by these workers who supposedly “think for a living.” What is it that they think about, I wish to know? If it is branding, marketing, management, then count me out.

I may work at a library, surrounded by all kinds of knowledge and art, but please don't call me a knowledge worker.
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