Communication & Theatre 4/514 Issues in Organizational Communication Administrative Evil

How have we unnamed evil? Collateral damage Regime change Right sizing Inventory shrinkage

Evil is masked by acceptable policy, projects and rules Microsoft purchases evil from Satan

Management (policing) is an ideology with the intentions of efficiency, practicality, and control.

Management is perfect and the teachers (workers) are imperfect servants, fragile, prone to irrationality, atavistic practices, and emotional outbreaks.

Therefore workers must be controlled. Corporations and governments prefer a system of training and discipline to education. Lower wages and longer hours.

In sum, Foucault stated that the goal is to forge a docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.

What is a moral inversion?

Ethical considerations have been sanitized out of the modern organization by technological rationality operating within a bureaucratic framework.

Administrators influenced by these forces tend to dehumanize their organizational communities, and to overvalue technical progress and processes.

administrative evil occurs when managers are willing to inflict pain on others (stockholders, workers, customers, community) for a good reason (from management’s standpoint).

What is hubris?

administrative evil, or depriving stakeholders of their humanity, is a likely outcome of hubris.

The administrator is much less likely to view personal acts as harmful compared to those on the receiving end of those actions.

How can a vision statement act as a method of disciplining workers?

planning processes often serve to anchor the organization by assuming that the future will be much like the past.

This bias towards the past tends to create a “cultural lock-in” where rigidity and inflexibility become corporate norms

Dressage = a kind of work that power elites can force workers to perform solely to demonstrate the fact that the privileged can require obedience, discipline, and self- control.

The appearance of input into decision-making involves: Loss of commitment Frustration And results in: Manipulation Worker responsibility

administrative evil also involves the manipulation of space to ensure that workers do not act collectively in some confused way (from an administrative standpoint), but rather individually in their own space (office, computer, or classroom). These separate spaces are very often largely invisible to other workers.

A panopticon is a prison that consists of a tower located at the center of a courtyard, surrounded by levels of cells. Each cell falls under the scrutiny of the tower and each inmate is visible to the surveillant alone. The cells become ‘small theatres’ in which actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The Panopticon operates even in the absence of a surveillant because the prisoner (worker) can’t see him.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

The panopticon transforms the inmate (worker) into the instrument of her/his own subjugation.

Panopticon applied to us: We need to make the University more cost effective, improve efficiency, enhance productivity and performance, provide value for the money, give consumers (students) more choice.

This means that we will re-define instructors’ responsibilities (more students, less security, lower pay), ration teaching resources, use mission statements, do appraisals and audit staff performance in the allocation of funding.