Ahem. Consider:
Jackall’s (1986) study of a large American corporation found that bullshitting was systematically expected of middle managers in the company. One informant told Jackall that his job involved ‘characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters. Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game’. A crucial aspect was not using too much or too little bullshit, and also being able to judge the appropriate moment to bullshit. Competent bullshitters also needed to become competent audience members for performances of bullshit.
There’s also this:
When ignorance is noisy, uninformed actors do not simply stay silent about what they don’t know. Rather, they are compelled to speak about an issue of which they have little knowledge or understanding. A recent experimental study found that this compulsion to speak (coupled with a lack of accountability created by a ‘social pass’) was an important factor in explaining bullshitting. For instance, middle managers are often relatively ignorant about the work their subordinates are engaged with, but are under pressure to act as the leader by doing or say something. They fall back upon generic management speak rather than engage with the people they manage in language they find meaningful. A second example is British government ministers who find themselves with a new policy portfolio. Often these politicians have little or no knowledge of the new policy area, but they are under pressure to say and do something. To address this tricky situation, politicians rely on empty and often misleading language.
I don’t have a ton to add here, honestly. I’ve never been a big fan or apologist of middle managers, who cripple the economy with astounding regularity. They also constantly tend to discuss how busy they are (note busy does not mean productive, nor has it ever), but in reality they don’t pull their own weight and tend to sink the good parts of a company. We’ve had this narrative for a few years that maybe, just maybe, the middle management class will die off — but what this narrative misses is that work is inherently very feudal. The middle management class has to exist because the executives don’t want to speak to the worker bees, much like the middle class often has to exist because someone needs to buy the shit that the world-builders are creating. It’s all a neat little ecosystem, no?
There’s actually a deep anthropological component to how work is organized, which we often ignore, and there’s also a reason so much bullshit language exists at work — namely that jargon and buzzwords convey in-group status, and status, relevance, and control tend to be what people truly seek at work.
Thoughts?
