Another beautifully insightful post from Carman. 🙂
Hi Lisa,
Thank you for discussing Dominator Cultures. As I write, the morning sun is penetrating my living room window both to dominate the day and to challenge me to respond to Emerson’s question, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ (the day)
My mind has been awash all week with your observations and questions. Your discussion of the Dominator Culture helps me to contrast it with the Partnership Perspective.
Your statement, “A Dominator culture shapes psychologies and social structures in ways that are dysfunctional in that they limit potential and cause unnecessary suffering,” acutely reflects my own experience. Regrettably, Dominator Cultures are all I have ever known.
Returning to the example of the child, not as a repository of wisdom but, rather as an embodiment of certain ideals, I recall a comment by Charles Davis (A Question of Conscience) who said,
“Exterior un-freedom causes interior un-freedom. A child first learns to talk or think aloud, then afterwards to think without voicing its thought.”
In an organization (Dominator Culture) with which I am familiar an enforced infantilizing silence characterizes each weekly meeting. Questions are forbidden and discussion is discouraged. Employees are thus banished to conversational catacombs to express their ideas and concerns.
Canadian historian Michael Welton (one of my professors at Athabasca University) has examined such systemic silence. He concludes that organizational silence is produced in four ways:
1) Managers’ fear of negative feedback and their belief systems. You and I have discussed Theory X assumptions wherein workers are believed to be untrustworthy and self-interested and responsive only to incentive or sanction. Managers, he holds, will implicitly or explicitly discourage “upward” communication.
2) An ideology that managers must lead, direct and control.
3) An unstated belief that unity and consensus are signs of organizational health, whereas disagreement and dissent should be avoided.
4) The distance between leaders and the led once they ascend the hierarchy. Welton suggests that “top” managers who have been together for a long time tend to blend their assumptions into a shared world-view. Senge terms this pathology (learning disability) “The Myth of the Management Team.”
Senge and Argyris, like Deming, lay the blame at the school which “trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer” (The Fifth Discipline p.25)
Welton says that workers “without a voice” will seek control through other means that may be destructive to the organization, such as stress, sickness, and little motivation.
Managers, in turn, may interpret the pathologies as evidence of hostility and willingness to contribute just to get by. Managers’ beliefs turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Someone once described “play” as the very essence of thought. I’m grateful for both the free and creative communion of your site and for the “creative play” it affords. I enjoy the opportunity to “voice” my thought—to hear and be heard and to sense in your comments the message “I see you” (The Fifth Discipline Field Book).
Bye for now,
Carman
Reference
Welton, M. Designing the Just Learning Society: A Critical Inquiry. Leicester: NIACE, 2005.
Hi Lisa,
Thank you for the opportunity to engage in creative communion–and to make the “unconscious conscious.” I believe it was systems scholar Bela Banathy who said, “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
I have begun to question the traditional labor market [employer-employee] nomenclature as an example of such mislabeling. When we strip away the legal lacquer and peel back the political politeness a master-slave paradigm appears to be the underlying animus.
Freire calls “domination” a “fundamental” phenomenon:
“I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved. In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of de-humanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which people are reduced to things.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p.84.
I contest the confining of domination to “our epoch.” The myth of Erysichthon and Ceres suggests that slavery is more ubiquitous and persistent than many may want to concede:
Erysichthon [Earth-tearer] was a rich and impious man who cut down a tree from the sacred grove of Ceres [mother earth] for his banqueting hall. By cutting down the tree, he had killed a dryad nymph [oak tree productive force]. The other dryads called upon Ceres [mother earth] to avenge their sister.
Ceres inflicted Erysichthon with insatiable hunger. No matter what Erysichthon ate, he could quell his hunger for more food. Erysichthon sold everything he had, for food, until he had nothing left but his daughter, Mestra [teacher]. He sold her too!
While on the seashore awaiting possession by her owner, Mestra prayed to Poseidon [the sea] to save her from slavery. She was then given the ability to shift-change—first a fisherman, then a mare, an ox, a bird, and so on.
Mestra escaped from her master and returned to her father who saw endless opportunity to make money by her. Driven by hunger, Erysichthon sold his daughter off, like livestock, into slavery, for a great deal of money to buy more food. But all the money she earned was not enough. Finally, driven to despair, he consumed himself.
Some observations and questions:
1. Is “domination” the exception or the rule? I suspect scholars have been tip-toeing around this issue.
2. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1996) defines slave thus: 1) captive 2) person owned by and has to serve another, 3) machine or part of one, directly controlled by another—Morgan’s Machine Metaphor immediately comes to mind.
3) Erysichthon sold his daughter off, like livestock. Our word chattel [movable “property”] originally meant livestock.
4) Moderns recoil at the suggestion of slavery as an organizational norm. “You are always free to leave,” they say. But if the assumptions underlying the master-slave, owner-owned, subject-object relationship greet the “runaway,” then how is that liberating?
Your thoughts Lisa?
Reference
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007.
[…] May 30th, 2009 by Carman Submitted on 2009/05/30 at 8:37am […]