While the following may shock the sensibilities of some, I want to emphasize that I am doing sociology, not ideology. That is, I am not exalting one political system above another or indicting either management or labor. Rather, I am attempting to understand the themes of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization-recurring issues on this site. Hopefully, with your help as intellectual mid-wife, we can attempt to surface entrenched assumptions which I believe catalyze most human-to-human interaction.I learned something about the word “leadership”: “laeden” is to go upward and “schaeppen” is to create a thing of value. Evidently, the word “shop” derives from the suffix. We buy things of value in shops. However, like the Dutch word “boss,” “leader” essentially means “master.” You allude to leadership as a creative act in your question, “What steps can leaders take to create an environment of trust and safety to support open and constructive communication?” Both words connote the right to command and the duty to exact obedience.
For the past few weeks I’ve been attempting to give my vague notions about leadership more concretion-to surface and challenge my assumptions about leadership. The exercise is both fatiguing and exhilarating. I’ve also taken a deep mental plunge into Orlando Patterson’s book “Slavery and Social Death, A Comparative Study.” I am attempting to integrate Patterson’s insights into my own experience. The fruit of this synthesis is what I term
THEORY OF THRALLDOM
(Bondage, Slavery)
I DISTINGUISH:
-PRINCIPAL OF THRALLDOM
-PRACTICE OF THRALLDOM
As a principle, thralldom is the condition of being entirely subject to another’s will.
As a practice, thralldom is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be, or treated as, the property of others.
I submit that the principle of thralldom is the active force underlying virtually all relationships. It is the bedrock of all social interaction. Thralldom is complete control over someone who is subject to that one’s will. The controller is subject, the controlled is object. The controller is a person; the controlled is a non-person-a thing.
Thralldom has two dimensions about which you have spoken at length Lisa: 1) domination 2) dehumanization.
The Tree will illustrate how I see thralldom as a ubiquitous phenomenon:
Leaves and Fruit: labels, language, media, scholastic systems, products and services, which simultaneously obscure and express the reality of thralldom.
Branches: interpersonal and organizational expressions of thralldom (e.g., organization as machine, organism, instrument of domination, political system, psychic prison).
Trunk: thralldom [slavery] as social fact [reality]
Root System: propensity to dominate, legitimacy of the State and its military apparatus, ideology, tradition, forgotten history.
Thralldom is:
Mediated: by money
Modified: by the character of the organization
Mitigated: by labor relations and human rights legislation.
Based on the above, “freedom” would be the degree of “protection” within an experience of exploitation.
While the conditions of slavery vary from relationship to relationship the dimensions of domination and dehumanization remain constant.
For example:
• discipline: punishments and rewards
• subjection and submission: (inferior) status
• performance: duties performed under duress
• treatment: as objects, human tools, instruments
• perception: as commodities
If you like, I will expand on my research, which we can discuss and debate to our hearts content-time permitting of course.
Bye for now,
Carman (My new e-mail address is not yet established–please bear with)
Reference:
Leadership: http://www.learning org.com/98.04/0257.html
Carman, Hello,
I apologize for the delay in posting and responding. I’ve been on a writing vacation for the past two weeks (continuing this week).
You’ve begun a powerful analysis of the dominator paradigm, and I am looking forward to reading how you further develop your tree of knowledge! It’s useful, I think, to expand our awareness of underlying structures and assumptions. (Even to the psycho-spiritual level).
You assert that thralldom “is the active force underlying virtually all relationships.” This is true by definition in dominator systems. On the other hand, I have experienced Partnership relationships where this is not the case. (And of course, my purpose in this blog is to both highlight elements of domination in our existing models of organization and to explore and describe some psycho-social-spiritual bridges to Partnership ways of being).
Thank you for sharing here!
Warm regards,
Lisa
P.S. We have a beautiful day here in Southern California on the cusp of Summer and Fall…
Hi Lisa,
I am happy to hear that you have experienced Partnership relationships where thralldom was not an active force. I would like to include myself in that relationship. Succinctly, I would say that “partnership” is more probable where one is not subject to the will of another. Even slaves experienced a kind of partnership, according to Patterson, in that they ‘had strong social ties among themselves though their relationships not recognized as legitimate or binding.’
However, as you observe, it is not enough to highlight elements of domination in our existing models of organization; it is also incumbent upon us to ‘explore some psycho-social-spiritual bridges to Partnership ways of being.’
I think I may have located one such a “bridge.” However, rather than rush to ‘prescription,’ I would like to devote more time to ‘description.’ Using raw materials from Patterson’s analysis of slavery, and incorporating the straight-edge of your critique, I would like to continue constructing a Theory of Organizational Thralldom that can speak to some of the more trenchant and troubling issues of organizational behavior. I want to demonstrate that asymmetrical power relations, characterized by domination and submission, activate the principle and practice of thralldom.
Let’s illustrate one such issue: psychological abuse, colloquially called “bullying.” To bully is to intimidate through blustering, domineering, or threatening behavior: workers who were bullied into accepting a poor contract (http://www.thefreedictionary.com). Bullied Persons are routinely forced into submission through fear. Now, most texts I’ve consulted approach this ubiquitous phenomenon through the perspective of the powerless. They typically treat the abused worker to psychology—How to understand the abuser, What are the characteristics of the abuser? How to personally cope, and so on. Because the systemic relationship remains untouched—and unchallenged—power continues to be weighted in favor of the abuser.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) website observes: “On June 1, 2004, Quebec became the first North American jurisdiction to include protection against psychological harassment of employees in its Act respecting Labour Standards.
Bullying, known as psychological harassment is defined as:
“Any vexatious behaviour in the form of repeated and hostile or unwanted conduct, verbal comments, actions or gestures, that affect an employee’s dignity or psychological integrity and that results in a harmful work environment for the employee. A single serious incidence of such behaviour that has a lasting harmful effect on an employee may also constitute psychological harassment” (http://www.cupe.bc.ca/stopbullying).
Two things stand out in the above:
1) Quebec is the first “North American” jurisdiction to legislate against the practice, and
2) “Protection.” There’s that word again.
In his discussion of injustice Patterson quotes an American ex-slave who recounts: “the most barbarous thing I saw with these eyes—I lay on my bed and study about it now—I had a sister, my older sister, she was fooling with the clock and broke it, and my old master taken her and tied a rope around her neck—just enough to keep it from choking her—and tied her up in the back yard and whipped her I don’t know how long. There stood mother, there stood father, and there stood all the children and none could come to her rescue.”
I have personally witnessed the verbal equivalent of such physical abuse as colleagues stood by and did nothing to stop a psychological assault. Patterson rightly asks, How could persons be made to accept such natural injustice? Not simply the victim but more particularly, “those who stood by and accepted it.”
Patterson isolates two dimensions: 1) denying the slave’s humanity, his independent social existence 2) the master’s authority was derived from his control over symbolic instruments, which effectively persuaded both slave and others that the master was the only mediator between the living community to which he belonged and the living death that his slave experienced.
Perhaps we can expand on the above dimensions later? I trust that as we cast our mental seine wide we will capture some really big ideational fish.
Bye for now,
Carman
I love listening to the University of Wyoming classical station in the morning. Saturday mornings are especially exquisite. I wonder how many seals I’ll see on the seawall today. Hey, that alliteration sounds a lot like ‘the big black bug bled blue blood.’ 🙂
Reference:
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, 1982
Carman, I apologize for the delay in responding (I’m still writing on a deadline). I appreciate your exquisite thought process. Yes, understanding a problem more deeply can create a perspective from which we can see possible solutions. Personally, I suspect that because the problem is systemic, solutions must be multi-level and multidimensional. When the time comes, I am very interested to hear your ideas with respect to “bridges.”
Bullying is a good example of dominator behavior. And we do (unfortunately but not unexpectedly) see this kind of behavior in the workplace.
I really like your fishing metaphor, “big ideational fish”!
Does this thread work for you as a locus for our conversation? If you should like to see some of this discussion move up a level, just let me know. You are, of course, always welcome to post there directly, if that seems appropriate.
Best wishes,
Lisa
P.S. I always enjoy your description of the local sounds and surroundings. Having lived on a boat for several years, in Monterey and Moss Landing, California, I remember seeing seals sleeping on sunny sea walls… We really enjoyed that lifestyle.
Hi Lisa,
Thank you so much for your gracious comments. It’s wonderful that our minds can interplay notwithstanding our constraints and commitments—you within an intellectual orchard, and me within a psychological sarcophagus.
Lisa, you ask if I would like to see the discussion move up a little. I believe I would find it easier on the eye, if you don’t mind. I keep trying to post directly but the site simply won’t let me in. I will attempt again on the weekend. I also have a new e-mail address I’ll forward to you when time permits.
I’ve been doing a lot of demolition and re-construction on my Mythology of Organization. The wrecking ball has been my so-called ‘theory of thralldom.’
In closing, I thought you might enjoy a quote from Freire:
“People are fulfilled only to the extent they create their world, and create it with their transforming labor. If for a person to be in the world of work is to be totally dependent, insecure and totally threatened—if their work does not belong to them—the person cannot be fulfilled. Work that is not free ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of dehumanization” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p.126).
Bye for now,
Carman
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