What is homo corporatus made of?
by Tom Sullivan
How we think is in ways more important than what we think. Fundamentalism, for example, is not a set of beliefs but a way of believing: rigid, dogmatic, unforgiving, especially of nonconformity. It applies not just to religious believers across faiths, but to radical political movements as well.
A New Yorker profile of Emily Martin examines her studies as a founder of the anthropology of science of the ways in which clinical psychology researchers think about the examination of thinking. Her research is a process of “observing observers observing,” says colleague Paul Rainbow.
Ceridwen Dovey explains her approach:
While she’s in field-work mode, Martin is always alert to what she calls these “ethnographic moments.” Even the smallest action or fragment of speech, she believes, can be a useful clue to the mostly invisible wider cultural assumptions that shape how research is done in any specialized field. She observes and collects these fragments, hoping that, later on, she’ll be able to find connections between them and make better sense of a scientific world view that is fascinatingly foreign to her.
“Anthropology allows me to see things that might be obvious but usually remain hidden, in a variety of settings, and put them into words,” Martin said, reflecting on the unspoken traumas of a childhood in the household of a father “profoundly disturbed” by his experiences in the Second World War.
One of her “ethnographic moments” captured the commercial framework used for viewing basic human biology:
At childbirth classes, Martin tentatively interviewed other pregnant women; she scoured textbooks on obstetrics and gynecology. She began to see that women giving birth “were being held to standards of production, time management, efficiency” analogous to criteria in manufacturing. The language used about menstrual discharge in textbooks was that of the “ruined debris of failure”; the post-menopausal body was described like an “outmoded factory.”
Martin’s observation reinforces how much not just the language of business but its impulses frame how we perceive the world and our places in it. Look at the screen on which you read this, at the chair in which you sit, and at the walls and furnishings around you and the clothes you wear. Almost nothing not the product of a corporation. Business is not just the “elephant in the room,” as Martin said of her father’s behavior. Business is the room.
It is a “person” who perceives a woman’s body as a factory, workers’ labor as product inputs, and their very lives as “human resources” to mine.
Case in point: the Marsh Supermarkets chain. Founded in 1931, the business filed for bankruptcy after first selling off 100 convenience stores, plus pharmacies, and 115 grocery stores after auctioning off the real estate they sat on:
“It was a long, slow decline,” said Amy Gerken, formerly an assistant office manager at one of the stores. Sun Capital Partners, the private-equity firm that owned Marsh, “didn’t really know how grocery stores work. We’d joke about them being on a yacht without even knowing what a UPC code is. But they didn’t treat employees right, and since the bankruptcy, everyone is out for their blood.”
The anger arises because although the sell-off allowed Sun Capital and its investors to recover their money and then some, the company entered bankruptcy leaving unpaid more than $80 million in debts to workers’ severance and pensions.
For Sun Capital, this process of buying companies, seeking profits and leaving pensions unpaid is a familiar one. Over the past 10 years, it has taken five companies into bankruptcy while leaving behind debts of about $280 million owed to employee pensions.
One might say investors strip-mined employees’ lives. I just did.
The Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey writes:
When a company fails, it is sometimes impossible to pay everyone who is owed money. The trouble, according to some critics, is that financial firms often extract money from losing bets to reward themselves and then, through bankruptcy, leave obligations to workers unpaid. Companies owned by private-equity firms have used bankruptcy to leave behind hundreds of millions of dollars in pension debts, according to a government estimate.
“These private-equity firms buy a company, plunder it of any assets, and then send it into bankruptcy without paying employees,” said Eileen Appelbaum, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research who studies private-equity transactions. “To anyone but a bankruptcy court, this looks like a swindle.”
Having unconsciously absorbed the mindset of the the bottom line, the balance sheet, and return on investment, we blithely dismiss how such an arrangement treats employees who have put their lives into businesses owned by absentee landlords. “It’s not personal … It’s strictly business.” What’s decency got to do with it?
For those left with their pensions shorted and their lives upended, it is very personal. When it was Social Security taxes Pres. George W. Bush wanted to turn over to Wall Street or tax withholdings he wanted to send out in refunds, it was “your money.” Except when it is negotiated pensions and benefits, it’s investors’. Tough luck.
This mindset is what it means to go from being homo sapiens to homo corporatus. And because business has been so very successful at what it does, and so ubiquitous, its framing slowly becomes our own without our realizing it. This implicit bias is what Emily Martin studies in how clinical psychology researchers do their work. It seeps in the way after visiting a foreign culture we sometimes pick up a bit of the local accent.
I am reminded again of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” from the first year of the original Star Trek. Unknown to the Enterprise crew, exobiologist Dr. Roger Korby has had his consciousness transferred into the body of a look-alike android. When the switch is revealed, “Korby” argues there is nothing essentially different about him. In fact, he has been made better:
KORBY: I’m the same! A direct transfer. All of me, human, rational, and without a flaw.
[…]
KORBY: I’m not a computer. Test me. Ask me to solve any, equate, transmit. Christine, Christine, let me prove myself. Does this make such a difference?
CHAPEL: Don’t you see, Roger? Everything you’ve done has proved it isn’t you.
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