THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF

(Prof) G D Donleavy *

Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University,

Rockhampton, Qld 4702.

Email [email protected]

THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF

(Prof) G D Donleavy *

Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University,

Rockhampton, Qld 4702.

Email [email protected]

Office As Workplace Fief Page 1

THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF

ABSTRACT

The Office is a very successful television series and the office is the weekday, daylight home of the population most ANZAM members study. Yet it has hardly been researched at all in its own right as a workspace or domain. This paper argues its significance, posits its feudal character as the heir of the medieval fief (not the Boisot-Child fief); and suggests research questions for the near future.

KEYWORDS Organizational culture, job and work design, perception

THE OFFICE

Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open

the gates of despondency - Welcome to a day in the average office.

Thus spoke Ricky Gervais playing office manager, David Brent, in the British series, “The Office” in the year 2000. “The Office “was a huge success in the UK. Its American and European counterparts have also done very well. They tap into a long tradition of baleful workplace humour syndicated in such cartoons as Blondie, Bristow and Dilbert. The message communicated over the years of this tradition is well described by the following quotation.

At the office, we have come to understand, the boss is always a blustery martinet;

abbreviations are a B.F.D.; your co-workers eat your food, talk your ear off, and stab you in

the back; and work has no inherent value. (Friend, 2006).

Although so many people over so many generations have spent so much of their lives at the office, it was not until the very end of the 20 th century that it inspired a TV serial. Similarly, office life and structure have only recently begun to appear in management literature. So far none of such studies have concerned the office itself but only its boundaries.

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Why should the physical office be a matter for Critical Management Studies (hereafter CMS)? A key work in the development of CMS gives the core of the answer as follows.

An important role for critical social science is to relate what is perceived to be a

manifestation of individual, technical incompetence to a system that institutionalizes

the non-accountability of managers to their subordinates. The central problem of

management resides in the social which systematically foster

and sustain very limited and often distorted forms of communication between those

occupying positions within the horizontal and vertical divisions of labour.

(Alvesson and Willmott 1992)

The place where that non-accountability is reinforced daily is the office, for it is the main arena where managerial power is exercised; especially now that manufacturing is largely outsourced so primitive capitalist exploitation is centered more on overseas sweatshops than in local factories.

This exposing of true relations has been at the heart of the critical theory project from the start. Thus in the words of a founding father:-

Critical thinking is motivated by the effort really to transcend the tension and to

abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity and

rationality, and those work processes on which society is built.

(Horkheimer 1976:220)

At the very heart of those processes lies the office.

Another key reason for CMS to have the office on its agenda is the silence in the literature about the office. It is arguable that this silence helps reinforce the unequal and unaccountable power relations that CMS seek to expose and deconstruct. During the decades of silence, we have seen the rise of open plan office, cubicles replacing rooms and the appropriation of home time and space by office work. These developments have received a certain amount of

Office As Workplace Fief Page 3 discussion in the classical management literature and are presumptively developments with only productivity rationales. “Expert cultures, such as those of the management specialisms, are ‘socially structured silences’ that exhaust the space of possible discourse.” Alvesson and

Willmott (1992:13). Discourse about the office itself in academic management literature is so scarce that the interests served by such silence could well be the very interests CMS aims to expose and deconstruct.

Lastly consider the effect of casualisation on office life and structure.

A sense of impermanence is blowing through the labor force, destabilizing everyone

from office temps to high-tech independent contractors to restaurant and retail clerks.

Factory jobs are being outsourced, garment jobs are morphing into homework and in

every industry, temporary contracts are replacing full, secure employment. In a

growing number of instances, even CEOs are opting for shorter stints at one

corporation after another, breezing in and out of different corner offices and purging

half the employees as they come and go.

(Klein 2005:231)

In parallel with casualisation, the division of office space between permanent private offices for full time staff and common open plan space for casuals has manifested in physical structures the emerging class divide between those with and those without security of tenure at work.

OFFICE TIME AND SPACE

Corporate practices pervade modern life by providing personal identity, structuring time and experience, influencing education and knowledge production, and directing entertainment and news production. (Deetz 1992:2). It is at the office that the daily interactions occur which forge the personal identities, or at least the working personas, of white collar employees.

Lyotard 1984 defines a performative intent as intent to develop and celebrate knowledge which contributes to the production of maximum output for minimum input. Performativity serves to subordinate knowledge and truth to the production of efficiency. (Fournir and Grey

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2000). Such studies as there are about the office in recent years are mostly performative, sometimes militantly and unashamedly so. For example, Halpern et al (2008:175) preface their article in the Journal of Business Ethics with these declarations of performative dogma:-

Any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they re being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to shareholders. One performative study on psychological depression in the workplace links it to an ugly neologism called ‘presenteeism’ (Sanders and Andrews 2006) where the worker is present but only abstractedly.

An area of performative interest in the office has been the effect on productivity of the laptops and mobile phones. The performative justification for mobile phones is flexibility.

Allowing people to work at home is one of the mechanisms for providing flexibility (Daniels et al 2001)

There are a few critical works on the impact of mobile phones on the boundaries between office space/time and personal space/time – a division first noted in a critical and phenomenological way by Zerubavel (1990) who characterized the formation of personal identity as being shaped by a distinction we all make between on duty and off duty identity.

A critical study of the office boundary by Towers et al (2006) looked at the impact of mobile technology. Mobile technology enables work extension into the home and outside office hours so managers expect staff to be always available to do work. The main empirical evidence is a survey of 33000 Canadian office workers by Duxbury and Higgins (2001).

In another non performative study, Prasopoulo et al (2006) found that mobile phone users are becoming more vulnerable to organisational claims and that in consequence the office is always present. Mobile phones mediate the organizational world and personal world since one device serves both but there only limited efforts to understand how the use of mobiles

Office As Workplace Fief Page 5 affects and restructures the temporal boundaries segregating work and non work activities

(Srivastava 2005). Green (2002:41) found ‘the presence of the employer becomes embodied in the devices, and...the presence of such devices prompts self-regulation on the part of the workers to be constantly available for work in a domestic setting.’

Only one non performative study could be found on the office itself, albeit a doctoral thesis rather a refereed article. Dunn-Jensen (2006) made a study of face time - the "perceived pressure to be seen" at work and how the pressures associated affect individual employees. Her findings were that individuals may spend long hours at the office for reasons that cannot be accounted for by the actual volume of work that they have to do, and that perceived pressure to be visible is associated with face time and that face time, in turn, is associated with work-family conflict. Yet the office workplace has long been recognized as a plentiful source of stress. White (1956:136/7) wrote:

In almost all companies, the five day week is pure fiction. Executives are quick to

learn that if they drop around the office on Saturday to tidy things up a bit, it won’t be

held against them in the slightest. Similarly, while the organization encourages

executives to do extensive reading of business periodicals and trade journals, few

executives would dream of being caught reading them in the office. Such solitary

contemplation during the office day, for some reason, is regarded by the

himself as a form of hookey.

THE OFFICE AS A FIEF

Feudal vassalage was, in some senses, the medieval equivalent of employment. The employee paid to his in a ritual act promising aid and obedience in exchange for protection, succour and the fief itself. A fief, a block of land and governance of the living on it, was transmitted in a ritual called investiture, immediately following the homage. The vassal held his fief only so long as he served his lord, and could be ejected on failure to do so. Since homage and obligations were personal, the lord of a lord (known as the suzerain) was owed nothing by the of the intermediate lord (i.e. the lord) (Ganshof 1952:88). Vassalage was always personal and was never dependant on role, function or title. A fief was granted against an obligation to serve.

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In this it was unlike the villein (also known as ) which was granted in return for unskilled labour obligations usually associated with work in the fields. Their lord could sell serfs to other together with their holdings (Hyams 1980:6-14). Serfs were not allowed to alienate their own land without the permission of the lord of their manor (Hyams 1980:43)

The distinction between serfdom and vassalage is comparable to the modern distinction between wages and salaries. The serf was a free man with recourse to the assize courts, except in relation to his lord whose word and court were not open to appeal. In modern parlance, the serf could not take the boss to court for mistreatment short of murder. The serf’s rights were more like those of today’s unlawfully employed and exploited illegal immigrant labour than like those of regular staff. The free vassal was more like the modern office worker. The area we call our office is remarkably similar to a medieval fief. Like a fief, an office is a piece of real estate to which duties of service attach. Like a fief, an office can be removed from the occupier on demand by the boss, with no recourse whatever by the tenant to the courts. In this respect medieval tenants were better off, as they had available the writ of ‘novel disseisin’ at the assize courts. This was a claim to have been wrongfully dispossessed by the demesne lord. The lord would usually argue that dispossession was imposed for failure to perform the services implicit or explicit in the fief. The courts would decide on the evidence, and evidence was even more crucial then than now. The modern employee has the possibility of bringing an action for wrongful dismissal altogether but not for wrongful dispossession of an office . There is no right in any law to occupy specific office space as an employee, but it is natural and observable that occupation thereof is in the gift of the boss of the manor and that his disposition judgments will reflect a combination of seniority, function and the extent to which the vassal is in favour. It is almost universally observed that personal status in a firm is associated with office size and comfort; and this association is the essence of fiefdom.

FEUDALISM AND NEO-

The original feudalism slowly arose in Europe after the barbarian dismemberment of the Roman

Empire. Comninel (2000) characterises feudalism from a Marxist perspective as the coercive extraction by lords of surplus value from serfs. In any system that can meaningfully be termed feudal;

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public authority has become a private possession. Everyone expects the possessor of a 'court'

to make a profit out of it and everyone knows that the eldest son of the court-holder will

inherit this profitable right, whatever his qualifications for the work. On the other hand, any

important accumulation of almost inevitably becomes burdened with public

duties. The possessor of a great estate must defend it, police it, maintain roads and bridges

and hold a court for his tenants. Thus lordship has both economic and political aspects; it is

less than , but more than private property.

(Strayer 1952:17).

More than private property but less than sovereignty is a possible way of characterising the neo-feudal

CSR movement and empirical examination of the public private boundary in this wider sense at the office is a rich field for research.

Neo-feudalism has been perceived within big business as far back as 1927. GE’s chair, Owen Young, told the Harvard Business School class in that year that they were public trustees who should be educated as such (Case and Case, 1982).

To the business community and the solicitor, land and capital are equally investments,

between which, since they possess the common characteristic of yielding income without

labour, it is inequitable to discriminate. Though their significance as economic categories may

be different, their effect as social institutions is the same. It is to separate property from

creative activity, and to divide society into two classes, of which one has its primary interest

in passive ownership, while the other is mainly dependent upon active work.

(Tawney 1921/1961:67).

Even when considering strictly economic resources, the resemblance between medieval land and modern capital may be less distant than we generally assume. Early medieval manorial evolution was not a single process of disintegration; great estates were formed and fragmented throughout the period, so resembling blocks of modern capital rather than the inalienable entailed estates of popular imagination. (Klingelhofer 1985) "Property is in its nature a kind of limited sovereignty….Property in things swells, in effect, into something which is sovereignty over persons.”

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The main objection to a large corporation”,' said Mr Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court of

the USA, “is that it makes possible and in many cases makes inevitable - the exercise of

industrial absolutism.

(Tawney 1921/1961:77)

FIEFS IN MODERN ASIA

Boisot and Child (1988) invented the notion of an iron law of fiefs to describe the formation of economic warlords within modernising in China. One of the ways in which has failed there is in giving way to fiefs so that the distribution of impacted, uncodified information is skewed in favour of a very few opportunistic players. They define "fief" (op cit 508) as "small numbers, hierarchically organized through face to face and power relationships that often have to be charismatically legitimated - by such means as the laying on of hands, initiation rites, commendation ceremonies and the like". Like their idea of a bureaucracy, a fief is hierarchically co-ordinated; but a fief differs from a bureaucracy in being materially more concerned that its members share values and beliefs, in the personal rather than impersonal nature of relationships, and by the lack of codification of information. They see the fief as the least efficient way of diffusing or codifying information. They are using the word 'fief' almost as a synonym for the word 'clique' rather than in a way that compares with the medieval fief. The fief as they see it has "a warm, involved rationality of vaguely defined ethical principles applied particularistically." (op cit 522). They say China's mishandling of decentralization and delegation issues in its modernization have created new fiefs, and perhaps reinforced old ones in some places. If we allow that fiefs as cliques in China often facilitate both the acquisition of private power intermixed with public office and also the occupation of buildings both commercial and residential, then we have made an important link between Boisot-Child fiefs and traditional fiefs. The very important implication of that is that the “” of command economies involves a significant and possibly inevitable dose of neo feudalism. The office is the physical space enshrining, symbolising and manifesting the fief.

In Japan, "the enterprise groups dominate whole areas of employment through a vast number of subcontract firms. Although formally independent these are highly structured and semi-formalized and enjoy ongoing relations with the big name and enterprise core companies. Effectively, in Muto's

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(1986:135) phrase, they are 'vassals' of the big companies. In turn, many of the subcontracting firms themselves rely on work subcontracted out to smaller subcontractors who in turn subcontract to female domestic outworkers who work on piece-wage rates far removed from those of the enterprise union members." (Clegg 1990:147). It is possible that corporate vassalage of the Japanese type will be echoed in certain respects by personal vassalage within the firm. This is another researchable question.

Russia has for at least three centuries borrowed both from its Eastern and its Western neighbours but never wholly aligning with either. Russia is not yet capitalist but rather is feudal, being characterised by personal allegiance, patronage and the control of, and being the driving forces of social coherence, no separation of public and private roles, wealth derived from rights to use land, but neither land nor labour is fully marketable (Ericson 2000).

CONCLUSION

Critical Theory seeks to encourage a questioning of taken for granted assumptions

about contemporary social reality and the models for the satisfaction of human needs

and wants that are so widely assumed in advanced capitalist society. This gives rise

to a number of foci for a Critical Theory research agenda, including drawing attention

to asymmetrical power relations and discursive closures associated with taken for

granted assumptions and .

(Alvesson and Willmott 1992:11)

This paper has argued three positions as follows:

1. The office is an important and neglected field of enquiry relevant to the central concerns of

critical management studies.

2. A rich source of non performative interpretations of the office is the medieval fief.

3. The medieval fief conveyed to the vassal rights and security of tenure lacking entirely to the

contemporary occupier of an office by a unit of human resources.

Research questions suggested by these positions include those following.

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Where does office size or office position stand in different cultures as an effective motivator relative to pay.perquisites and the ingredients of Theory Y?

To what extent is the accessibility and connectivity that performative rhetoric associates with so called “management by walking around” ranked lower by subordinates than the boss having a genuinely open door to his/her own office?

Under what circumstances are office cubicles and open plan offices not experienced as demeaning and demotivating?

To what extent can and do people refuse promotion or reassignment within the same building when required to move offices?

How much variation is there within any one industry in any one country on and practices as to what employees may install in their offices to render them more personal?

Is there any systematic tendency for employees whose office duties intrude into their personal time through mobile phones to claim back the deficit by using time in the office to read and write personal emails?

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