Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Looking Away? Civilized Indifference and the Carnal Relationships of the Contemporary Workplace

2016; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/joms.12175

1467-6486

David Courpasson,

Critical Theory and Philosophy

Journal of Management StudiesVolume 53, Issue 6 p. 1094-1100 EssaysFree Access Looking Away? Civilized Indifference and the Carnal Relationships of the Contemporary Workplace David Courpasson, Corresponding Author David Courpasson EMLYON Business School and Cardiff UniversityAddress for reprints: David Courpasson, EMLYON Business School, France ([email protected]).Search for more papers by this author David Courpasson, Corresponding Author David Courpasson EMLYON Business School and Cardiff UniversityAddress for reprints: David Courpasson, EMLYON Business School, France ([email protected]).Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12175Citations: 9 For your comments about this discussion, please visit http://www.socadms.org.uk/looking-away-civilized-indifference/. AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL I The idea that I put forward in this essay is not, in its immediate content, a happy one. The three-year old Aylan Kurdi, lying face down in the sand, on a Turkish beach; the immobile figure of a police officer beside him, like a powerless sentinel. This small body washed up on a beach. Other pictures emerged of the boy with his five-year old brother Galip [also dead], laughing and holding a teddy bear in a pink dress; another with Galip's arm around his brother. These pictures gripped the whole world in early September 2015, for several days. They were 'extraordinarily powerful images' (The Independent, 3 September 2015). It appeared like a revelation to each of us that millions of people were trying to escape from their camps, villages, dead places where no future could be invented any more. The image of the boy's body was an emotional shock. Why him? Why now? Surprisingly, these pictures created carnal connections, as if we knew the boys and their family because they acted like any boy: laughing, playing with teddy bears, and… with sand on a beach. But did we really care? Were we feeling true and durable pain and suffering, as if we all were his parents, brothers or friends? Or some ersatz substitute displayed on-line while we continue our studied indifference to the people around us? I think that this unfortunately mundane experience of virtual solidarity can help us to interrogate (again) the genuineness of contemporary emotions and of the gaze we have on each other's destiny: civilized indifference and voyeurism? Genuine solidarity is rare; it is hardly achieved by emotional excitement or empathic attunement, especially on-line, because we are not in others' skin. At the time of the internet, people often remain hidden behind their screens to express feelings and opinions. They click out and forget what they have done and said with the smell of lunch. They are socially disengaged while spending and/or wasting hours watching videos, sending pictures, answering or asking pointless questions in their 'social' networks. Sometimes, they are actually emotionally grasped by an event occurring in a remote place where they will never go, by faces of people they will never meet. Focused on the very image of Aylan, we forgot that hundreds of thousands of children have been dying under the bombs of diverse oppressors for some years in numerous different regions of the world… We tend to physically disappear behind our screens while expressing these emotions in our curious isolation; we are contained and confined by our screens, in the secluded bedrooms or offices where we spend most of our time. The corporeality of Aylan's tragedy contrasts with our curious inclination to prefer, or at least enjoy, virtual relationships. This decorporealization of social relationships has been documented many times, for we are in a social media society where links are strange hybrids between invisible technological connections and deep physical feelings. At the same time, we live in a 'body-driven' society, where the peer and societal/media driven pressure to have fit and healthy bodies (you have got to look good!) is greater than ever; moreover, the importance of physical encounters, of corporeal connections remains crucial to any form of social life and media: what grips people is indeed the cadaver of the Syrian boy, the imploring face of another starving child, or the bleeding fighting bull not standing a chance in front of the colourful acclaimed toreador: these are corporeal images. But these are 'just' images. Whether we are that gripped by the dying beggar at the corner of our own street is another kettle of fish. Other 'true' people may have no true place in the current obsessional struggle to prove oneself, to improve oneself, to measure oneself. In organizations, the story of bodies is pretty much the same; nothing has really changed since Taylor: the Google factory may be more outwardly smiling, more connected, and its offices more colourful too, but it is still designed to constrain bodies to be at work all the time, by mixing up leisure and work, by tying people physically to their workplace. This nicely oppressive factory reproduces a view of the adequate worker as being physically resilient for supporting the long hours that s/he spends at work, which is the exact spitting image of the corporeal Taylorian discipline. Among other consequences, in many corporations, the 'practice of suicide' as a personal bodily sacrifice in response to the duress of work and management, as well as the addiction to drugs that modify the physical presence and availability of workers are seldom studied but constitute major social facts. In France, an increase of 25 per cent over the last ten years in the number of employees taking drugs before coming to work, to forget one's fears and always be 'up to it', hit the news before being forgotten (Le Monde, 13 April 2012). In Japan, the number of karoshi, literally translated as 'death from overwork', mainly from heart attacks or stroke due to stress, is increasing steadily. In China, where the phenomenon is called guolaosi, it was estimated in 2010 that 600,000 people had died this way (Japan Times, 7 January 2013). Suffering bodies at work seem to be part of the contemporary social landscape of work and we organization scholars seem to be quite indifferent to this phenomenon. Indeed, despite these harsh realities of the condition of bodies in the workplace, despite the power of images of dead bodies, organization studies have largely neglected corporeal elements, to the advantage of more subjective and identity-driven accounts of organizational life. They have preferred to focus on the subjective rather than on the physical dimensions of people's experience at work, despite recent efforts to think about the 'socio-materiality' of organizations. We scholars also enjoy debating for hours about the emotional power of social media in catalysing movements and political protest. However, many interesting accounts of specific forms of work and occupations contribute to highlight the salience of the corporeal dimension in the accomplishment of work, especially in the tainted and dirty jobs of the factory, as well as in settings such as call centres: contemporary organizations are developing 'cool factories' where the work being done is still largely characterized by dirtiness, stigma and/or lack of substantial interest, notwithstanding the above mentioned bodily consequences due to the demands of productivism. In a similar vein, collective action on the internet creates a buzz much more than strikes, blockades or street demonstrations, less crunchy and more traditional practices of protest. However, research also largely demonstrates that the tweet without the street amounts to almost nothing (Gerbaudo, 2012), and that collective protest is all the more powerful as bodies are central in the mobilization (Juris, 2008) and concrete places are occupied. Be they dying, suffering, acting, occupying, shouting and fighting, bodies are decidedly central to many aspects of social and organizational life. So why are we more stimulated by a picture than by the close-by pain of our colleagues to which we are indeed indifferent? II This thought came to my mind as I was walking down a busy commercial street in a lively North-American city. Luxurious displays, attractive cafés and pictures of perfect bodies were contrasting with the dirty and unlikely bodies of many people that were either sleeping close to the entrance doors of cheap hotels, silently sitting at the corner of a street, or wandering like sleepwalkers looking for nothing, and talking to nobody but themselves. The contrast was shocking: Brandy Melville little dolls, perfectly waxed and made up in their perfectly fitting blue jeans, and homeless bodies, indifferent to their own dirtiness, stuffed with alcohol and weed. In the midst of all that, a sort of invisible social connection made of civilized indifference, I spotted a young guy in his twenties (I reckon, although he looked older) begging for food. On a sign he had written: 'help me stay alive, I left my body behind me'. I did not dare ask what he meant. But that brutally reminded me that many workers had been doing exactly the same for decades in the name of work, and many migrants as well, in the name of a promised land: leaving their bodies behind. This is simultaneously a terrifying and mundane statement; and again, quite surprisingly (or not?), we are not that interested in the fate of bodies in organization studies, except to understand their relationship to identities and discipline or erotic dimension [surely because of the influence of Foucault]. This is very annoying: are we actually living in the cities and factories, to see these estranged people from the other side of the society, to listen to the duress of the corporeal life at work, or are we living in a disconnected world; do we have a physical proximity with these people? At times, a fair amount of pity mixes up with something darker, a mental turning away that is justified by the liberal idea of responsibility: these suffering people must have done something wrong to be like that, after all. Or it is simply our lack of time that prevents us from paying attention to the everyday tragedies occurring at work (as well as in the streets and in the sea). But it remains that, as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik put it: 'the sun is shining, the acacia is blooming and the slaughterer is slaughtering' (in Geras, 1998, p. 8). Lamennais points to the gloomy future of societies in which indifference is the most widespread sentiment: 'The age that is most ailing is not that which is violent on behalf of error, but the age which neglects, which disdains the truth. There is still power, and consequently hope, whenever violent commotions are felt: but when all motion is extinguished, when the pulse has ceased to beat, when a cold chill has reached the heart, what next is to be expected but an approaching and unavoidable dissolution' (Lamennais, 1895, p. xv). III This statement suggests that the problem of indifference is as much corporeal as social: motion and pulse are the key factors of social life. I do think that there is a close relationship between the phenomenon of civilized indifference that I evoke above, and the lack of attention given to bodies [in organization studies], whereas bodies are everywhere in the social media, be they perfect or rotting. Indifference lies at the tension between the sufferings of some people and the blank inaction of others in response. Indifference is fundamentally based on lack or absence of true membership to a group or a community: this absence makes people un-moved by the emergencies of others; we are not Syrians or beggars after all. This is why bodies come to play, because membership is not just about a disembodied collective conscience: it comes to life in members' bodies (Eliasoph, 2005, p. 160). And it is also why social media are so successful: they allow people to live social relationships behind a veil, a screen of abstraction which separates them from the actual bodies of people they know and do not know. Aylan became 'our child' because of the image of his dead body. An exciting and protective image for our conscience but we nevertheless rapidly look away. That cannot be the model of our world. Take the example of a fitness room. Bodies at work, the fleshly companionship that can arise in the course of years of frequent training and suffering side by side under the bars. That simple activity generates bonds that help caring about others, simply helping them to lift a heavier bar and share their contentment! Or think about a workshop in a chemical factory: working by night, this team of seven workers controlling the always uncertain functioning of a machine and of dangerous products flowing in the conduits, trusting the colleague for her ability to fix the problem when the flow is blocked: they need to be two together in their special suits to open the tub and see how it goes… These experiences are conducive to developing carnal connections (Wacquant, 2005). I am not talking about an exalted view of interpersonal fusion in teams, but of a connection that prevents those which experience it from the civilized indifference, a connection that pushes people to not look away because they are incorporating the social structure and see any person as worth the detour. In the closed contexts where we spend most of our lives (offices, bedrooms, shops, cars… fitness rooms) what matters most is people's actions and 'how they relate to one another in recurrent interpersonal encounters' (Wacquant, 2005, p. 455). The homeless writing that he left his body behind explains that he is not incorporating the social structure anymore: he is left behind by the social structure, by us. He is not part of any small-scale civilizing machine in the sense of Elias, imposing rules, taboos and strict adherence to forms of control and obedience to authority. He is alone. If he got his body back, he could be with us. So we need to reinvestigate the carnal connections existing in the confined spaces where we spend our time, including workspaces. Carnal connection means feeling physically what the other is feeling; it prevents the current contract of mutual indifference (Geras, 1998) that characterizes life at work and elsewhere. In another context, Geras reminds us of a story happening during the period of the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942: 'Adina Szwajger, a woman who worked in the children's hospital there, recalls a scene: "They kept going past and it was a sweltering day….On the balcony of a house on Zelasna Street-there, on the other side [of the ghetto wall]-a woman in a flowered housecoat was watering plants in window boxes. She must have seen the procession below, but she carried on watering her flowers"' (Szwajger, 1990, pp. 48–9, cited in Geras, 1998, p. 3). Carnal connections are decisive because they mean that if I cut my finger, it does hurt someone else, not only me. Is the world of work so different from that crude account of social relationships? The most dangerous enemy is not necessarily the most vicious dictator but the silence of good people (Geras, 1998, p. 20). Reinstalling effective carnal connections in organizations might help in preventing so many workers leaving their bodies behind and thereby reduce the magnitude of the social and physical calamity that is affecting the world of work. This is what Michel told me in his own terms when narrating the experience of collective dismissals in his bank in 1997: 'we were all waiting for the names; you know the names of those who would lose their job. The HR department was in charge of making the list, for several weeks the atmosphere was just unbearable, and when I knew that I wasn't in the list, Oh My God, I remember that I felt more than a sense of relief, a real happiness and at the same time, absolute indifference to the fate of the four colleagues in our branch who had to leave the place. Simply happy to be alive in a sense. When I learned that one of them had committed suicide two weeks later, I was sad but sadness could not exceed the threshold of my personal satisfaction to keep on working'. IV What could organization studies do to understand why so many people do not come to the aid of others in dire need or great distress? Do we organization scholars have anything to do with this implicit contract of civilized indifference? We live a life largely concerned with private ends and the ends of very closely related others in the shadow of widespread human catastrophe. And we keep on focusing on issues such as identity, subjectivity, performativity, CSR, strategy, and so on, individualistic issues for an egoistic research agenda that does not pay any attention to that catastrophe. Is that inappropriate to the issues considered central in organization studies? Is this statement so naïve that it is of no use to tell again and again about the barbarity of current corporate practices, the lack of consideration for topics of public value, without being accused of aristocratic critique? Everyone alone at work: that would be the deal. Organization would be a space where no mutually assisting behaviours would be developed. Also because there would be in fact nothing effective that can be done by most people to oppose duress or oppression. Or because the arbitrariness of management would be after all acceptable, in a post-political world where people would prefer exiting and looking away to engaging and struggling. A moral universe of apathy and indifference, for people looking for exalting moments elsewhere. V Readers can make of this what they want. Some perhaps will consider useless another reflection on indifference. Others may think that the parallel drawn between indifference to the tragedy of the Jews or migrants, to homelessness, and corporeal suffering at work is exaggerated or simply irrelevant. Others may find an intellectual and emotional sympathy, even empathy, by thinking about the bystander who looks away because she is indeed indifferent or because she cannot bear to look; or by thinking about what the wide tolerance of unjust and unbearable practices can produce. The duty of organization scholars is simply to take the pain of thinking about these things, if not feeling obliged to act against them. But it is not the most relevant element in the context of this essay: it is not a matter of calling the scholar to attend to the needs of the social world beyond the theory that s/he is working on. It rather should speak to the internal coherence of the theory itself: there is some inner inadequacy to most organizational theory to not even mention suffering bodies and the civilized indifference that characterizes contemporary experiences of work; because it does not contain this element, our theory runs the risk of being useless to people before the oppressive nature of organizations. Theories of organizations and work are insufficient when they do not encompass the requirement of a pervasive idea of mandatory care. To be sure, organization studies' rendition of human reality is far too disembodied and even decontextualized; we talk about micro-interactions and agency, discourses and language, without often realizing that observing and analysing people at work implies that they can get mad at our accounts of their experiences because they are irrelevant to their lives. The sign of the homeless boy was not supposed to be published. All those puzzles in writing an embodied organization theory obviously increase the difficult combination between the thing we call theory and the experiential knowledge that we draw from our observations. But our theories cannot happen and be developed behind people's backs. Here organization scholars might turn to Durkheim, a strangely ignored giant in our courtyard so prompt in importing social theorists. He contends that society needs the sacred energies of the physical experience of group life to revitalize the energy that is 'worn away with the passage of time' (Durkheim, 1995, p. 217). Progressively and surreptitiously avoiding this experience because of the alienating presence of social media, we remain indifferent to the deaths and risks that threaten us too, like the poor characters that appear constantly on our screens, be they TV or computers or smartphones. Disembodied, society 'would be proclaiming that it does not hold its rightful place in their hearts. Indeed it would defy itself' (Durkheim, 1995, p. 403). The carnal experience of being social, of not looking away, is unlikely to happen on the internet. It happens in the street, in the workshop, in the office at the corner of the corridor. References Durkheim, E. (1912/1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. by K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Eliasoph, N. (2005). 'Theorizing from the neck down: Why social research must understand bodies acting in real space and time (and why it's so hard to spell out what we learn from this)'. Qualitative Sociology, 28, 159– 69. Geras, N. (1998). The Contract of Mutual Indifference. Political Philosophy after the Holocaust. London: Verso. Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto. Juris, J. S. (2008). Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lamennais, F. R. (1895). Essays on Indifference in Matters of Religion. London: John McQueen. Szwajger, A. B. (1990). I Remember Nothing More. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wacquant, L. (2005). 'Carnal connections: On embodiment, apprenticeship, and membership'. Qualitative Sociology, 28, 445– 74. Citing Literature Volume53, Issue6September 2016Pages 1094-1100 ReferencesRelatedInformation