Sunday, December 12, 2004

No Collar

I'm ill. I haven't finished reading. I feel like rolling over to die.

1. Does it seem to anyone else that the corporate culture of such organizations is to give employees what they think they want in order to elicit more productivity and thus more profit?

2. For all the talk about sellouts by the fish, aren't they, in their own way, elitists? And, as noted by Ms. Snyder, they seem oblivious to the power hierarchies under which they are employed. How can they both rail against the traditional models without knowing exactly how those models are structured? Does this ignorance/naivete leave them susceptible to corporate structure changes that would/will move them closer to older models?

3. The cult metaphors seem strong, but there is this similarity in the sense that work becomes one's life. Fellow employees are "family" and the head of the family, the corporation itself, is entity worth sacrificing oneself for. Do the images and the rhetoric these workplaces exude "trick" people into thinking that they aren't part of the machine while sacrificing their lives to it? How is this any different to the cold war business environment in which loyalty to the company was the thing?

I will try to be in class tomorrow, but right now I feel wretched.

Katy

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