Legitimating bosses

A front page headline in today's print edition of the FT reads: "Malone close to victory in Charter's $55bn battle for Time Warner Cable."

Why use military terms to describe an everyday commercial transaction? When I bought a pint of milk this morning, I didn't consider it a victory. Why, then, should a takeover be any different - especially as many of them fail badly?

The answer lies in a paper by Olivier Fournot. He shows that one of the tricks bosses use to glamourize and legitimate themselves is to present themselves as Hollywood-type heroes: charismatic, often unorthodox, leaders. The FT's language of "victory" and "battle" fits this template more than would the more quotidian language of accountancy.

A big part of this image-making is to present bosses as risk-takers - even though, objectively-speaking, it is often workers and small contractors who actually bear the biggest risks.

Bosses' legitimation methods don't stop here though. The media commonly pretend that bosses have objective expertise on economics - although they often don't - whereas trades union leaders are merely vested interests: compare, for example, the BBC's treatment of, say, Martin Sorrell and Len McCluskey.

It's not just words that help legitimate and glamourize bosses. So too do silences. The media rarely pose the knowledge problem: what can bosses know? And yet the answer might be: less than you think. And they rarely ask: could it be that bosses' success is due in part at least to luck? This is despite the fact that Alex Coad's work, showing that corporate growth is largely random, is consistent with this possibility.

For these reasons, what looks like neutral business reporting is in fact heavy with ideological bias. This is often inadvertent: I doubt FT subs last night thought "how can we help to glamourize bosses?" Media bias is not merely a matter of deliberate partisanship; it is often unconscious.

But it matters. The steady drip, drip process of legitimating top-down conscious control serves to take competing ideas of the agenda. Such ideas include market-based-management; the value of trial and error; the idea that economic processes are complex and emergent; and, of course, worker democracy. In these ways, boss ideology has contributed to what David Marquand rightly calls a "comatose intellectual conservatism."   

Comments

[Rob Vico]

You use the concept of spontaneous order a lot in your posts, so I'm wondering how you would respond to this criticism of it.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/12/07/timothy-sandefur/four-problems-spontaneous-order

I feel like spontaneous order is a bit like the term natural, in that people use it to make distinctions that aren't really there.

For instance, many things are called unnatural when they are human made, but humans themselves are a product of nature. In the same way, a dictatorship is often considered the opposite of a spontaneous order, but dictatorships are the result of lots of people, supporters and non-supporters of the regime, making everyday decisions. A person can't control another group of people through sheer force of will alone.

[Blissex]

«reporting is in fact heavy with ideological bias. This is often inadvertent: I doubt FT subs last night thought "how can we help to glamourize bosses?"»

I doubt that very much applies in general. As to the FT their version may be "how do we pander to our likely readers?"

But anyhow newspaper editors in general are pretty ruthless in communicating which kind of ideological stance they want journalists to have by various indirect means like firing and hiring and bonuses and promotions to encourage "aligned" journalists to stay and "unaligned" ones to disappear.
Good journalists smell the air and follow spontaneously the prevailing winds.

It is a bit like academics and endowed chairs or funding: some crass idiots like the Koch promise funding and endowments to univerity with explicit conditions attached, but cleverer ones just work the incentives.

For example Ken Lay of Enron had a programme to endow 35 (thirty five) professiorial chairs in various universities in the USA, most of them in *accounting*. Of course any deparment head with a bit of sense will never promote to professor someone whose work will push away potential rich donors like Ken Lay, and most academics have the good sense to understand how to avoid work that repels potential endowed chair donors, and eventually attracts rich consulting contracts from corporations. The "aligned" academics then get much more successful and recognized.

As to how "directed" are newspapers (and not just those who received "partisan" talking points memos) my eyes have been opened over the past year or two by the shameless outright lies (and many more misdirections) about Russia, which have appeared with very similar points and even words in newspapers across the polical range and of course on the BBC, and even in the papers or interviews of some academics. Obviously not by chance.