Identity, Culture, and Transition
Selection from: Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of the Modern Organization
The following is an edited selection from my short book Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of the Modern Organization, available through Amazon.
Understanding Culture
We can’t understand the transitions taking place in organizations or in society at large, without understanding our individual relationship with the world. We partially understand personal relationships and our relationships with the company where we work. We need to better see what the underlying conditions that affect the functioning of organizations each day. Whether we are the CEO or a lowly clerk, we need to understand that these transitions are disrupting every aspect of organizations and the larger society. We need to begin by understanding our relation to the world is a relationship through the culture of the society that surrounds us like water to fish.
Culture
Think of culture as a set of beliefs or values that get organized as ways of living and working. In our homes, we have responsibilities for who does the laundry, fixes the meals, takes out the trash, pays the bills, and plans the family vacation. Over time, over many generations, a culture that defines the family grows up. We can talk about our families being a certain way.
For example, in my family, we’ve always valued our history. My father used to joke that as a family, we practiced “ancestry worship.” We all laughed because the culture of our family was one where we shared stories about past generations. This is our family culture. Over the past several hundred years, an organizational culture has developed which defines the way the modern world works. If three hundred years ago, your family, like mine, were people who lived in small communities in the rural areas of the British colonies, you had little connection to the growing industrial culture of the modern world. Understanding this culture is important for understanding why organizations today are at a transition point.
The Consumer Culture Hegemony
French writerJean Baudrillard, in one of his last pieces before his death, described the transitions in culture of society that are mirrored in the structures of organizations.It is a transition from domination to hegemony.
“Domination is characterized by the master/slave relation ... a relationship of force and conflicts ... There are the dominators and the dominated ... Everything changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave. Hegemony begins here ... (and) brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global Order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves. Consensus, be it voluntary or involuntary, replaces traditional servitude ... “HEGEMON” means the one who commands, orders, leads, and governs ... Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal, or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange.”
In order to make sense of the English translation of Baudrillard’s complex French, let’s try to understand the difference between these two ideas of domination and hegemon. Until recently, most people were subjects of a governing power. Power was not subject to the people but to a king, a queen, or an emperor. The popular series Game of Thrones is a good illustration of the master/slave culture. Then later the factory owner or corporation became our masters. People were cogs in a machine. There was little freedom, little personal autonomy, only accountability to the authority of the institution.As the old mountain folk song rhymed it, “I owed my soul to the company store.” There are very few instances in human history where this was not true.
During the past century, we entered into a transition where prosperity spread beyond the ownership of factories to people owning their own small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises. In this transition, most of us witnessed the growth of the middle class, the driving social force of the post-World War II world. As technology advanced, economies grew, the social dimensions of working for a company changed. No more master/slave relation. We became consumers, no longer workers. We became masters of our lives. We worked to consume. For to consume is to define who we see ourselves to be. In our consuming, we joined a culture of consumers. We participated as brand ambassadors for the products and ideas that define us. This is the hegemon we joined.
The Global Monoculture of Consumption
We cannot see that we have been captured by this hegemon. We are not personally dominated by it. Instead, all the places where we interact with people, places, and institutions are controlled by this culture. We are held hostage to it. We can not see that it is a monoculture. It is a culture of consumption. Period. End-of-sentence. We join it because there is nothing else to join. It is the entire culture of the world.
As hostages to it, it is very difficult to say that we will not participate. We join by the simplest acts of having to make choices at the market between brands, types of products(organic or non-organic), and how we pay for our selections, cash, check or debit card.
This global mono-culture is what we see on our screens. It is also how it sees us through our screens.
It is a culture of identification that is constantly appealing to us. Not just to buy, but to believe in the messages that are presented to us through our screens.
Organizational titles are vital in the marketing of products, services, and the narratives of belief. A title defines our role in the hegemonic culture. With that title, we are identified in our relation to the larger culture of organizations. This identification, however, marginalizes us. This marginalization is reflected in our most fundamental human need, which is to compare ourselves to others. Beyond our titles, our identity is formed by our comparison to other people. A consumer culture is constructed to create a constant lack of satisfaction in life. The result is that we live in conflict with ourselves and the rest of the world.
A Culture of Competition and Conflict
Historian René Girard refers to this human phenomenon as mimetic desire. It is the desire to imitate, to be like others. The closer we are to someone the greater conflict we have. This desire brings us to a point of violence as we must destroy those with whom we compete to be alike. Girard sees the implication this way.
“Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be. ... America indeed embodies these mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive. These competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it as the winner, but if the winners are always the same then, one day or the other, the losers overturn the game table. This mimetic rivalry, when it turns out badly, always results eventually in some form of violence.”
The power of this culture is a chief obstacle to living a fulfilled, satisfied life. If we wish to be persons of impact then must address this mimetic desire. Without awareness, our desire to imitate, those we wish to be alike, takes away our unique voice and perspective. The hegemonic culture is a mimetic culture. It tells us how we are to fit into society. As a result, we become victims of our own desire to be like everyone else.
The transition that Jean Baudrillard identifies is from a world dominated by economics to social influence. The worst thing to happen to a person today is to be socially ostracized online, to be canceled. The power of the hegemon is the power of inclusion and exclusion in a global social consumer culture. We feel it in the fear of alienation, of being alone in a world of people. The key word here is fear. For it is not just a fear of rejection, but a fear of the loss of identity. As long as our identity is external to us, this fear will dominate our lives. If we were able to look under the surface, we would see the actor without make-up, the Wizard behind the curtain, the house collapsing, and institutions operationally lost in the complexity of a rapidly changing world. If we could see below the surface of our lives, what would we see?
The Transition in Identity
A real shift in self-understanding came after the Second World War. The culture shifted from a focus on industrial production to the consumer.My father returned from military service in the war and became the first in his family to earn a college diploma thanks to the G.I. Bill. It meant that he, unlike his father, who was a clerk in a factory, became a corporate executive. Our family transitioned from being office workers into being middle-class consumers. Over time, as the middle class grew, we began to define ourselves by what we could purchase. Brand names became important to us. We took pride in the labels that we wore. They defined us as people in relation to our neighbors and co-workers. As a child, the kind of car you drove said something about you. There were Ford people, Chevy people, and Plymouth/Dodge people.
Where I grew up in the South, stock car racing grew to be so popular because we followed the drivers who drove our cars. The transition was one of self-perception. We aligned ourselves with products that we felt represented the values of who we were, even if that connection was nothing more than clever marketing. As a result, we no longer worked to produce. We worked to consume, to buy, and to move up in status as we bought.
Consumer products became status objects. The status was in the name, not in the quality of the product. I remember when luxury brands began to show up in outlet malls to sell lower-priced, knock-off versions of their more expensive clothing or consumer products. We could not see what this change in society was doing to us. Products represented social advancement. We had become subjects of the brands that became the source of our identity. In our consuming, we join a culture of consumers. We participated as brand ambassadors for the products and ideas that define us. This is the hegemon we joined. We cannot see that we have been captured as hostages to this consumer hegemon. We have freely assimilated the brand idea into our own self-understanding. With the emergence of social media, we now develop our own brand identity.
The Next Transition In Consumer Culture
However, nothing remains as it is. We are always in transition. This is also true of modern consumer culture. There came a moment when commercial products began to lose their appeal. Products and labels became boring. We owned more stuff than we could store at home. A shift in culture happened.
We became consumers of social interaction.
The emergence of the internet and social media platforms led to us becoming a culture of influencers. We follow people who we want to be like. We become consumers of opinions. We talk about their Instagram pictures, YouTube videos, podcasts, and Facebook posts. We buy products now, not because of the label, but because of the social influencer who is associated with the product. This is the hegemon that Jean Baudrillard describes. This is the monoculture of social media. Now, we decide who we are to be, not because of our family history or some community group, but because of what we see on our screens. We have replaced relationships with connections.
Very interesting, and rings true to me.
This is some rabbit hole :-) The antonyms of hegemon all relate to powerlessness - an absence of the ability to lead. The other opposite is counter-hegemony; a movement designed to dismantle the power of the hegemon. So where does that leave us?
The 1920's gave us Edward Bernays; his book "Propaganda" and the hugely successful "torches of freedom" campaign which set the stage for the hegemon to emerge. The arrival of the internet put it on steroids. The question becomes "has it run it's course"? Is the hegemon exhausted?
Maybe. We are seeing the rise of localisation, and its malign relative, populism. Peoplemare making choices despite the hegemon. As in chaos theory, new groups will form around "strange attractors" and it is down to us, and choice, as to what attractors we gravitate towards. It is a huge responsibility for each of us, but one we have no real choice other than to address.
Thanks for being such an attractor.