Peter Drucker: The Practice of Management (1954)

“Management is not just a creature of the economy; it is a creator as well. And only to the extent to which it masters the economic circumstances, and alters them by conscious, directed action, does it really manage. To manage a business means, therefore, to manage by objectives. . . . The enterprise cannot therefore be a mechanical assemblage of resources. . . . What is needed is a transmutation of the resources. And this cannot come from an inanimate resource such as capital. It requires management.” Drucker's The Practice of Management is arguably the first work of management theory, or at least the first self-consciously constructed one (Drucker mentions Chester Barnard, Elton Mayo, and Frederick Taylor as important predecessors). As I have previously noted, management theory is an anathema to even the most economically-oriented corner of the humanities. But Drucker's early books are symptomatic of a historical change in capitalism and its corporate institutions to which it is well worth paying more attention. Though he rarely acknowledges it, Drucker was heavily influenced by Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter strongly attacked economic theories that treated capitalism as a mechanism that automatically generated profit. He praised the entrepreneur for not passively adjusting to changes in the market but instead creatively responding to the possibilities inherent in it. Without the entrepreneur, capitalism - so Schumpeter claimed - would lose its vitality and dwindle into socialism, being unable to organize its existing productive resources into new forms. In other words, for Schumpeter capitalist practices were necessary but not sufficient for a viable capitalist economy. Capitalism needed to be supplemented by entrepreneurship. Otherwise, capitalism could not live up to its own ideal. Drucker's idea of management overlaps with, though is not quite identical to, Schumpeter's idea of entrepreneurship. But more importantly, Drucker extends Schumpeter's identification of a necessary supplement to capitalism. Drucker's earlier Concept of the Corporation was constructed as a study - that is to say, a description - of the General Motors Corporation, whose decentralized divisional structure and management policies Drucker admired. Yet Drucker’s conclusions in that book functioned more as normative prescriptions for corporate capitalism. If the corporation was allowed to blindly seek profits, it would come into conflict with the desires of individuals and the demands of society, and therefore it would threaten its own existence. Therefore it was necessary to go beyond studying the mechanisms of corporate capitalism and give it a concept towards which it could aspire. Rather than suggesting the use of force or law to motivate capitalism towards that conceptual ideal, Concept of the Corporation exhibits a sort of corporate reflexivity that attempts to steer the corporation through communicating to the corporation about itself. Moving from institutional analysis to management theory in The Practice of Management, Drucker again argued that the mechanisms of the capitalist economy must not be allowed to operate without self-conscious guidance. Drucker singled out the manager as the key agent in changing and steering the corporate institution, asserting, “the entire free world has an immense stake in the competence, skill and responsibility of management.” According to Drucker, for the corporation (as well as capitalism itself) to work well, management – with the aid of management theory – needed to deliberately contemplate its practices and articulate objectives for itself and the firm. In other words, the practice of management and the goal of the business needed to enter into discourse so that they could be reflected upon and communicated throughout the corporation. Both Concept of the Corporation and The Practice of Management attempt to show how the central position of the corporation in the postwar economy led to a reflexive, discursive capitalism. In order for corporate capitalism to prosper, it needed to continuously communicate to itself about itself (this might be true only of large, hierarchical firms in a Fordist economy: 19th-century industrial capitalism did not generate such commentary in its time, and it remains to be seen whether post-Fordist, networked firms can survive through a more strictly informational form of feedback).

Cameron Hawley: Executive Suite (1952)

Hawley’s first novel, Executive Suite (1952), set the pattern for the rest of his literary career. Like the rest of Hawley’s books, Executive Suite narrates the story of a change in executive management and the restructuring of a corporation. With almost no mediation, business acts as the primary narrative engine and subject. When Avery Bullard, the president of the Tredway Furniture Corporation, suddenly dies from a cerebral hemorrhage, control over the corporation is thrown into uncertainty. Bullard’s abrupt death reveals a flaw in the corporation’s managerial organization: instead of an executive vice president lined up as a successor, there are five vice presidents of equal standing. The ensuing power struggle generates an explicit debate about the purpose and structure of the corporation, as each vice president argues the importance of his respective specialty and vision for the overall success of the business. All of Executive Suite’s material is immanent to the corporation. Hawley transforms literary realism into corporate realism that closely attends to the details of corporate capitalism while resolutely refusing any attempt to imagine an alternative to it. Executive Suite’s primary characters are all business “types”: corporate executives, members of the board of directors, stockholders, financial speculators, and - on the narrative’s margins - various subordinates who attend to these businessmen. The spouses of the vice presidents should be included in the last category, as couples in the novel typically appear as business teams, though rarely full business partners. Throughout the book, individual praxis is limited to business practice. Agency is possible only through corporate activities, whether arguing at executive meetings to selling stocks to commanding office staff. As the novel’s title indicates, Executive Suite is set within the spaces of the corporation. The novel is heavily invested in describing the architecture of the Tredway Tower as well as the arrangement of office space, both of which serve as the “natural environment” for the novel’s managerial protagonists. And finally, narrative temporality is tethered to the duration of a business crisis. Far more than any of Hawley’s other novels, Executive Suite approximates corporate "real-time." Covering roughly 24 hours of struggle over corporate control, the book is divided into small sections each labeled with a location and a time, the latter often changing in as small as one minute intervals. Deploying a literary convention traditionally linked to the death of a king (the novel’s epigraph is “The king is dead“), Executive Suite utilizes the suspense created by a suspension of sovereignty to render the minute details of its corporate world relevant to the reader. The death of the Tredway Corporation’s president does much more than force the selection of a new corporate leader. It produces a rearticulation of the relation of executive management and corporate structure. The corporation is abruptly forced to reflect upon the “practice of management,” and it is no surprise that Peter Drucker was a fan. Tredway’s president Avery Bullard had built up the firm over the past thirty years by personally supervising and controlling nearly all of its activities. In the period prior to his death, Bullard had begun introducing new bureaucratic procedures and financial controls that lessened the demands the growing organization placed on him, but these changes were made without any explicit alteration of the role of the corporate president. The strength of Avery Bullard’s reputation and name covered over the changing structure of corporate management and the growing conflict between different goals of the business. Hawley uses Bullard’s death to figure the inevitable termination of one-man management in a robust enterprise. As one character claims: "[A] company needs a different management technique during different stages in its development. While it’s going through a period of major expansion, breaking into new ground, there’s no doubt that it takes a two-fisted dictator with a whip in both hands to make things go – an Avery Bullard. However, when that period is over future success depends upon efficiency of operation and maintenance of position. Then you need a different kind of management."
Yet this new “kind of management” has to explicitly find a way to reconcile the different divisions and values of the business and risks letting one perspective dominate all others in a way Bullard never had to face. Except for the vice president Loren Shaw, who is the company Comptroller, each vice president heads and voices the perspective of his respective division, which include Sales, Production, Design & Development, and Treasurer. Each vice president is shown in the narrative to contribute something essential to the functioning of the corporation, but none is clearly the most important when contrasted with the others. Because the corporation’s nine-member board of directors (all of the vice-presidents serve on the board) elects the president, the struggle for corporate control quickly is reduced in complexity by being split into two groups grappling for hegemony of the board. One side is led by the financially-oriented Shaw and the other side by Don Walling, vice-president of Design and Development. The novel’s conclusion hinges on a debate between the two of them for the support of one of the directors, the last remaining heir of Tredway’s founder (and therefore owner of large amounts of Tredway stock). Originally a management consultant brought in to tighten the Tredway’s organization and finances, Loren Shaw was responsible for many of the financial controls and “modern business practices” implemented while Bullard was still alive. Though many of the other vice presidents strongly dislike Shaw and Hawley at times portrays him as a quasi-villain, Shaw prides himself on his service to what he considers an economic enterprise:
"[N]o one could ever say that anything he had done had not been in the best interests of the corporation. No one could argue that he had not been right when he had installed a system of tight budgetary control – nor when he had put complete cost accounting on every factory operation, co-ordinated purchasing with better inventory control on raw materials, established scientific pricing methods and set up sound salary administration. In less than four years the Tredway Corporation’s return on invested capital had increased by almost fifty per cent."
When justifying his claim to the presidency, Shaw simply projects his current position as Comptroller upward, equating executive leadership with financial savviness. He argues:
"The problems that come to the president’s office are predominantly financial in character. Matters concerning manufacturing and distribution are largely handled at lower levels in the organization. The president – who we must always remember is the agent of the stockholders – must now concern himself largely with the primary interest of the stockholders."
Shaw goes on to explain that stockholders, unlike business owners who have invested their own time and interests into a business, are interested only in their dividends: "The average stockholders doesn’t think of his stockholdings as ownership. . . . When he buys Tredway stock he makes an investment. The only reason he makes it is to get a return. Thus, at the top level, the corporation must now be governed to be what its owners want it to be – a financial institution in which they can invest their money and receive a safe return with the emphasis on safety." Through Shaw’s cold application of financial logic to the corporation’s split of ownership and management, Hawley portrays the very real possibility that corporate capitalism will make profit into its sole end. For Hawley, equally troubling is how Shaw’s financial logic aims to transcend production as a necessity and value. Shaw boasts how he has adjusted the corporation’s structure to exploit tax laws to the fullest extent, and he rationalizes privileging financial projects by claiming, “one piece of work, all purely financial in character, will contribute more to our net earnings than the total profit we’ll make from one of our smaller factories.” Facing Shaw’s financial scheming, production risks becoming a dirty word, an activity too bound to the material of manufacturing. In contrast to Shaw, Don Walling is decidedly passionate about production and willing to get his hands dirty with it. As head of Tredway’s Design division, Walling uses his entrepreneurial capability, as Joseph Schumpeter put it, to “get a new thing done” or to “get things done in a new way.” Walling’s wife recognizes that he is not fully an artist or a profit-oriented executive. Walling got his start by balancing aesthetics and business as an apprentice to a “functionalist industrial stylist” (surely a reflection upon Hawley’s own literary occupation), though his climb up the corporate hierarchy led him to delegate much of his immediate design work while retaining his creative capabilities for larger business projects. Walling’s talent for innovation (as well as the corporation’s threat to it) is visible from his first appearance in the novel when he his dragged away from a materials research experiment to an executive meeting. The reluctant hero, Walling initially does not desire the corporate presidency, and only fully strives for it when he realizes he is the only viable alternative to Shaw, whom he detests for restraining innovation with cost calculations. After Shaw makes his argument for pleasing the stockholders with profit, Walling argues that neither an executive president nor factory workers will do good work for money alone, and compares the corporation to its employees: "Loren's right when he says that we have an obligation to our stockholders - but it's a bigger obligation than just paying dividends. We have to keep this company alive. That's the important thing - and a company is like a man. No man can work for money alone. It isn't enough. You starve his soul when you try it - and you can starve a company to death in the same way." Walling says of Avery Bullard, “The thing that kept him going was his terrific pride in himself – the driving urge to do things that no other man on earth could do.” Therefore the Tredway Corporation should undertake new business projects that will generate pride among its employees and their community (and perhaps even the stockholders). He concludes by proposing a new line of high-quality, low-priced furniture, “as different from anything we’re making now as a modern automobile is different from an old Mills wagon.” By articulating a new goal that will require all of the vice presidents to do their best, most dignified work, Walling is able, as Drucker recommended, to harmonize the quest for profit with the desires of individuals and the needs of society. Walling’s ability to gain the support of Tredway heir Julia Tredway Price, whom Walling had been informed considered the corporation merely a source of revenue, validates his argument. Influenced by her hidden love for Avery Bullard, Price figures how the stockholders too might harmonize their profit motives with social ones. Yet in the process of discovering his desire to be president and negotiating with other members of the board, Walling has to learn to be less self-reliant, and especially less likely to repeat Bullard’s one-man show. At the novel’s end, Walling comes to accept Shaw as a necessary element of the corporation, especially because, as one director notes, Shaw’s skills will be necessary for financing Walling’s entrepreneurial vision that is able to unite the board and corporation. Hawley’s novel concludes by granting finance a legitimate - but subordinate - position in corporate capitalism when Walling decides Shaw should be the new executive vice president. Though Shaw is older than Walling and therefore unlikely to eventually inherit the presidency, the novel’s solution to the contradictions of the corporation seems tenuous, and Hawley’s next novel, Cash McCall, would explore the apparent unleashing of finance.

Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child – such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist.” The central text of the Chicago School of economics, Friedman's book exemplifies American neo-liberalism in its purest form. Friedman's unbending, unsentimental submission of everything he sets his eyes on to the hands (or rather, Invisible Hand) of the competitive market is striking for its cold adherence to a single logic. Naomi Klein's admirably partisan portrayal of Friedman and alarming documentation of Friedmanite economics running rampant across the globe in The Shock Doctrine only sharpens the implications of Friedman's intentionally razor-edged ideas. Since the 1980s, the Republican Party has assimilated the arguments of Capitalism & Freedom to an eerie extent. It is hard not to hear Reagan's or a Bush's voice while reading Friedman's words, making for a rather schizophrenic reading experience. Yet due to its political popularity on the Right, Friedman's book serves little function today, its arguments having been so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of the contemporary public sphere (that is, completely stored in the caches of the blogosphere) as to have made their origin irrelevant. Like the rest of the American neo-liberals, Friedman owes a clear debt to Hayek, taking the latter's claims about the totalitarian essence of centralized planning for granted and borrowing heavily from the idea of a liberal Rule of Law (see the blogs on Hayek and Foucault below). Like Hayek, Friedman accepts government intervention if it establishes the rules of the economic game but does not interfere with the actions of individual players. He claims politics necessarily tends towards a centralization of power, whereas economics doesn't, so a liberal economy will act as a benevolent counterforce to politics' undesirable tendencies. Two more problematic types of government intervention focus on the removal of monopolies (which Friedman mostly blames on government interference in the first place) and what he calls "neighborhood effects," where individuals are affected unwillingly by others' exchanges on the market. Having delimited this very narrow space for legitimate government action, Friedman uses the rest of his book to attack a wide range of government programs, many that have now been ended due to the influence of his ideas. Early on, he lists the government activities the ideology of liberal economics requires to be eliminated, mentioning: protective tariffs, rent control, minimum wage, industrial regulations, social security, professional licensing, public housing, conscription, national parks, the nationalized postal service, and toll roads. He argues competitive capitalism is opposed to all forms of racism and discrimination, since the individual who discriminates has to literally "pay a price" for discriminating, usually in the form of higher labor costs. However, Friedman admits but is completely unable to explain why those marginalized groups whom he claims have benefited from liberalism clamour so strongly for anti-liberal government intervention. He proposes primary education be turned over to the market and largely rejects the government subsidizing vocational schools. He argues that such subsidies can only be justified by treating students as "underinvested" "human capital" that an enterprise, perhaps even the government, might make an investment in only so long as it literally pays back well. And contrary to Peter Drucker's hope that the corporation might function as a social institution, Friedman claims "there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stay within the rules of the game." By the end of the book, one is so desensitized that it comes as no shock when Friedman unveils his solution to the problems of economic inequality and poverty to be nothing more than a flat-rate tax.

Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944)

“The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme. In short, they are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word.” One of the most notorious foundations of neo-liberal economic theory, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom argues that economic planning necessarily leads to totalitarianism. Written in England near the end of WWII by an Austrian exile, the book warns that Great Britain risks repeating the historical path of its enemy, Nazi Germany, if it does not return to the principles of liberal economics that it pioneered in the 19th century. Surprisingly, Hayek's book is far more preoccupied with politics than economics. Hayek equates liberal economics with individual freedom, asserts that human rationality must humbly submit to the complexity of the market, and claims free competition is the best method for achieving the greatest good. Yet he spends more time associating liberal economics with morality, Western Civilization, and even the wisdom of the ancients than he does explaining how competition works so well (worshipful descriptions of the "invisible hand" are mostly absent). The book instead has a primarily negative purpose: demonstrating how any large-scale economic planning will necessarily face practical obstacles that can only be overcome by renouncing democratic principles and individualist ideals. Look magazine published a cartoon version of this argument in 1945 that to an unsympathetic reader (need I explain where I stand on this?) might appear as a parody of Hayek's book. Hayek's core assumption is that a common idea about economic plans is impossible at large scales. Whereas small groups such as working class movements might be able to unite around an economic goal and plan, at a national and especially at an international level there will necessarily be disagreements about the goals, means, and practical steps of economic intervention: though everyone may initially demand an economic plan, they will eventually disagree about the details. Centralized planners who suggest and attempt to implement a common economic program therefore must either be defeated by popular disagreement or increasingly seek non-democratic and dictatorial powers in order to carry out their plan. Once this power is granted or taken, centralized economic planning will extend itself to every region of society and co-opt the production of truth in order to justify or rationalize itself. For Hayek, all socialists and sympathizers of economic planning (which were many at the time since ideas were circulating about maintaining war-time planning in the impending peace-time era) are nascent Nazis, regardless of their good intentions. Needless to say, Hayek's rejection of a possible economic commons can be itself rejected, along with the tidy little political-institutional narrative he derives from it. Hayek's critique of centralized planning has many reasonable points - witness the struggle over the recent economic recovery plan - but his belief that the problems of centralized planning must always exist in the same form and follow the same tragic path can be denied, and his critique might then help generate a new concept of planning. As Foucault points out, Hayek's neo-liberalism does not promote laissez-faire government policies. Hayek finds strong government intervention acceptable as long as it is aimed at making competition possible or at non-market concerns. “In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other.” Hayek articulates the idea of a liberal Rule of Law (Foucault considers this a "governmental rationality") that sets the boundaries of legitimate government intervention. For Hayek, the Rule of Law, “Stripped of all technicalities . . . means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand – rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive power in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.” The Rule of Law determines the rules of the economic game, but does not intervene in or concern itself with the fates of individual players (the makers of the board game "Monopoly" create the rules that allow consumers to play the game, but would never intervene to assist a specific player win). “Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.” For Hayek, centralized planning dismantles the Rule of Law, replacing its formal equality/indifference with arbitrary favoritism. He cites Carl Schmitt, and part of his point is that the shift from the liberal market to centralized planning forces the government to declare a "state of exception" that transcends legal norms. But the boundary between the norm and exception, Rule of Law and arbitrary planning decision, is not nearly as clear as Hayek admits (again the problem of the rule for the application of the rule). Keynes of all people found much to like in Hayek's book, claiming in a letter to Hayek that "morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it." But Keynes goes on to emphasize the ambiguity of Hayek's distinction: "You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line. You agree that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it."

Peter Drucker: The Concept of the Corporation (1946)

“To understand that the modern large corporation is the representative institution of our society; that it is above all an institution, that is, a human organization and not just a complex of inanimate machines; that it is based upon a concept of order rather than upon gadgets; and that all of us as consumers, as workers, as savers, and as citizens have an equal stake in its prosperity, these are the important lessons we have to learn. To make it possible for this new social institution to function efficiently and productively, to realize its economic and social potential, and to resolve its economic and social problems, is our most urgent task and our most challenging opportunity.” In Olivier Assayas' most recent film, Summer Hours, the economist Fredric complains that his family has no interest in his work, an allusion to how Assayas has to mask his own interest in the global economy through genre film-making (Demonlover and Boarding Gate work through issues of globalization by using the thriller genre, Summer Hours through the family drama). Fortunately, economic crises have a way of making economics attractive across the disciplines and in the public sphere. Within the humanities, the recent spurt of general interest in economics might even extend to economic sociology, but management theory remains forbidden territory, the most un-sexy of all possible interdisciplinary partners. Yet Alan Liu, Luc Boltanski, and Eve Chiapello have all made compelling arguments about how important management theory is for understanding post-Fordist transformations in work (Drucker did after all invent the term "knowledge worker"), and - at times - management theory has been an important response to economic theories that have a wider intellectual circulation. Drucker's The Concept of the Corporation is a case in point. Though it is not always apparent, Drucker, who was from Austria, was heavily influenced by Viennese corporatism and Eastern European intellectual currents, especially Joseph Schumpeter's work on business cycles and entrepreneurialism. In the acknowledgements of his definitive critique of liberal economics, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi thanks Drucker and Drucker’s wife for being “a source of sustained encouragement, not withstanding their wholehearted disagreement with the author’s conclusions.” Appearing two years after Polanyi’s work, Drucker’s book could be read as a response to Polanyi (whom it cites three times) that investigates how the large corporation in the 20th century might allow a new form of liberal economy to satisfactorily perform for society. In doing so, Drucker shifts Polanyi's frame of analysis from general economics to institutionalism. Drucker begins by asserting that after WWII it was undeniable to all that the large corporation had become the "representative social institution" of America. According to Drucker, any representative social institution - whether a corporation or church or government bureaucracy - must serve three functions. First, it must satisfy its own specific needs of organization and survival (the corporation must be managed well and achieve the profit needed for its continued existence). Second, an institution must be able to satisfy the desires and dreams of individuals in society (the corporation must be able to provide workers with an adequate amount of dignity and status). Third, an institution must attain certain social goods (the corporation must be a force of stability and peace in society). As an economic institution, the corporation need only concern itself with the first function of achieving profit and an adequate organization. But as a social institution, the corporation must find a way to "harmonize" all three of these functions. Drucker admits the quest for profits must be a priority since it is what allows the corporation to exist long enough to satisfy the other functions. But it is vital that the corporation “should be so organized as to fulfill automatically its social obligations in the very act of seeking its own self interest." Showing some unpersuasive optimism, Drucker argues that such a harmonizing of interests is possible. He completely commits himself to the idea that in modern American society the social good can only be achieved through corporate prosperity (barring a revolution, which he quickly dismisses). Throughout the book, Drucker objects to "collectivism" such as the Russian state-planned and state-operated economy. These objections are rather unusual, however, since they are aimed less at general ideological/political differences (though these of course are at work in his argument) than at perceived problems of social institutions. Drucker argues the Soviet economy achieves many purely economic functions quite well, yet fails to satisfy certain institutional needs - the production of leaders, the satisfaction of non-economic social aspirations, the reconciliation of social and individual interest. Drucker's neo-liberal tendencies are restrained by his engagement with Polanyi's critique of liberal economics. Although Drucker believes the government should not directly intervene in the market and free enterprise, he does accept the use of government regulation to protect certain aspects of society from the market. He has in mind Polanyi's trio of labor, land, and money, three things which are only "fictitious commodities" and therefore in need of government intervention. In one note, Drucker admits he finds Polanyi's analysis "brilliant," but cryptically adds he considers Polanyi guilty of "economic absolutism." What Drucker appears to mean is that in contrast to Polanyi he believes the market does not need to become a total market society or be replaced by a non-market economic organization. By shifting from economics to institutionalism, which is evident in his preference for the term "free enterprise" to "free market," Drucker argues not only can the market be effectively constrained by political action aimed at large industries, but also the corporate form is a particularly powerful means for making the market serve the social good (he points out that a capitalist society of small businesses would be unable to satisfy many of the same social functions). Yet as Boltanski and Chiapello point out, management theory tends to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, describing corporate capitalism as it should be rather than as it really is. Though Drucker repeatedly rejects socialist collectivism as too "utopian," history has made his own corporatism seem equally unrealistic.

Cameron Hawley: The Hurricane Years (1968)

“There are a lot of off-base ideas floating around about what it’s really like working for a big company – all this guff about life in the corporate jungle, what a terrific battle it is, all the back-stabbing and throat-cutting that a man has to go through to get ahead. Most of it’s written by guys who are on the outside looking in. It’s a different story when you’re on the inside looking out.” In Cameron Hawley's fourth and final corporate fiction, the corporation’s demands on the executive have literally led to a capitalist sickness: an epidemic of corporate presidents and managers being struck by heart attacks. Judd Wilder, director of Advertising & Promotion for the Crouch Carpet Company, has applied the total personal dedication and control he learned as a theater director and wartime film propagandist to his corporation’s annual convention, a popular spectacle he single-handedly runs. While rushing to deliver the proofs of the annual stockholder report to the corporate president and anxiously anticipating this year’s upcoming convention, Judd suffers from a heart attack. Pulling off the turnpike in rural Pennsylvania, Judd winds up in a country hospital - an institution geographically freed from the mainstream organizational pressures of the medical profession - and under the care of Dr. Aaron Kharr. Judd’s encounter with Kharr is fortunate, since the latter is preparing a book on how corporate executives in the “hurricane years” of their 40s are being struck by heart attacks due to the stress generated by their "neurotic compulsions" to work endlessly without any ultimate goal. Kharr specializes in “psychogenic” diseases, and worries he needs to heal not only Judd’s body but also his mind so that he does not have another heart attack as soon as he is released from the hospital. Judd spends the entire (600 page) novel convalescing in his hospital bed, while Kharr questions him about his past in order to convince him he needs to establish a new, healthier relation with his corporate work (despite this outbreak of executive heart attacks, the corporate form itself is never called into doubt). Judd's personal history is nothing more than the sequence of corporate jobs he has held. The most interesting of these is his work in the early television industry, which as a new commercial medium had tiny operating budgets, absurdly low barriers to entrance, and heavy competition from the radio industry. While Judd recovers in the hospital, the Crouch Carpet company goes through the kind of change of ownership and re-organization that is found in all of Hawley's novels. Shortly after Judd’s heart attack, Matthew Crouch sells his controlling shares of Crouch Carpet to an operator, Harrison Horter, and Judd and other employees become wary that the company will be either dissolved or turned over to the profit-oriented and quality-indifferent control of its current financial manager, Roger Stark. Judd is saved from intervening and risking another heart attack by the gentlemanly, entrepreneurial character of Horter, who plans to move the company into high-end furniture sales for the booming middle-class market, and Judd in the end is assured a secure position in the firm. Judd finally learns to give up his near-fatal individualism and accept his true place with the larger and now more organizationally modernized firm. Hawley's novel asserts that the modern corporation must have multiple goals, which the narrative figures through different characters. The conflicting personalities, goals, and actions of Judd, Stark, Horter and others reflect how the corporation needs to balance rationalized cost accounting with entrepreneurial innovation, personal commitment to one's profession with a submission to the organizational good, etc. Though calculating and financially scheming figures like Stark remain cold and quasi-villainous, they demonstrate how Hawley believes corporate profitability remains a necessary priority because it allows the organization to continue to exist and be able to serve other personal or social goods. In this novel, Hawley's usual concern with the ambiguities of corporate control is extended to the computerization of the corporation. Stark attempts to steal control of the corporation away from its president Crouch without obtaining the stocks that would give him legal control by using an IBM 1401 to begin automating the firm's accounting, cost analyses, production and inventory control, and other corporate operations. As was often the case with early purchasers of mainframe computers, Stark promotes the use of the computer not because of any clear or provable improvement in productivity or profitability but because the integration of the machine forces a transformation of the corporate structure, one he hopes will ultimately favor his quest for power. Despite the novel’s happy ending, the book remains haunted by the dozens of examples of executive heart attacks (many fatal) that litter the narrative. If only the executive body count was as high in reality, we might see more support for "healthier" forms of commercial enterprise.

Eugene Harvey & Burdick Wheeler: Fail Safe (1962)

“[A]t some point in the last ten years we went beyond rationality in politics. We became prisoners of our machines, our suspicions, and our belief in logic. . . . This disappearance of human responsibility is one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole thing. It’s as if human beings had evaporated, and their places were taken by computers. And all day you and I have sat here, fighting not each other, but rather this big rebellious computerized system, struggling to keep it from blowing up the world. . . . In one way . . . we didn’t even make the decision to have the computerized systems in the first place. These automated systems became technologically possible, so we built them. Then it became possible to turn more and more control decisions over to them, so we did that.” In Harvey and Wheeler's Cold War novel, nuclear disaster occurs because of a technical malfunction. A radar anomaly leads the United States to routinely launch nuclear bombers to pre-arranged holding points near the Soviet Union's border, from which they will either be called back or receive the command to go to war and drop their bombs on the enemy. When the radar anomaly is shown to be harmless, the bombers are sent a signal to return to base. But due to a technical breakdown in the "fail safe" system, one squad is sent a command to proceed on route to bomb Moscow, and Soviet radar interference as well as rigid operating procedures prevents the United States from commanding the bombers to come home. Blocked from recalling the bombers and unable to assist the suspicious Russians in stopping them, the American president avoids worldwide nuclear devastation by dropping a bomb on New York City as a "symbol" of America's good intentions towards the Soviet Union (call this the Watchmen solution to escalating nuclear tensions). If the story sounds familiar, this is because Dr. Strangelove's is nearly identical. Stanley Kubrick's film (Terry Southern contributed to the script) was based upon the novel Red Alert, whose author sued those of Fail Safe (it was settled out of court). Both the film version of Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove were in production at the same time, with the former being released 8 months before the latter and to much less critical and public acclaim. Harvey and Wheeler's novel explicitly frames itself as a warning about the incorporation of cybernetics and computers into military strategy, and is thoroughly serious in contrast to Kubrick and Southern's absurdist tone. The novel presents military strategy as being reduced to a series of simulations (the War Room is described as a movie theater) and statistical calculations (the Americans warn the Russians that they calculate 2 out of their 6 bombers are statistically likely to penetrate the Soviet defenses and reach Moscow) that give military leaders a false sense of command and control. The authors emphasize that the only perfect simulation of reality is reality itself: “The Fail-Safe machines could be truly tested only once: the single time they were used." An ICBM international missile system would be quicker than using bombers, but missiles would be too fast for human intervention and therefore would eliminate human agency from the mechanized defense system. The novel relishes describing the nuclear bomber system's numerous mechanical components as well as how the pilots have been transformed into mere "automatons" within it, forming an "immense man-machine." Within the nuclear defense system, men are no more than machines, and their decision-making and actions are as programmed as the system's computers. The system's fail safe device retains a degree of autonomy and decision-making for the president, who must give the final command to attack. The accidental breakdown of the fail safe device, however, excludes even the president from the defense system, and melodramatically demonstrates the danger of marginalizing human responsibility and decision-making in the construction of cybernetic machines. In its cautionary plot, blunt characterizations, and lack of subtlety, Fail Safe reveals itself to be a didactic novel. Its didacticism is interesting, however, because the book takes a Washington insider's view of politics, reducing the political to the determination of specific political policies. That is to say, the authors would deem the novel a success less if it caused a major transformation of political ideologies or practices than if it accomplished the passing of a specific policy into law. At the novel's conclusion, the American president tells Khrushchev over the emergency red line, "Somehow these computerized systems have got to be brought under control. They represent a new kind of power - despotism even - and we've got to learn how to constitutionalize it." The idea of "constitutionalizing" the computer and cybernetics is completely nonsensical, but it reveals the authors struggling to articulate how deliberate political reflection and regulation have a vital role to play in an era when the implementation of technological "progress" has become as automatic as the machines themselves.

Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation (1944)

"With the international gold standard the most ambitious market scheme of all was put into effect, implying absolute independence of markets from national authorities. World trade now meant the organizing of life on the planet under a self-regulating market, comprising labor, land, and money, with the gold standard as the guardian of this gargantuan automaton. Nations and peoples were mere puppets in a show utterly beyond their control. They shielded themselves from unemployment and instability with the help of central banks and customs tariffs, supplemented by migration laws. These devices were designed to counteract the destructive effects of free trade plus fixed currencies, and to the degree in which they achieved this purpose they interfered with the play of those mechanisms." Polanyi's book remains the definitive critical history and analysis of liberal economics and retains all of its force half a century after its publication. That The Great Transformation was published the same year as Friedrich Hayek's neo-liberal bible The Road to Serfdom makes Polanyi perhaps the first and one of the best critics of neo-liberalism as well. Polanyi's book should be read alongside Michel Foucault's lectures on liberalism and neo-liberalism. Either Polanyi was an unacknowledged influence on Foucault (the former only makes minor appearances in the notes of the latter) or both writers gleaned the same problematic from their historical sources: in addition to covering the origins of liberal economics, Polanyi discusses the "discovery of society," reveals the paradoxical balance of freedom and security in modern governmental rationality, and explores the relation of Bentham's ideas (most notably of course the panopticon) to market society. The foundation of Polanyi's thought is the belief that the self-regulating market is a utopian fiction. He claims, "Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society." Attempts to impose a self-regulating market eventually lead to destructive effects across society that prompt protectionist responses. For Polanyi, the dance of liberalism is always a two-step: first, the implementation of a self-regulating market, and second, protectionist interventions that attempt to limit the destructive consequences of that market. Polanyi completely unravels the arguments and defenses of liberal economists. When faced with examples of the negative effects of the self-regulating market, liberal economists respond that those effects occurred because the market was not fully implemented: those effects reveal not the failure of the market but the existence of interventions that block the market from operating in its ideal manner. The next step for such liberal economists is to argue that society needs to implement the self-regulating market even further, though this merely makes the previous failure worse and prompts the creation of even stronger regulations. For Polanyi, chasing after the impossible utopian ideal of a self-regulating market only leads to a complex tangle of failure and regulation that actually leads away from that ideal. Although exchange and "market patterns" have always existed, the market as an institution and the belief that market behavior is a dominant feature of mankind is a recent one. Dubiously drawing from anthropological examples, Polanyi tries to show that economic man - that central myth of liberal economics - is not universal, not man's essential nature. The liberal argument/faith that self-regulating markets will naturally function (and that man's subjection to them is natural as well) is therefore unwarranted. Polanyi also anticipates Foucault by showing how markets prior to the Industrial Revolution were heavily regulated (they were exceptional spaces that were strictly controlled): "Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together." The self-regulating market is therefore a latecomer on the economic scene, one that could only be brought about by the active "separation of society into an economic and a political sphere." But even after that institutional separation had been achieved, liberal economics was not as adverse to regulation as its theories claimed. In order to create the conditions for the self-regulating market, liberalism has historically been often willing to drop its laissez-faire mask and utilize governmental intervention. Polanyi argues that the birth of a "market society" meant "no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system." This market society universalizes the form of the commodity, which for Polanyi is a good produced for sale on the market. But "labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced is emphatically untrue to them." Since the market society especially needs labor, land, and money, they must be made into commodities. But "The commodity description of labor, land and money is entirely fictitious," and Polanyi hopes that the passing of liberal economics will once again allow these entities to be treated in their full depth and complexity (Polanyi does seem to rely on a kind of humanism and naturalism that needs to be jettisoned). A great deal of the book describes the historical process through which labor, land, and money were converted into commodities. He particularly spends time on the transformation of labor into a commodity, which so quickly caused disaster that regulations spontaneously appeared to compensate for it (he counters the myth of an anti-liberal conspiracy by tracing how quickly social regulations appeared across different nations in spontaneous response to the savage destruction brought about by the self-regulating market). Most notably, the quick degeneration of labor at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of acts such as the Speenhamland Law, which turned workers into paupers. Further reforms responded against Speenhamland until the English working class, a class of worker-commodities, was finally established. While making this argument, Polanyi also turns a critical eye on the Marxist prioritization of classes and class struggle, claiming the self-regulating market was a problem for society as a whole (his argument here, however, resembles and could be sympathetically read through the lens of Gramsci on hegemony). He then turns to the fictitious commodity of land, describing "the subjection of the surface of the planet to the needs of an industrial society." Finally and most ironically, he shows how money has to be made into a commodity. But the self-regulating market destroys the proper functioning of money-as-commodity, thereby threatening to destroy capitalist business itself. One of the most groundbreaking parts of the book is Polanyi's discussion of finance and the international gold standard. During the 19th century, the gold standard acted unintentionally as an instrument of peace. Though it was not designed for this purpose, the gold standard motivated countries to desire peace because the international monetary system could not function during general war (though smaller and particularly colonial wars could occasionally be an exception). The breakdown of the gold standard in the early 20th century therefore was one of the major causes of the two world wars: the first still guided by the crumbling institutions of the 19th century, the second involved in the complete transformation of the old institutions. With the thorough dismantling of the gold standard in the 1930s and 1940s, world civilization entered into a new order (the quasi-continuation of the gold standard by the postwar Bretton Woods agreement on monetary policy, which dissolved at the beginning of the 1970s, both contradicts and extends Polanyi's claims). In the 19th century, the reliance on the gold standard made international monetary policy a universal political and even personal issue for the first time: "Under a modern money economy nobody could fail to experience daily the shrinking or expanding of the financial yardstick; populations became currency-conscious. . . . men and women everywhere appeared to regard stable money as the supreme need of human society." One of Polanyi's best points is that during the era of the gold standard, national politics often was constrained or even determined by an unquestioned valorizing of the gold standard: the need to stabilize currencies could lead to unpopular actions against labor or the lifting of protectionist trade policies, which were portrayed as "sacrifices" for the good of the monetary system (as is often the case in this book, history reads like current events). We might consider the gold standard as an early "market device" that allowed the market to operate in a specific form: the "faith" in the idea "banknotes have value because they represent gold" allowed the coordination of a diverse and international set of interests. Polanyi's book ends on a note of optimism that history has proven to be unwarranted. He claims the "passing of market society" will restore not only previous freedoms (especially over labor and land) but also allow the addition of new kinds of freedom: "An industrial society can afford to be free." Unfortunately as neo-liberal economic policies continue to batter the Global South and the global economy tremors, we're instead forced to reread his book and relearn its lessons.

Fredric Jameson: Jameson on Jameson

“The political unconscious implies that certain kinds of knowledge about society are encoded in literary texts and in their forms. The analysis I propose is designed to make it possible to recover some of that knowledge. The notion of cognitive mapping insists much more strongly on the way in which art itself functions as a mode of knowledge, a mode of knowledge of the totality.” Collections of interviews are always problematic undertakings, and especially when they deal with theory. The best usually offer autobiographical data that allows one to better understand the author's more substantial works and intellectual debts or engage in an analysis of a specific political conjuncture and speculative claims that in another more formal context might seem risky or clumsy (for an example of both, see the interview with Derrida about Althusser in The Althusserian Legacy). Too often, however, interviews become verbal mush from which it is hard to extract any new insights. Jameson's introduction of course reflects on these weaknesses of the form, admitting there are legitimate pleasures in interviews, “pleasures more closely affiliated with curiosity and gossip than with practice and the project. . . . But these mild pleasures have to be paid for by a deterioration in the language itself." He makes the additional Marxist criticism that interviews reify concepts so that they can circulate on the market: “Unfortunately, the rhythms of intellectual reification are at one with the public sphere itself, which demands a constant traffic in such tokens, which it calls ideas. . . . The named idea, like the various forms of money itself, is the indispensable unit of circulation of the public sphere.” So in this volume, the reader finds the repeated circulation of a few ideas from The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, brilliant ideas indeed, but ones better served by the original books. Many of the interviewers are concerned with post-colonialism and globalization, yet they never manage to push Jameson into a more polemical engagement with the many criticisms of his western Marxist framework. The best they get is the response, “It is not a matter of cheering for third world countries to make their revolution; it is a dialectical matter of seeing that we here are involved in these areas and are busy trying to put them down, that they are part of our own power relations.” Or Jameson responds by referring to Goethe on world literature and the idea of an internationalism of nationalist situations, “a way of respecting the primacy of the national situation and also making it possible for an international network of intellectuals and cultures.” One is left wishing Jameson would utilize more of the frictional possibilities of the role of public intellectual, which Sartre, who receives praise at multiple points in this collection and whom Jameson wrote his first book about, never hesitated to deploy.

Cameron Hawley: The Lincoln Lords (1960)

“[At] Coastal Foods there would be no multimillion-dollar gambles on television programs, no bond issues to pilot through the wolf-denned canyons of Wall Street, no shock troop of tax lawyers to direct in the never-ending warfare with Internal Revenue, no harassment from gangster-led unions, no strength-sapping struggles between vice-presidents, no more anxiety over sharp-tongued stockholders – and, most important of all, no more board meetings where he would have to confront cold-eyed directors to whom nothing mattered but the net profit figure, a drop of a penny a share excuse enough for the gut-twisting torture of disapproval. That could never happen here. Coastal Foods did have a board of directors but its existence was no more than the filing of a legal requirement of incorporation, a meaningless entity shorn of power. . . . for the first time in his life, freed of all fear, he was truly in control of a company.” Cameron Hawley's third corporate fiction furthers his effort to articulate through the form of the novel an ethics for corporate capitalism. At the novel's beginning, Lincoln Lord is an unemployed corporate executive who maintains his luxurious lifestyle (a room in the Waldorff, his son off to the most expensive prep school in the nation, a membership in a Manhattan social club) in order to keep up the appearances he hopes will soon land him a new executive position. Lincoln has had five executive jobs in ten years, showing a lack of commitment to any one corporation that has hurt his public reputation despite the improvements he has brought to most of the firms for which he has worked. The novel initially leaves open the question of whether Lincoln is all image and front, which is quickly seen through at each corporation, or whether he has a strong character and managerial vision that always is constrained and frustrated by the complexities of the modern corporate form, hampered as it is by tax laws, boards of directors, and differing levels of stockholder control. When the Coastal Foods Company, a privately-owned canning corporation, discovers that its single largest corporate client has switched to another cannery, Lincoln is brought in as president in order to find a way for the business to carry on. Desperately seeking work (and never considering for a moment any job that isn't upper-management), Lincoln takes the position even though Coastal Foods is a far smaller corporation than those he has worked for in the past. The smaller size, however, apparently gives Lincoln complete control over the business. As a result, he comes to identify with the corporation, to not just be a part of the corporation but also to see the corporation as part of himself. He leads the firm into releasing a new baby food product and, despite a panic over food contamination that threatens to send the company into complete bankruptcy, at the novel's end (after 500 pages of business decisions, that is) Lincoln chooses to stick with the firm, claiming, "I can’t leave. I’d be running away from myself." Like Cash McCall, The Lincoln Lords valorizes a mid-sized form of the corporation. For Hawley, this capitalist ideal resides somewhere between the gentlemanly stagnancy of small owner-operated firms and the manipulative excesses and managerial obstacles inevitably found in larger corporations. In fact, Coastal Foods loses its biggest corporate customer because of the secret actions of one of the latter corporation's employees, who is able to change suppliers without upper management's awareness. Lincoln Lord leads Coastal Foods into a new growth phase, which involves a number of risks - new forms of finance, investment of capital in fixed forms such as new factory machinery, the unpredictability of research, and the development of a marketing strategy - through which his managerial vision must navigate. As in Hawley's other novels, literary realism is deployed to create a strong impression of Lincoln's character. However, Hawley is less interested in representing the full subjective depth of Lincoln than in isolating an agent who can ethically direct the modern corporation, which everywhere in his books seems to degenerate into corrupt scheming or an inefficient distribution of control. For Hawley, modern corporate capitalism needs to produce strong characters in order to live up to its ideal form. Good capitalist propagandist that he is, Hawley sees the novelist's task as being no different.