The Subtle Incivility of Political Correctness.

I received the politically correct email copied below from a management listserv. Political correctness has become a standard of acceptable behavior in universities. In a way, it resurrects medieval courtly courtesy.  

According to Debra Kelly on Urban Ghosts, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance courtesy books were popular to help people of different social ranks deal with each other.  Each era has its own interpretation of etiquette and appropriate behavior. According to Tim Nash in The Finer Times, vagrancy was a capital crime during the Middle Ages, and people were suffocated in water, boiled in oil, had their fingers torn off, and had their eyes burned out for this and more serious offenses.

Improving our skill at dealing with others is an important and useful goal, but when rules of etiquette become legally enforceable and punitive, they become authoritarian.   

Among the etiquette issues that were salient in the Middle Ages were avoiding bringing your horse into the house, checking yourself for fleas, and avoiding the attentions of your lord's wife by feigning illness.  In his poem Liber Urbani Daniel of Beccles advises us not to play with our spoons, not to steal a host's spoon, and not to put our used spoons into the serving dish.     

Today, the field of management plays an equivalent role to that of Daniel of Beccles. According to the email, sent by a management professor on behalf of the special issue of a journal, incivility abounds, and it costs firms money.  

In particular, the professor is concerned that insufficient attention has been paid to selective incivility because of gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion, immigrant status, and so on.  The extensive list of workplace regulation on the books, which includes the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, the Equal Pay Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Pregnancy Disability Act, child labor laws, and the Americans with Disabilities Act--not to mention abundant state and local laws--have apparently failed to help. The professor's solution seems to be to extend the academic rules of politically correct etiquette to the workplace. Soon, management professors will be advocating corporate safe spaces.  

Nash points out that in the Middle Ages the poorer classes tended to suffer the worst punishments, and the same is likely true today. The elite etiquette advocated by politically correct professors targets working class prejudices and mostly white males.  A university professor in today's America is at least three times more likely to have been born in a foreign country than to be a Republican. Republicans are marginalized in academia to a greater degree than any class of individuals is marginalized in the private sector.

The professor proposes that identifying sources of slights to a wide range of groups is an important management issue.  My guess is that it is one of two things: (1) one more useless academic study that will do little or nothing to help real world managers but will generate conferences and publications of no importance outside the management field or (2) one more effort to generate laws that target working class men (and to a lesser degree working class women) and to marginalize them, much as the medieval rules of etiquette and criminality targeted and marginalized the lower classes.  

The professor's email reads as follows:

Recent news headlines and political discourse underscore the relevance and salience of incivility in our everyday lives and workplaces. Incivility seems to permeate our work lives, manifesting in experiences such as being ignored or disregarded, being excluded from professional opportunities, or having your judgement unfairly questioned over a matter for which you are responsible ...Research over the past 20 or so years has started to document the prevalence, costs, and correlates of incivility, finding that targets suffer personally and professionally and that organizations face financial and productivity loses...

While we have made great strides in understanding general experiences of incivility, less attention has been paid to how these experiences affect those with stigmatized identities. In 2008, Cortina introduced the concept of selective incivility to describe how subtle, ambiguous acts of rudeness may function as a covert manifestation of bias against devalued, stigmatized, or marginalized people in organizations.  Such biases may be based on one, or multiple, identity groups such as gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion identification, immigrant status, transgender identity, disability status, language, or accent.

Initial research in a test of this theory found disproportionate uncivil treatment may provide an explanatory mechanism for the lower rates of women and racial minorities found in the upper echelons of organizations...However, not all research finds increased risk of incivility for stigmatized groups...

The purpose of this special issue is to foster constructive insights into the selective incivility phenomenon. We welcome papers of an empirical or theoretical nature that investigate questions such as (but certainly not limited to):
•    What are the ways in which selective incivility may act as vehicle to communicate larger organizational and social values and ethical norms?
•    What kinds of cultural considerations should be taken into account when conducting selective incivility research internationally? How do we meaningfully include cultural norms into our work?
•    How do intersections of multiple social identities affect risk of experiencing mistreatment? Do certain identities act as a mitigating factor?
•    What are group and organizational-level factors that might predict experiences of selective incivility?
•    What are individual differences that may explain how targets respond to selective incivility? Incivility, by definition, is ambiguous: Does labeling the experience as discriminatory matter for target outcomes?
•    What factors predict instigation of selective incivility?
•    How might organizations address the issue of interpersonal slights being experienced by some employees more than others? 

A Modern Management Parable

H/t Don Rubenstein who e-mailed this:

A MODERN PARABLE . . .

A Japanese company ( Toyota ) and an American company (Ford) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.

Their conclusion was the Japanese had eight people rowing and one person steering, while the American team had eight people steering and one person rowing.

Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.

They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to four steering supervisors, three area steering superintendents, and one assistant superintendent steering manager.

They also implemented a new performance system that would give the one person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners, and free pens for the rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes, and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year's racing team was out-sourced to India.

The End.

Here's something else to think about:
Ford has spent the last thirty years moving most of its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages.

TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter's results:

TOYOTA makes $4 billion in profits while Ford racked up $9 billion in losses.

Ford folks are still scratching their heads.
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The Federalist Number 24 and the Scope of Government

In the Federalist Number 24 Hamilton makes the following statement about the powers that the Constitution confers upon the federal government:

"The powers are not too extensive for the OBJECTS of federal administration, or, in other words, for the management of our NATIONAL INTERESTS; nor can any satisfactory argument be framed to show that they are chargeable with such an excess."

Are the powers that we have granted the federal administration today impractical for the management of national interests? I refer to the myriad of large-scale administrative tasks that the President and Congress are asked to review: Social Security, the Federal Reserve monetary system, Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education. These are broad, comprehensive programs of such scope and extent that no group of people, much less a single person, could competently oversee all of them.

Compare the problems of the federal government to the problems of General Motors. The president of General Motors is beset with complex details and administrative challenges concerning a handful of products: automobiles, parts, financing and some additional products. Yet, the management of this handful of products has proven too difficult for the management of General Motors to handle all that well, and the firm seems to be drifting to bankruptcy.

Are the politicians who serve in Congress or the President that much more capable than the executives of General Motors? Are the people whom the president appoints to his cabinet and to senior posts in the federal agencies that much more competent than the management of General Motors? In the case of Hurricane Katrina, it seemed that the government agencies are not competent at all. Yet, the public has burdened the federal government with such extensive powers that the management problems, ranging from control to budgeting to personnel selection are orders of magnitude more complex than the problems that confront the executives of an automobile company.

When Hamilton, Madison and Jay wrote the newspaper articles that form the Federalist Papers, the United States of America had a population of three million. Today, the average state has a population of six million. Yet, the powers of government have been federalized to a much greater extent than Hamilton anticipated. This enormous concentration of managerial demands resulted from the perceived threat that industrial concentration posed to the economy. Yet, the concentration resulted in enhancing such concentration. The New Deal intensified the extent of concentration by establishing federal programs that replaced state discretion in fields like social security. The concentration was also enhanced by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, which required a degree of federal intervention to end Jim Crow laws and discrimination.

Today's problems are managerial as much as strategic or political: how to make social security work; how to best combine incentives for innovation with an equitable tax system; whether to extend or contract the scope of government; how to manage the nation's money supply to limit economic crisis and corruption. All of these are managerial problems that lend themselves to a range of strategic choices. The political arguments about them become more emotional and cantankerous as the various protagonists, Democratic and Republican, know less about each question. The expertise that fields like economics, sociology and business offer do not offer one or another optimal solution to any of these problems. In industry, trial and error has proven to work better than grand theory. Yet, subjects of considerable subtlety from the Iraqi War to the management of Social Security are pronounced upon with dogmatic rigidity in the pages of the daily newspapers and in the blogs.

Why can't a pragmatic delegation of complex managerial decision making to states, which are on average twice as large in population as the entire nation was in Hamilton's day, permit a multiplicity of solutions? Such a multiplicity would serve (a) to afford experimentation and learning about solutions; (b) to test alternative ideological approaches; (c) to resolve bitter conflict among Red and Blue proponents (d) to reduce and contain the risk of failure; and (e) to enhance democracy.