Note: This post is an excerpt from The Great Mechanism: The Power Behind the Relentless Juggernaut of Western Capitalism. It is available on Kindle here.
The Development of Corporate Offices
Following on the development of state offices, corporations undertook a similar structure. To carry out the corporate mission, corporations set up offices, and each office was assigned its own charter or function. The office concept converted the work of the corporate worker into a mechanistic function that had little to do with the worker, per se—it had everything to do with effectively carrying out the function of the office. This sense of “office,” along with its attachment to function, is what makes corporate activity fundamentally mechanistic. It is the tool and the form that implements the idea, and provides a new set of guidelines for worker activity. Office is a function of the greater mechanism, and its depersonalization makes the execution of that function inevitable, relentless, and free of any concern but its own mission. By creating the office, corporations guarantee that the work assigned to the office will occur, and the organization does not care who is in the office, so long as the work is done well.
The Structural Power of the Office
Hierarchy enshrined into the corporate structure constitutes an under-recognized structural power that has two primary characteristics—its function and its form. As function, the office’s charter defines what it is supposed to do—the duties of the office. It tells the office holder what they are responsible for and how success or failure will be measured. All offices carry this function in hierarchies, but in the corporate setting, there is a single focus on the corporation’s economic purpose throughout the hierarchy. The driving corporate function leads to nearly all problems arising from capitalism—exploited employees, neglected communities, externalities driving climate change, confrontations with local communities, and so on. These problems can be blamed not on a profit motive, but on the corporate profit imperative and the office-based structure that empowers it.
As form, office enshrines hierarchy. Offices force us to think hierarchically. One office above another, one parallel, one below others. Offices are always organized hierarchically within the corporate structure, and also in political and religious structures. In other words, office creates a consciousness of hierarchy that pervades our very perceptions of the world and colors all of our notions of reality. It teaches us and trains us by habituation of thought that mechanistic hierarchy is how the world works.
So, with form and function, offices carry hierarchical values and perception into the culture. Their pervasiveness changes our perception of reality; we assume that hierarchy is the only way of organizing everything, but isn’t. Every time people believe it is, they are giving away their power to the hierarchy. When they do, people express powerlessness as frustration with government and the world. In reality, their powerlessness is lodged in a structure that is biased in one way, and no amount of change agent, political power, or activist movements will change that. The deck is stacked and that is why the juggernaut continues—we are all complicit in it, willingly or not.
