patrice on Mon, 28 Sep 2015 13:39:25 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> VW |
"Bad employees come up with problems - or excuses; good employees come up with solutions" (New Management mantra) Mething Michael was right with asking the question about the internal workings that made the VW clusterf%$#&^*k 'happen'. And I also think it has to be analysed and answered before we move further - it's not the paramount issue, Jaromil and John are right about that, but tackling the issue is a prioritary, necessary condition to be able to go forward. The more so since the mechanism is not limited to the 'commercial' world, it is universal. Besides the above, another concept to keep in mind is "plausible deniability". It is what the now ousted president of VW invoked "I am responsible, but I didn't know" - bit strange for someone having asserted before he knew every screw of a Beetle, but that's not really the point. The point is that subalterns are expressivily prevented, forbidden, to tell superiors about problems and risks which might slow or even halt 'advances' (be it in the form of profits, political gains, academic credits etc etc etc). Incidentally this also (partially) explains the quandary whistleblowers find themselves in. And there is nothing recognizablym, demonstrably, - within the system - evil about it. As they say at M$ "it's not a bug, it's a feature". Modern Management and its governmental equivalent 'New Public Administration" function, like the rest of the neo-liberal system, on the principle of externalising the burden and the liabilities downwards the pyramid and internalising all benefits and credits upward. Of course that is in itself nothing new (it is known in French as "faire payer les lampistes"), but it has reached a rare degree of sophistication in our times, in parallel with the ever growing technological complexity. Its most disturbing aspect is that it has been mentally internalised by all parties in a form of particularly perverse TINA, blanking out everybody's conscience, and even consciousness, from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. The bad news is that this situation is not amenable to improvement. Any attempt at it turns out into fighting the symptoms, not the causes (VW's new directorate's statements are surrealistic manifestations of this approach) and even more probably into what was (un)funnilly called in the former DDR "verschlimbesseren" (betterworsening?). Cheers from p+2D! (Meanwhile in Athenes ... ;-( # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org