Management in Technopoly

Neil Postman has defined the term Technopoly for the overall system which has has elected the technology as the main objective. Machines can be described by it's mechanical and electrical properties but to make these machine work some kind of management system is needed which explains to the workforce what to do next.

There is a larger online forum available in which work-related problems are discussed with a psychological point of view. It is https://workplace.stackexchange.com/ and most questions are about does and don't in business environment. It's interested to recognize who the filter of the website is working. The filter has the obligation to let trivial questions pass but it blocks more fundamental problems.

Let us give some examples. One option to describe the group interaction at the workplace is the theory of “Total customer orientation”, another approach for getting a deeper knowledge what a social role is, would be a so called business theatre. The idea is to perceive an office as foremost as a stage in which persons have roles. Somebody may argue that both ideas are great for get a deeper knowledge about modern business, and exactly for this reason both topics are blocked at the workplace website. It is an example of knowledge of domination. That means, the value of the knowledge is high and as a result it's not transported into the public domain.

I have tested out to post some questions in that direction. Most of them were deleted very soon, because of different reasons. The main one is perhaps, that if everybody knows how to manipulate a group of workers, the manager would loose their power. And the assumption is right. The knowledge will become useless if the magic trick is explained so that everybody can understand the background.

Total customer orientation alone is not able to describe modern business scenarios. Human workers are more complex than it is estimated in the theory. But it would be an important step towards a realistic picture. It is some kind of irony, that especially subjects which leads to greater knowledge are identified as offtopic. This shows how the knowledge production in Technology works or to make the point more obvious: knowledge is part of the game and the task is to hide the important knowledge from the public.

It's the same strategy what early software companies were used. They published the working program but they didn't talked about the sourcecode. Exact the same principle is done by today's manager. They are able to coordinate larger groups of workers, but they didn't talk about how to do so.

But i don't want to become to critique. The mentioned workplace forum has some lighter sides as well. For example, there is tag “scrum” available under which agile management is discussed. Some of the postings and comments are trying to explain at least a bit, how group interaction can be realized.