Small critics on the workplace.stackexchange forum

The website https://workplace.stackexchange.com/ is part of the Stackexchange website and it's an active community which are discussing work related issues. Situation in the office are described, and other users give advice how to handle it right. The overall forum follows a strict pattern which isn't made visible in the help section but can be determined by analyzing the existing postings. The overall pattern in the workplace forum is:

obey to the boss and delimit the customer.

Let us observe some example threads. In one case a user asks what he should do if his boss is acting in a certain way. The overwhelming answer is, that he should try to become the friend of the boss, because the manager is defining what the situation at work is. In a second question, it was asked how to handle a customer who complains about a product, and according to the workplace community, the correct response is to argue with the customer if he is wrong.

From a business perspective the idea of never criticize the boss but argue against the customer is a management strategy which increases the stress on the workplace. It seems, that the forum is arguing in that direction and potential alternative principles like “customer orientation” aren't described in the forum. The reason why is because if somebody is able to explain a certain ideology, then he is in power. If a forum is able to teach that it's important to obey to the boss, but it's not recommended to criticize the boss, a certain semantic framework is given.

It's important to know, that business communication is mostly about the relationship between a boss, an employee and a customer. If a forum argues that the boss is on top, the employee has to obey to the boss and the customer doesn't care, this is a equal to promote a certain behavior. The reason why the workplace forum is explaining this behavior is because they are not interesting in discussing the pattern itself. In the forum the question is not if customer orientation make sense, but it's the assumption for all postings, that it doesn't make sense and the only authority available is the boss.

This position is possible but it doesn't reflect the current management literature, Many thousands papers were published in which the customer gets a more dominant position in a business context and ignoring them all is a sign for a bias in the workplace forum.