Some companies are genuine corporations; others merely play the part. The former have tens of thousands of employees, offices in many countries, inevitably complex processes and a genuine need to translate what happens into numbers that can be understood from afar. The latter may be family businesses worth a hundred million euros with a hundred employees, where everyone knows everyone and the owner walks past the warehouse every morning, but they have decided to play at being Deloitte or Procter & Gamble.
They organise calls, define missions, develop visions, build dashboards and assign an indicator to every activity. Where complexity does not exist, it is artificially reproduced through its symbols.
The result is an organisation in which intelligent people devote a substantial share of their intelligence to activities unrelated to what the company ought to be doing. They prepare presentations no one will use, spend hours discussing the wording of an objective already decided upon, invent indicators to measure phenomena they know first-hand and attend meetings whose only outcome will be to schedule the next meeting.
Everything must appear strategic, even when it is insignificant, because acknowledged insignificance would be intolerable. It is therefore necessary to produce a formal meaning that allows nothing to circulate with the dignity of an enlightened decision.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan described something very similar as early as 1977, discussing formal structures as myths and ceremonies. According to the two sociologists, many organisations adopt procedures and models because these confer legitimacy, regardless of their effectiveness. The company demonstrates that it is contemporary through the conventional signs of corporate modernity. The organisational chart, the code of values, the dashboard and the language of strategy become institutional stage scenery. In a business imitating a corporation, this scenery is particularly visible because the distance between representation and actual work is short and can constantly be checked. Within minutes, one can move from a call about organisational transformation to a department where a delivery is held up because two people are not speaking to each other.
The intelligence this system requires is of a very particular kind. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer have studied it under the apparently paradoxical name of “functional stupidity”. Organisations efficient at maintaining their own stability encourage a selective suspension of judgement. People continue to reason, often at great length, but learn not to question the premises, not to ask why a procedure exists and not to assess whether the assigned activity bears any relation to the stated outcome. Functional stupidity requires individuals capable of understanding which questions must not be asked, which contradictions must not be named and which conclusion their superior wishes to receive. The ideal employee must be bright and manageable. Their intelligence is appreciated so long as it produces solutions within the established framework; when it begins to examine the framework, it becomes negativity, inflexibility or a lack of collaborative spirit.
Gideon Kunda, in the ethnographic research collected in Engineering Culture, showed how corporate culture can become a form of normative control. The traditional business chiefly controlled time, behaviour and results. The culturally evolved business also seeks to shape the way people describe themselves. Through slogans, stories, rituals, uplifting examples and depictions of the founder, it offers a model of personhood to which they should conform. The deepest control begins when the company stops merely saying what must be done and starts explaining what sort of person would do it spontaneously. The implicit message becomes: “People like us do these things, and do them in this spirit.” At that point, behaviour can be judged correct yet still insufficient, because it lacks the expected enthusiasm, the appropriate attitude or visible allegiance to the shared culture. The organisation demands both the performance and its emotional enactment.
From this comes the vocabulary of companies that call themselves families. The corporate family demands willingness, sacrifice and loyalty, while retaining all the prerogatives of an economic relationship when it has to dismiss someone, reduce their pay or distribute profits. “I’m doing it for the team” becomes a ritual formula uttered by people who often detest the team, the boss and the activity they are engaged in. Two colleagues can declare to each other their commitment to a group in which neither believes. Public repetition produces a social reality of its own: each knows the other is acting, but both must protect the performance because the first to interrupt it exposes themselves as a problematic element.
This is where the resemblance to a cult begins. In his book Corporate Cults, Dave Arnott described the techniques through which some businesses absorb ever greater portions of their employees’ time, energy and identity. Dennis Tourish and Hugh Willmott have explored the relationship between despotic leadership, ideological manipulation and totalising organisations, going so far as to propose the concept of “hegemonic totalism”. An ordinary corporation is not a cult, but it can use some of the same mechanisms: an internal doctrine presented as beyond question, a leader endowed with visionary qualities, a language intelligible only to initiates, collective rituals, success testimonials, sacrifices made in the name of the group and a tendency to interpret dissent as a moral failing on the part of the dissenter. Cults, too, prefer intelligent members, provided they use their intelligence to justify the doctrine.
Corporate kindness is often a form of codified violence. Hostility is repressed and translated into procedure: it takes the form of a delay, an omission, a superfluous request or a formally impeccable message sent to the right people. Everyone appears collaborative while trying to protect themselves from everyone else. Courtesy makes conflict administratively presentable.
Corporate rituals also have the character of exhausted liturgies. They continue to be performed after their function has been forgotten. The weekly meeting, the report, the KPI presentation and the celebration of results are repeated because stopping them would seem more dangerous than their uselessness. The ritual confirms the existence of the organisation and each person’s position within it. Those who present, those who approve, those who ask for clarification and those who remain silent reconstruct the hierarchy every time. An inconclusive call can therefore be perfectly functional: it produces no decision, but reproduces the roles.
KPIs complete this system because they give the ritual an appearance of objectivity. In studying incentives in activities comprising multiple tasks, Bengt Holmström and Paul Milgrom showed that people tend to concentrate their efforts on what is measured and rewarded, neglecting what eludes measurement. When the indicator becomes the sole criterion of existence, the most valuable work can disappear because it is not represented on the dashboard, while a sterile activity acquires importance because it produces a number. The administrative map progressively replaces the productive territory. If something does not appear in the KPIs, it does not exist for the organisation, even when it is gold; if it does appear, it must be attended to, even when it is nothing.
Simulated kindness steps in to hold all this together. Arlie Russell Hochschild defined “emotional labour” as the activity through which workers alter or perform their emotions according to the demands of their role. In the contemporary company, controlling anger is not enough: one must display enthusiasm, willingness, gratitude and a constructive spirit. One cannot say that a request is absurd even when everyone knows it is. One must anticipate the manager’s mood, neutralise the aggression of the client’s marketing contact and get the warehouse worker to do what he should already be doing without letting him perceive the request as an affront. One thanks those who have deliberately created an obstacle, wishes a good day’s work to those who have just acted out of spite, and ends with warm regards an email that copies in the boss.
The structure remains peaceful because violence is repressed and translated into procedure. Hostility takes the form of a delay, an omission, a superfluous request or a formally impeccable message sent to the right people. Everyone appears collaborative while trying to protect themselves from everyone else. Corporate courtesy does not eliminate conflict: it makes it administratively presentable.
This life ultimately produces a mutilation of the self, because it requires a constant distance to be maintained between what one sees, what one thinks and what one can say. The organisation occupies intelligence by forcing it to calculate the risks of sincerity, interpret moods and construct official meanings for activities in which no one recognises any real meaning. The totalising corporation thus obtains something more useful than faith: a simulation of faith disciplined enough to function as though it were genuine. It does not need everyone truly to believe in the mission, the family or the team. It needs only for each person to fear being the first to confess that the liturgy no longer means anything.
References
Alvesson, Mats; Spicer, André, “A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations”, in Journal of Management Studies, vol. 49, no. 7, 2012, pp. 1194–1220.
Arnott, Dave, Corporate Cults: The Insidious Lure of the All-Consuming Organization, New York, AMACOM, 2000.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983.
Holmström, Bengt; Milgrom, Paul, “Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design”, in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, vol. 7, special issue, 1991, pp. 24–52.
Kunda, Gideon, Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992.
Meyer, John W.; Rowan, Brian, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony”, in American Journal of Sociology, vol. 83, no. 2, 1977, pp. 340–363.
Tourish, Dennis; Pinnington, Ashly, “Transformational Leadership, Corporate Cultism and the Spirituality Paradigm: An Unholy Trinity in the Workplace?”, in Human Relations, vol. 55, no. 2, 2002, pp. 147–172.
Tourish, Dennis; Willmott, Hugh, “Despotic Leadership and Ideological Manipulation at Theranos: Towards a Theory of Hegemonic Totalism in the Workplace”, in Organization Studies, vol. 44, no. 11, 2023, pp. 1801–1824.