Pushing back on management gobbledygook
The curse of the modern workplace
About 15 years ago, having endured many university committees and been, like everybody else, intimidated by the impenetrable jargon used — jargon which one had to affect to understand and 'implement' — I was liberated, and made both fearless and scathing, after reading Don Watson's book, Gobbledygook and Harry Frankfurt's On Bulls**t.
In 2017, Laurie Taylor's regular radio programme on sociology devoted an episode — which you can find here — to "management jargon". To be honest, I am not normally a fan of Laurie Taylor, and there is a chunk late on here that you might want to skip (one of his guests insisting that a political policy he doesn't like is somehow 'explained' by the same analysis). But overall, the programme is great!
What troubles me is that, despite repeated exposés such as this, or such as the aforementioned books, the phenomenon of empty management jargon persists. Indeed, it now pervades almost every kind of workplace: business corporations; universities; hospitals; tech industries; government departments. And the jargon keeps evolving — moving from one 'paradigm shift' (to borrow its own empty nonsense for a moment) to another.
The mirage that something important is happening when it is not is clearly part of this. And that in turn has driven up the volume of administration relative to work directly producing a good or service. The average UK teacher, for example, now works 48 hours a week — and only 16 of those hours are spent propped up in front of a classroom. The rest is taken up with monitoring, classifying, proving that X, Y, or Z has been done — in the interests of 'quality control'. (Though it should be noted that quality is driven downwards, not upwards, as a result of such massive diversion of effort and work time.) Something broadly similar will be true of nurses. The number of full-time administrators, relative to sharp-end deliverers of goods and services, has ballooned also. (Startlingly, 42% of male employees in the UK think that society would be better off if their jobs did not exist.)
As John Kay pointed out in The Financial Times, management jargon, is “characterized by prolixity.... If you are asked to report on implementation milestones towards key performance indicators, you are obliged to reply in the same language.” He points out that “the most powerful enemy” of this substance “is ridicule”, and that its “most powerful ally” is “the corporate conformity that makes ridicule impossible”.
In line with Kay, my own explanation for this bizarre, profits-and-efficiency-hindering, unnecessary-cost-inflating phenomenon — and I recognise it can be only a partial explanation — is as follows:
it is a power game, internal to the organisation for which one works, designed to burden staff with uncertainty about what is expected of them (thereby heightening the degree of control from above in an era when the old formalities have been dispensed with and the boss is routinely addressed as Dave or Barbara); to humiliate staff by demanding their complicity in a form of speech in which they do not believe, while shielding management from real scrutiny. If the language for asking real, contentful questions is no longer usable — or can be 'answered' by impenetrable duckspeak — then real accountability of our executives is rendered impossible.