On 20 Jul 1996, Rol Fessenden wrote:
> I think Ben's history of corporate change is right on. As previously
> pointed out in the LO, employment in the US increased 160% or something
> like that between the early 70s and the ealry 90s. It took a lot of work
> to absorb all of those people.
>
> In this environment, not everyone who is capable will be able to proceed
> up the corporate ladder. Not enough positions. One consequence is that
> some quite capable people are further down in the hierarchy. Given this
> level of competence scattered throughout the organizational levels,
> flattening and distributing responsibility makes a lot of sense.
>
> The way this has shown up is that while employment has increased by the
> percentages mentioned, the population of middle managers is no smaller or
> larger than it was 15 years ago. Thus, downsizing among middle managers
> has not really occurred despite the news. Its growth has simply not kept
> pace with expectations. this is part of Ben's point.
I think Ben and Joan have both described good reasons for the economic
shift the US is currently experiencing. IMHO, the main reason for all the
anxiety and dislocation is that we in the US have come to assume that the
economic and social conditions that existed in the 25 years after WWII
were "normal" and that the conditions that exist now are somehow abnormal,
but can be "brought back to normal." But the 1950s was one of the most
*unusual* periods in American history, both economically and socially.
Economically, the period was defined by both an absence of competition and
a huge demand for American goods and services, both a pent-up domestic
demand resulting from the end of 10 years of depression followed by five
years of war, and an international demand caused by the fact that most of
the Western world was rebuilding itself and we were the only ones who
could supply the goods. Socially, the "cultural values" that our friends
on the political Right are so fond of talking about were quite strange
compared to the rest of American history. The relative absence of women
from the workplace was a *new* phenomenon, *not* a break from years of
tradition. People typically got married in their late teens and early
twenties and women bore children in their early twenties, reversing a
long-term trend toward later marriage and childbearing (my mother always
talks about how young she was when she married at 21, but at the time, she
was a couple years *older* than most newlywed women!). In many ways, the
"sexual revolution" of the 1960s simply put sexual mores back where they
were headed prior to the Depression.
Also, there was actually a labor shortage during parts of the postwar era.
This, combined with the rapid growth we were experiencing, led Americans
to conceptualize the labor market in terms of supply rather than demand
and make the assumption that most of the variation in people's economic
status was due to variations in personal characteristics like intelligence
and diligence. We're now stuck with the 1950s assumption that if someone
doesn't have a high-paying, high-status job, it's only because they don't
have the "right stuff." In the late 1980s, social scientists came to the
belated realization that "baby boomer" and "young upscale professional"
were *not* synonymous. In the popular press, one could read all kinds of
speculations about what had gone wrong with the lives of the Boomers who
were making less than 40K/year (labelled "young urban failures" by the
popular press), but few of the commentators raised the possibility that
maybe the number of openings for high paying jobs was less than the number
of qualified applicants. "Generation X" is labelled as a bunch of
"slackers" who "know how to have fun, but not how to work hard" because
most people in their twenties don't have prestigious jobs nowadays (never
mind that they never did) and because when they were teenagers, they spoke
in slang and dressed differently than their parents did (which has been
the case for at least the last 3000 years). Our ability to solve social
problems is hindered because we have trouble confusing genuine problems
with failures to live up to unrealistic expectations. We cannot wannabe
ourselves into improvement; trying to recapture the postwar boom by
re-adopting the mannerisms, styles and mores of the 1950s will only make
things worse. A population survives a change in its environment by
adapting to the new environment, *not* by redoubling its efforts to adapt
the the old one.
Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
--Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>