Kevin Carson has written a most remarkable essay, about the double nature of the new, ‘peer to peer’ inspired management practices, which can be read as a companion to Adam Arvidsson’s book-in-progress on the Ethical Economy.

See also my own comment to the fourth installment of the Ethical Economy book.

Kevin’s comments are of particular interest since I’m actually mentioned in the book by Tom Peters, because I had adopted some of these practices in the information management field. See my own essay, entitled “P2P and the Corporation”.
Kevin’s essay is long, worth reading in full at the original site, but here are extensive quotes.

Here then is just the intro, the article then continues by describing and detail the different characteristics of ‘management by stress’.

“From my first reading of Tom Peters’ work, my overwhelming impression was of the ambivalent or dialectical character of the “revolutionary” management and organizational trends he championed. Depending on the system of power into which such ideas are incorporated, they could make life either heaven or hell for those doing the actual work.

The same generalization applies to many other organizational and management theory trends (reengineering, lean production, kaizen, and the like), all of which celebrate the dissolution of corporate hierarchies and the organization of production along decentralized, consumer-driven, and (allegedly) bottom-up lines. And indeed, a lot of it sounds like what might be the seeds of a libertarian, self-managed, decentralized economy, if the structural bulwarks to authoritarianism were removed. The same practices, however, when integrated into the existing system of state capitalism, become what Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter [Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering (Detroit: Labor Notes, 1994)] call “management-by-stress.”

The striking thing is that ideas like demand-pull, self-directed teams, and flexible manufacturing are discussed both by corporate management gurus like Peters, and by left-wing economic decentralists, in language that is virtually indistinguishable from one group to the other. The demand-pull concept, for example, was anticipated at least as early as Barry Stein’s Size, Efficiency, and Community Enterprise. The difference is that Peters considers such ideas (despite his revolutionary rhetoric) largely in terms of their integration into the existing corporate economy, while the left-wingers imagine a post-corporate economy of producer and consumer cooperatives built around the new practices.

Reading Peters brought another, seemingly obvious, question to mind. In his work of the late ’80s and early ’90s, he wrote of the dissolution of corporate walls, the elimination of middle management, and the rise of worker self-management as inevitable revolutionary trends that the Fortune 500 would inevitably adopt or die. If the large corporation were not revolutionized along such lines, he wrote, it would go the way of Gosplan. Yet, fifteen or twenty years later, the corporate dinosaur is still thrashing quite vigorously in those alleged tarpits, with no sign of going under. Why didn’t the old hierarchical corporation disintegrate to anywhere near the extent Peters predicted, and why isn’t the flattened network of self-directed teams anwhere near as prevalent?

One partial answer is that Peters greatly exaggerated the competitive disadvantages of inefficiency in a cartelized, state capitalist market, and underestimated the inertia of the existing system. When three-quarters of a market is dominated by a handful of corporate “Gosplans” that share the same pathological organizational culture and follow the same “industry trends,” Gosplan can be pretty profitable.

But another part of the answer may be that the stuff Peters talked about actually was adopted to a large extent; it’s just that the contrast between the new and old ways of doing things wasn’t nearly as great as he imagined, and that what’s called the “self-directed team” can be integrated quite nicely into the old hierarchy without anywhere near the revolutionary upheaval he expected.

Peters himself made it clear that he wasn’t opposed to bigness, as such; he just wanted to simulate the advantages of smallness in the context of a large corporation. And he also made it clear that his prescriptions for eliminating middle management, transforming the corporation into a loose network of self-directed teams, and “outsourcing everything” would take place within a mercantilist framework of corporate headquarters that retained central control of “intellectual property,” branding, and finance, as well as the price-setting power that comes from coordinated buying and selling. Nike has taken the principle to its logical conclusion, outsourcing all the production to an archipelago of “independent” sweatshops, while retaining control of corporate finance and legal possession of the Nike brand-name. It’s pretty hard to miss the fact that the world in which Peters saw his ideas being implemented was a world built by Tom Friedman, upheld not by the invisible hand but by the fist of the World Bank, IMF and WTO, and the U.S. armed forces.

For the left-wing economic decentralists, on the other hand, such ideas are expected to reach their full flourishing only when intellectual property, centralized finance, and corporate headquarters themselves have gone the way of T. Rex. In other words, they will become the basis of economic organization in an economy centered on decentralized production for local markets, with production organized predominantly through consumer or producer cooperatives. Peters’ prescription, as it is actually being implemented, is a way to integrate the Goths into the framework of the old Roman imperial structure and give the Empire a new lease on life.

All these management trends of flexibility, decentralization, flattening of hierarchies, and related ideas, examplify what might be the seeds of a new libertarian economic system along the lines that Kirkpatrick Sale described in the economic chapters of Human Scale. But adapted to the existing corporate economy, they are more accurately described by Parker and Slaughter in Working Smart.

Many of the stated principles, as such, might be good, if they were applied by workers for themselves, in an economy of worker cooperatives. But when they are done tomanagement, they become management-by-stress.

Indeed management theory gurus, in describing kaizen, lean manufacturing, etc., use rhetoric of empowerment reminiscent of left-wing literature on worker self-management. An especially egregious example is Tom Peters. But in practice, in the corporate capitalist workplace, they translate into relentless downsizing and speedups, and a nightmare of overwork and job insecurity. As Parker and Slaughter describe it, these fashionable management practices can be broken down into several key components (they focus especially on the NUMMI joint-venture of Toyota and GM) workers by .”