More on Alienation

I would like to follow up on my analysis yesterday of the report of three suicides at Renault. Yesterday I made a passing reference to the book, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry, by Robert Blauner. I thought it would be appropriate to supplement yesterday's analysis with Blauner's characterization of alienation, as he expresses it in the first sentence of the second paragraph of his Foreword:

Domination, futility, isolation, and discontent are each aspects of experience that have been identified as elements of the general condition of alienation, a leading perspective in modern social thought.

I should also point out that the last time I tried to address the question of alienation was in my previous blog, where I drew upon the Habermas characterization, which he based on deprivation and domination. Habermas was more interested in the general quality of life, rather than life in the workplace; and, even though the Renault suicides were "knowledge workers" (remember when we were all being told that, as knowledge workers, we would have a better "quality of life?"), rather than factory workers, I think that Blauner's approach is more appropriate to the situation. So let us see to what extent each of Blauner's characteristics is appropriate to yesterday's report:

1. The focus of the police investigation appears to be on harassment, which is certainly one of the less rational (but still) popular ways to exercise domination.
2. This brings us back to the "stinger" at the end of the report, Renault's "plans to roll out 26 models including 12 new ones by 2009." We all know that life is pretty rough in the garden of the automobile industry, and it would be fair to say that every leading player is fighting for its survival. Is this Renault's way of invoking the desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures strategy? Did they seriously believe that this was a realistic plan, or were they trying to make a rhetorical move to cow the competition? In the latter case, even if top-level management knew that the plan was unrealistic, did they decide that the strategy would only succeed if the rest of the organization actually believed that this was the plan? Put another way, are these suicides the result of a confidence game gone wrong, where too many good "knowledge workers" were being driven to the futile task of satisfying an unrealistic plan?
3. If all this is due to the backfiring of a confidence game, did the confidence game come about in the first place because of the social gulf that isolates senior management from what is happening in the rest of the organization; and, if so, is that gulf the result of a senior management what is more eager to please its stockholders than its workers?
4. If the arguments of points 2 and 3 are valid and if point 1 is just the backlash of middle management trying to achieve the goals against which evaluation takes place at the end of the year, then there is more than enough discontent to spread across the entire enterprise. The question then is how one deals with that discontent. One benefit of the "isolation of the top" is that one can try playing the denial game and just go about "doing one's job," however void of realistic semantics that phrase may be. At the next level down one cannot deny. but one can harass to relieve one's own pressure. That then takes us to the level of the suicides, who may just have been stuck with no other way to deal with the multiple layers of discontent whose consequences were accumulating on their shoulders.

The conclusion, then, is that at least this particular division of Renault was very likely a hotbed of alienation. This raises a more interesting and poignant question: Is Renault the exception or the rule and in what space? Are we talking about the anomie of the automobile industry, the whole production economy, or just about any workplace in this new age of globalization? Is anybody putting resources into examining these questions?