The power to give credit and blame

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Notes

1. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 17, 255.

2. Spencer, Social Statics, 133.

3. Spencer, Justice, 103-104.

4. Brunner, Justice and the Social Order, 13–30; Spencer, Justice, 103.

5. It is technological because it has to do with making things work in the world, and because administrative techniques are themselves technologies, akin to software in computing. ‘dehumanized’ appears in Fisk, Working Knowledge, 254.

6. The nature and expansion of corporate power is of increasing interest to scholars; witness the re-issue (2010) of Robert Brady’s classic study Business as a System of Power, and the recent contribution from anthropologist and Occupy movement leader David Graeber; Brady, Business as a System of Power; Graeber, Debt

7. I do not use the term ‘contract of adherence’ although this is the term translators have used for the work of Jacques Ellul, which I will discuss below. English speaking audiences may be more familiar with the term ‘contract of adhesion,’ which makes much the same point: the power under the contract is all on one side, but ‘contract of adhesion’ relates more particularly to standard-form contracts (offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, hence the similarity), and for some jurists connotes a null and unenforceable contract. See Rakoff, ‘Contracts of Adhesion.’

8. Note that I do not label Ellul a technological determinist, as do many others (see Kline, ‘Forman’s Lament,’ 163). Ellul would have objected to the label because he had found, within his religious belief, a way out of the closed system of technological determinism, in the hope for justice through the intervention of, or collision with, a system more powerful than the technological one he saw growing around him.

9. Gilmore, ‘Friedrich Kessler,’ 676.

10. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 5.

11. Ibid., 1. The technical relies on organized, methodical, or systematic procedures. Here, the doctrine of corporate ownership of intellectual property is technical because it makes use of procedures established in patenting and copyright systems, for example, and also of procedures for the bringing of suits and the enforcement of judgments. The goal of fostering innovation is technical because it is itself aimed at uncovering rules or procedures of innovation, and in establishing procedures that will be organized, methodical, or systematic. The technical relies upon technique, upon rational method, and is concerned with method as a guarantee of result, rather than with specific results themselves.

12. Bury, Idea of Progress; Walterscheid, Promote the Progress; Khan, Democratization of Invention; Marshall, Correspondence of Alfred Marshall; Hughes, Human-Built World; Hughes, American Genesis.

13. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 4, 255.

14. Brady, Rationalization Movement, xx.

15. A good example are the extreme labor rationalization measures of the Siemens concerns in late Weimar Germany, which choreographed each movement of a worker’s body, literally from head to foot, in an effort to prevent unnecessary movements; the puzzle is why such measures were seen as necessary in a period of unemployment approaching catastrophic levels and when labor was cheap. See Alexander, ‘Efficiency and Pathology.’

16. Ellul, Theological Foundation, 45; Ellul, Technological Society, 291–300.

17. This appears with remarkably clarity in Robert Frank’s recent discussion of efficiency in competitive economics, where it is entirely a matter of calculation; see Frank, ‘Efficiency Rules,’ 100–18.

18. Alexander, ‘Efficiencies of Balance.’

19. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 187 (emphasis mine).

20. Alexander, Mantra of Efficiency.

21. Kessler, ‘Contracts of Adhesion;’ Rakoff, ‘Contracts of Adhesion.’

22. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 82.

23. Brady, Business as a System of Power, 297.

24. Ibid., 78, 79.

25. Ibid., 9.

26. Kessler, ‘Contracts of Adhesion,’ 640; Gilmore, ‘Friedrich Kessler,’ 676.

27. Caputo, Prayers and Tears; Derrida, ‘Circumfession,’ 3–315.

28. Ellul, Theological Foundation, 50–1; Alexander, ‘Radical Religiosity’. Ellul did make an important distinction between covenant with God and contracts of adhesion that turns on the very idea of efficiency that such contracts were supposed to foster: contracts of adhesion, in opposition to covenant with God, were tools of administrative procedure and thus embodied the technical organizational methods that efficiency demands. In contrast, the workings of God were never the product of logical causation or of plans and programs of action.

29. See Miller, ‘Marrow of Puritan,’ 48–89.

30. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 137, 211, 76, 248, 109.