Workplace Politics Quotes

Lamb said, ‘If you had issues with him, I could have spoken to HR. Arranged an intervention.’ He tapped Moody’s shoulder with his foot. ‘Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record.

What we witness playing out in the relationships of our public figures we risk finding acceptable in our private lives. Feminists have connected women’s sexual subordination to their unequal status in society, and have strived to transform women’s expectations in their private lives. Private dignity at home equates to dignity in the workplace and the public sphere.

It took me too long to realize that the people most inclined to say “You sound angry” are the same people who uniformly don’t care to ask “Why?” They’re interested in silence, not dialogue. This response to women expressing anger happens on larger and larger scales: in schools, places of worship, the workplace, and politics. A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world-in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life-as we are called back to our "hidden wholeness" amid the violence of the storm.

The working class had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace.

Recognizing sexism is harder than it once was. Like the micro-aggressions that people of color endure daily—racism masked as subtle insults or dismissals—today’s sexism is insidious, casual, politically correct, even friendly. It

When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.

When a woman excels at her job, both male and female coworkers will remark that she may be accomplishing a lot, but is “not well-liked by her peers.” She is probably also “too aggressive,” “not a team player,” “a bit political,” “can’t be trusted,” or “difficult.

When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall.

Self-promotion is a leadership and political skill that is critical to master in order to navigate the realities of the workplace and position you for success.

The emoluments of toxic workplace is stress & depression, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a haggard existence.

My philosophy of equity feminism demands removal of all barriers to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women in the workplace. Treating women as more vulnerable, virtuous, or credible than men is reactionary, regressive, and ultimately counterproductive.

We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfectionist "good girls," who never showed our drive or our desires around men. Now we were becoming mad women, discovering and confronting our own ambitions, a quality praised in men but stigmatized--still--in women.

If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue— control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is— a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.

Observe the behavior of your environment carefully for clues as to what is acceptable and rewarded.

Recognizing that you have a bias and blind spots is essential to personal growth.

Controlling your mindset is one of the most powerful badass things you can do.

I don’t care how old you are—fifty, sixty, or seventy. Your value doesn’t diminish with each birthday.

Don’t be stingy with your praise and support of other women. What goes around comes around. It’s great karma.

Ambition doesn’t end on a particular birthday. Own it and live it.

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.

The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.

How have we learned to look at those women who exercise power, or who try to? What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects)? How and why do the conventional definitions of ‘power’ (or for that matter of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’) that we carry round in our heads exclude women?

Gaining patience and a positive attitude, being polite and respectful to the most negative person, and being able to have insight into the type of person you are dealing with are all important for a lifetime of success.

For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity. Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting." Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories. The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it. — excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)

The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put greater efforts into encouraging a higher level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee that truly valuable goal: the kindness of strangers.

...politically charged punk that combined activism and art. Forged out of a meeting of friends who decided they wanted to start a “girl riot,” the women gave rise to bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, addressing rape and violence in their songs, publishing zines, popularizing “girl power"...

The work we should do involves calling for the war on drugs to end, supporting phonics-based reading instruction, and celebrating every political move that helps dilute the conviction that all people need to spend four years living in a dorm before they start training for the workplace. That’s work enough, and it will help change the world.

The dreams we had of finding meaning and fulfillment through our jobs have faded into the reality of professional politics, burnout, boredom and intense competition.

I have been through the OSHA system twice and I can confirm that I did not have the right to a safe workplace or whistle-blower protection on either occasion.

I became a new person; sucked into the neutrality of the abyss, comforted by social norms, and set free from the burden of individuality.

Understanding who you are is critical for your career advancement. Self-awareness helps you get ahead.

Political skills are essential career competencies to get ahead and stay ahead.

Our hesitancy to take credit for our accomplishments results in a loss of power, influence, and political capital in the workplace.

For the success equation to be complete, hard work, skills, and intelligence need a few more additives, such as strategy, relationships, politics, tenacity, and faith.

In politics, the players jockey for power; in academia, they play for vanity, a far more compelling instinct that could conjure far more vindictive punishment.

it became clearer that if there was any doubt in my mind about leaving my job, it had to be set aside.

Managers who don't allow office gossips and politics understand how to promote happiness in the workplace.

legal emancipation remains an empty shell if it does not include public services, social housing, and funding to ensure that women can leave domestic and workplace violence.

Women need to keep asking for what they’re worth, and leaders need to make sure women are paid the same, whether they ask for it or not.

It’s long overdue that we expose this behavior and create environments where everyone feels safe and can be productive at work.

You now have more experience and wisdom than ever before. Age enhances your value.

We believe that we don’t have what it takes to compete, therefore we don’t compete.

Make it your mission to finish your career on your terms with a bang, not a whimper.

Be proud of how you show up every day, feeling comfortable in your own skin, being your magnificent you.

When did wrinkles become shameful and when did we start buying into all this bullshit?

What a waste of time it is to be anxious and worried about aging instead of living.

Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.

What led to our revolt? Why did our generation suddenly realize that our place in society was changing--and had to change? In part, we were carried by the social and political currents of our time...But even with the social winds in our sails and the women's movement behind us, each of us had to overcome deeply held values and traditional social strictures. The struggle was personally painful and professionally scary. What would happen to us? Would we win our case? Would we change the magazine? Or would we be punished? Who would succeed and who would not? And if our revolt failed, were our careers over--or were they over anyway? We knew that filing the suit legally protected us from being fired, but we didn't trust the editors not to find some way to do us in. Whatever happened, the immediate result is that it put us all on the line. "The night after the press conference I realized there was no turning back," said Lucy Howard. "Once I stepped up and said I wanted to be a writer, it was over. I wanted to change Newsweek, but everything was going to change.

I dream of a time when politics, cultures and predispositions stop being a divisive, destructive, evil force, and instead…becomes a positive, unifying force for good; freedom, love, abundance, peace, meaning and joy.

The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.

[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

We need an uprising to guarantee that the bullies with unchecked and unlimited power and money do not continue getting away with abusing employees in most workplaces. We need a #MeToo movement for bullied and silenced American employees!

. There were also multiple ways of earning an income that didn't pose a threat to my well-being. But there weren't various options to choose from when it came to life. I simply had one life, and it was up to me to create great experiences for myself. I

I think we should first address conscious and unconscious bias. I believe these conjoined twins set the stage for how office politics erode the workplace, leaving a lot of talented and tenured people overlooked and undervalued—more than likely people of color.

As you become aware of life, you will begin to see the root cause to all your actions and reactions. Then you will realize that you are not angry with the child because he made a mistake, but because you get pleasure out of being angry. The mistake was only a excuse.

[T]he dire need of millions of Americans to get a biweekly paycheck (and the need of having to shut one’s mouth to be paid) significantly contributes to destroying America’s potential for healthier and more inclusive workplaces, and indeed for a healthier society overall.

Elections outside the workplace stand in an ambivalent relation to capitalism’s exclusion of real democracy inside. On the one hand, elections distract people from their conscious and unconscious upsets with working conditions. Elections focus instead on political candidates, parties, and alternative policies around issues other than capitalism versus alternative economic systems and other than their respective working conditions. That is why supporters of capitalism appreciate elections. Well-controlled elections do not question, let alone threaten, capitalism.

As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone

the employer's control of the political content of the professional's creative work is assured by the ideological discipline developed during professional training. And the employer's control of the workforce is maintained in part through the professional's elitism and support for hierarchy in the workplace.

I would like Britain - and indeed other countries - to be run in the interests of people's needs and aspirations, rather than on the basis of profit for a small elite; for democracy to be democratically managed by working people; for democracy to be extended as far as possible, including in the workplace and the economy.

If he's simply an obnoxious, heckling colleague--and if undermining the Undermine-Her isn't going to hurt you--then toss the politeness. "My 'pretty little head' outsold your figures by three last month. But thanks fir asking." "I think by 'young lady' you mean 'woman in charge.' That's how we refer to female leaders nowadays.

I like to judge people and it was clear to me that Colin’s life has been about as exciting as a cluster headache. You can tell this just from his humour tumour which runs through every conversation you have with him. I got the impression that Colin had arrived at his early fifties resenting the fact that he’s spent his entire career worshiping at the altar of Dynasty PLC. But he is now so indoctrinated by the world of corporate banking that he’s forgotten how to express the real him. This is what a life working for large corporations does to people. The workplace is a place not to be you; it’s a place to be the corporate you. The you that doesn’t really exist. We all see this corporate you and pretend that it’s a normal part of life. But we know that something isn’t quite right. We know that the real you is slowly fading away like old wallpaper. The corporate you is a myth; just like Icarus. And yet we are powerless against it. All of us are powerless against the wrath of the corporate world.

Terror attacks are now 'man-caused disasters.' And the 'global war on terror' is no more. It is an 'overseas contingency operation.' Nidal Hassan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of 'workplace violence.

Sonnet of Human Resources There is no blue collar, no white collar, just honor. And honor is defined by character not collar. There is no CEO, no janitor, just people. Person's worth lies, not in background, but behavior. Designation is reference to expertise, not existence. Respect is earned through rightful action, not label. Designation without humanity is resignation of humanity, For all labels without love cause nothing but trouble. The term human resources is a violation of human rights. For it designates people as possession of a company. Computers are resources, staplers are resources, but people, Aren't resources, but the soul of all company and society. I'm not saying, you oughta rephrase it all in a civilized way. But at the very least, it's high time with hierarchy we do away.

INFJs believe overly competitive environments are harmful to the creative process. They have a visceral, instinctual aversion to workplace dynamics that set one employee against the other, and they abhor backstabbing and office politics almost as much as they despise social injustice and wasted human potential—probably because they see such behavior as a contributing factor to our society’s dysfunction.

.. evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women. In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

In fact, I should say to begin with that the term anarchism is quite a range of political ideas, but I would prefer to think of it as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of say Bakunin and Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope. And the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live.

The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which—in return for political quiescence—offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’ The

Just as most American employers give us ‘at will’ employments, our entire existence has become subject to their will. We have arrived at a point where most of our stress is a result of not knowing whether we will get the next paycheck. Exploitative employers love it this way. So long as we are afraid, they are sure to get 100 percent submission from us. We cannot let our toxic way of working be accepted as the norm and as the typical American work ethics. We deserve and can do much, much better than this.

If you tour any workplace, you will see countless logos and banners paying lip service to freedom of speech, democracy, logos like ‘speak up, speak out’, creativity, innovation, and on and on goes the list of flashy words and adjectives that companies and corporations want their employees (and outsiders) to believe are part of their work ethics and culture. Yet, most employees learn at the earliest stages of their careers that these bogus adjectives will get them fired, if they are naïve enough to believe in – let alone act on – them.

While we are all forced to participate in the games of office politics; it is very defeatist position for a Black woman. Many would argue that White men in America write the rules, mange the courses, and call all the plays. They are trusted to lead organizations and are in key positions to make positive change. I believe that at this moment in time, the onus shouldn't be places on the underdogs to pull themselves up. The onus is on White men in power to create work environments that are both inclusive and sustainable for marginalized people.

Men in offices are, for the most part, Deadly Bores. They suffer from indigestion and ask you to buy their pills in your lunch hour. They seldom think of their girl employees as human beings at all. What they would prefer, if they were procurable and didn’t cost too much, would be a series of automatic machines, into which you put the week’s salary and took out the letters at the other end. They would prefer these to young women, because you can kick a machine, if you happen to be put out about something, without being hauled into court for assault.

If trust is the core value that allows us to meet the world in a cheerful stance, then tolerance is the equally important quality that allows us to deal with the realities of differences and conflict. Let's be honest: If people were all more or less the same — if there were no differences in race, religion, sexual orientation, political leanings — life would in some ways be easier. But, boy, would it be dull! Diversity is the spice of life. Our ability to embrace diversity makes our own lives richer. Conversely, whenever we fall victim to prejudice or unadmitted bias, we make our own lives smaller and poorer. You don't believe that women are the equal of men in the workplace? Well, your world has just shrunk by half. You have a problem with gay people? Well, you just deprived yourself of 10 percent of the population. You're not comfortable with black people? Latinos? You get my drift. Keep giving in to intolerance, and eventually your world contains no one but you and a few people who look like you and think like you; it gets to resemble a small, snooty, and deathly dull country club! Is that a world worth living in?

A series of Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades struck down race-conscious measures to desegregate schools and workplaces. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., decided in 1989, the Court ruled that the former capital of the Confederacy practiced reverse discrimination against whites by adopting a set-aside program to steer some of its construction dollars to minority-owned firms—“even when, without the program, less than one percent of construction contracts went to minorities in a city over 50 percent African American,” as legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez pointed out.

Society, Burke believed, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these can be built only from below, through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbours. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

It was a familiar trick, I thought to myself, the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that had become a staple of conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue: taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem is no longer discrimination against people of color, the argument goes; it’s “reverse racism,” with minorities “playing the race card” to get an unfair advantage. The problem isn’t sexual harassment in the workplace; it’s humorless “feminazis” beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem is not bankers using the market as their personal casino, or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs. It’s the lazy and shiftless, along with their liberal Washington allies, intent on mooching off the economy’s real “makers and the doers.

Here, accordingly, we encounter two principal sets of institutions that depoliticize social needs: first, domestic institutions, especially the normative domestic form, namely, the modern, male-headed, nuclear family; and, second, official-economic capitalist system institutions, especially paid workplaces, markets,credit mechanisms, and “ private” enterprises and corporations. Domestic institutions depoliticize certain matters by personalizing and/or familializing them; they cast these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradistinction to public, political matters. Official-economic capitalist system institutions depoliticize certain matters by economizing them; the issues in question here are cast as impersonal market imperatives or as “ private” ownership prerogatives or as technical problems for managers and planners, all in contradistinction to political matters.

Now imagine what a change it would be for a young black American to grow up in a society where they didn’t have to settle for the worst schools, the worst health care, the worst jobs, or possibly be subjected to the worst carceral system on Earth. Imagine what it would mean for women if they were more easily able to leave abusive relationships or escape workplace harassment with the help of strong welfare guarantees. Imagine our future Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis liberated from grinding poverty and misery and able to contribute to human greatness. Or forget Einstein and Leonardo—better yet, imagine ordinary people, with ordinary abilities, having time after their twenty-eight-hour workweek to explore whatever interests or hobbies strike their fancy (or simply enjoy their right to be bored). The deluge of bad poetry, strange philosophical blog posts, and terrible abstract art will be a sure sign of progress.

I awoke to the fraud that had been committed in socialism’s name, and felt an immediate obligation to do something about it. All those laws formulated by the British Labour Party, which set out to organize society for the greater good of everyone, by controlling, marginalizing or forbidding some natural human activity, took on another meaning for me. I was suddenly struck by the impertinence of a political party that sets out to confiscate whole industries from those who had created them, to abolish the grammar schools to which I owed my education, to force schools to amalgamate, to control relations in the workplace, to regulate hours of work, to compel workers to join a union, to ban hunting, to take property from a landlord and bestow it on his tenant, to compel businesses to sell themselves to the government at a dictated price, to police all our activities through quangos designed to check us for political correctness. And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe.

But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

By the time he came around to shake hands at the conclusion of his speech, I’d been reduced to a twelve-year-old girl at a One Direction concert. I was shaking and nervous and sweating and seriously crushing. If it had been socially acceptable, I would’ve started screaming at the top of my lungs like the fangirl that I am. I tried to hold on to my politics. But Jacob, you have to remain critical. He still hasn’t issued an executive order banning workplace discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. Statistically, he hasn’t slowed deportations. You still disagree with some of this man’s foreign policy decisions. And you don’t like drone warfare. You must remain critical, my brain said. It is important. NAH FUCK THAT! screamed my heart and girlish libido, gossiping back and forth like stylists at a hair salon. Can you even believe how handsome he is? He is sooooo cute! Oh my God, is he looking at you right now? OH MY GOD JACOB HE’S LOOKING AT YOU! And he was. Before I knew what was happening, it was my turn to shake his hand and say hello. And in my panic, in my giddy schoolgirl glee, all I could muster, all I could manage to say at a gay party at the White House, was: “We’re from Duke, Mr. President! You like Duke Basketball don’t you?” “The Blue Devils are a great team!” he said back, smiling and shaking my hand before moving on. WHAT. Jacob. jacob jacob jacob. JACOB. You had ONE CHANCE to say something to the leader of the free world and all you could talk about was Duke Basketball, something you don’t even really like? I mean, you’ve barely gone to one basketball game, and even then it was only to sing the national anthem with your a cappella group. Why couldn’t you think of something better? How about, “Do you like my shoes, Mr. President?” Or maybe “Tell Michelle I’m her number one fan!” Literally anything would’ve been better than that.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

In this precarious climate of employment, achieving basic health and safety standards in the workplace is hard enough; to ask for maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks is to ask for the moon.

You’ll also note a chronology to the theories, with later ones tending to supersede earlier ones. It is not, however, an exact timeline; bits and pieces of various theories still hold sway among current thinkers and some older ideas, such as trait theory, have resurfaced with renewed vigour in the light of modern science (genetic studies show that some traits associated with leaders, such as intelligence and extroversion, are highly heritable). One consequence of the chronological approach is that earlier leadership studies tend to focus on political and military figures, whereas the rise of corporate culture in the twentieth century shifts the focus of later theories to leadership in the workplace (which can be termed organisational, management or business psychology). In the corporate sphere, ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ become ‘managers’ and ‘employees’ or ‘subordinates’.

Miss Manners' distaste is for pseudo-social life at the office, because it is occasioned by proximity rather than affection. She believes we should all just work through, go home earlier, and give showers for our own friends.

And in a world where individuals felt their vote counted little either in the political arena or the workplace, they could at least demonstrate authority over their own bodies.

The joy of God equips us with knowledge, freedom, and strength. . . . Our identities and motivations are invested in loving others rather than serving ourselves. And we have the power of the Spirit to help us carry that love through in action. Shame on us if we’re not experts in making the world a better place! This—and nothing else—is what can create a real encounter with the holistic joy of God for people outside the church. If they encounter Christianity through our efforts to leverage secondary assets (politics, scholarship, worldview, evangelism, emotions, causes), they will not encounter the joy of God. But when they see that the total Christian life makes a radical difference in homes, workplaces, and communities, they will want to know why. Then they will know that the joy of God is a real thing. Then they will know that there is a real supernatural power working in the lives of Christians.30

People still think the Lewinsky affair was one political party making a big deal over a little extra pie on the side; it wasn’t. What Starr proved was that the president had engaged in inappropriate sexually related workplace conduct with an intern/employee, as he had with other women. Some women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, even alleged he had assaulted them. He had zero integrity in this area, and that made everything he did suspect and untrustworthy. It revealed his real character. The president of the United States believed that he was above the law. He perjured himself and convinced others to perjure themselves to try to save his carefully crafted image. He created a spirit of corruption that infected the White House, the Secret Service, the whole government. Bill Clinton endangered us all by serving himself. He dragged me through the mud for it. He raked a lot of people over the coals for it.

Tripp somehow manipulated Monica into giving her the infamous blue dress. Nel and I hadn’t cleaned up everything. The president had “deposited” somewhere besides White House towels. The biggest security leak in history was the one that Monica wore into the White House and then strutted out with—right past us. There was no way to spin it. Either the president had mysteriously gone around the White House ejaculating on people’s clothing, or he and Monica had a taxpayer-funded affair for which he committed perjury. It also proved what I damn well knew, that Monica was easily manipulated, either by the likes of a higher-up like President Clinton or a lower-down like Linda Tripp. She had no business playing in a high-stakes environment within arm’s reach of intelligence of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. I mean, the spook shit that moved and was approved through the White House was the most sensitive intel in existence. Actionable intel is power. How could anyone in the Secret Service be expected to do his or her job if the Americans allowed people like the Clintons to assume national leadership? People still think the Lewinsky affair was one political party making a big deal over a little extra pie on the side; it wasn’t. What Starr proved was that the president had engaged in inappropriate sexually related workplace conduct with an intern/employee, as he had with other women. Some women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, even alleged he had assaulted them. He had zero integrity in this area, and that made everything he did suspect and untrustworthy. It revealed his real character. The president of the United States believed that he was above the law. He perjured himself and convinced others to perjure themselves to try to save his carefully crafted image. He created a spirit of corruption that infected the White House, the Secret Service, the whole government. Bill Clinton endangered us all by serving himself.

the average CEO-to-worker compensation in the nation was 354:1; after, it dropped to 89:1. At your workplace the most extreme differential is now 4:1. It’s similar at others, as well. Work gets better, but it doesn’t feel as if something monumental

How do we translate these abstract ideas into concrete policies at the current moment? We can start by trying to counter the specific abuses that have driven assertions of identity, such as unwarranted police violence against minorities or sexual assault and sexual harrassment in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. No critique of identity politics should imply that these are not real and urgent problems that need concrete solutions. Beyond

Zettler and Hilbig (2010) examined counterproductive behaviors—such as stealing from work, showing up late, being rude to coworkers, and other acts—in a sample of employees. The researchers wanted to understand how personality characteristics would be related to counterproductive behavior. To find out, they asked the employees to give anonymous self-reports about their personality, about their workplace, and about their counterproductive behavior at work. The findings of Zettler and Hilbig showed, not surprisingly, that employees who were high in Honesty–Humility generally engaged in little counterproductive behavior. In contrast, employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot more counterproductive behavior. But Zettler and Hilbig noted that this finding only applied to some of the low-Honesty–Humility employees. It depended on whether the employee worked in a place where there was a lot of “organizational politics”—for example, where employees could get ahead simply by agreeing with the boss or by having the right network of allies. Employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot of counterproductive behavior if they worked in places that were very “political,” but not if they worked in places that were not so political. Presumably, workplaces with more organizational politics tend to make employees feel that self-serving behaviors (including some counterproductive acts) are normal and that punishment for those behaviors is less likely. In such a workplace, employees low in Honesty–Humility are therefore likely to act on the temptation to commit counterproductive behaviors, but employees high in Honesty–Humility remain untempted. The researchers noted that these findings were an example of a person-by-situation interaction: In one situation, the personality characteristic of low Honesty–Humility was expressed through counterproductive behavior, but in another situation, it was not.

Masses of women feel angry because they were encouraged by feminist thinking to believe they would find liberation in the workforce. Mostly they have found that they work long hours at home and long hours at the job. Even before feminist movement encouraged women to feel positive about working outside the home, the needs of a depressed economy were already sanctioning this shift. If contemporary feminist movement had never taken place masses of women would still have entered the workforce, but it is unlikely that we would have the rights we have, had feminists not challenged gender discrimination. Women are wrong to “blame” feminism for making it so they have to work, which is what many women think. The truth remains that consumer capitalism was the force leading more women into the workforce. Given the depressed economy white middle-class families would be unable to sustain their class status and their lifestyles if women who had once dreamed solely of working as housewives had not chosen to work outside the home.

Journalists in the South predicted rapid and sweeping political and cultural change. Black people would register to vote in huge numbers. Staunch segregationists would be shoved out of office. In cities and counties where Black voters outnumbered white, Black politicians would win office and wield power. Black citizens would get a fair share of government services, including new schools and paved streets. As schools integrated, achievement levels and income levels would rise until Black and white Americans, eventually, achieved parity. Neighborhoods and workplaces would integrate, voluntarily. Police and judges would deliver equal justice. It might take a few generations, but the political and cultural changes would begin, and life would improve for all. “The

Every job I had in the UK was hourly with overtime pay. All jobs I had in the USA were salaried with no overtime pay and an expectation to work really long unpaid hours at some of them!