The manufacture of personhood, and the institutionalization of mutual humiliation

The manufacture of personhood, and the

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Concepts and Transformation 9:1 (2004), 1–37.

issn 1384–6639 / e-issn 1569–9692�©John Benjamins Publishing Company

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institutionalization of mutual humiliation*

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John Shotter

“We reduce things to mere Nature in orderthat we may conquer them”(C.S. Lewis, 1978, p.�43).

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“Instead of the speculative philosophy taughtin the Schools, a practical philosophy can befound by which … [we can] make ourselves,as it were, masters and possessors of nature”(Descartes, 1968/1631, p.�78).

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A first version of this paper was written back in 1982, against the background ofwhat then worried me greatly as a worker in academic Psychology. For it thenseemed to me that, not only was there the development of a mechanical, causeand effect way of thinking that could lead to the dehumanizing of people, thetreating of people as merely numerical entities, but also of a disrespectful anddegrading way in which expert researchers related themselves to those whomthey were researching into. They related to them only through thoughts andtheories, not in a living responsive way. Both the way of thinking and ways ofrelating, I thought, could easily spread out from academic Psychology intosociety at large. Indeed, in an earlier work (Shotter, 1975), I had quoted

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Sigmund Koch’s (1964) comments on the dangerous tendencies he saw at workboth in the world at large, and how academic Psychology was failing to resistthese tendencies. As he then saw it:

… the mass dehumanization which characterizes our time, the simplificationof sensibility, homogenisation of experience, attenuation of the capacity forexperience [currently at work in our societies] continues apace. Of all fields inthe community of scholarship, it should be psychology which combats thistrend. Instead, we have played no small role in augmenting and supporting it.(p.�37)

2 John Shotter

I originally wrote this paper precisely in response to Koch’s lament. A while ago,I mentioned its existence to Werner Fricke, the editor of this journal, and heasked to read it, and was then keen to publish the article as it then stood. I felt,however, that it was too obviously still situated in the 1980s and that I neededto update at least some aspects of it, although the main themes seem to me (andI guess to Werner Fricke too), perhaps even more relevant now than twentyyears ago: in an age in which quantification, spread-sheet administration, hasspread into every aspect of our lives. Although not, I hasten to add, due to thegreat success of academic Psychology colonizing the rest of its surroundings,but due to the general growth of the administered society (Habermas, 1979), andto the spread of the market and to the measured relations it introduces intoevery crevice of our lives both in our relations to each other, and, perhaps evenmore importantly, in our own relations to ourselves. I mention this to makeclear why so many of the citations are from twenty years ago, and are not, so tospeak, up-to-the-minute although, to repeat, to the extent that our ends are inour beginnings, we can find in these beginnings many of the tendencies that arenow coming to realization in the violent, distrustful relations everywhereprevalent in our time.

Memorable for me at the time of its original writing, and influential in thetitle of this paper, was a newspaper image from one of the anti-Vietnammarches in New York in the late ‘60s. The punched cards for IBM machinesused to have printed on them: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR BEND, and amarcher, naked except for having encircled himself in a large, punched card-like piece of cardboard, had written on his costume: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLEOR BEND, I AM A PERSON. He was reminding us that we are more than justliving organisms to each other, we are persons, and persons have a very specialstatus in their relations with each other. They cannot just be reduced tonumbers, to patterns of punched holes for a digital machine. It is that degrada-tion of that status that I wanted then, and want now, to examine in this article.

Written just as the Postmodernist movement was beginning, the article beganand continued as follows1: People used to believe in Progress: That human toiland poverty could be eliminated; that improved manufacturing processes,communications, and transport would make available to many what had beenavailable only to a few; that people’s increasing ability to be (as Descartes put itat the inception of the modern age) the masters and possessors of Nature,would lead to increasing knowledge, power and wealth for all. At least, that wasthe vision offered in the rhetoric of modernity which motivated the frontiers-men of industrialization. Although it was opposed and is still opposed in Britain

The manufacture of personhood, and the institutionalization of mutual humiliation 3

by establishment elites who dream of peace and stability (and of their ownprivileges) within a pastoral idyll (Weiner 1982; Darendorf 1982) many

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nonetheless identified with it; and all willy-nilly became enthralled by it, unableto resist its apparently all encompassing rationality.

Belief in progress of that kind, however, drawing upon the resources ofscience, now seems to be collapsing, to be turning in fact, into a nightmare. Wefeel at the end rather than at the beginning of an age; rather than new opportu-nities appearing on the horizon, even those we already have seem to be slippingfrom us (Lasch 1980). Something is happening: Instead of masters we seem to

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be becoming victims once more — all of us. The attempt implicit in ourproductive ways of life to dominate Nature, has led in fact to us becomingdominated by our own techniques of domination: Thus we find ourselvesbecoming increasingly objective and detached, even in relation to ourselves;required always to program our actions before executing them, we feel unableto act immediately and spontaneously, to decide what to do in the course ofdoing it the idea of an inner game (Gallwey 1974), of acting in an appropriate

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way spontaneously, comes as a revelation to us. We have become divorced fromour feelings and intuitions; unsure as to what we ourselves want and what wecan claim by right, we feel we can only justify our claims by reference to provenfacts. Indeed, if we do attempt to do anything to alleviate our distress, we seemsimply to reproduce it in an intensified form — iatrogenic diseases mount,education seems to fail, our professions disable us (Illich 1975, 1976). We feel

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helpless and disempowered, as if assailed on all sides by a world which is alien to us.If we are to understand what is actually happening to us (what in fact we are

doing to ourselves), if we are to understand the social conditions whichdetermine people’s unhappy experience of themselves at present, then werequire (a) an account of what actually is to be a person, and (b) an account ofhow we currently account for ourselves to one another, how we rationallyjustify and legitimate the ways in which we treat one another — to compare itwith (a) to see to what extent our current ways of relating ourselves to oneanother fall short of those required if we are to experience ourselves actually aspersons, in the fullest sense of that word.

What is it to be a person?

Before turning to that task, I must first point out that if we are to give a full andproper description of what it is to be a person, then what we require is neither

4 John Shotter

a theory, nor a model of persons: We must not talk about them as really beingsomething else, as entities which require an unusual description in specialtheoretical terms; nor must we talk about them as being to an extent likesomething else which, in other respects, is not actually like a person at all. Boththese ways provide only partial views; and our task is to talk about personsactually as persons. Thus, we must simply collect together in an orderly andsystematic manner, what persons already know about what it is to be a person,what all competent persons must know in being able to conduct themselves asthey do. What we require is an account of personhood in the ordinary sense ofthat term, as simply a report or description of a circumstance or state of affairs.Something which in its telling moves us this way and that through the currentterrain of personhood, so to speak, sufficiently for us to gain a conceptual graspof the whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it. Whatwe in fact require is an understanding of what, in our ordinary everyday lives(when not functioning as an expert with a special purpose in mind), it meansfor us to treat each other as persons.

This is the special power of Wittgenstein’s (1953) later philosophical

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investigations: To bring to our attention in the concrete contexts of theiroccurrence, the myriad small but different details that are of importance to usin our many different dealings with each other, in addressing each otherpersonally. Central to his approach, that makes it very different from allprevious philosophical approaches, based as they are in ways of thinking, is hisemphasis on our ways of acting. Indeed, his primary emphasis is not on what wedo deliberately and voluntarily, but on what we do spontaneously, in immedi-ate, unthinking response to events in our surroundings. For it is only in thesedetailed circumstances that the meanings in terms of which we conduct ourdaily lives together are revealed. By emphasizing the use of our words, ourutterances and other expressions, in relation to their concrete surroundings,Wittgenstein retains what is lost in analyses in the behavioral sciences: for theyanalyze our living activities into separate elements, they divorce them from theirsurroundings, and re-insert them into a theoretical schematism of a mechanicalkind, thus to gain control over them. But to re-describe them in this way, is tolose what it is about people’s expressions that makes them meaningful to us:their spontaneously responsive relations to events in their surroundings.

I shall not discuss in any detail here all the different ordering devices whichmight be produced to systematize the knowledge we all have as to what personsare, about how we individuate them and distinguish them from all the otherthings that there are. A number of such systems of differences, some of them


highly technical, have already been produced (see Davis 1981, 1982 as well as

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Saussure 1911). Below, it will be sufficient simply to indicate some crucial

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distinctions we must make in recognizing persons as persons.As anthropologists point out, wherever human beings exist in a group,

within a social totality, they exist as persons (Geertz 1983a); that is, they exist as

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beings aware in some sense of the character of their social order, and they areable to take responsibility, i.e., be accountable (Mills, 1940, Scott and Lyman,


1968), for its continual reproduction in their everyday activities. Personspossess, we say, a common sense and render what they do and what happensaround them intelligible and account for it in its terms. Even utterly untowardevents are eventually made sense of in the terms it provides. Unlike a scientifictheory, such a common sense cannot be upset by events which seem to contra-dict it, even though in the history of a culture it can slowly be transformed. For,quite literally, people do not know how to doubt it; the formulation and expres-sion of intelligible doubts requires people to use as appropriate the very catego-ries they want to question. Doubts about them may be mooted, but they cannotbe expressed with any logical force, hence the apparent ultimate status of suchcategories. Yet the common sense of one social order can be very different fromthat of another, and what are facts within one order can seem ridiculousconceits in another — for instance, the idea that we have minds and memorieswhich mediate between us and our world, is a notion alien to some Africanpeoples; what we attribute to processes within us, they attribute to agencies inthe external world, to ghosts and spirits, etc. (Leinhardt 1961). Clearly, althoughwe have no experience of our hand in its making, our common sense is pro-duced and reproduced by us in our daily social activities.

Besides a common sense, what is also necessary to human existence withina social order is the possession by all its members of a unique identity: everyonemust know their momentary place or position within it, and a knowledge ofrights and duties that their place affords them. Unique identities are necessary,for if a social order is to be self-maintaining and self-reproducing, then depar-tures from it must be recognized, identified, and repaired; whereabouts in thetotality they occurred must be located, wrong-doers must be individuallyidentified. And in our individualistic culture, it is the specific individual whomust be condemned and attempt to make restitution (and be thereby re-deemed); whereas in other more communal cultures than ours, once thewrongdoer has been identified, the restitution of the social order can be done ina communal ritual: “something must be wrong with us,” they may say, “suchthat our brother or sister has strayed” (Lutz 1988).

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6 John Shotter

To qualify as a person, then, as a competent autonomous member of asociety, individuals must be able (if asked to do so) to answer for themselvesand their conduct; that is, they have to be able to indicate in a way which makessense to others, who and what they are (i.e. where in their society they areplaced), and what they are trying to do. In other words, they have to be able tofulfill a certain duty: they have to be able, even when all alone, to be able tomonitor and evaluate their experience of their own action, in terms they sharewith others in their community, i.e. in common sense terms. But along withthat duty goes a right: Persons can expect most of what they do and say to betaken seriously and responded to without question, as meaning what theyintend it to mean. They will only have to justify or explain their action if it ispuzzling, suspicious, or enigmatic in some way. They must show how, in fact,what they did can be explained in the basic, taken-for-granted terms in whichthe reality of everyday life is understood — thus reaffirming those terms.

But they will not have to justify everything that they do; indeed, that isimpossible: it would be as if, after having justified to someone that 12 × 12 =144 (by reference, ultimately, to the fact that 1 × 1 = 1 and 2 ×1 = 2, etc.), thatsomeone was then to say “Now justify to me in the same way that 1 ×1 =1.”That would be to doubt, not just a particular result within the social practice ofdoing arithmetic, but the very possibility of doing arithmetic at all. For 1 × 1 =1 is one of the taken-for-granted paradigms, the canonical forms, upon whichthe practice is based, and into which we have all been trained as children. Asocial practice provides the framework within, the background against whichparticular results within that practice can be evaluated, but the practice itselfcannot be evaluated in the same terms — which is just to repeat Kuhn’s (1962)

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central point in other words: that scientific theories are grounded ultimately inthe practices they work to inform, guide and explain, and do not have adeterminate sense apart from them.

To describe the nature of personhood in this way, in terms of reciprocallylinked rights and duties, privileges and obligations, invitations and rebuffs, etc.,is to describe it as a status, as the genus to which all the other statuses availableto people: Man, woman, father, mother, child, judge, policeman, etc., are thespecies. All can be described as different locations, places, or positions within asocially structured environment. In other words, according to their status,different people may experience their social environment as offering themdifferent opportunities for action. And what they do by their actions, moment-by-moment, is to change that status; they change their momentary position intheir society in relation to others: They assert, for instance, a right to entertain


a certain mode of relationship, while at the same time, perhaps, committingthemselves to various duties it entails. For example, saying to someone ‘I loveyou’ is not so much to give a retrospective report upon a state one finds oneselfalready to be in, as prospectively to create a new situation in which one commitsoneself to the person in the hope of certain rights of access to their person in thefuture; the difference between these two kinds of utterance being the differencebetween a 3rd-person report, and a 1st-person telling. Where it is only throughtheir 1st-person tellings, their expressions, that we get to know another person’sinner life, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and judgments, i.e., how theirworld is for them.

Thus in this view, the everyday world of social activity can be seen as anever-changing sea of rights and duties, privileges and obligations, and enable-ments and constraints. But there is one outstanding right: one’s 1st-person rightto express oneself, and to be taken by the others around you seriously — if, thatis, one can account for, or answer for oneself. And one can only learn to do thatif one has had the developmental opportunities, in one’s social environment, todevelop the appropriate forms of common sense skills; without those opportu-nities one cannot fulfill the duty required to qualify for the right of self-expres-sion and self-determination.

The point to be drawn from the descriptive analysis of personhood provid-ed above is this: the tabula rasa theory of human nature, and the theory ofpossessive individualism which flows from it — the theory that “the individual(is) essentially the proprietor of his (or her) own person or capacities, owingnothing to society for them” (Macpherson, 1964, p.�3) — must be rejected.

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People cannot be treated as being simply persons in themselves; they owe theirpersonhood to others. And they can only be a person if treated as such by theothers around them, and children can only develop from dependent personsinto autonomous ones if given the developmental opportunities as they growup to do so (Shotter 1974; Shotter 1984; Shotter and Newson 1982).2 Person-

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hood is a status conferred upon one by others, and if others do not take one’sexpressions of self seriously, if they do not respond to your utterances and otherexpressions as you intend, then you are being denied your opportunity to be aperson — you are being degraded and humiliated.

In this view, then, what people take their selves to be is not something theysimply find within themselves, as a fact of nature, and which they express thisway and that as best they can, given the opportunities provided them in theirenvironment. What they take themselves to be — how they perceive, theirforms of experience, and their ways of talking about themselves — are all

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produced and reproduced in the continuous flow of human activity (constitut-ing their social order) within which they grow from children into adults. Hence,we experience ourselves as being very much the kind of person we are treated asbeing, even to the extent, sometimes, of thinking of ourselves as being stupid,bad, or wicked people who deserve to be treated as such by others. But ourcurrent forms of psychological analysis, in analyzing all our living activities intoseparate elements divorced from their surroundings, prevent us by their verynature from understanding the source of our own bad feelings about ourselves.Thus, even if we feel a sense of lack, an inadequacy within ourselves, the onlydisquiets about our lives we can intelligibly express are ones that reproduce intheir expression the very practices about which we would like to raise a doubt.In other words, they reproduce in their expression the same separation orexclusion from the relations with the others around us that we wish to criticize.Legitimately, we cannot discuss such disquiets because we cannot account forthem logically, i.e., within a rational scheme of things in which proofs arepossible. To that extent, our accounts lack rational force; others can dismissthem as simply untrue. Where’s our evidence? Where’s our proof?

Later, I shall argue that we have in fact adopted a mode of rationality whichleads us to treat ourselves as we treat entities within a manufacturing process.We act as if we are related to one another (and to ourselves) as puppets orrobots, moving only according to external forces, controlling ourselves as if bypulling our own strings or pressing our own buttons. We act as if we were amachine within a machine, a mental machine within a bodily machine. Wetreat ourselves and others like this because, when we reflect upon ourselves andour actions, the systems within which we think about and talk about ourselvesallow the articulation of views only of a certain kind: theoretical (and thuspartial) views supported by the facts produced by their application. These arethe only ways of talking which we can rationally justify within our currentversion of what it is to be scientific in our claims to truth. But with respect toour everyday activities, our living relations with each other, this entails re-situating and re-formulating our accounts of our open, dialogically-structuredactivities in terms of closed, single, systematic orders of connectedness — thusto render them as scientific truths, rather than as merely possibly understand-able activities within a particular living context. Such systematic, scientific waysof talking, however, suggest that we talk about ourselves in a cause-and-effectway, in a way that does not allow us to describe the special, noncausal (inten-tional) processes making us truly human. Consequently, whenever we act onthe basis of plans or policies formulated within this framework, we humiliate


each other, we treat people as less than human. As Marx pointed out, weproduce within ourselves a false consciousness3: we confront ourselves as beingother than what we actually are, and in particular, we experience ourselves ashelpless in the face of what seem to us alien forces, external to human influence,the supposed ‘technological imperatives’ of our time.

In the next section I shall turn to a discussion of psychological research, andargue that it is very largely Taylorism (i.e. an application of the principles of‘scientific management’ in disguise. In its current ‘cognitive phase’, it isconcerned to analyze all intelligent human activities in such a way that they canbe broken down and down into a hierarchy of sub-activities so that a level isfinally reached where each activity can be performed by a machine. Here,however, I want to point out why a critique of this way of talking aboutintelligent activities in psychology is of crucial importance to us at this momentin time. It is crucially important, because all the other social and behavioralsciences rest upon the more basic science of psychology; they turn to psycholo-gy for an account of what it is that makes an action both an intelligent and anautonomous action. That is, we need to understand what it is that makes anaction one that is, on the one hand, a considered or reasoned action that takesinto account the surrounding conditions within which it must be performed,and on the other, what it is about an action that makes it into an action of oursand not an action under the control of others, so that we become a mere pawnin the realization of their desires. Economics, politics, government, jurispru-dence, business management, etc., all make assumptions about the nature ofpeople’s processes of reasoning in the conduct of their own affairs. But, to theextent that these disciplines leave to psychology the task of explaining how andwhy people reason as they do, if psychology is wrong in its account of people’sintelligent behavior, then these sciences will be ill-founded. In the next sectionI will turn to an examination of the account currently offered, i.e., in 1982, bypsychology of such behavior.

The scientific management of psychological (mental) processes:Hierarchically structured processes of manufacture

Control mechanisms

Since its inauguration as a science 100 years ago, one whole main stream ofpsychological research has been concerned with mechanisms within us said to

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be mediating our activities: Mechanisms of perception, motivation, learning,and memory, etc.; where such mechanisms are presented, in fact, as doing ourseeing, and reasoning, etc., for us. And we have often used this vision of such aform of order, to organize and structure of relations with each other in ourwork organizations. In this section, however, I want to be critical of suchmechanical forms of order, especially for how they in fact exclude what it is inour own human activities that makes them intelligent, and allows us to creative-ly respond to the many different contingencies occurring in our surroundings.

We can begin with Neisser’s (1967) views. Neisser’s book, coming after Miller,


Galanter and Pribram’s (1960) Plans and the Structure of Behavior, was takengenerally as marking the start of the ‘cognitive revolution’ in experimentalpsychology that I want to be critical of here. While committing himself to what hecalled “the program analogy” in describing psychological processes, he made itclear that this was not to claim that machines themselves were intelligent: “It istrue,” he said, “that a number of researchers, not content with noting that comput-er programs are like cognitive theories, have tried to write programs which arecognitive theorists” (Neisser 1967:9). But for Neisser himself, the task of a psychol-

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ogist trying to understand human cognition is, he said, “analogous to that of a mantrying to discover how a computer has been programmed” (p.�6). And this is howpsychologists in general do see their goal in their doing of their science, and thenature of the phenomena with which they must deal they now want to discover theunderlying rules they see as governing what we do.

I want to show that, even if one does inveigh, as Neisser does, against theview that people are machines, the pursuit of the program analogy in ourunderstanding of ourselves is still nonetheless degrading, and leads us withinour current hierarchical conceptions of organizations, to treating ourselveswilly-nilly as machines. I would like to begin simply by quoting a passage fromAdam Smith’s (1947/1776) Wealth of Nations:

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In the progress of the division of labor, the employment of the far greater partof these who live by labor, that is, of the great body of people, comes to beconfined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But theunderstandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by theirordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simpleoperations … has no occasion to exert his understanding… He naturally loses,therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid andignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (pp.�781–782)

Adam Smith extolled the division of labor for “the great increase in the quantityof work … the same number of people are capable of performing” (p.�771).


But, for F.W. Taylor (1947), there was another reason for the division of

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labor: “All possible brain work should be removed from the (work) shop andcentered in the planning or layout department,” he said (p.�25), because (andhere I quote Braverman’s (1974) summary of Taylor’s conclusions):

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Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are notadequately controlled, because they retain their grip upon the actual processesof labor. So long as they control the labor process itself, they will thwart effortsto realize to the full the potential inherent in their labor power. To change thissituation, control over the labor process must pass into the hands of manage-ment, not only in a formal sense but by the control and dictation of each stepof the process, including its mode of performance. (p.�100)

Thus, Taylor introduced into the analysis of the work process the aims of bothcentralizing control, and rendering the work process independent of craft,tradition, and the worker’s skills.

As Andrew Ure (1835) put it in his book The Philosophy of Manufactures:

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“The grand object of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capitaland science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercises and dexterity… appropriate to a child.” And this is what, by applying the intellectualresources of science to the interests of capital, Taylor in his system of scientificmanagement achieved.

It will be instructive now, however, to see how these aims were also presentat the inception of the so-called cognitive revolution in academic Psychology.Although here, they were not presented in a business or commercial context, asthe kind of analysis required if managers are to get control of the productionprocess to direct it in the most profitable manner. They were presented as aphilosophically respectable analysis of what intelligent action in actual fact is.Daniel Dennett (1979), who was then seen by many academic psychologists as

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a philosopher supportive of the current ‘information processing’ view ofcognitive abilities, outlined the “remarkably fruitful research strategy” of theartificial intelligence (AI) programmer thus:

His first and highest level of design breaks the computer down into subsystems… into a committee or army of intelligent homunculi with purposes, informa-tion and strategies. Each homunculus in turn is analyzed into smaller homun-culi, but, more important, into less clever homunculi. When the level isreached where the homunculi are no more than adders and subtractors, by thetime they need only the intelligence to pick the larger of the two numbers whendirected to, they have been reduced to functionaries ‘who can be replaced bya machine’. (pp.�80–81)

12 John Shotter

Dennett produces here an account as a description of what intelligent activitiesare4 but in so doing, he executes a philosophical sleight of hand which, appar-ently, diverts even his attention from the main point, never mind ours: for whatis intelligent here is not the product, the program for the activity produced bythe programmer, but the process by which it is initially produced by the pro-grammer. Plan-following, as Dennett himself says, can be done by a machine;whereas plan-creating, program-creating, is a different kind of activity altogeth-er (see Ryle 1949); it requires judgment as to what should be the features in our

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surroundings that have significance for us as embodied beings.Nonetheless, what Dennett presents here is a philosophical argument, not a

commercial one. Yet I think it is worth noting that the computers that inspired thecognitive revolution, were first developed in a business context. IBM does, after all,stand for International Business Machines, and the very development of theDifference Engine, the forerunner of the modern computer which is now offeredas the model of mind by workers such as Dennett, was undertaken by CharlesBabbage within the context of automating and controlling processes of manufac-ture. In his 1832 book, The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Babbage

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1963), he begins where Adam Smith left off, with a detailed, seven page analysisof pin-making. In other words, Babbage’s concerns were not purely mathemati-cal; he in fact was concerned with commerce and manufacture.

But I do not want to argue in any crude sense, that because computers hadtheir origins in commercial life, that accounts such as Dennett’s represent theresult of a conspiratorial union of science and capital; not in the least. It is notnecessarily people’s commercial concerns which lead them to theorize as theydo; the form their theory takes can arise entirely as an unintended consequenceof the fact that the theories people produce must reflect the ways in which thosewho produce them account for their experience of their reality intelligibly, in away which makes sense to other people in their society. That they see it asworking in terms of hierarchies of domination along mechanical lines shouldcome as no surprise, for that is how it has been arranged to work for some longtime now.

But let me just add here (with the 2003 hindsight gained since 1982)5 threefurther points: (1) One is that we are now, gradually, becoming much moreaware of the difference between those conditions of our lives which we (withoutany awareness of our own agency in the process) make between ourselves andto which we then subordinate ourselves e.g., our cultural traditions (Geertz

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1983b), the grammars (Wittgenstein 1953) and syntax (Chomsky 1965) of our


language, our systems of accountability (Mills 1940; Scott and Lyman 1968) and



those aspects of our lives over which we have (as yet) no control whatsoever.We might call these different conditions, the humanly constructed,6 and thenatural conditions of our lives. We remain unaware of our own agency in suchconstructions, because they are the outcome of joint, collective, or dialogically-structured activities (Shotter 1984; 1993) occurring between us. In such collec-

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tive activities, when someone acts, their actions cannot be accounted as whollytheir own, for each individual’s acts are partly shaped by their acting in responseto the acts of the others around them.7 Thus in such conditions, our actions areneither your’s nor mine; they are truly ours, collectively. This, however, meansthat we cannot account for them in terms of any prior events, i.e., their sup-posed causes, or in terms of the reasons or intentions of any identifiableindividuals — in other words, in terms of our current ways of making sense ofpeople’s activities, they are, so to speak, rationally invisible to us, mysteriousand unaccountable.

It is Wittgenstein’s (1953) great achievement, not only to bring the exis-

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tence of these otherwise unnoticed background activities to our attention, andthe way in which all our expressions only have their meaning when embeddedwithin them, but also to provide us with some methods of practical inquiryenabling us to recognize the many fleeting but crucial points within them whenour agency is at work (Shotter 2001), thus to enable us to become aware of our

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own role in their construction, and of the fact that there are other roles that wemight play. In other words, our currently taken-for-granted ways of relatingourselves both to each other and to the world around us our forms of life, asWittgenstein (1953) calls them could be different.

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This leads me on to my next additional point: (2) Above, I mentionedDennett’s (1979) philosophical sleight of hand, in which he diverts our atten-

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tion away from the fact that what is intelligent in a computer program is not theprogram itself as a product of the programmer’s art, but the process by which theprogrammers produce it.8 In other words, in the light of Wittgenstein’s meth-ods, we can now see that the Tayloristic kind of analysis exhibited in Dennett’saccount of intelligent human activities, is both (a) after the fact and (b) besidethe point, and to that extent, is only of use to us when trying to replace peopleby machines. But it is useless to us if we want to come to a deeper understand-ing of our own actual role in our own intelligent activities. (a) It is after the factin the sense that it looks back on already successfully completed events with theaim of finding an order or pattern in them that can be instituted mechanically,unthinkingly, according to rules or recipes. But if we do want to understand ourown role in our collective activities, (b) it is beside the point, for we need to

14 John Shotter

focus, not on the form of their ultimate outcome, but on the particular,moment-by-moment, unfolding, concrete details of their performance, thedetailed contingencies to which, as agents, we must be responsive in theperformance of our actions. It is precisely these contingent details and thejudgments we must as agents make in coping with them that are ignored insuch Tayloristic analyses. Indeed, to try to represent such loose-textured,temporal, disorderly processes in which many possibilities are considered butfew are chosen as an already orderly and coherent process, is to hide fromourselves the character of the social negotiations, navigations, and strugglesproductive of its order.

It is thus no wonder, not only that is there always a seeming reservoir of stilluntapped ‘tacit knowledge’ left behind in the attempt to apply such methods ofwork-study to people’s activities, but also that such methods in excludingagents’ own judgments in the execution of their own actions create resentmentsand resistances in those to whom they are applied.

This brings me to my third extra point, (3) which is to do with our sense ofbeing a free agent in our actions, and our reasons for the intensity with whichwe are prepared even to fight for such a freedom: As living beings, we cannothelp but be responsive in some way to events in our surroundings. In anafterword to this article I will comment further on Klaus Peters’s (2001)

<LINK "sho-r39">

brilliant analysis of what it is to have autonomy in our actions, in contrast toacting heteronomously, and how it is that new methods of management beinginstituted at the present time, i.e., around 2000, which seem to give morefreedom of action to employees in fact work in a hidden way to give less. But letme note here that crucial in his analysis is the difference between being ableoneself to act in response to calls from one’s surroundings (whether from otherpeople, or from natural events), and having to act in ways which are imposedupon one by another person, particularly if one’s way of acting is to theiradvantage. This difference, however, is a rather subtle one, for, to the extentthat we must always be responsive to the others around us in some way, we willalways be acting to an extent heteronomously.

To appreciate what is at stake here, let us consider, say, simply being inconversation with friend. We talk in response to their talk. Thus, clearly, we cannever be completely autonomous agents in our talk with others; we also actheteronomously in two senses, with our talk being partially determined notonly by their actual talk, but also by us both being required to talk by the sharedways of talking with currency in our speech community. Yet, even with havingto meet all these requirements, we still do not feel ‘dictated’ to by others in what


we say. We still sense ourselves as free agents in our talk. What makes us feelthat we ourselves are wholly responsible for what we say, is that we can still actcompletely in terms of our own judgment and skills in the gaps between theirtalk and our responses to it. But what would it be like if, even in these smallgaps (through a radio earpiece, say), the voice of another was at work in us,trying to tell us what to say next? First, our conversational partners, if theyfound out, would feel outraged at having been cheated, at having being misledinto responding to our talk as if it was our talk, when it was in fact the talk ofanother. Our disturbance, however, would be greater. Not only would we sufferdisorientation and confusion with the other trying to command us to talk inways unrelated to our own sensing and judging as to what was best for us ineach moment, as we related ourselves to the changing nature of our circum-stances. But above all, we would feel great anger and resentment. For at the veryheart of our precarious living out of our lives as beings continually vulnerableto unforeseeable events in our surroundings, is our being able to act, and havingthe right to act, in ways related to our own sense of what matters to us as theunique persons we are.

In other words, being a free agent is basic to our being able to sustainourselves as organized, integrated, unitary wholes, i.e., to retain our integrity,even in the face of many perturbing events destructive of our identities as such.In their attempts to usurp one’s right to do this for oneself, others are attempt-ing to insert themselves, along with their own interests and desires, into the veryactivities that are central to us maintaining ourselves as the living beings we are.No wonder that (if one becomes aware of the other’s influence in one’s ownlife) such attempts provoke such an intense, deeply felt resistance!

To return now to my concerns in the 1982 version of this article: To repeatwhat I said above, the fact that people currently see their lives as working interms of hierarchies of domination along mechanical lines should come as nosurprise to us, for that is how we have arranged the relations between us forsome long time now. But what are the consequences of thinking of our socialrelations in this way? To what kind of politics, to what kind of ethics, and to whatkind of social inquiries, does such a view of our relations to each other lead?

Sub-systems of dependence, and hierarchies of domination

Conceptualizing mental activity on the model of a hierarchically organizedsociety or social group has a very long history, dependent no doubt uponnotions of kingship and other such orders in history. A classical example of such

16 John Shotter

theorizing can be drawn from Hughlings Jackson (1840), the renowned

<LINK "sho-r25">

neurologist, in his theorizing about the evolution and dissolution of processesin the nervous system: “The higher nervous arrangements evolved out of thelower,” he says,

keep down those lower, just as a government evolved out a nation controls aswell as directs that nation. If this be the process of evolution, then the reverseprocess of dissolution is not only a ‘taking off’ of the higher, but is at the verysame time a ‘letting go’ of the lower. If the governing body of this country weredestroyed suddenly, we should have two causes for lamentation: (1) the loss ofservices of eminent men; and (2) the anarchy of the now uncontrolled people.The loss of the governing body answers to the dissolution in our patient.(p.�662)

From his position in the world, given his undeniably high status, this no doubtwas how the social world did appear to him, and the incapacities and anarchictendencies of the ‘lower orders’ was (and still is) no doubt a real phenomenonbut whether that is their natural state is another matter altogether, and it cannotbe proved to be so, simply by observing their current behavior. As a model,however, it exerted a selective (and productive!) influence upon Jackson’sthought, perception, and action, suggesting certain important lines of investiga-tion to him. However, it precluded other forms or styles of order, e.g., heter-archical, or coalitional styles of organization, in which coalitions reconstitutethemselves according to contextual and situational requirements. And onlyrecently have such forms of organization begun to be investigated (Kelso and

<LINK "sho-r27">

Tuller 1981) in the nervous system.The ideology of Taylorism within the context of a hierarchy of domination,

was also transparent in Eysenck’s psychological theorizing.9 In his article ‘TheTechnology of Consent’ (Eysenck 1969), he outlined aspects of our current

<LINK "sho-r12">

forms of life that he thought of as worrying:

… society is getting more and more closely knitted together, due to ouradvancing technology: production is nearing the point where it is nationwide.… In other words, there is a greater and greater dependence upon co-opera-tion between very large groups of people. … Yet if even a small section withinone of the co-ordinated complexes fails … the whole nexus breaks down, andfar-reaching consequences are experienced over a wide area. (p.�688)

What is required, in the terms in which he conceived of human beings, theirsocial relations, and society at large, is


a technology of consent which will make people behave in a socially adapted,law-abiding fashion, which will not lead to a breakdown of the intricatelyinterwoven fabric of social life … a generally applicable method of inculcatingsuitable habits of socialized conduct into the citizens (and particularly thefuture citizens) of the country in question or preferably the whole world.(p.�688)

The terms in which he conceives of human beings, and the terms in which heproposes we should plan our social policies and treat disorderly conduct, arerevealed in the theories of ‘conditioning’ he offers. He agrees with the common-sense notion that socialized patterns of behavior are in fact largely mediated byconscience. But then, rather than attempting to describe what we knowconscience to be, in a way which does not do a violence to the term as we knowit, he simply states that it is:

… nothing more than the accumulated sum of conditioned rewards andpunishments, produced by childhood upbringing, and later adolescentexperience. (p.�689)

Thus implying, of course, that because no one can, scientifically, say whatconscience is, he is quite at liberty, being an accredited scientist, to tell us whatit is — according, so to speak, his ‘discoveries’ in his science. Thus immunized,he goes on to illustrate how such a notion of it as “nothing more than the sumof conditioned rewards and punishments” can be used to produce the results headvocates. And he reinforces his claims by describing experiments on childrenand puppies which show that they avoid repeating actions for which they havebeen punished. However, as history is full of brave adults struggling on in theface of continual punishment, doing what their conscience demands of them,he is prudently silent about the everyday heroics of quite ordinary adults.

Eysenck attempts to mislead us here in a way in which Neisser does not: totreat something as being like something else in order to find a way of manipulat-ing it, is not to prove that it in fact is that something else. Aspects of what we callour conscience may very well be like the model he proposes, but it is not at allidentical to it. Why Eysenck prefers his model is that its elements can bedescribed clearly. But what is it a model of? That seems to remain as indetermi-nate as before, as indeed does everything when reflected upon in common-senseterms; because the terms we make use of in our common-sense dealings withthe world are only given a determinate sense in the course of their use.

Many writers in academic Psychology, however, with views similar toEysenck’s, see this as intolerable, and advocate the abandonment of that

18 John Shotter

framework altogether, for being too vague and too ambiguous. Science is onlypossible in this sphere if we substitute clearly describable models for all thevague terms we use in our everyday dealings with each other. For instance,Broadbent (1969:40–41) in discussing the ‘bias’ in ordinary common- sense

<LINK "sho-r5">

terms towards presupposing people possess a personal identity and act in termsof it, points out that:

… the traditional terms … give us grave difficulty when we try to apply themto detailed experimental analyses of the way people work. … There is noobvious and clearly correct way of identifying the traditional with the experi-mental concepts.

This does not mean, however, that it is the experimental concepts which areinadequate in any way. On the contrary; it means that:

One needs therefore to abandon the older mental terms, and rather to generatenew technical languages for considering particular psychological problems.One such language is that of information processing …

And this, in very large part, is what has occurred in modern psychology, whichis now almost wholly given over to the information processing or cognitiveapproach, in individual, social and in many parts of developmental psychology.The cognitive phase that was just beginning when this article was originallywritten, is now all but totally hegemonic throughout the entire discipline.

Cognitive and ontological Taylorism: Manufacturing our selves

To recapitulate

In Section 2, I suggested that we come to experience ourselves very much as wetreat ourselves as being. And that because of that, not only how we treatourselves as being in our daily lives, but also how we treat ourselves in ourpsychological investigations, and the possible discrepancy between the two, isvery important to us. For it is in our talk with the others around us that welegitimate our actions, and plan our future. Indeed, the authority of academicexperts in our scientific culture can easily tempt us to over-ride our commonsense notions of ourselves, and to use their talk about ourselves in planning oursocial policies for the future. But as we have seen above, such expert talk aboutourselves is often couched in terms derived from mechanistic theories, and suchtheories provide only a partial view of people’s nature how we must see people


if we are going to cause them to behave in ways predictable by us. The partial-ness of our theories is easily ignored, however, for it is not their adequacy thatis in question. In science, it is their truth that matters — and theories areproved true if one can, by applying them, achieve the results they predict.

Above, I have questioned this, and in line with Wittgenstein’s (1953)

<LINK "sho-r53">

philosophical investigations, I have tried to outline a more adequate account ofwhat it is to be a person and to bring into view the fact that the spontaneouslyexpressed, responsive relations between us (that are rendered rationallyinvisible in our academic theorizing), are crucial to our personhood. InSection 3 I attempted to show that in academic Psychology at the present time,mechanistic theories of psychological processes could, nonetheless, often besuccessfully be applied to our current human activities, because from AdamSmith’s time to the present day, an increasing proportion of our daily activitieshave in fact become organized in ways which parallel such manufacturingprocesses no wonder theories modeled upon machines invented for the controlof industrial processes seem applicable to our psychic processes.

To continue

If our theories about the nature of human activity arise out of our experiencesof it, which arise in turn from our participation within it, then one mightsurmise that by 1900, the division and organization of labor had advancedsufficiently for F.W. Taylor to see in it the possibility of it being ‘scientificallymanaged’. And it should come as no surprise to find that, after having lived amajor part of our lives under such ‘managed’ activities, the theories we formu-late to describe the nature of our psychic lives have a similar structure to them.Taylorism is, in fact, deeply embedded, not just in the manufacturing processeswe conduct out in our factories, but within many other activities in our lives.They too have become organized as efficient, hierarchically structured andcontrolled processes of manufacture. Two forms of psychic Taylorism can beidentified: cognitive and ontological forms, the second, ontological form, beingmore pernicious than the first.

By cognitive Taylorism I mean the procedures by which people’s conductof their own mental activities their thought processes, their perceptual abilities,their skillful planning, their remembering, etc. are studied, regularized, andappropriated, i.e., taken from them, so that eventually they may be replaced bymachines. By ontological Taylorism, I mean our being (mis-) led into control-ling our own responses to people to such an extent that, instead of reacting to

20 John Shotter

them in a spontaneously responsive way, as one living being to another, wereact to them mechanically, according to prior formulae, or checklists, or otherrational schematisms devised and imposed on us by others. In the rest of thissection I explore the effects of cognitive Taylorism further, turning to the effectsof ontological Taylorism in the next one.

There is now much ‘research’ afoot in which understandings currentlyshared out amongst everyone in the community (which have been transmittedto us in large part from previous generations) are being extracted and expropri-ated by ‘scientific’ experts, and re-presented to us as (in fact, costly) commodi-ties, as something supposedly ‘discovered’ by them in their studies of ournature. Furthermore, they are re-presented to us as something only seeable by3rd-person external observers, by outsiders, the view required by a manipulatorbut not by a participant, a view of our own understandings that renders us asordinary persons even more helpless in relation to them than before. Our 1st-person, insider’s understandings, are at best trivialized in this approach, and atworst rendered invisible and irrelevant.

But it is not just our everyday understandings of ourselves and our everydaylives that is under attack in this way. Behavioral experts are continually studyingwhat they take to be the ‘problems’ we face in society. Social difficulties that weall should participate in alleviating, are thus also appropriated and removedfrom democratic consideration and even if they then try to give away (Miller

<LINK "sho-r36">

1969) the knowledge they have appropriated, in its 3rd-person observer form,it is still a form of knowledge that renders people dependent upon them, theexperts. It is not in a form that is of any help to practitioners, to those needingto respond to events in their own local circumstances. Current versions ofcognitive psychology are now a central contributor to this process.

While studies in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) canclearly contribute to the development of ‘intelligent’ and flexible manufacturingsystems, and I have examined these applications above, they are mostly present-ed as neutral, scientific studies with an independent philosophical basis. Theyare presented as if being the ‘findings’ of disinterested intellectuals for ourdemocratic consideration. But they have, I think, some immediate psychologi-cal consequences of a less democratic kind.

Take, for example, studies by psychologists of problem solving behavior. Insuch studies, people (called subjects) are presented with problems of psycholo-gists (a professional elite), and they develop solutions to them. Given therequirements of their science, these solutions are theorized as consisting ofrecognizable elements, lawfully related and regularly repeated to produce


predictable results. Thus theorized, the strategies used in solving the problems,which have been created by the subjects, are presented as the psychologists’‘findings’. Such studies are, perhaps, innocuous enough, for contrived problemsin the laboratory may not have much relevance to everyday life for they willhave little market value. In the early 1970s, psychologists clearly began to sense this,and many became Applied psychologists, and turned away from the laboratory tothe study of behavior in everyday life (Broadbent 1971) to the extent that, as

<LINK "sho-r5">

Howarth (1981) put it, with respect to the study of problem-solving, “this neglect

<LINK "sho-r23">

of naturally occurring strategies is now a thing of the past” (p.�151).Psychologists are parvenus upon this scene, however. Frank Winslow

Taylor (1947) had already realized the value of ‘naturally occurring strategies’:

<LINK "sho-r49">

The ingenuity and experience of each generation — of each decade, even, havewithout doubt handed over better methods to the next. This mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principle asset orpossession of every tradesman … which is not in the possession of the manage-ment. (p.�32)

But this state of affairs can be remedied: By applying the principles of scientificmanagement in which, the managers assume“…the burden of gatheringtogether all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed bythe workmen and then of classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge torules, laws and formulae…” (p.�36). Because:“… all the planning which underthe old system was done by the workman, as a result of his personal experience,must of necessity under the new system by done by the management in accor-dance with the laws of science…” (p.�36). Thus, through the application ofscientific methods (but not to scientific ends), all this ‘naturally’ occurringknowledge can be quarried, excavated, and fashioned into a marketableproduct. But the process can be applied to the management as well, as Taylorrealized, in the form of ‘functional management’:

‘Functional management’ consists of so dividing the work of management thateach man from the assistant superintendent down shall have as few functionsas possible to perform. If practicable the work of each man in the managementshould be confined to the performance of a single leading function. (p.�99)

And this completes the circle. Management itself becomes subject to a processof manufacture, and can be ‘packaged’ and marketed as a commodity.

This is cognitive Taylorism, in which the communal stock of knowledge isplundered as a natural resource, and fashioned by the knowledge industries asa commodity in the market economy. While such a procedure influences the

22 John Shotter

legitimacy of people’s claims to (their own) knowledge, and tends to disqualifythem in favor of experts, it does not bear upon their claims to their socialidentity, their claims to their status as persons. The application of the tech-niques of scientific management in such areas as jurisprudence, politics (seeEysenck’s ‘clockwork orange’ suggestions above), psychotherapy, psychiatry,social work and child-care, can of course change all that. For if it is true that weonly become what we take ourselves to be, and that the processes within whichwe perceive, experience, and generally make sense of ourselves to ourselves areproduced and reproduced in our daily social activities, then what we are toourselves reflects the character of that activity — and if that activity is ‘scientifi-cally managed’, than our very being will become fragmented, separated intohierarchically ordered elements, and amenable to external control.

Lasch (1980) charts some of the effects of this process of this separation and

<LINK "sho-r29">

fragmentation: in the so-called ‘awareness movement’, for instance, he pointsout how the emphasis upon the centrality of the self and the emphasis onpeople’s own decisions in determining their identity, has in fact intensified boththe ‘isolation of the self ’ and people’s sense of their own helplessness — forpeople cannot, of course, simply re-make themselves by their own actions.Others have to afford them the opportunities they require. The ‘therapeuticoutlook’ ignores this, however, and it has worked to transform, as he points out,“collective grievances into personal problems amenable to therapeutic interven-tion.” As a result, politics degenerates into a struggle, not for a restructuring ofsocial institutions, but for self-realization. For people come to perceive theirsocial position, not as a reflection of their position in an institutional structure,but as due to their own capacities and abilities; and they blame themselves forthe injustices inflicted upon them.

Such a perception of life in the everyday world gives rise, Lasch suggests, toa special kind of personality type adapted to cope with it: the ‘narcissisticpersonality’. Such people are centrally concerned, as one might imagine, withissues to do with dependency and self-worth. Wholly responsible to themselvesfor who they are and for their ‘problems’ they no longer dream of overcomingany real sense the problems they face — for the problems are ‘in the system’ andcannot be located and solved by individuals. Such a perception encourages asurvival mentality: ‘How are you today?’… ‘Oh, surviving thanks.’ And tosurvive, they must be able to look after themselves; which is much easier if oneis young, rich, handsome, intelligent and single. Hence the obsession with oldage, dependency, with ‘travelling light’, and with ‘being cool’. As actual perfor-mances count for less than the recorded, tabulated indicators of them people


come to prominence more by ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1967) than

<LINK "sho-r20">

by real achievement. They are concerned with ‘style’, with the indicators ofsuccess — a company car (then, 1982) with electric windows, now (in 2003) with$1,000,000 per year stock options rather than with success simply in itself.

The effects are apparent in psychopathology too, as Lasch notes: whereas inFreud’s time, the hysterias and obsessional neuroses carried to extremes thepersonality traits of the capitalist social order in the earlier stages of its develop-ment — acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression ofsexuality. In our time, preschizophrenia, borderline, or personality disordershave attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself. “Today’spatients by and large,” writes Beldoch (1972),

<LINK "sho-r2">

do not suffer hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions;instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they mustscrub and re-scrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean.(p.�136)

These patients suffer, he says, from “pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deepdisturbance of self-esteem” (p.�138).

In other words, what we have here with cognitive Taylorism is the comple-tion of the process begun by the ‘scientific management’ of production. Havingexpropriated the worker’s knowledge, and concentrated production in thefactory, industrialists broke down production into its component parts.Keeping the knowledge of the process as a whole to themselves, they assigned toeach worker a specific function, a status within ‘the system’ of passive depen-dency. Eventually, industry organized management itself along industrial lines;and it too became essentially a manufacturing process. Producing the knowl-edge required to do this became an industry in its own right; and people’sclaims as to the adequacy of their own practical knowledge, were deprived oftheir legitimacy. The ‘knowledge industries’ used as a natural resource, theknowledge people produce and re-produce in their co-ordinated daily activitiesin relation to one another. Introducing ‘scientific management’ into thisprocess of production, into the processes by which people reproduce, not onlytheir knowledge of the world, but also their knowledge of their selves, structureseven the social processes productive of persons as a manufacturing process andproduces within ‘the system’ people who exist as passive dependents in theirvery being.

24 John Shotter

Daily life in a technological society:A self-reproducing ‘status degradation ceremony’

Let me now turn to the even more pernicious effects of ontological Taylorism,the kind of Taylorism that can become institutionalized into our very relationswith each other and eventually into our own relations with ourselves. For this,it seems to me, is how we can institutionalize between ourselves a way of actingin which we can come to humiliate and degrade each other as a matter ofroutine, without realizing what it is we are doing to each other, and to ourselves.

As I indicated above, a central feature of our current ‘scientific’ approach tohuman behavior, the ‘cognitive’ approach, is that people’s behavior is seen asissuing only from an ‘inner’ plan or program, an ‘inner’ representation orpicture of an outward situation, with their thinking being a matter of ‘symbolmanipulation’. In such a view as this, their bodily activities are ignored. Ourspontaneous reactions to other people must always be of a cognitive kind. Insuch circumstances we must always think how we will react to them, and howwe will react is continually a matter of interpretation, choice, and calculation.But to react to people in this way, is to ignore the ‘involvement obligations’(Goffman 1967) we have in our everyday interactions with them. It is to treat

<LINK "sho-r20">

them as ‘out of the ordinary’ in some way, and this is not just to treat themdifferently. It is in fact to degrade them, to humiliate them.

Garfinkel (1956) defines a ‘status degradation ceremony’ as any communi-

<LINK "sho-r16">

cative work between people, whereby the public identity of an actor is trans-formed into something looked upon as lower in the local scheme of social types.And he sets out a number of requirements which must be met, if such ‘cere-monies’ are to be successful:

1. First amongst them is, that “the victim should be removed from the realmof their everyday character and be made to stand out as ‘out of the ordi-nary’” (p.�422), which a description of them in ‘scientific’ terms, of course,clearly achieves.

2. Secondly, what is unique and utterly idiosyncratic about them should beignored, and they should be presented as an instance of a type; this, ofcourse, is to ignore their own idiosyncratic expressive-responsive reactionsto their circumstances, the expressions in terms of which we get to knowntheir own, 1st-person ‘inner lives’.

3. Thirdly, as instances of a type, they should be presented as a dialecticalcounterpart to a preferred type as indeed, entities which are caused to moveby influences unknown to them, are, when compared with those of us who,


as unique individuals, act in accord with our own judgments and sensitivi-ties to our own local circumstances.

4. Fourthly, the denunciation must be done not by private but by publicpersons, by those who can speak with the supra-personal values of thecommunity (apparently) in mind, and have been licensed by the communi-ty so to speak — as again, the ‘social and behavioral scientists’ in ourscientific culture have been licenced to so act.

5. And finally, the denouncers must distance themselves from those to bedenounced, so as not to degrade themselves, which the adoption of anobjective, 3rd-person external observer stance achieves.

In other words, to institute amongst ourselves a ‘scientific’ way of treating eachother, is to institutionalize amongst ourselves, mutually degrading and humili-ating relationships.

If the Tayloristic tendencies I have depicted in the previous two sectionscontinue, and all everyday practical activities yield to the techniques of ‘scientif-ic management’ — a goal currently legitimated by the empirical ‘findings’ of asupposedly neutral psychology seen as a natural science — then that is what willhappen. We shall have succeeded in transforming all our social institutions intoself-reproducing status degradation ceremonies — except that within themthere will be no denouncers and denounced. ALL will be denounced as unin-tended consequence of ‘the system’ because it, of course, will come first. For itwill have become institutionalized into our everyday relations with each other.

Indeed, as Taylor (1947) himself put it: “In the past the man has been first;

<LINK "sho-r49">

in the future the system must be first” (p.�7). And to the extent that Taylor’sprophecy has come true, instead of the majority living under the domination ofthe few, all of us will live under the domination of ‘the system’ dominated byour own techniques of domination.10

What, psychologically, might be the effects of this? Price (1967) has

<LINK "sho-r42">

explored the relation between mental illness and positions (and changes inposition) in dominance hierarchies. He points out, that for maintenance oftheir stability, hierarchies require certain behavior patterns from their mem-bers: irritability towards inferiors; anxiety towards superiors; and elation ongoing up the hierarchy (to increase one’s self-assurance, thus to maintain one’sposition) and depression on going down (to decrease one’s confidence, thus toprevent one ‘fighting back’). His main thesis (which I think is mistaken) is thatthis dominance hierarchy behavior is now a vestigial and useless heirloom, andis no longer of any advantage to us — for, he seems to imply, such person-to-

26 John Shotter

person dominance hierarchies no longer exist. Yet, interestingly, his account ofthe experiences of those displaced downwards in a hierarchy seems nonethelessto be of contemporary relevance.

Price drew his account of hierarchical processes mainly from his study ofother people’s work on monkey colonies. Every social interaction betweenmonkeys (and undoubtedly between people too) is affected by their relativestatus (as I argued in Section 2). Superiors act with implied threat, irritability,aggression and snappiness towards inferiors; while inferiors are disturbed bytheir presence and avoid them, hesitating to invade their personal space, and soon. Those at the top of the hierarchy are calm and self-assured, while those atthe bottom have a ‘hen-pecked’, depressed appearance. Such hierarchical socialorders, then, provide a differential set of opportunities for, and barriers against,action, according to one’s ‘position’ or status within them. And it is stable,presumably, when its disadvantages (in terms of the capacities wasted by those inthe lower orders who are denied the opportunities they require to develop them)do not exceed its advantages, i.e., (a) the provision of everyone within it of a stablesocial identity, (b) an intelligible place in the group’s scheme of things, and thus (c)a degree of purchase at least, upon a communally shared reality.

Price also discusses the character of behavior produced by changes in thehierarchy; and it is his discussion of depressed behavior that I want to mentionhere. He points out the way which depression works to prevent individualsfrom attempting to regain their former, higher status: they withdraw, sufferlosses of appetite and libido, and feel generally uncertain, unworthy, andinferior. Redemption is possible, one can make amends, but it is not easy.Depressed individuals tend to withdraw and not to respond to new opportuni-ties, even when they are readily available, as Seligman’s (1975) studies on

<LINK "sho-r46">

learned helplessness suggest. The defensive strategies developed to minimize theworst effects of one’s aversive environment, preclude the striking out intouncertainty required if one is to explore new opportunities. Thus it is notsurprising that, as Jahoda (1982) points out:

<LINK "sho-r26">

Several studies on job enrichment or participation have demonstrated thatthose most in need of an improved working environment low-skilled workersin repetitive jobs are least likely to avail themselves of offers of new opportuni-ties … the humanization of work is demanded by the intellectual elite, not bealienated workers. (p.�188)

— or at least, so claims Jahoda, but see Fricke’s (1983) findings outlined in the

<LINK "sho-r13">

afterword below.


Now, one does not have to buy Price’s sociobiological arguments to acceptthat what is at work here is a process which can function to stabilize a socialorder. For the fact is that, whether one has been downgraded in a full- blown‘status degradation ceremony’ or simply informally by a passing insult, there isno simple way of ‘answering back’ except by transgressing the social order andby being rude oneself, etc., and running the risk of incurring further negativesanctions. What is at work here may not be an evolutionary, biological necessi-ty, but it is an ecological necessity; something which is required if the importantset of social processes constitutive of both our selves and our reality are to bemaintained as stable processes. Hence, even those victimized by a social orderoften still act to reproduce it, rather than risk loss of their selves, by attemptingto break down the structure victimizing them. Yet it is a stability that has beenbought at a price: the price of excluding from our relations with each other ourmutually responsive, spontaneous bodily reactions to each other. This is toexclude, not only those expressive-responsive reactions in which we, as 1st-person, express our selves to each other, but also to exclude the creativepotentials that are created between us in the dialogical relations to which suchmutually responsive reactions can give rise (Gustavsen 1992; Shotter 1993).


Concluding remarks

Let me now attempt to draw together into one place all the component parts ofthe view I have tried to present above. My main concern has been with thenature of human social orders. As they are not produced or maintainedinstinctually; if they are to endure and not fall into disorder, they must bemaintained by the activities of the people within them. Transgressions anddeviations must be recognized, the transgressors identified, and the social orderrepaired and re-instituted. Central to this process are the accounts people giveof what they are doing and why they are doing it (Mills 1940; Scott and Lyman


1968). To reproduce their social order in their reactions, in their spontaneousbodily reactions to each other, people must be able to relate what they do totheir place, position, or status within it. Indeed, an implicit morality is thus atwork all our interactions with each other: 1st-person actors and speakers havea moral right to expect the others around them to value them and to treat themin ways appropriate to who they are, appropriate to their identity (as long asthey observe a moral duty to be sincere in whom they present themselves asbeing). Whilst the 2nd-person-others around them also have a moral duty to

28 John Shotter

treat 1st-persons as the 1st-persons they are, unless there are reasons to believethat they are being dishonest in whom they present themselves as being — then,but only then, do such 2nd-persons have the moral right to challenge them, andrefuse to accord them their status as the 1st-persons they are (Goffman 1959).

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Not to be taken seriously as the person one is, not to be accorded the right toexpress oneself, one’s self, is to be humiliated, degraded, not to be accorded therespect one deserves — and in such circumstances, people express anger andresentment, and try to remedy in some way what seems to them to be an utterlywrong state of affairs.

Such events are memorable, the resentments they cause run deep; sooner orlater those humiliated will get their revenge!

How does all this relate to the processes of research and manufactureoutlined above? It relates directly because it is precisely this spontaneouslypresent, interactional morality that is being ignored. What happens to thosesubjected to both processes, is the ignoring of their spontaneous, living, bodilyresponses to the conditions to which they are subjected. The central aim in the‘scientific management’ of processes of manufacture was, originally, to separate‘brain-work’ from ‘muscle-work’, and to place the ‘muscle-work’ of the lowerorders under the control of the ‘brain-work’ of those at the top of a dominancehierarchy. However, such procedures are now being applied to ‘brain-work’ aswell, and this downgrades even those at the top, and puts, as Taylor says, ‘thesystem’ in control of us all. The psychological effects of this are predictable, andresemble those produced in the victims of status degradation ceremonies.

While person-to-person dominance hierarchies (monarchic systems,military systems), although productive of a stable social order (if a threat offorce is also readily available), clearly have their disadvantages, replacing themby impersonal systems of domination also has its disadvantages. To change ourrelations to each other in our daily lives to resemble those in processes ofmanufacture, can result in us being the kind of entities produced by manufac-turing processes — entities amenable to measurement, to numerical assess-ment, rank ordering in terms of efficiency and/or effectiveness, etc. We caneasily become merely entries on a spreadsheet. But if this does occur, then ourcircumstances will be such that, quite literally, it can be said that we have losttouch with each other, and as a consequence, become opaque to each other …and perhaps even to ourselves, for our ‘inner lives’, as we noted above, are onlyrevealed in those of our expressive-responsive activities that occur spontaneous-ly out in the world between us.

As Vico (1968) described it in 1744, in such circumstances as these, in

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which people have succeeded in institutionalizing their own mutual humilia-tion, then, “no matter how great how great the throng and press of their bodies,they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any twobeing able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice” (para. 1106).Although I think that there is no emancipation to be had from systems as such,for we can never be developmentally self-sufficient, in the sense of drawing allour psychological resources solely from within ourselves alone, the quest forways to transform ‘the system’ under which we currently live must now beenjoined by all (including those currently at ‘the top’). And that, it seems to me,can only be achieved by a move from systems conceived of as ‘logical’ or as‘rational’ by a special elite of researcher-theoreticians, to new dialogicallystructured practices within which all of us as ordinary people become our ownresearch-theoreticians (Brulin 1998; Gustavsen 1992; Shotter and Gustavsen

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1999; Greenwood 2002; Pålshaugen 2002). Otherwise, we all run the risk of


becoming members of the same democracy of misery in a continuing round ofmutually humiliating attempts to ‘solve problems’ by the application ofsupposed ‘scientific’ methods by professional elites.

Afterword, 2003

Seligman’s (1975) research on learned helplessness, conducted in a non-

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participatory, objective, scientific manner, was originally conducted on individ-ual and isolated dogs (the individualistic, non-conversational nature of thesestudies was not, at the time, thought to be of importance). As I intimated above,when extended to human beings, it seemed to lend support to the paradoxicalconclusion, voiced by Jahoda (1982), that those most in need of an improved

<LINK "sho-r26">

working environment (low-skilled workers in repetitive jobs) were least likelyto avail themselves of offers of new opportunities. But now with hindsight, withour understanding of the differences between human behavior as viewed by3rd-person non-participant, outside observers, and as experienced by 1st-person, inside participants, we can, perhaps, begin to appreciate what mighthave been missed in such studies. The findings may not be as paradoxical asthey seem. To begin with, whose opportunities were on offer? Were theyopportunities proposed to those in repetitive jobs by outsiders on a take-it-or-leave it basis, or were they opportunities seen and appreciated from within theirown circumstances by the workers themselves? We can turn to Fricke’s (1983)

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work to bring out what seems to be at stake here.

30 John Shotter

He and his colleagues approached representatives of the employees in amachine and screw factory with the offer of a then (i.e., in 1975) much moreparticipatory approach to work-life research than was usually the case. The offerwas accepted, and among a group of machine operators working at unskilledjobs on a piece-work basis, over a period of four years, a number of differentforms of participation were initiated. First, in collaboration with the research-ers, workers described the problems of their department as they saw them. Theythen developed possible solutions to them, while taking all aspects of theproblem and the interests of all workers into account (thus coming up withmuch more comprehensive and multi-dimensional solutions that the partialones usually proposed by outside experts). Action-programs for implementingsome of the proposed solutions were then developed in one-week seminars heldtwice a year outside the factory. When worker’s proposals resulted in productiv-ity increases, the works council negotiated with management for the worker’sshare of the benefits in the form of new personnel and production policies,training wages, and other QWL issues. The forms of participation institutedwere such, as Fricke (pers. comm) comments, that even after decades of workunder extreme stress and unskilled working conditions, the workers

found and used opportunities to reflect on their work and working conditions, todesign alternative solutions (technical, organizational) and to think about possiblefutures, unfolding their ‘subjective, innovative qualifications, as we called it. It wassurprising and very moving, how these workers (so-called unqualified workersworking in a screw factory with very poor working conditions, i.e. under extremetime pressure, high noise, very fragmented work with cycles of 12 seconds atminimum, high work load, some of them moving six tons per day etc) developedtheir abilities to reflect, to design alternatives, to participate in working groups anddialogues, to insist in and use their democratic rights etc.

In other words, in accord with the comments above as to why being a free agentis basic to our being able to maintain ourselves as the living beings we are, wecan suggest that there is in all people, both an undestroyable urge, and anability, to organize their work according to their own interests, their own needs.But if this is the case, why is it that this urge and this ability find expression soinfrequently? How can the paradoxical situation described by Jahoda (1982) arise?

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For at least the two following reasons: (1) One is suggested by Fricke’s

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(1983) work. He suggests that the ‘innovative qualifications’ of workers oftenremain unrealized because of the many different kinds of obstacles they facethat they cannot, by themselves as isolated individuals, overcome. Among suchobstacles are the hierarchical command structure organizing work in the


enterprise, the Taylorization of work, the influence of outside experts, and theisolation of workers by piecework and work distribution. There is no space toset out in detail the character of all these obstacles. But it is not difficult to seethat they all, to an extent, work to position almost everyone in the workorganization as 3rd-person, outside observers. For mostly, only expressionsfrom this position will be acknowledged as of significance. Only those right atthe very top of the organization can influence each other’s actions by their 1st-person ‘tellings’, and convey in their expressions of their personal feelings,attitudes, and judgments, their sense of what matters to them (as the supposedpersonification of the whole organization). All the others in the organizationmust replace their own sense of what matters to them, in their own uniquecircumstances, with ‘commands’ arising out of these expressions from the top.What is excluded in such a structure of human relations (whether hierarchicalor not), is the possibility of people’s local, living, spontaneously responsiveconnections with each other, mattering. In other words, what is excluded are allthe creative potentials occurring in the dialogical relations to which suchmutually responsive reactions can give rise (Gustavsen 1992; Shotter 1993).


When considered in this light, the waste of local knowledge, the waste ofemployee’s ‘innovative qualifications’, the degree of resentment and angergenerated amongst them at being ‘robbed’ of their rights as free agents to facewith sober senses the real conditions of their lives, and their relations withothers of their kind,11 must be enormous. What might our world be like if suchenergies, such knowledge could find appropriate arenas for its expressions? Onecan only conclude that many manufacturers must in fact be more concernedwith manufacturing (i.e., reproducing) present forms of social order andpersonhood, than with the actual products of their factories.

Indeed, if we now turn to a second reason why it is so hard for employeesto exert their rights as free agents to determine their own conditions of work,we now begin to find an even more subtle reason, one that masquerades as infact giving us the very freedom we seek. (2) As Klaus Peters (2001) shows, even

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when acting in response to the actions of those around us, we can still feelautonomous, as if we are acting as a free agent if, at the moment of our acting,we have some leeway (to use Peter’s term), some personal choice, in how we act.Or, as I put it above, if we can exercise our own choice as to how we act in thegaps between another’s behavior and our response to it. But as Peters (2001)

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shows, new management techniques that try to reproduce the performancedynamics of self-employed entrepreneurs among their employees, by embed-ding them in ‘a market’, this feeling of autonomy can be illusory. He leads us

32 John Shotter

into his account of how this can be so by asking us to consider our relations toour parents, and the ways in which we learn from them, although we are free toact as we please while out, what is entailed in our being home on time. To theextent that they are not continually (through a radio earpiece, say) issuing uswith actual commands, we must learn to anticipate their reactions to our timesof arrival home. If we do, then their external commands can come to bereplaced by our own internal anticipations, and they will not need to explicitlyissue us with any more commands. But our parents’ control over us, which isnow exerted in us by the guilt we feel if we stay out late, can be, and often is,resented, and we seek as soon as possible to free ourselves from them. Thecrucial move in new management methods noted by Peters (2001:156–157) is

<LINK "sho-r39">

the replacement of the actual supervisors in a hierarchical command system, inwhich supervisors function like parts of a machine in explicitly telling subordi-nates what to do, with ‘the market’ or ‘a market’, so that, instead of employeesbeing penalized by another actual person if they make a mistake, they mustnow, like self-employed entrepreneurs, ‘take the hit’ themselves. They have nowonly themselves to blame for their mistakes.

In such circumstances, instead of employees being able to locate the actualpeople responsible for the injustices in their treatment, and aim their resent-ments and demands for change accordingly, we now arrive at the bewilderingsituation in which all our failings are seemingly our own, as Peters (2001) puts

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it, we now have the seemingly paradoxical figure of the ‘dependent independentemployee’. But let us be quite clear here about what has actually happened:Where in the past we had been able to act freely in the gaps between anotherperson’s actions and our responses to them, we now find ourselves having torespond to the seemingly impersonal requirements of ‘the market’ or ‘amarket’. Thus the employee is independent in the sense of not being subject tothe commands of others, but is dependent in the sense of being subject to thedynamics of the ‘market’ conditions governing his actions.

But these ‘market’ conditions are not ‘natural’ conditions, equal for all; theyare ‘unnatural’ conditions, dictated by ‘invisible’ others. The independence andautonomy of employees is not restricted by natural conditions at all, but byother people who place themselves between those taking action and the trueproblems they face. Who in fact sets up the ‘prevailing conditions’ so that a‘partially autonomous unit’ performs well by itself? Who actually chooses, andimposes, the market segment, the personnel mix, the financial and materialresources, etc., that are made available to each supposedly autonomous workunit in the company, the so-called ‘internal market’ within which it must


operate? As Peters (2001) notes, such a ‘market’ is “man-made and is really

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nothing but a form of reciprocal human behavior between people” (p.�151).But what is new here, really new, is that those who create and organize the

‘market’ are now exerting a quite new form of control over us, not explicitly asin the past, in the same way as someone controls a machine or the departmentof a company organized under an hierarchical command system, but in a quitedifferent way. The paradox of arranging the control of a self-controllingprocess, is not a matter of technology but, says Peters (2001) of “biotechnology.

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… The company of the future is, in fact, something quite like a living organism,not machine-like” (p.�157). In other words, control over individuals’ behavioris being achieved here, not consciously and cognitively, through ideas, instruc-tions, or explicit commands, but by structuring those aspects of their surround-ings to which they are spontaneously responsive in their immediate bodilyreactions. As Foucault (1979) notes, this is not a politics of ideas, but a bio-

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politics. And, as every nook and cranny in our relations both with each other,and with our selves, is now being ‘commodified’, is now being measured,counted, or weighed, thus to be ‘costed’ and made ‘accountable’ in spreadsheetterms, so we now all become complicit in the destruction of our own freeagency. The mutual humiliation of all by all continues, but not now by theintention of any identifiable individuals, but due to the general conditions of lifewe have all agreed to impose on ourselves. Do we really want to go on like this?

Notes

*�I must express my most heartfelt thanks to Werner Fricke, first, for his interest in this

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article in its earlier form and for his continual encouragement to update it. And then for hisclose attention to certain details within a first attempt at that updating, and the lengthysuggestions he then made for its further improvement. I am deeply grateful.

1. From here on in, the article remains much as it was written in 1982. I have made only afew additions for clarity, and deletions of now irrelevant comments.

2. See the discussion of the ‘political economy of developmental opportunities’ that exists inour societies in the West, in which some people clearly gain more of their fair share thanothers, in Shotter (1984:112, 116–117).

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3. “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. real, active men, as they areconditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercoursecorresponding to these, up to its furthest form. … If in all ideology men and their circum-stances appear upside down as in a camera-obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much

34 John Shotter

from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects does from their physical life-process” (Marx and Engels in the German Ideology 1971:47).

4. And this view has not changed very much since. We can still find such a view expressed,for instance, in Haugeland (1993) who, in commenting on the fact that artificial intelligencedidn’t originate with computers or with advances in technology, suggests that it arose out ofa central tradition in Western philosophy: “Thinking (intellection) essentially is rationalmanipulation of mental symbols (viz., ideas)” (pp.�3–4) where what is meant by the rationalmanipulation of mental symbols is the reconfiguring of abstract structural patterns accordingto an unambiguous set of rules or principles. But here I must add that Haugeland is nowconcerned with creating a consciousness, a mind, de novo, ex nihilo, in something non-livingor non-human — the goal that Neisser eschewed. As Haugeland (1993) himself puts it, “tothe extent that computers can manipulate arbitrary tokens in any specifiable mannerwhatever, we need only arrange for those tokens to be symbols, and for the manipulations tobe specified as rational, to get a machine that thinks. … Indeed, if that traditional theory iscorrect [that intellection is essentially the rational manipulation of symbols], then ourimagined computer ought to have ‘a mind of its own’: a (genuine) artificial mind” (p.�4).

5. On reading my first re-write of this article, Werner Fricke noted that these Tayloristicefforts to appropriate the knowledge of skilled crafts-people, “do not and cannot succeedentirely. There is always a rest, a reservoir of tacit knowledge owned by the subjects ofproduction processes … [and there is] a permanent resistance of people’s abilities to bestandardized, integrated into technology and machinery” (pers comm).

6. There has been the most important emergence in recent years of the social constructionistmovement, concerned to bring the nature of this distinction — between the natural and thehumanly constructed conditions of our lives — to our notice (Shotter 1970; Berger and


Luckman 1967; Gergen 1985).

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7. As Peters (2001) shows, all our attempts to act autonomously are to an extent colored by

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the degree to which we are heteronomously influenced by the surrounding conditions intowhich we must ‘fit’ our actions if they are to be appropriate to them — see my comments inthe Afterword to this article.

8. “We talk of [mental] processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometimeperhaps we shall know more about them, we think . But this is just what commits us to aparticular way of looking at the matter. … (The decisive movement in the conjuring trickhas been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent)” (Wittgenstein

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1953: No. 308).

9. Eysenck was a follower of Hull’s (1943) ‘animal-conditioning’ approach to learning inpsychology, and was well-known between the 1950s and 1980s for his claims that racialdifferences correlated with differences in IQ scores.

10. A few years ago, when there were some pretty destructive contract negotiations takingplace in the university I was at, a number of chairs appealed to the President to set up somepublic conversations on the issues involved. His reply was: “I’m sorry, we cannot do that. Itwould prejudice the integrity of the bargaining procedure.” Maintaining pre-established,formulaic relations was of predominant importance to him

11. To adapt the well-known words of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.


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Weiner, M. J. 1982. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1930.

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London: Cambridge Univ. Press.Vico, G. 1968. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ed. and trans. by T.G. Bergin and M.H.

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Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Author’s address

Prof. John ShotterKCC Foundation2 Wyvil CourtTrenchold StreetLondon SW8 2TG

e-mail: [email protected]

About the author

John Shotter is Professor Emeritus of Communication University of New Hampshire

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mailto:e-mail: [email protected]

The manufacture of personhood, and the institutionalization of mutual humiliation

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