Two Kinds of Packaging for Corporate Rule....

According to a couple of good posts by Little Red Blogger.

Nulab/New Democrat "progressivism"....

Government agencies are to be routinely sham privatised, leaving the control and command apparatus pretty much the same if a little more exploitative and efficient at screwing the ordinary worker out of any surplus value they might create. True privatisation would of course place the agency in the hands of the workers rather then selling it to the highest paying rentier, but I digress. How does this tie into the governments plan for making schools more independent and thus more control over their own destiny?...

Now any non-authoritarian Socialist or Libertarian is obviously for reduction or marginalising of state control, Blair’s proposals do nothing to enhance either the parents or child’s liberty when choosing or organising and education for themselves. The market for education is again to be highly cartelised with very high start-up costs for parents and an extremely strong regulatory framework controlled by central government essentially the merging of the corporate and governmental state...

and New Age motivational hippiespeak.

Marks and Spencers have recently invested a large amount of their employees money(according to shop workers union USDAW around £10 million) into a motivational scheme designed to raise sales and address the flagging fortunes of the huge retail group. This scheme is designed and pedalled by the almost stereotypically American Mary Gober with the inevitably trade marked ‘Gober Method’ with its three pronged approach to improving service. This consists of changing the ‘psychology of service’, the ‘language of service’ and the ‘management framework’. In short convert, indoctrinate and wave the big stick…

As has been observed within capitalist corporations all management techniques can be reduced to Taylorism and the refining of command and control over the frontline worker. The Gober Method is then unsurprisingly old wine in new bottles dedicated to streamlining and making more ‘efficient’ the customer service ends of large corporate organisations. Like most of these methods it does not address the structural problems of these corporations that produce de-motivated staff. The Gober Method sees this is something that can be adjusted by merely changing the mindset of the staff within an organisation, what it deliberately fails to recognise is that workers are quite capable of seeing that they have no control over their own workplace, how their company is run, the stupidity of management and the general pointlessness of their own jobs. The Gober Method seeks to falsely align the interests of the worker with that of senior management all under the excuse of serving the customer better. Interestingly the Gober Method makes no mention of the workers needs and wants and completely ignores any role for unions or other means of representation. This is not surprising due to the top-down technocratic command and control mechanisms that the Gober Method uses to implement its changes. A long-term fix to these problems would of course be the dismantling of these over-large corporate structures and democratic worker self-organisation of whatever remained. Without these changes corporations orientated around customer service and call-centres will keeping buying the same snake oil with a fancy new set of buzzwords slapped on the front each year...

On this kind of managerialist Bobo-feed, I strongly recommend "Molotov Cocktail for Tom Lagana's Soul" (link now apparently defunct, alas).

Snatching hypocritical victory from the jaws of defeat, this electrical engineer turned mind engineer is now complicit with his old "redundancy eliminators." He now helps "organizations who want to get the most out of people;" and those people would, of course, be the Prozac-plied personnel now doing twice the work they would have at the same position twenty years ago and are too sedated to feel the boss's whip cracking across their backs. "[Lagana] put a smile on my face and it stayed there even after I went back to work," gushes one successfully sheered sheep, her organization now getting the most out of her. "I already feel less stress as I apply some of the techniques," bleated another after scampering from a Lagana seminar payed for by the Firm.

This Toastmaster vet shares his "techniques" in a number of workshops and seminars tailor-made to the needs of your employer....

You also might check out my own post, "Dubya Moved My Cheese: Chicken Soup For the Upper Class Twit's Soul."