What happens when we take current ideas of meaning-making in the world of work and put them within a wider historical context. Inevitably we encounter the concept of alienation. Alienation is a concept most strongly associated with the work of that great 19th century critic of capitalist society, Karl Marx. Although as we'll see later, it comes up figured heavily in the work of other 20th century scientists in the concerns of business leaders, industrial relations specialists, personnel managers, and governments. It still retains much significance even today. Alienation can be broadly understood as the experience of meaninglessness at work. Marx, he was writing at a time when large industrial workplaces were burgeoning, documented the degradation, the harshness, the physical and mental violence that define the experience of work for the majority of people. In his major work Kapital. Marx relate for example, how children as young as seven worked 15 hours a day in the Staffordshire Pottery districts. How average life expectancy for the potters was extraordinary low, and how each generation was more beaten down and less robust than the last. Observing such working conditions in Victorian England, Marx argued that the work done by the majority of people held no intrinsic meaning for them, or at least no meaning aside from it being a source of exhaustion and exploitation. People did not relate to their work as something they could feel connected to or proud of. Rather the work they did felt alien to them, separate from their desires and needs standing over them and opposed to them. For Marx, this alienation, this meaninglessness at work, had several dimensions. First, the actual physical labor that people performed, the actions of their own hands and brains lacked any meaning for them. Rather than for instance, being an expression of craft or skill or their own ingenuity, their labor become routine and fragmented, meaningless series of repetitive tasks. Second, these workers couldn't feel that they were producing something that connected them in any positive way with others. They could feel no pride in knowing that their products they made would be valid and useful for other people when these products represented so much suffering for themselves. Third, their work led them to feel alienated from the wide and natural world. The environment of their labor, stifling heat, freezing cold, unbearable pollution, deafening noise seem so unnatural, so hellish. The natural world itself seem reduced to mere resources. Coal, oil, water, clay, wood to be used up, burn through, and discarded by industrial production. The meaninglessness of alienated work that Marx identified in the 19th century was only a taste of what was to come in the early to mid 20th century with the rise of massive industrialized workplaces, the fragmentation and de-skilling of work that the industrialized assembly line represented. Brought the problem of alienation to the forefront, not only for workers themselves, but also for industrialists and governments. Employees emotional and psychological disconnection from work led to large-scale absenteeism, strikes and workplace resistance. This gave rise to both productivity concerns amongst industrialists and concerns over societal cohesion and stability among those in government. Away from the factory floor, enlarged corporate offices and bureaucracies, white-collar employees are experiencing alienation and meaninglessness in their working lives too. In this highly regarded 1951 book, "White Collar" C. Wright Mills would argue that the middle-class office worker in the US had become the small creature who is acted upon, but who does not act. Who works along unnoticed in someone's back-office or store. Never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand. Someone who is bored at work and restless at play and this terrible alienation wears him out. Robert Jackall 1988, "Moral Mazes": the world of corporate managers made similar observations even if managerial level employees. His research documents, senior managers, CEOs of major divisions of American corporations. Your sense of their own abilities and pride in their work is lost to a corporate world of uncertainty, anxiety, and petty politics without any sense of intrinsic meaning in their managerial work. These senior managers now focus on the only thing that remains advancing their own careers. Outside of these works of academic research, meaninglessness still plagues many employees today. Outsourced assembly and manufacturing workers in developing countries for instance, may experience working conditions but they are not too removed from those criticized by Marx back in the 19th century. Even those producing goods for some of the world's best known brands have reported intolerable levels of meaninglessness and alienation. For example, since 2010, there have been scores of employees suicides by those producing Apple iPhones at Foxconn manufacturing premises in China. Other parts of the world are not immune to the experience of profound and meaninglessness that we're either. The privatization of France Telecom and its transformation from a public state run service into the profit oriented global telecommunication brand, orange for example, was experienced by many employees as a profound loss of the prime meaningfulness of their work and their service to others. Tragically, there too their experience of meaninglessness resulted in many employees, managers taking their own lives. Thankfully, a sense of meaninglessness at work doesn't always result in such despairing actions. We can still see its results however, when we consider the number of successful corporate employees, who dream of retiring early starting new careers, or choosing to leave the rat race, as it sometime called, in search of something more meaningful to do with their lives. The risk of meaninglessness, alienation at work has driven managers and academics to search hard for remedies. A raft of motivation theories, human relations theory, human resource management, corporate culture, job rotation, job enlargement and enrichment. Quality circles and more have been tried as ways to substitute to the deficit of intrinsic meaning in people's work. More recently, significant attention has been given to the idea of the leader and leadership as providing the meaning that employees that all of us want to feel in our lives. Previous weeks of this course, I've introduced you to some of this work. It is when we put current attempts to provide meaning for others within the broader historical context that I've introduced here though, that we can really start to see the challenges that making meaning for others presents. It is a challenge that has been bedeviling business for at least the last 150 years.
