"#Modernism can be characterized as the forceful imposition of rational administrative procedures into all facets of everyday life. Its subjects — you and I as individuated identities — crave both protection and authority.
You and I search for some measure of refuge in a totalized, secularized myth, a grand meta-narrative that accounts for everything, and this tendency towards #totalitarianism is worldwide.
The concern of the United States over its loss of market share in the service industries, and its concern over the quality of work by its subjects, are only symptoms of a much more pervasive and deeply rooted historical condition.
#Taylorism and the industrial revolution left such an indelible mark on how management came to be theorized and practised that thinking in any other ways appears to be unthinkable.
Nineteenth century industry threw masses of subjects together with no social ties, other than family. Because they needed a system of authority, and because of the dynamics of the families themselves, subjects granted the centralized bureaucratic structures even greater control
over their lives. Whereas feudal ties restricted but protected their subjects, bureaucratic ties individuated but abandoned them. Bureaucratic subjects became both self-centred (not self-reflexive) and apathetic (not satisfied).
The more self-centred subjects become in the search for their modern selves, the more vaguely defined their boundaries become. It appears in retrospect to be a cruel irony.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the European industrial nations were centrally administered welfare states. Those states mushroomed into the pervasive social security systems of the second half of the twentieth century." - Leonard Hawes, #Postmodernism and Power/Control
