Managers v. Professionals

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Jun 5

Critics of the populism that put Donald Trump in the White House (again) often point to what they assume is a contradiction between the “average Joe” of populist imagination and the decidedly above-average wealth of the people’s chosen tribunes. How can populists celebrate “the little guy” by sending a billionaire to Washington and lauding his bromance with the world’s richest man?

What the critics don’t get is that populist dislike for “the elite” is reserved for elites of a certain stripe. As Joan C. Williams succinctly put it, “the white working class resents professionals but admires the rich.” Williams wrote those words after Trump’s first victory; following his second, which was sealed in part by the movement of many non-white working-class people into Trump’s camp, the truth has only gotten easier to see. Obfuscating charges of “racism” are much harder to make when the black and brown objects of professional beneficence and blue-collar prejudice join with their supposed haters to support a man who promised to smash their supposed helpers.

Williams’ insight was not new, of course. Among other sources, she was drawing on John and Barbera Ehrenreich’s seminal theory of the “professional-managerial class.” Neither owners of capital nor sellers of labor nor “petty bourgeois” proprietors of small businesses and family farms, the PMC are a “mediating class” unanticipated by classical Marxism. They are laborers, not owners, but their labor is “mental” rather than manual. Their function is either to directly manage the manual laborers who enrich the capitalists, or else to provide professional services to those same laborers – by teaching their children, doctoring their bodies, counseling their minds, and generally running their lives (for their own good, of course). Many have taken up the Ehreneichs’ mantle. The PMC was the central antagonist in the work of Christopher Lasch, and it fills the same role in recent books like Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders and Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke.

As a description of social and economic reality, the concept of the PMC hits the mark dead center. Social scientists like Al-Gharbi are careful to make the empirical case for its existence, but I don’t think you really need more evidence than the fact of anti-PMC populism itself. Like most of the intellectuals who share the people’s attitude toward “intellectuals,” I grew up on the other side of the divide. I’m a “class migrant,” a white-collar professional from a blue-collar background. I’m a college professor whose parents never went to college. I know exactly what Joan C. Williams is talking about when she cites other “class migrants” who say that in their families, “‘professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids ‘who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job.’” I feel the punch of her observation that if working people resent one kind of elite (the PMC) but not the other (the billionaires), it’s because “most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day.” The PMC is not some figment in the propagandized imagination of the poorly educated. It’s a “lived experience” – to put it in terms that an overeducated intellectual might understand. Donald Trump may be manipulating the resentment for his own enrichment, but the resentment was there for the taking. For the working class, the PMC isn’t some distant abstraction, an innocent party transformed by a cynical politician into a convenient villain. It’s the enemy we know.

Despite its resonance, something has always bothered me about the concept of the PMC. It captures something crucial about the way things are, but it also encourages us to assume that the two groups that comprise this class are a natural pair, when in fact there is a natural tension between them. While material circumstances have thrown them together, “professionals” do not necessarily share material interests with “managers,” and their elision has obscured the deep difference in their sensibilities – much to the benefit of the managers, who have their own reasons to promote the idea that the two groups are one thing. After all, since managers can’t form unions, classifying professionals as “management” often makes it easier to manage them. And the idea that management is its own “profession” helps a lot of glorified box-tickers feel like they’re practicing some noble craft in service to the greater good.

Maybe I only say this because I became a professional, not a manager, but I think a sharper version of the argument against the PMC would be an argument against the managers, in defense of professionals. The fact is, the managers ate the professionals a long time ago, and now they’re wearing their clothes. Take medicine, for example. Back in the 70s, when the Ehrenreich’s wrote their article, sociologists were developing a powerful critique of “medicalization,” the process of bringing more and more aspects of human life under medical jurisdiction by defining them as “medical problems.” Their argument laid a lot of stress on the authority of doctors – that quintessential “professional” – to decide what was a problem and how to treat it. Think of the proverbial “doctor’s note,” or the pompous white-coated surgeons on TV shows. The figure of the imperious physician is still rhetorically useful, as when proponents of new-fangled “evidence-based medicine” sneer at the old-fashioned “eminence-based medicine.” What’s striking, though, is how dated this is. Doctors have in fact become largely powerless, and many of our gripes about the medical system are really frustrations with the fact that doctors are now so hemmed in by “best practices” that they can barely use a stethoscope without a permission slip. Today’s doctor’s are just as likely as yesterday’s factory worker to complain about managers “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job.” But those managers get that authority by dressing up as “health care professionals” – a phrase which, tellingly, puts the actual professionals in the same category as the “management professionals” who happen to manage a hospital, but could just as easily manage a factory, since their actual “profession” is neither medicine nor manufacturing, but just generic “management.”

As doctors and nurses have lost their authority to insurance adjusters and hospital administrators, patients have lost their respect for doctors and nurses, and doctors and nurses have lost respect for themselves. The situation forces them to choose: either struggle to maintain your professionalism – your freedom and responsibility to make a judgment rather than follow a rule – or succumb to managerialism, and use your white coat to play the game. Not surprisingly, most give in, and can hardly be blamed for doing so. Eventually, the older idea of the professional is lost, though the word is retained.

There were certainly problems with the professionals of yesteryear. Doctors really were the agents of medicalization; they really did wield “medicine as an institution of social control,” as Irving Zola put it in his classic article. But the problems with the PMC today are mainly problems with the “M,” not the “P,” because the “P” is hardly there, except as a costume for the “M.” Medicalization has only gotten more intense since the seventies, but sociologists of medicine now describe it as the fruit of an alliance between pharmaceutical companies and their customers – many of whom are managers of other institutions, like schools, where “social control” is an explicit aim, and drugs like Ritalin prove useful to the cause. In the new dispensation, doctors are often just highly-paid rubber stamps.

Critics of the PMC should therefore consider whether it might not be more effective to heighten the submerged tension between professionals and managers. In some recent brouhahas over school curricula, parents incensed by what teachers are teaching have often responded by demanding more “accountability.” Some suggested putting cameras in classrooms so parents can watch in real time, any time they want. I can’t imagine anything more corrosive to civic relations; surveillance isn’t the same as democracy, which requires trust, not control. Just as it is with doctors, teachers today have too little independent authority, not too much, and our frustrations with schools are mostly frustrations with the “standards” so beloved of policymakers and administrators. I say this as someone who finds so little redeeming value in public schools that my kids don’t go to one (we homeschool). But “teachers have too much authority” is not one of my objections. I would be much more likely to send my kids to school if teachers were actually the professionals we say they are, as opposed to being something akin to the “associates” at Walmart. Some of them, to be sure, would use their freedom to teach things I don’t like. But I could respect that much more than I can respect a teacher who teaches things I do like because it’s mandated.

The good teachers I know want the same thing the blue-collar worker wants. Williams quotes one of them, a machine operator: “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else.” Williams’ contrast between the distant rich and the proximate PMC is almost but not quite right; it’s not genuine professionals who “order us around every day.” It’s “management professionals.” The problem is that there are few genuine professionals.

Genuine professionals – real doctors, real teachers – don’t want to be managed. Not wanting to be managed, and not seeing the point of most managers, is what makes you a real professional. Every time I hear a professional ask a manager for more “training,” I hear a manager-in-training, someone who has traded their discipline for a set of best-practices which are no substitute for the practice of medicine, or education, or whatever it might be. If populists want to smash the PMC, they should encourage real professionalism, which means real independence from management. Divide and conquer, as they say. A real professional, or someone who wishes they could be, has more in common with the yeoman of the populist imagination than he or she does with the lackey of management’s fantasy.

The challenge is that the populists themselves are divided, and thus mostly conquered, by a PMC that encourages them to demand the kind of “accountability” for professionals that further empowers managers, as illustrated by the conflict over school curriculum. When populists take real action against the managers, as in Trump’s assault on the administrative state, they end up further disempowering the professionals, because the two groups are one thing in their minds. Populists are caught between their desire for more independence from the nanny state and their desire to take away “independence” from professional nannies who often have as little of it as they do, even if they get paid a lot more for their submission. Management wins either way.

It’s possible that just as material circumstances bound professionals and managers together in spite of their natural rivalry, so might changing material circumstances pry them apart in ways that bind the white-collars back together with the blue-collars – a defensive union of head and hands that recalls an older, more natural paradigm of “work” that cuts out the empty-headed paper-pushing middle-man who has insinuated his services where they don’t belong. The managers of old used the new technologies of their day to turn craftsmen into assembly-line workers, who are now being replaced by robots. If the hype is anywhere close to the reality, the latest versions of the computer technologies that have already allowed managers to turn professional “knowledge-workers” into system-minders will be used to replace those professionals altogether with artificially “intelligent” versions of themselves. At that point, the material interests of the doctors and teachers would coincide with those of the machine operators.

That would be a healthier populism than the one we have now. Populism at its best is a defense not of “the people,” which is a dangerous abstraction, but of people, of flesh-and-blood. The moral heart of populist resentment is a desire to protect the possibility of living like a whole person instead of a number or a number-cruncher. Teaching or doctoring is just as much the work of a person as housebuilding. Professions properly understood are crafts, and craftsmen ought to recognize one another. Differences in prestige make that difficult, but as the prestige of the professions diminishes (see above), it may get easier for the two groups to see one another, and to see more clearly the “managerial elite” that threatens them both.