I have been in love with Dilbert for a long time. It's funny how popular he is, because it presumably means that lots of people understand the underlying message of the strip, which is that bad decisions happen all the time in real businesses because of perverse incentives experienced by everyone, but particularly by management.
I knew a guy who was, and possibly still is, in a senior management role who was a fan. I always thought of him as a bit pointy-haired, but he clearly admired the strip. Maybe he just saw the funny side of his own position.
The above strip (sorry if it doesn't fit properly in my narrow content column - just click on the image to see the whole thing on Scott Adam's site, is the first in a series about how the latest CEO drags along a series of cronies with him and puts them in senior positions for which they are ill suited. The joke is how management knows nothing about what the company actually does, but it's OK because they know about important things like negotiation and marketing, and tax planning, and mission statements.
I tend, as regular readers will have noticed, to try to understand what happens in the world of commerce using the tools of economics. I think that when it comes to companies and society, the tools of anthropology probably are as relevant. Dilbert is about inter-tribal conflict: the engineers against the managers, the senior managers against the workers, the engineers against the support staff, the engineers against the sales staff, and so on. We need to belong to a tribe, and we want to support other members of our tribe. Managers are not in the same tribe as shareholders, or ordinary workers and so are happy to screw both of them. The board at Goldman Sachs are, plausibly, in the same tribe as the workers, and, although they have pretty daunting initiation rituals, they do not treat them as badly as, say, the board of an engineering company treats the shop-floor workers.
I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Flip Chart Fairy Tales for this insight into the idea of how tribalism is more important in setting worker compensation than anything strictly to do with added value and merit or even supply and demand for workers with the relevant skills. It seems that Barbara Wootton understood this and wrote about it in her 1955 book "Social Foundations of Wages Policy", which, unusually, seems difficult to get hold of.
Gillian Tett has said that her training in social anthropology was hugely helpful in understanding how the credit crunch developed. She studied for a PhD on the subject. I'd like a simple primer to get me started on understanding the basic principles of this obscure discipline. Anyone got any suggestions?
