Chapter 1

Death, terror and addiction in motivation theory

David M. Boje and Grace Ann Rosile

This will be chapter 1 in book by Joanna Brewis, Stephen Linstead, David Boje and Anthony O`Shea (Eds). 2004.  Passion of Organizing. Copenhagen Business School Press, Solbjergvej 3, DK-2000 Copenhagen F, Denmark (forthcoming). See Book Cover:

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter – which is unashamedly and avowedly polemic throughout - is to explore how motivation theory fails to consider addictions and yet how, simultaneously, its material effects make us addicts. Need-deficiency (/ content) theories, for example, are clever phantasms which make us humans seem more satisfied than the Other, less beastly than the animal, yet in such schemes only an addiction to work can gratify and actualize our being. Meanwhile, we work and live in addicted organizations, embedded in an addicted society, in the addicted global economy, against a backdrop of the spectacle of postmodern capitalism. Who has never been employed in a hostile work environment, in a corporate culture fed on terror, in a house of pain? The chapter tries to get behind motivation theory by contrasting the modernist writings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and then examining the more postmodernist aspects of Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche and Guy Debord. Our thesis is that motivation theory at one and the same time represses and courts the death wish.

Preamble

Leader, don't motivate this over-achiever, I have too much to do, too much stimulation, too many screeching influences in my life: I am the embodiment of the Protestant Work ethic. My life is about resisting influences that terrorize me as addictions. I stopped drinking in the early 1990s: its influence on me was overpowering my life. One brother is a heroin addict, another was/ is addicted to cocaine, and my sister lives the life of AA. All around me lives are wrecked by addiction. But work is my addiction of choice, no less easy to control, especially as capitalism does like its over-achievers. (David)

I turned my love of horses from fun into a business, and the business became an endless treadmill of deadening performativity. When I finally quit, it took me two years to learn to relax and just enjoy a trail ride again. (Grace Ann)

Motivation theory centres on cultural myth[1], capitalism refracts its script of self through many narrators - but each fails to consider the terror, death, desire and addiction of work and consumption (Boje and Dennehy, 2000). The main plot behind motivation theory suggests that the work-consumption-work-consumption cycle is the path to the good life, a means of satisfying our ‘higher order’ needs, an escape from base animality, an escape from death (Boje, 2001a). It thus represents a double bind, teaching us to measure our self-worth through our work, our sacrifice of family and self, and then rewarding us with an addiction to work and to consumption as a substitute for a meaningful life. In this chapter, we first look at the complicity of motivation theory in this process, then at our addicted world, the destruction of the social, and why motivation theory is pretty much silent about death, sex and terror. Our connective metaphor is how the theatrics of spectacle motivate our daily lives. Spectacle (Debord, 1994) fosters addictive patterns, without which motivation theories would be much less effective, in the managerialist sense of the word at least.

Modern motivation theory

Having taught the ideology for over twenty years, we can now summarize motivation theory in two tables. They cite motivation rhetoric common to most modernist management and organizational behaviour texts, the rhetoric our MBA students learn to recite.

Table 1

Influential motivation theories

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All these theories combine in the ‘path-goal’ theory of leadership and motivation (House, 1971; House and Mitchell, 1974).

Table 2

Path-goal theory - the combination of Table 1 theories of motivation

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We are interested in the overt message of manipulation of desire in Tables 1 and 2. What is the story here? Basically it is that management influence equals management manipulation. The narrative of modern management influence, of how best to motivate workers, is the story of the route to achieving rational compliance; teaching manipulation categories, positioning humans into these categories, and using them to control one’s staff. Look at the rhetoric in Table 2 in particular, at the number of times the word "manipulate" is used, and in both tables at the total focus on work, work and more work as the way to be happy, self-actualized, recognized - and have a shrinking personal life. It is no wonder that the relevant studies reveal contradictory results and fail to explain motivational variance between groups of workers or between individual employees, but then this is not the point of motivation theory. And we certainly have no interest in making motivation theory work any better: in our opinion, it already works all too well.

Our point is a simple one. Motivation theory is a repressive and puritanical ideology, a way to manipulate performance (and satisfaction), where visions of self-actualization, (higher) need gratification and true happiness are fulfilled in acts of work. But there is another level to motivation theory; the fostering of an addiction not only to work but to (over-)consumption, addictions that embrace the desire for death itself. Motivation theory, we shall argue, incorporates the death wish into its ideology, in utopian visions of need fulfilment and Rube Goldbergesque[2] theory where instrumentalities, valences and need strengths can be manipulated in forms of social control embodied in leadership. ‘Control desire!’, motivation theory tells managers, ‘Channel it into productivity, efficiency and the quest for scarce resources and rewards!’. Our radical notion is that motivation theory represses death and then, circuitously finding that needs are never fulfilled, expectancies never enough and the self never quite actualized, feeds on our desiring addictions. That is to say, in apparently speaking of life, it in fact speaks in a profound way of death, and of our barely perceptible, subconscious but nonetheless ever-present compulsion to destroy ourselves. In sum, the ‘motivated’ worker engages in a compulsive search for impossible gratification that turns into fetishization (of both work and consumption), and disguises (not too well) their death wish. Motivation theory in its existential struggle against ‘soldiering’, ‘laziness’, ‘inefficiency’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ – against ‘decadence’ - becomes just another form of decadence. To see this deeper point we will need to explore Smith, Marx, Bataille and Nietzsche.

As established, then, the basic idea of motivation theory (be it hierarchy of needs, expectancy, equity, path-goal, whatever) is that a leader should manipulate the psychological states of subordinates to increase their motivation, and persuade them to work harder, faster, smarter. For example, if subordinates have a ‘high need’ for esteem and affiliation, supportive leader behaviour may serve as an immediate source of satisfaction. On the other hand, subordinates with a ‘high need’ for autonomy, responsibility and self-actualization are supposedly more likely to be motivated by leaders who are achievement-oriented rather than supportive in their approach. Similarly, individuals who are ‘internally oriented’ (believing they can control their own behaviour) as opposed to ‘externally oriented’ (believing that their behaviour is controlled by fate) apparently prefer leaders who demonstrate more supportive behaviour than those who are low on this dimension (Hellriegel and Slocum, 1979: 483).

Such contingency theories of motivation and leadership therefore claim to predict the situational factors that can be manipulated by changes in leader behaviour to motivate subordinate behaviour. The leader then chooses those behaviours appropriate to the situation. And such theories appear to be growing in sophistication all the time – for example, "In response to the mixed research results and methodological problems, Bob House (the originator of Path-Goal Theory) recently introduced a new version of the theory" (Howell and Costley, 2001: 44). House (1996) now suggests ten types of leader behaviours (including charisma, networking, group and shared leadership) and these combine to seemingly influence everything from subordinate empowerment through job satisfaction, ability and individual performance to work unit performance.[3]

But, as Alvesson and Willmott (1996: 18) observe, and as we have already suggested, motivation theory is "pregnant with unintended consequences”. They go on to say that

techniques that stimulate individualistic behavior perversely fuel the desire for ever more potent ways of satisfying the egoism that they breed; and, in this process, the application of such techniques tends to undermine any efficiency gains that they initially produce. (p. 19)

In other words, managerial practices based on motivation theory, like Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra[4], ‘make hungry where most they satisfy’: they constitute self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating, prophecies. In constructing workers as having higher order needs – for esteem, growth, self-actualization etcetera - and introducing interventions aimed at meeting those needs, a cycle of addiction is put in place such that the targets of such interventions come to demand more and better ‘rewards’ to satisfy such ‘needs’.

Moreover, as Golding (1996: 57) concludes, "the location of the problem [of motivation] in this way leads to the acceptance of an apparently total responsibility for the situation by managers". The belief in the right of leaders to control by manipulation goes apparently unquestioned. It is Marx – more of whom later - who examines the consequences of such storylines, the manipulation of the employment situation to extract more and more surplus value. But for Taylorism and its successors (TQM, Continuous Process Improvement, BPR, Team Concept … ), motivation theory is merely mechanical action in and on a context defined as the management of the situation. This makes an artificial separation between what is considered ‘management’ and what is considered unethical manipulation – although of course manipulation in any case can be taken simply to mean treating, arranging, operating or controlling something, without any insidious overtones. Management is understood here, then, to translate into performing an action and turning a lever to make more valences, to increase instrumentality, to make a path accurate, to render a reward greater in amount. It does not mean problematic influence on someone else's behaviour: it is just a series of mechanics, levers and passage points, “keeping the machine running” as Fischer (cited in Alvesson and Willmott, 1996: 21) has it. In sum, the managerialist perspective on motivation theory considers the elements in Tables 1 and 2 so as to ‘improve’ the work situation by increasing motivation.

Deetz (2000), like Alvesson and Willmott (1996 – also see Thompson and McHugh, 2002), takes the problems and tensions in such constructions of management and motivation seriously. His research shows that conditions which, if dictated by management, would be deemed abusive are adopted voluntarily by a `motivated’ workforce. For example, if management frequently required workers to stay in their offices 24 hours a day to complete tasks, even non-unionized staff would rebel. However, `empowered’ employees cheerfully sleep on cots and live on coffee and doughnuts for multiple days in a row, on a fairly regular basis, even comparing this to the `fun’ of cramming for tests during their college years, because they are `self-motivated’.  Relatedly, at least one study of the socialization of accountants in the UK showed that what we consider `networking’ may actually be the colonization of private life in the interests of one’s professional career: junior managers here were seen to assess dating and potential marriage partners in terms of whether any such relationship was likely to further their employment prospects, in a new twist on the `corporate’ or `trophy wife’ syndrome.

It is therefore possible to raise a set of moral-ethical concerns about motivation theory in the context of modern organizations and global capitalism:

1.      Motivation theory makes work the only source of satisfaction in life;

2.      Motivation theory constructs worker and leader identity in terms of work output and productivity, and therefore also moves attention away from the need to fight pollution, the decline in species diversity, eco-sustainability and the growing gap between rich and poor;

3.      Motivation theory convinces managers they can manipulate the world of subordinates - here leaders are heroes, while workers are fit only for the humiliating motivational machine with its engineered valences and instrumentality levers;

4.      Motivation theory increases the addiction to work;

5.      Motivation theory does not attend to its role in the spectacle of consumption; and

6.      Motivation theory lets us sleep-walk without critical self-reflection about values and practices that are more viable in human and ecological terms.

We turn now to explore in more depth how motivation theory is associated with death and desire. Although need-deficiency theorists like Herzberg do not recognize either as motivating[5], for Bataille (1962) both are inextricable and basic human impulses that can interfere with the rational projects of work and productivity. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that they are taboo for motivation theory. We begin with a look at more romantic stories of death and influence in Adam Smith's work, then turn to the tragic/ romantic stories of death in/ the death of capitalism and the triumph of worker revolt in Karl Marx. This exploration sets our stage for an examination of Georges Bataille’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s more postmodern perspectives on death and desire in western culture. As we proceed, our theme is how motivation theory approaches death and tries to tame desire.

Death and motivation in Smith and Marx

In this chapter, as should be now be obvious, we intend our argument to be sacrilegious – to speak against the established and commonplace tenets of motivation theory, and to say that most of what we westerners think we need or want in life is addiction. To delve into these issues a little further, we want to start with Adam Smith, the author of capitalism, and see what nascent theory of motivation resides in his writings. Here there is definitely a positive valuation of work as an important human activity, even in ‘primitive’ societies:

Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniences of life, for himself, or such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing. (Smith, 1976b [1776] – emphasis added)

Indeed Smith fairly obviously constructs the ‘savage’ as a prototype of humanity, taking the first shaky steps along the path to fully human status:

As an African savage prepares his death-song, and considers how he should act when he has fallen into the hands of his enemies, and is by them put to death in the most lingering tortures, and amidst the insults and derision of all the spectators; so a Grecian patriot or hero could not avoid frequently employing his thoughts in considering what he ought both to suffer and to do in banishment, in captivity, when reduced to slavery, when put to the torture, when brought to the scaffold. (Smith, 1976a [1759])

There are many such stories of death and terror in Smith, each made into a romantic narrative where both the savage and the cultured man of sensibility are heroic. There is also a strong critique here of imperial exploitation, as in the following passage:

When a savage is made prisoner of war [by imperialist colonizers], and receives, as is usual, the sentence of death from his conquerors, he hears it without expressing any emotion, and afterwards submits to the most dreadful torments, without ever bemoaning his fate, or discovering any other passion but contempt of his enemies. While he is hung by the shoulders over a slow fire, he derides his tormentors, and tells them with how much more ingenuity he himself had tormented such of their countrymen as had fallen into his hands ... Every savage is said to prepare himself from his earliest youth for this dreadful end ... Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. (Smith, 1976a [1759])

Here the apparently most civilized prove to be the most degenerate, to have the fewest moral sentiments – the quest for land, fur and gold has taken an appalling toll. But the irony for us is that Smith’s capitalism, as outlined in detail in The Wealth of Nations (1976b [1776]), takes as its archetypal hero the toiling workaholic who perfects production by repressing lower order needs in favour of higher ones (self-actualization, recognition and pleasure through work). Smith does not seem to recognize the contradiction between his construction of the worker-under-capitalism-as-hero and his ‘moral sentiments’ critique of the effects of the imperialist quest for wealth.

Karl Marx (1967 [1867]), on the other hand, is explicit in his characterization of work and workers under capitalism as alienated. Marx's heroes are tragic heroes, workers exploited unto death. Indeed a reading of Smith through Marx suggests certain parallels between the situation of the proletariat under capitalism and the brutal torture of ‘savages’ in the building of empires. For Marx the key influence on human behaviour is greed – it certainly sits atop the capitalist hierarchy of needs – whereas capitalists manipulate worker motivation through the ideological superstructure, selling them soporific justifications of the status quo via social institutions such as religion. Marx’s stories speak of vampires and werewolves as embodying capitalist hunger for the blood of labour - perhaps the ultimate addiction. In Chapter 10 of Capital (1967 [1867]), for example, Marx observes factory life and tells stories of child and female labour, as well as efforts by capital to chain factory labour to work 24 hours a day. The workplace here is a "Theatre of Terror," a "House of Pain" (p. 276). The unquenchable greed for surplus value appears in the straining after an unlimited extension of the working day:

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. (Marx, 1967 [1867])

The account which follows, also from Capital, illustrates this argument most succinctly.

Figure 1

Mary Anne Walkley dies from over-work

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Of course at this time in history there were also few monitors of the conditions of labour, their reporting procedures were inadequate and owners in any case routinely complained about monitoring’s interference with production. However, Mary Anne Walkley’s story is not an account that we can safely relegate to a more barbaric past, in the assumption that capitalism is more humane and more civilized, now. Wal-Mart, for example, is currently employing Netslaves in Silicon Valley and setting up sweatshops in China, where it is estimated that 500 Chinese women commit suicide each day, their choice one of sweatshop or starvation. The sweatshop is a "House of Pain" that lives today.[6]  Ironically, even Smith (1976b [1776]) saw that the choice about paying each worker a `living wage’ was clear, economic and moral – and arch work scientist Frederick Taylor (1911) agreed that workers deserved a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, even if that work did involve performing like a circus animal while the expert planned the mechanical motions of their day.

In Walkley’s story and other such narratives past and present, we can see the obvious and substantial costs of the workplace Theatre of Terror: “Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of [the worker’s] bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday” (Marx, 1967 [1867]) are all swallowed by capital’s demands. But what is also clear is that

capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible into the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler ... It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation and refreshment of bodily powers to just as many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. (Marx, 1967 [1867])

However, for Marx all existing classes except the proletariat disappear in a process of dissolution in the face of modern industry. It is this, ironically, which signs capitalism’s death warrant. In The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848]), the proletariat is a ‘dangerous class’: it is the lower layers of the old (dead) society that will propel it into revolution. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx (1926 [1852]) similarly suggests that the vagabonds, jailbirds, prostitutes, thieves, gangsters, discharged soldiers, escaped slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers and beggars - all these disintegrated masses - will topple capitalism. The capitalist order is seen as rotten and decaying, and historically doomed to tragedy, to death. At the same time there is the romantic notion that the proletariat class will revolt. As Dollimore (1998: 220) summarizes, here the "capitalist order thrives on an ideology of death".  Whereas Smith mystifies death as something heroic, best accomplished in torture, for Marx death is the material essence of capitalism and its factories of terror: death is part of the dialectic struggle, as dead and decaying capitalism is to be overcome by the revolt of the dangerous class, who will sweep capitalism into the dustbin of history so that a new synthesis may be born. Marx's ideology of death sees a rotting yet still repressive social order resisted by the masses and thus his materialist philosophy demystifies the ideology of romantic death we see in Smith's writing. Death for Marx is reduced to its biological reality, it is `de-heroized’ – as in the story of Mary Anne Walkley – and, furthermore, it is capitalism’s own death wish that will bring it down.

So, as we have seen, capitalism according to Marx operates on the basis of how to stretch the working day and make it 24 hours long. This emphasis on performativity (used here in Lyotard’s (1984) sense of working until you drop) is of course, as we have argued earlier in the chapter, also very visible in modern motivation theories; and it is the addictive nature of motivation, work and consumption that is at issue here. To be sure, Marx argues that, if labour can revolt and obtain control of its tools, then such exploitation cannot continue - but this argument has never been realized in practice.

Death and motivation in Bataille and Nietzsche

Arguably motivation theory is also, again as suggested above, Apollonian: it sells us self-sacrifice and self-control, seeking to `civilize’ desire and thereby to harness our life energy in the service of productivity. In their (proto-)postmodernist writings, both Bataille and Nietzsche are fascinated by this dialectic. Bataille would, we argue, see motivation theory as built upon the disavowal of life, the imperatives of prohibition and utility that make humankind servile. Nietzsche, similarly, wants to shatter cultural restraint and advocates flux, change and the life-force of Dionysus.

Bataille explores how we are attracted towards precisely what is forbidden. Eroticism, he says, works on an interplay of desire and aversion: that which is filthy and prohibited is simultaneously tempting. The lure of the void is death, chaos and ruination (Bataille, 1991 [volume 2]: 108). Eroticism draws us into terror and anguish, which lays us open to annihilation and death: our sexual activity finally rivets us to the distressing image of decay, which it tends to eroticize, and in sexual ecstasy there is also sadness, an apprehension of death which we will never be able to shake off (Bataille, 1991 [volume 2]: 84). Death is not pure non-being here: it is ever-present in life as change, decomposition, or putrification. The stuff of life is also that of death, and vice versa (Bataille, 1991 [volume 2]: 95). Motivation theory read through Bataille is therefore riven with bourgeois hypocrisy, with our attempt to control being human, to manage attraction and repulsion with levers of valence and instrumentality when we are in reality attracted to where maggots swarm and the lukewarm ferments. We could speculate that his take on such thinking would be to argue that it represents an anti-life set of principles, and operates at the expense of the animal within us. He certainly identifies productive work as part of the wider human project of denying and forestalling death, controlling the animal, the passionate, the erotic, so as to elevate ourselves above nature and erect a psychological pretence that we are more than base creatures and are not inevitably doomed to die. But death will always and inevitably exert its fatal attraction, and its epiphenomena (sex, gluttony, drunkenness, hysteria etcetera) will always break through into the productive, rational, profane world despite our best efforts, because it is death which really compels, draws, motivates us.

As we have seen, however, motivation theory makes little or no reference to sexual desire, eroticism or the death wish. It is just about work, the Protestant Ethic of purification through work, the Judaeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, nailing oneself to the cross; while simultaneously deploying images of sexual ecstasy to sell the good life, and the face of death to sell life insurance. In motivation theory, the personality dies, suffocated in work, perfection and performativity. But in the Dionysian aspects of the human condition there is an adventure incomprehensible to Apollo, an indifference to death: death becomes a guarantee that life will flourish (Bataille, 1962: 23-24). Indeed "Bataille recovers a medieval obsession with mutability as physical decomposition and crosses it with the romantic desire for a pure annihilation in ecstasy" (Dollimore, 1998: 256). Organizations, on the other hand, quake in terror at the prospect of their decomposition and disintegration: capitalist production is all about securing the future and forestalling the inevitability of death.

Whereas Marx put his faith in revolution against the repressive excesses of capital, then, Bataille favours a more erotic project. Nietzsche (1968), on the other hand, wrote in this regard of the Will to Power. In connecting this to the current argument, we can suggest that ‘I do not possess a hierarchy of needs. I pretend to be hierarchical. I will myself to perform as if I have such needs. Instead of a need hierarchy, I am a player with a Nietzschean Will to Power. I am a player in a game of will to power.’ Motivation theory from this angle reminds us of the film The Matrix and its two sequels Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. It is spectacularity, a theatre in which we knowingly participate but from which our minds cannot unplug. In the first movie, the character Cyber would rather remain in the spectacular illusion of The Matrix, where simulated steaks taste better than real food, and withdraw from the everyday pain and suffering of revolution. Nietzsche urges us instead to embrace suffering and pain, to step out of the spectacular illusion of The Matrix - not in the name of Marx’s revolution, but in order to reclaim our life-force (Boje, 2001b).

Nietzsche, we think, would agree with Bataille that beneath motivation theory is the exhausting denial of life energy, the repression of Dionysus by Apollo. It is Dionysian ecstasy that such thinking seeks to control, in principles of Apollonian order through acts of self-control, self-knowledge, restraint, containment and denial, to ensure productivity. Nietzsche might therefore see motivation theory as characterizing the plight of the eternally unsatisfied to find satisfaction, fulfil needs and top off valences, as representing the dogged wistfulness of Protestant resolve, the performative demand to suffer and work unto death, to fight off the self and conquer animal nature. He, by contrast, embraced an atavistic, Dionysian lust for life, and sought to elude the control of life's passions represented by Apollo. 

Having connected motivation theory to death and sex, we turn now to examine its specific relationship with addiction.

Addiction and motivation theory

Addiction is a slow form of death. Schaef and Fassel (1988: 5) observe that the study of organizations is in denial when it comes to addiction, not just to drugs, alcohol, sex etcetera, but to processes of work that are addictive.[7] An addiction, they tell us, "is [to] any substance or process that has taken over our lives and over which we are powerless" (p. 57). We contend that motivation theory leads us into addiction, because it constructs work as a compulsion, and thus renders us vulnerable to work addiction. Within organizations, addiction to work or workaholism is for us an untold, unacknowledged ramification of the material effects, the power effects, of motivation theory. Motivation theory, in its silence on and denial of these issues, promotes workaholism as a socially acceptable phenomenon, something that is organizationally productive, a Good Thing. At the same time, western society promotes addiction to consumer ‘stuff’, and suggests that we can only pay for that stuff with more work. Contrast this with Bhutan, a tiny country between India and China, that calculates the Gross National Happiness Index. The Bhutanese GNH is based upon acquiring more knowledge, imparting knowledge (and wisdom) to others and overcoming delusions born of ignorance, aggression and the desire for consumption and acquisition. Bhutan therefore seems to us to represent the opposite of addicted western society, its addicted organizations, and its addicted workers.

In western society, nascent work addicts are recruited out of college to work 60 to 80 hours a week to prove they are worthy of tenure and promotion in professions and corporations; repeating behaviours in organizations that they have learnt in their families. Indeed the substance of choice of children who grow up in addicted families is often workaholism: these are dedicated workers, unable to say no to demands, rarely open to options, preferring to do it their way. Calm and cool when things are falling apart, used to working in extreme conditions (and why not, since they grew up in households that were violent, chaotic and contentious?), out of touch with their feelings, workaholics are also unaware of the effects of their demands on those who work with them. They seek what the corporate world promises but cannot provide; attention, encouragement and approval (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 102). And the true addicts rise quickly in the leadership hierarchy. But our work-addicted lives also infect our home lives, with fatal results for many marriages and other personal relationships. For example, it is surely no coincidence that the UK has both the highest rate of divorce and the longest working hours in Europe.

Nonetheless, the problem here is not that there are people running around with addictive personalities: instead there exists an addictive process that underlies an addictive system, which surrounds and influences all of us (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 51). The theory of an addictive personality perhaps serves to obscure this issue because it locates the source of addiction solely in the individual’s psyche and not in society at large. And the lean, mean, high performing contemporary organization itself functions as "an active addict" (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 8) because it blurs – even effaces - the boundary between home and work, such that organizational commitment means putting in more hours. Working 24/7 is an expectation that workaholic leaders bring to addicted organizations. These leaders suffer from self-centredness, mood swings, depression, guilt and inadequacy. They can and do become increasingly tragic figures, seeking to fix the organization through more work and more control. And if the executive is hooked on ‘can-do-better-must-do-better’ paranoia, then the work processes in their organization often take on these qualities. 

In such workplaces, fashionable motivation programmes are therefore implemented, one after the other, to give leaders and managers (the illusion of) control over human unpredictability; to socialize employees to do what pleases others, to identify their sacrifices as voluntary, to do ‘whatever it takes’. The T-groups of the 1950s and 1960s were a way to ‘deal’ with frozen feelings about (the lack of) employment participation. The quality circles of the 1980s were a way to `involve’ workers in their work processes. The re-engineering craze of the 1990s was a way to get ‘lean and mean’ through supposedly empowering teamwork. The new spirituality movement is just a more recent attempt at control. Organizations keep themselves busy with management fads and fashions like these which always flatter to deceive, distracting themselves from their addictive processes, applying the ‘quick fix’. These fixes take the form of efforts to involve workers (and leaders) more deeply in the passion for work.[8]

See APPENDIX for Workaholic Test

Besides the addiction of work, there is the process of perfectionism. The obsession with quality and zero defects, under modern TQM regimes in particular, can become a system that breeds perfectionism such that “Addicts use their perfectionism as a way of seeing themselves as bad people trying to become good, instead of sick people trying to get well" (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 64). Mistakes are unacceptable in a total quality system and, when they happen, they are denied, covered up or a scapegoat is sought. The frantic pursuit of more work, more stuff and more perfection is never enough to `fix’ the addicts it produces. In the terms of Vroom’s (1964) influential motivation theory, expectancy is never satisfied, instrumentality continues to disappoint and predicted valence is never realized. And we would also do well to remember Maslow’s (1943, 1954) counsel that self-actualization – the pinnacle of the hierarchy of needs – is rarely, if ever, fulfilled. Instead he constructs the self-actualizing individual as constantly seeking to become more than they currently are; always hankering after a new set of goals, always seeking to ‘improve’, ‘develop’, ‘grow’ themselves. Moreover, during the downsizing of the 1980s and 1990s, addicted organizations combined workaholism and perfectionism with a scarcity model; not enough work for everyone. So we keep working, hoping that things will get better, that a drastic turnaround will happen. Meanwhile the status quo of the addictive system - its stresses, craziness and denial - is sustained in the two- and three-job service economy (days at McDonalds; night shifts at Wal-Mart).

Addicted organizations also thrive on chaos, confusion and crisis: this is part of the ‘high’ for any work addict. We become co-dependent on/ with the addicted leader, enacting a theatre of fiction, to keep our workaholic bosses (and ourselves) from confronting their (/ our) addictions. We engage in the classic addict’s lies - to ourselves (denial), to those around us (creating a camouflage of confusion) and to the world (putting up a front) (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 63). And it takes the collusion of hordes of co-dependents to keep addicts from hitting bottom. Addicts recruit co-dependents (and vice versa) to play the roles they need to keep their show on the road. Scripting is ongoing such that, if the co-dependent gets a `fix’ out of being a rescuer or a martyr, then someone must be recruited to play the role of self-centred addict so the storyline can play out to its inevitable climax. It is easy for addicts and co-dependents to act out their theatrics in an organization that sees workaholism, perfectionism and stress as positive. And co-dependents, like the addicts they court, can be just as angry, depressed, controlling and manipulative (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 76), yet it is those who are balanced and work reasonable hours who are seen as troublemakers, as threats to the survival of the organization. Thus the addicted organization works overtime to refuse to recognize processes that are threatening and unhealthy. Knowledge is truncated and disinformation passes for information, so that personalities in conflict can look harmonious to the outside world.

Such illusions and denials eventually become systemic, not personality-driven. Organizations can be paranoid, confused, dysfunctional and obsessive just as can people. Harvey (1988), in his book The Abilene Paradox, discusses Phrog farms. A Phrog farm is an organization in deep trouble that pretends it is not knee-deep in the swamp. The people are addicted to pretending that they are powerless to do anything about their collective behaviour. They collude in the agreement that they do not talk about their problems, do not confront dysfunctional, even abusive, behaviour. They spend inordinate amounts of time and energy justifying why change is just not possible. There is all kinds of gossip, but no efforts to sit down, engage in straight talk, and work through the problems. In short, people turn into co-dependent, enabling Phrogs.

But neither the addicted organization, the addicted leader nor the addicted employees precisely reflects the other/s, "for they are not a mirror, they are the other" (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 53). Organizations only continue to exist through the efforts of their members - the term ‘organization’ is after all nothing more than a convenient shorthand - and they are embedded in an addicted society. In this sense the organization adapts to its context, but also seeks to continue to addict that society to both work and consumption. Indeed addicted organizations, like Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom, are essential to the theatrics of capitalism and to addictive society (Boje and Rosile, 2002, 2003). At Enron, `better’ workers have fewer sick days, do not take vacations and work weekends, with no sense of the resulting physical and psychological harm to themselves and others. Commitment means full participation, as we have seen, and the new technologies (e-mail, fax, pager, mobile phone and Palm Pilot) further upset the work/ life balance. Until its very public implosion, in fact, Enron was the ‘excellent’ company, doing more with less, working harder, faster and smarter with fewer people, and courting chaos in energy markets, engaged in the theatre of illusion and denial, trading debt to off-the-balance sheet partnerships, practising quick fix leadership; an organization taking on the personality of its chairman-in-denial, Ken Lay, and its workaholic CEO, Jeff Skilling. Here accurate information was a threat to inflated stock prices, and therefore to corporate survival.

As should by now be clear, organizations are therefore more than just another context in which we act out our addictions (be they process- or chemically fuelled). Motivation theory practices in complex organizations enmesh with addictions and the popular imagery of wider western society, to the point that the organization is itself an addictive substance. We are told that when we are working we are most alive, feeling energetic, actualized and needed. We feed off the adrenalin rush that tricks our bodies into believing work is fun, and stress is healthy. The addicted/ addictive organization promises, as already suggested, to fulfil our needs, gratify our desire for influence, provide opportunities to empower us and for us to self-actualize. It is a place where life is manageable, and there is equity, even a sense of belonging. For Disney we are members of the family, or cast members in the show; at Wal-Mart we are associates. All the promises of capitalist society are to be realized by our work in organizations. In popular culture, furthermore, images of work are seductive and the pace is furious, it hooks us. The message is clear: "work like this and you will get ahead" (Schaef and Fassel, 1988: 130). The recognition, belonging and approval that traditionally came from family and community life are now corporate experiences – albeit watered-down and ersatz versions thereof. We go to company picnics, evening socials and wear company T-shirts; in the company family there are (rigid) rules of behaviour, dress codes and all kinds of controls that many of us growing up in dysfunctional families never experienced; our MBA students attend `dress for success’ and `eat for success’ training programmes. And, when the work organization does not always seem like a family, when we fit into the system and begin to see that this is no democracy, no family, and our needs are unmet, many of us just keep pretending that organization is the substance of our happiness. Indeed, as Schaef and Fassel (1988: 124) remark, "whenever the promise of the mission [and goals] puts a buffer between the people in the organization and what is really happening in the organization, the addictive process is flourishing". Over time, the promise of benefits of loyalty and dedication, even when unfulfilled, becomes not only the `con’ but an addictive agent or "fix" (p. 125) in itself.

Figure 2

My name is David, and I am a workaholic

ABOUT HERE

With the above established, the next section seeks to elaborate on some connections to which we have already alluded; between addiction, consumption, work and the society of the spectacle.

Spectacularity and motivation theory

We think motivation theory is just spectacularity. We have a counter-story to tell to those peddled by Maslow, Herzberg, Vroom et al., one where Smith’s ‘savage’ is the higher-order being. We met a man in Fiji. He came from working in Suva, the capital of Fiji. He had just left his city job, the 9 to 5 grind where he `needed’ to buy food in the supermarket, `needed’ to get a car, and `needed’ an apartment with all the modern utilities. "I am back in my village," he said as he sat on the bench, "and I am happy every day."  He took our money as we paid for the right to enter his rainforest, to soak up its beauty, to breathe fresh air, and reach the end of our journey. Why not be happy every day? These villagers fished for food in the ocean by wading out with a net. They picked mangoes and breadfruit straight off the tree. The people in the village wore colourful garments, smiled at one another, and we wondered about their need hierarchy.

On the other hand, if there is a western hierarchy of needs, it is a spectacular one. If we deconstruct Maslow, new words suggest themselves; greed, jealousy, envy, gluttony, hoarding and addiction:

Need for Work

Need for Stuff

Need for Accumulation

Need to Consume

Need for Power

Need to Conquer

Need to Control

Need for Gluttony

Need for Sex

Need for Death

The more stuff we have, the more we become slaves to our stuff. We need bigger houses to store stuff, more energy to preserve stuff, more security to guard stuff, and more help to clean stuff. Stuff rules our lives. Our hierarchy of needs begins and ends with a need for more. Motivation theory feeds an addicted society. Be it need or process theory, it is blindly embedded in a world addicted by spectacle (Debord, 1994) to work and consumption. Debord saw the society of the spectacle as predicated on the move from Marx’s performativity of production to the stretching of consumption over every surface, invading every aesthetic with consumerism. For him, in seeking to control ‘decadence’ (human unpredictability), motivation theory and its material consequences craft us into fetishizing machines, seduced into a life of dependency and addiction to decadent spectacles of consumption. In seeking to control our mutability, it entangles us in immutable social orders. The spectacle convinces us work is our identity and consumption our happiness, and so we eagerly ignore how work life is erected as a performativity experience, a flat, dull homogeneous existence that we embrace until we die. Spectacle, portrayed in the media in 6 000 ad-bites a day, presents work and accumulation as our ultimate desires, more powerful than death or sex as a motivator. Stuff rules our lives. This stuff is part of the game of death, terror and addiction.

What, then, is self-actualization?  It is, we suggest, an illusion, a fantasy that we are more than animals, that our human culture makes us different. Instead, it is our contention that we are part of the war machine that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write about in A Thousand Plateaus; a war machine fed by desire and will to power, not by need. We do not need most of the stuff in our closets, our dressers, our garages. We do not need more of what we consume. We don't need most of what we eat, wear and store. Did Imelda Marcos need 400 pairs of shoes? Did Michael Eisner[9] need a 210 million dollar bonus? Does Tiger Woods need another endorsement contract? But addicts, after all, crave more and more ... and we live in an addicted postmodern world.

The spectacle of addictive work and accumulation underlies all motivation theories. At the top of need-deficiency theory lists of what motivates us, as we have seen, are achievement, challenging work, personal growth, self-esteem, responsibility, recognition and advancement - all defined by our work, and all leading us down the path to addiction. If we look at the bottom of these lists, on the other hand, it is our human relations (which are in any case to be fulfilled by peer, subordinate and boss relations – ie,  workplace relationships) and our personal life (which died long ago). Motivation theory is out of touch with the addicted workplace, the changes in the global theatre of post-industrial consumption and production, and the darker side of the postmodern workplace. The desire for work is overwhelming. For David, it is a compulsion to write more, publish more, present more, to go berserk with words. It is a need to work himself to death: he works at home, at work, on planes, in hotel rooms. He has converted his private world into a world of work. He dreams of work, he wakes up working, he goes to bed working. He is addicted to work. He is, nonetheless, a `good’ citizen, a `good’ worker: he is `self-actualized’ in his work. But beneath this theatrical mask is a speculation that his needs are addictions, his needs are desires gone haywire, and his accumulation is out of control. He needs motivation theorists to convince him he is `empowered’, `growing’, that he has a `high need for achievement’. But he only pretends to be motivated: his need is a desire for death, a working unto death. He is `cultured’, working to be more than animal. But animals do not work themselves to death. He is higher so he can see the Other as lower, motivated by lower order needs.

Conclusion

In Goux’s (1998: 43-44) analysis of a play by Alfred de Vigny, he points out that a poet chooses suicide over "selling his soul by turning his language into a market commodity" and a woman follows him in death, her most intimate feelings overcome by “a materialistic and utilitarian society that does not know the imperatives of love" (Goux, 1998: 43). Proletarians, women and artists are the three agents that Auguste Comte, in the nineteenth century, wanted to ally with the philosophers in order to exercise the only possible moral authority in a context of predatory capitalism (Goux, 1998: 41). But is there really no alternative but suicide to transcend motivational regulation and manipulation? In Debord's society of the spectacle, there are ways to juxtapose spectacle with non-spectacle, to take a walk through the city and see places where spectacle has not taken over. We also know that addictive organizations are hurtful ones, as are societies of the spectacle. In both, addictions are progressive and fatal. But there are no quick fixes, no easy solutions. Giving up an addiction exposes us to the life problems that our addictions allowed us to escape from, and the problems that they created for others. These are systemic, even global issues which require collective approaches, as the table below suggests.

Table 3

What is the influence of `work’, `consumption’ and `convivia’ ethics[10] in our lives?

ABOUT HERE

Motivation theory, we contend, offers us death, not life. Motivation theory is the grease on the machine that addicts us to work and to consumption. The fantasy is that through more and more hard work we become perfect human beings, able to fulfil life's satisfactions, and to self-actualize. But instead of a capitalism that embraces life, ours wages war on nature. Motivation theory is a doomed quest for transcendent being through perfection, self-sacrifice and corporeal control, achieved through performativity. Do we have needs full of desire? We desire to do something before we die: our desire is to topple motivation theory, to unbolt its mechanisms, to show that we are not performing machines. Put away your carrot and stick. Give up your reinforcement schedule. Forget your performance related pay. Do not play us like fools. We do not have higher order needs.

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Appendix

Workaholic test

1. Do you get more excited about work than about family or anything else?

2. Are there times when you can charge through your work and other times when you can't?

3. Do you take work with you to bed? On weekends? On vacation?

4. Is work the activity you like to do best and talk about most?

5. Do you work more than 40 hours a week?

6. Do you turn your hobbies into money-making ventures?

7. Do you take complete responsibility for the outcome of your work efforts?

8. Have your family or friends given up expecting you on time?

9. Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won’t otherwise get done?

10. Do you underestimate how long a project will take, and then rush to complete it?

11. Do you believe it is okay to work long hours if you love what you are doing?

12. Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?

13. Are you afraid that if you don't work hard you will lose your job or be a failure?

14. Is the future a constant worry for you, even when things are going very well?

15. Do you do things energetically and competitively, including play?

16. Do you get irritated when people ask you to stop doing your work in order to do something else?

17. Have your long hours hurt your family or other relationships?

18. Do you think about your work while driving, falling asleep or when others are talking?

19. Do you work or read during meals?

20. Do you believe that more money will solve the other problems in your life?

TOTAL NUMBER OF YES SCORES  _____________

According to Workaholics Anonymous (http://www.workaholics-anonymous.org/), if you answer `yes’ to three or more questions, there is a chance you are a workaholic or on your way to becoming one. All 25 of David’s MBA students taking this test had a score of 5 or higher with 18 as the highest score, and he also scored an 18.

Table 1

Table 2

Figure 1

Figure 2

Table 3