in Motivation Theory

David M. Boje & Grace Ann Rosile, New Mexico State University dboje@nmsu.edu garosile@nmsu.edu  

NOTE: 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). CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NEWEST PRE_PUBLICATIN DRAFT.  Book Cover

Department of Management, MSC 3DJ New Mexico State University P.O. Box 30001/Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001 Phone (505) 646-2391 Work Phone (505) 532-1693 Home Office   October 30, 2000   Proposed Paper for Critical Management Studies/ Conference July 11-13 2001 hosted by Manchester School of Management UMIST, England. Submitted to the "passion of organising" stream, chaired by Jo Brewis, University of Essex, Stephen Linstead, University of Sunderland , Tony O'Shea, University of Sunderland, David Boje, New Mexico State University& Grace Ann Rosile, Horse Sense At Work.

 

DEATH DESIRE AND MOTIVATION THEORY PRESENTATION RESOURCES

1. Boje, D. M. & Grace Ann Rosile (2001). Death, Terror and Addiction in Motivation Theory 

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2. Boje, D. M. (2001). Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A Critical Postmodern Theory of Public Administration.  In submission to Administrative Theory & Praxis special issue on Radical Organization Theory, Lisa Zanetti (ed). April 12, 2001; Revised April 30, 2001

3. Boje, D. M. & Grace Ann Rosile (2001). Where's the Power in Empowerment? Answers from Follett and Clegg. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

 

 

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to reread how motivation theory is currently deployed to render us servile. We contend that motivation theory fails to consider addictions (sex, alcohol, work, consumption, domination, etc.) and how it makes us addicts. The hierarchy of needs is a clever phantasm to make us seem more satisfied than the "other," less beastly than the animal, yet in the clever scheme only work gratifies and actualizes our being.  Meanwhile, we work and live in addicted organizations, embedded in an addicted society, in the addicted global economy of the spectacle of late postmodern capitalism.  Who has never worked in a hostile work environment, a corporate culture fed on fear, in a house of terror? The paper tries to get behind motivation and influence theory by looking at the modern writing of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Frederick Taylor, and then the more postmodern aspects of Georges Bataille and Frederick Nietzsche.  Our thesis is motivation theory is the death wish repressed by puritanical ideology.

Well, it's a cold, cold, cold, cold,

cold, cold, cold, cold

Post, postmodern world

No time for heroes, no place for good guys

No room for Rocky the Flying Squirrel

They're not here, they're not coming

Not in a million years (Henley, 2000).

My name is David and I am a workaholic, like my father, and his father before him. Most of my relatives are addicted to drugs, but work is my addiction of choice.  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. I work in Marx's House of Terror. 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 heroine addict, another 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, but capitalism does like its over-achievers. I view organizations as addicted, and societies addicted to spectacle (Debord, 1968; Schaef & Fassel, 1988). My first marriage was an addiction to alcohol, credit cards, and work. Now it is just work. My profile is a classic one; I resist and rebel at authority; I prefer to go my own way; I do not like group sports; jogging and cycling are for me. In my self-discipline I have given up my addiction to meat, to dairy, and become not only vegetarian, but vegan. I think animals have more right to the planet than its polluters. Finally, I renounce material accumulation by courting simplicity, conviviality, and before long I may conquer violence, and head for Ahimsa. 

My name is Grace Ann and 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 (www.horsesenseatwork.com).

Motivational theory centers on heroic cultural myth, a storyteller's script of self; it fails to consider the terror, death, desire, and addiction of work and consumption (Boje & Dennehy, 2000). The main plot of this myth is work/consumption is the path to the good life, an escape from death (Boje, 2001).  Motivation theory is a double bind; it teaches us to measure our self-worth by our work, our sacrifice of family and self, and then rewards us with an addiction to consumption as a substitute for a meaningful life.

First, we 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 silent about death and sex, and terror (Maslow does treat sex as physiological need, but it is more than that). Our connective metaphor is how the theatrics of spectacle motivates our daily lives.  Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1967) fosters addictive patterns, without which our motivation theories would be even less effective than they already are.

The Modern Motivation Theory

Having taught the ideology for over 20 years, we can summarize motivation theory in two tables. They cite motivation rhetoric common to most modernist management and organizational behavior texts, the ones our MBA students learn to recite.

Table 1 - The Influence Theories of the Modern Management World

All these theories combine in the Path-Goal theory of leadership and motivation (House, 1971; House & Mitchell, 1974). The table quotes Wagner and Hollenbeck (1992) and we invite you to count the number of time "manipulate" appears (Boje & Dennehy, 2001).

Table 2: Path Goal Theory, the Combination of Table One Theories of Motivation

In texts such as Wagner and Hollenbeck (1992: 437) it is stated that "the job of the leader, according to path-goal theory, is to manipulate these five factors [see Table 2] in desirable ways... Path-gal theory proposes four behavioral styles that can enable leaders to manipulate these five expectancy theory variables: directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented leadership" (additions mine). We are interested in the overt message of manipulation of desire in Tables 1 and 2.  What is the influence story here? Influence equals manipulation. The narrative of modern influence is the story of rational compliance: teaching manipulation categories, slicing man into categories, and using categories to control people. Look at the rhetoric in Table Two, the number of times the word "manipulation" is used; in both table the total focus on work and more work as the story of how to be happy, self-actualized, recognized, and the shrinking personal life. It is no wonder the studies reveal contradictory results, little explained variance, but this is not the point of motivation theory. But we do not have any interest in making motivation theory work any better. We prefer to look at how it already works all too well.

Our thesis is quite simple. Motivation theory on the surface is a repressive and puritanical ideology, a way to manipulate performance (and satisfaction), where visions of actualizing, need-gratification, and true happiness are fulfilled in acts of work-performativity. Performativity is used here in Lyotard's (1984) sense of working until you drop.  And at a deeper level motivation theory is an addiction not only to work but also to consumption, to 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 fulfillment and Rube Goldberg motivation theory where instrumentalities, valances and need strengths can be controlled and manipulated in forms of social control. In its resistance to the death of organization, motivation theory controls desire, channeling it into productivity, efficiency, and scarcity. 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, motivation theory feeds on our addictions.  In sum, motivation is a compulsive quest for impossible gratification that turns into fetish (both work and consumption), and covers over (not too well) a death wish.  Motivation theory in its existential struggle against soldiering, laziness, inefficiency, and dissatisfaction, becomes just another form of decadence. Motivation theory struggles against decadence then becomes decadence.  To see this deeper point we will need to explore Bataille, Nietzsche, and Marx.

First, we look a bit more at overt manipulation, then we turn to help in associating motivation theory to death, terror, and addiction.

The basic idea of motivation theory (be it hierarchy of needs, expectancy, equity, or path-goal) is a leader is to manipulate the psychological states of subordinates, manipulating leader behavior to increase the motivation of subordinates.

For example, if subordinates have a high need for esteem and affiliation, supportive leader behavior may server as an immediate source of reward satisfaction. On the other hand, subordinates with high needs for autonomy, responsibility, and self-actualization are more likely to be motivated by leaders who are directive rather than supportive. Similarly, individuals who are internally oriented (believe they can control their own behavior) as opposed to externally oriented (believe that their behavior is controlled by fate) prefer leaders who demonstrate more supportive behavior than those low on this dimension (Hellriegel & Slocum, 1979 : 483).

This contingency theory of motivation and leadership predicts the situational factors that can be manipulated by changes in leader behavior to motivate subordinate behavior. The leader choose those behaviors appropriate to the situation of influence and motivation.  "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 & Costley, 2001: 44). House (1996) now has ten types of leader behaviors (including charisma, networking, group, and shared leadership)  and these combine to manipulate and influence everything from subordinate empowerment, satisfaction, ability, performance, to work unit performance.  As Alvesson and Willmott (1996: 18) observe motivation theory is "pregnant with unintended consequences." They go on to say "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). Indeed there are moral-ethical concerns about organizations and societies, and the world system of global capitalism.

• Motivation Theory makes work the only source of satisfaction in life

• Motivation Theory constructs worker and leader identity in terms of work output

• Motivation Theory convinces managers they can manipulate the world of subordinates

• Motivation Theory increases the addiction to work

• Motivation Theory is rooted in particular assumptions about the world

• Motivation Theory moves attention away from the need to fight pollution, the decline in species diversity, eco sustainability, and the growing gap between rich and poor

• Motivation Theory does not attend to its role in the spectacle of consumption

• Motivation Theory lets us sleep walk with out critical self-reflection about values and practices that are humanly and ecological  more viable

As Goulding (1996: 57) concludes, "the location of the problem [of influence and motivation] in this way leads to the acceptance of an apparently total responsibility for the situation by managers." Yet it is a local situation, a spectacle one, not the role of motivation theory in the conduct of exploitation and oppression.  The belief in the right of leaders to control by manipulation the situation of influence goes unquestioned. It is Marx  that examines the consequences of such storylines, the legitimation of manipulating the situation to extract more and more surplus value. For Weber, it is the idea that in bureaucratic organization the leader exercises control by calculated acts of influence.

In Taylorism, and its successors (TQM, Continuous Process Improvement, and Team Concept), motivation theory is the mechanical action on the context that we define as the management of the situation. Motivation theory is a story of the mechanical connection of action. It makes an artificial separation of what is considered management of the situation and what is considered unethical manipulation of people. Manipulation means performing an action and turning a lever to make more valences, move an instrumentality, make a path accurate, make a reward more in amount.  It does not mean unethical influence on someone else's behavior; it is just the mechanics, levers and passage points. The managerialist perspective on motivation theory considers the elements in Table 1 and 2 the situation to manipulate.

Stanley Deetz questions even the more "enlightened" aspects of motivation and empowerment.  His research (Deetz, 2000) shows that conditions which, if dictated by management, would be deemed abusive, are adopted voluntarily by a "motivated" and "empowered" workforce.  For example, if management frequently required workers to stay in their offices 24 hours to complete tasks, even non-unionized management folks 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."  A 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 professional career.  This operates so effectively that most junior managers will assess dating and marriage partners in terms of their ability to further one's professional career, in a new twist on the "corporate" or "trophy" wife syndrome.

We turn now to how motivation theory is associated with death and addiction. Ironically, Maslow did not include death or desire as motivation, and if you look at what is at the bottom of the list of the need theories (Maslow, Alderfer, Herzberg), it is our human relations (which for HR is to be fulfilled by peer, subordinate and boss relations) and our personal life (which died long ago).  For Bataille both sex and death are forms of violence, impulses that can interfere with work (1962: 49). Both are taboo to 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 the death of capitalism and the triumph of worker-revolt in Karl Marx. This exploration sets our stage for a look at how Bataille and Nietzsche take a more postmodern look at death and desire in western culture. As we proceed, our theme is how motivation theory approaches death, and tries to tame desire.

Spectators, Death, and Influence in Smith and Marx

Let us be sacrilegious and speak against motivation theory. Most of what we think we need or want in life is addiction.  We can go back to the author of capitalism and see what theory of influence resides there. 

Adam Smith - Adam Smith asks us to be a spectator to our animal instincts, to become impartial to our need to empathize, to see our self as more than savage and beast.  Smith (Moral Sentiments & Wealth of Nations) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have much in common. In Smith's defense of the Moral Sentiments of the cultured European, he ironically exposes the brutality of imperialist exploitation in Africa, America, and Asia. As he tries to undercut the differences of civilized European and Savage, the most civilized prove to be the most degenerate, to have the least moral sentiments.

Rather than a hierarchy of needs, that puts us above savage and animal, I see a script, a way to perform theater.  The motivational theorists write scripts.

We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. If in this view it pleases us, we are tolerably satisfied (Moral Sentiments, Part III).

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 (Wealth of Nations, Book 1).

This impartial spectator, "the great inmate of the breast" is able to stand by while torture reigns and think it romantic. Read Smith's stories of Euro torture of the Savage, and you find a radical erasure of difference. Smith's critique of imperial exploitation is a vulnerable as Conrad's to the charge of dehumanizing Africa (plus Asia and the Americas).

As an American 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 (Moral Sentiments, Part VIII).

In Smith there is the duality of human and beast, the cultured man of sensibility and the savage. There are many stories of death and terror in Smith, each made into a romantic narrative, where the capitalist and the savage are heroic, and the message quite clear:

When a savage is made prisoner of war, 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 himself, 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. After he has been scorched and burnt, and lacerated in all the most tender and sensible parts of his body for several hours together, he is often allowed, in order to prolong his misery, a short respite, and is taken down from the stake: he employs this interval in talking upon all indifferent subjects, inquires after the news of the country, and seems indifferent about nothing but his own situation. The spectators express the same insensibility; the sight of so horrible an object seems to make no impression upon them; they scarce look at the prisoner, except when they lend a hand to torment him. At other times they smoke tobacco, and amuse themselves with any common object, as if no such matter was going on. 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 (Part V).

The story appears to be heroic, then we see its context in tragic relief, and finally there is irony in a moral sentiments voiew of the age of imperialism, as the quest for slaves, land, fur and gold takes its toll. Smith views the impartial spectator as "the man within the breast" (Part VI). The impartial spectator "does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites" (Part VI). This impartial spectator, "the great inmate of the breast" is able to stand by while torture reigns and think it romantic.

Smith like Conrad anticipates the modernist aesthetic development in his moral philosophy. There is a taming of the untamable character of brutish animalistic human nature in Smith's writings.  When the capitalism of Adam Smith is demystified as a death drive, then the unconscious desire held in check by the performativity principles of motivation theory, the archetype hero of motivation theory is the toiling, workaholic producer, who perfects production by repressing lower order needs in favor of higher ones (actualization, recognition, and pleasure through work).

Karl Marx - In this Critical Theory conference, it is only right to look to Marx (1867) for our motivation theory. For Marx (1867), work is alienated, workers alienated. Marx's heroes are visions of tragedy, the workers purified in the house of terror, exploited unto death, while their last drop of blood is sucked from their vein. For Marx, motivation theory is a way to subject the working class to the influences of servanthood. Marcuse tunes into the spectacle nature of consumer culture, the attraction of the additions, the embrace of the death instinct. 

Marx has his own motivation theory. For Marx the key influence is greed, and his stories speak of vampire and were-wolf, as characterizations of capitalist' greed for the blood of labor, the ultimate addiction. In a pre-play of monitoring we see today about the conditions of labor in athletic apparel, there were few monitors, their reporting procedures inadequate, owners complained about the interference to their production. History repeats. Chapter 10, Das Kapital (1867), Limits of the Working Day Marx observes factory life and tells stories of child and female labor, as well as efforts by capital to chain factory labor to work 24 hours a day. The sweatshop is a "Theater of Terror," a "House of Pain" (p. 276). The greed for surplus-labour appears in the straining after an unlimited extension of the working-day.  Greed sits atop the capitalist hierarchy of needs. "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" (Chapter 10).  In Marx, we can see the cost of the House of Terror:

Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) [72] — moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with 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, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential (1867, Chapter 10).

The word "torpor" means a drug, being half a sleep from being to tired to think and see clearly.

In Marx's 18th Burmaier of Louis Bonaparte:

The tradition of all the dead generations weights like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (Marx as cited in Dollimore, 1998: 214).

For Marx all existing classes except the proletariat disappear in a process of dissolution in the face of Modern Industry.  In the Communist manifesto, the proletariat is a "dangerous class," the lower layers of the old (dead) society that will sweep it into revolution.  In the 18th Brumaier, Marx argues that the vagabonds, jailbirds, prostitutes, thieves, gangsters, discharged soldiers, escaped slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, and beggars all these disintegrated masses and putrid corpses of dead institutions will topple the capitalist order.  The capitalist order is seen as rotten and decaying, and historically doomed to tragedy, to Marx's death wish. At the same time there is the romantic notion that the proletariat class will revolt.  As Dollimore (1998: 220) summarizes 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. For Marx death is part of the dialectic struggle, the dead and decaying capitalism 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 decaying yet still repressive social order resisted by the masses.  Marx's materialist philosophy is a demystification of the ideology of romantic death we see in Smith's writing. Death for Marx is reduced to its biological reality, it is deheroized and it is the death-wish that will bring down capitalism. Marx's philosophy of praxis holds out the romantic prospect of final liberation "that renders death rational and painless" (Dollimore, 1998: 223).

Story from Marx: Mary Anne Walkley died from Over-Work:

Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26 1/2 hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 3 of the cubic feet of air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. [57] And this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor, Mr. Keys, called too late to the death-bed, duly bore witness before the coroner's jury that "Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work in an over-crowded work-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom." In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner's jury thereupon brought in a verdict that "the deceased had died of apoplexy, but there was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated by over-work in an over-crowded workroom, &c." "Our white slaves," cried the Morning Star, the organ of the Free-traders, Cobden and Bright, "our white slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine and die."

Marx analyzes the situation of labor, capital, and monitoring. His storytelling points to greed of Vampires and Were-Wolfs of capital sucking the last drop of blood out of labor.  His is a theory of performativity, how to stretch the working day, and make it a 24-hour day. The average motivation theory is an extension of the same conditions.  Taken to the ultimate, the logic of motivation theory is to extend the working day to 24 hours.  It is not a matter of degree, it is the addictive nature of what we call motivation and consumption that is at issue here, first with Marx's observations of performativity, then with Debord's extension to consumption. Marx argues that if labor can democratize and obtain control of their tools, and representation in Workers' Councils, that it will be more difficult for exploitation to continue. Late in his career, this dream is not realized. Debord argues that we can step back from spectacle, and see how it influences us, another impossibility. Smith thought we could step back from the spectacle of global capitalism and see how to control corporate behavior, how to invoke moral sentiments that could judge corporate behavior; again, another impossibility.

Debord (1967) emphasizes consumption spectacle over Marx's production. Motivation theory in seeking to control decadence crafts us into a machine that forges fetishism, and seduces into a life of dependency and addiction to spectacles of consumption. Motivation theory in seeking to control our mutability entangles us in immutable social orders. We are chronically fatigued to master our needs, satisfactions and expectancies in acts of production, only to turn into addicts of consumptions; the perfect machine of addictive desire.

Death in Motivation Theory as Seen by Nietzsche and Bataille

How would Jonathan Dollimore (1998) and his cast of characters, Nietzsche, Bataille, Mark, Marcuse, Sartre,  Shakespeare, and more look at modernist motivation theory?  For Bataille, motivation theory is built upon disavowal of life, the imperatives of prohibition and utility that make humankind servile.  Nietzsche, like Bataille wants to shatter cultural restraint and advocate for flux, change and the life-force of Dionysus. Motivation Theory is Apollonian, the self-sacrifice, self-control, and denial of life. Motivation theory seeks to civilize desire, to harness the life energy in civilizing repression. This dialectic fascinated Bataille and Nietzsche. Bataille explores how we are sexually attracted towards what is forbidden in our eroticism. Eroticism interplays desire and aversion, that which is filthy and prohibited becomes temptation. The lure of the void is death, chaos, and ruination (Bataille,1991, II: 108). Motivation theory is bourgeois hypocrisy, our attempt to control being human, to manage attraction and repulsion with levers of valance and instrumentality. We are attracted to where maggots swarm and the lukewarm ferments. "I know that one day 'this living world will pullulate in my dead mouth'" (Bataille, as cited in Dollimore, 1998: 253). Death is not pure non-being, it is ever-present in life as change and decomposition. Marx also saw death as what would happen to the capitalist system.

The stuff of life is also death for Bataille (1991, II: 95). Eroticism drays us into a terror:

anguish, which lays us open to annihilation and death, is always linked to eroticism; our sexual activity finally rivets us to the distressing image of decay constantly recoils on sexuality, which it tends to eroticize: in sexual anguish there is a sadness of death, an apprehension of death which... we will never be able to shake off (Bataille, 1991, II: 84).

"Death is the condition of birth, and life is a product of putrefaction" argues Georges Bataille (as cited in Dollimore, 1998: 250). Bataille advocated the flux and change and energy of life force as being both life and death.  Bataille would see in motivation theory a disavowal of how the path-goal and need hierarchy models make us servile. He might even say motivation theory is an anti-life set of principles and practices producing sacrifice at the expense of the animal within us. Our expenditures on performativity work us unto death would seem to be quite the fatal attraction. Bataille would resist the servile mechanisms in motivation theory, and tempt us to abandon making work the center of all existence.

The hierarchy of needs does not mention sexual desire, eroticism, or the death wish; the hierarchy is all about work, the Protestant Ethic of purification through work, the Judean/Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, the nailing of self to the cross. Yet we do advertise sexual ecstasy to self the good life, and the face of death does sell insurance.   But in motivation theory, the personality dies, we become trapped in self-sacrifice to work, perfection, and performativity. Ultimately the organization wants our death, its own death at our expense, and the negation of our life-force.  In the Dionysian there is an adventure incomprehensible to Apollo, an indifference to death, death as guarantee life will flourish (Bataille, Eroticism: 23-4).  We are in physical decomposition, decaying; we have an appointment with death.  "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 cleave in terror at the prospect of their decomposition, disintegration, and death.

Motivation theory is a Apollonian response to authoritarianism. Empowerment makes me laugh. Shall we set out empowerment against authoritarian predation?  Can motivation theory discipline corporate predation? Do we hope to empower a few workers to take on totalitarian modern corporate hegemony? Empowerment, the reincarnate of delegation, is the great hoax, a desperate fantasy that the meek shall inherit the earth.  Marx hoped that some liberating prxis would empower worker democracy, out of a revolution against the repression of capital. Bataille favored a more erotic project, and Nietzsche the Will to Power.

Will to Power

I do not possess a hierarchy of needs. I pretend to be hierarchical. I will myself to play like I have a need. 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 is like that movie, The Matrix. It is spectacularity, a theater in which we participate, from which our mind can not unplug. Motivation theory is a romantic way to take flight for the life and death struggle of planetary life.  In the movie, the character Cyber, would rather remain in the spectacular illusion of The Matrix, where simulated steaks tasted better than real food, and just withdraw from the every day pain and suffering of revolution.  Nietzsche urges us to embrace suffering and pain, step out of the spectacular illusion of The Matrix, but not for revolution, rather to grasp the lust for life.  

Beneath motivation theory is the life-exhausting denial of life energy, the repression of Dionysus by Apollo. The will to power, for Nietzsche embraces the lust for life.  In reading Nietzsche, we see motivation theory as romantic, heroic repudiation of death, the plight of the eternally unsatisfied to find satisfaction, fulfill needs, and top off valences. It is the heroic wistfulness of Protestant resolve, the performative demand to suffer and work till death, to fight off the self, and conquer the animal nature.   Nietzsche embraced Dionysus' lust for life, and sought to elude the control of life's passions represented by Apollo. 

It is the Dionysial ecstasy that has to be controlled by motivation theories, in principles of Apollonian order through acts of self control, self-knowledge, restraint, containment, and denial.

Do I have needs full of desire? I desire to do something before I die, I want to figure out this writing game that academics play. My desire is to topple motivation theory, to unbolt its mechanisms, to show I am no machine.  Put away your carrot and stick. Give up your reinforcement schedule. Do not play me like some fool. I do not have higher order needs.

I train MBA students to see a need-hierarchy everywhere. those people from Chian and El Salvador are starving. The families in Pakistan are worried about survival, getting enough food today. We westerners are fat, we are driven by our higher order needs. Best to locate the Skinnerian and Tayloristic factories in the countries abundant with lower order needs.

We have a need for sex that is everywhere, in each ad, on every bill board, in every TV show, in all the movies. I have a need to be manly. As Mick Jagger says "He can not be a man because he does not smoke the same cigarettes as me" (from I can Get No Satisfaction." 

In specularity, the Society of the Spectacle (Debord, 1967) present the story of what motivates me to be happy.  I learn how to interpret the other.  I enter into this script as an actor on a global stage. I see the script staged hundreds of times a day in spectacular media, so I know my part all too well.

We turn not to the relationship between Motivation Theory to Addicted Organization and Society of the Spectacle.

Addiction and Motivation Theory

Addiction is a slow death. Schaef and Fassel (1988: 5) observe that the study of organizations is in denial when it comes to addiction, not just to drug use, but to processes of work that are addictive. "An addiction is any substance or process that has taken over our lives and over which we are powerless" (p. 57). I think motivation theory leads us into addiction, making work our increasingly a compulsion, manipulating the situation to make us powerless to resist work addiction.  Within organizations, addiction to work or workaholism is an untold ramification of motivation theory. Since the addiction to consumption is the norm of a capitalist society, we all participate addictively at some level.

Indeed, our society itself is an addictive system and acts exactly like an individual addict in the way it functions and the processes it sets up. Thus the theory of an addictive personality clouds the issue. The problem is not that there are people running around with addictive personalities; there exists an addictive process that underlies an addictive system, and it surrounds and influences all of us (Schaef & Fassel, 1988: 51)

Nonrecovering 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 accounting, law, and consulting firms. The true addicts of corporations rise quickly in the leadership hierarchy.  Motivation theory, by its silence and denial, promotes workaholism as a socially acceptable influence, one that is organizationally productive. The Society of the Spectacle promotes addiction to stuff, and paying for that stuff with more work.  The organization itself functions as "an active addict" (Schaef & Fassel, 1988: 8).  We all work in more or less "addictive organizations," where we patch up problems of addiction. The lean and mean high performing organizations is an addictive one, with no boundary between home and work, where commitment means putting in more hours. Working 24, 7 is an expectation that workaholic leaders bring to addicted organizations.

Besides the process-addiction of work, there is the process of perfectionism. Being obsessed with quality and zero-defects can become a system that breeds perfectionism. '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 & 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 addict. In motivation theory terms, the expectancy is never satisfied.

During the downsizing of the 1980s and 1990s, addictive organizations combine workaholism and perfectionism with a scarcity model. "In this system, there is an abiding belief that there is simply not enough to go around" (p. 65). 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 get sustained. IN the addictive organization it is not OK to talk openly about problems or express feelings. Co-dependents refuse to handle a situation by confronting it, preferring more enabling roles.

The addictive system is preoccupied with control and the illusion of control Motivation and leadership theory is preoccupied with how to control one another, and how to control the work who is busy trying not to be controlled.  Fads and fashionable management and development programs are implemented, one after the other to give the illusion of control.  The T-groups of the 1950s and 1960s were a way to deal with frozen feelings about participation. The quality circles of the 1980s were a way to involve workers in their work processes. The reengineering craze of the 1990s was a way to get lean and mean. Organizations got busy with fads and fashions, distracting themselves from their addictive processes. Postmodern organizations and the new spirituality movement are just more recent ways to attempt to control, to perfect, and to enact the scarcity mentality.  Each can be just a surface treatment, a quick fix, that does not deal with quality of life and ecology issues.

The addicted organization contrives ways to involve workers and leaders more deeply in the excitement of work. Addictive organizations thrive on chaos, confusion, crazy-making, and crisis; this is the fix for the process addict.  We become co-dependent with the addictive leader, enacting an illusionary theater to keep workaholic bosses from confronting their addictions. Schaef and Fassel (1988: 63) list three levels of lying by addicts:

• First, addicts lie to themselves. The purpose of this lying is to stay out of touch with what they are feeling and what they know and need.

• Then addicts lie to people around them, and by o doing, create a confusing and dishonest...  [organizational] system.

• Finally, they lie to the world at large. One example of this is "putting up a good front" to the community.

Keeping up a front, plausible denial, and disinformation are part of the act. The addictive organization not only reflects the characteristics of its leaders, but the addictive processes perpetuate the cycle. Actually, neither the addictive organization nor the addictive leader reflects the other, "for they are not a mirror, they are the other" and embedded in an addictive society (p. 53). In this sense the organization adapts to an addictive society, but also seeks to addict that society to both work and consumption. Addicted organizations are essential to an addictive society. 

Better workers have fewer sick days, do not take vacations, work weekends,  with no sense of the physical and psychological harm to themselves and others. Commitment means full participation, the new technologies (email, fax, beeper, cell phone, & Palm Pilot) help work from being isolated from any private life. The excellent company does more with less, workers faster with fewer people, and courts chaos.  In leadership, the organization takes on the personality of the executive. If the executive is addicted to speed, chaos, paranoia, then the work process can take on these process qualities. 

People working in addictive organizations are socialized to do what pleases others, to pretend their sacrifices are voluntary, to do whatever it takes to keep control. the addictive organization works overtime to refuse to recognize processes that are threatening and unhealthy. Knowledge is truncated, disinformation passes for information, so that personalities in conflict can look harmonious to the outside world. "In the addictive system, accurate information is always a threat to the status quo" (p. 72). "In the addictive organization, everyone loses" (p. 93).  Co-dependents are part of the system of addiciton. If an adict recovers then the co-dependent is not needed.

We teach about deconstruction and dualism analysis. Addictive organizations court dualistic thinking. since it allows a complex world to look simple (two choices), the one side of the dualism can look right while the other is just wrong, a false sense of control and stability can be perpetuated, and no other options get explored so that the addictive system can just stay busy.

It takes a the collusion of hoards of  co-dependents to keep process 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 on 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-centered addict so that 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. Co-dependents like the addicts they court, can be just as angry, depressed, controlling, and manipulative (p. 76).  There are four key forms of addiction in organization:

1. Organizations in which a key person is an addict. In terms of process addiction, this can be a leader who has a compulsive personality, such as perfectionism, workaholism, and dogmatically insists that others submit to their way of doing things.  Workaholic leaders suffer from self-centeredness, mood swings, depression, guilt, and inadequacy.  Buried in their work, they get out-of-touch with their feelings, and detach from the present (except for the process of choice which becomes their whole world). Workaholics can and do become increasingly tragic figures, seeking to fix the organization through more work, more perfection, and more control. Eventually the stress and pace take their toll and the wipe out is inevitable. To perpetuate the "con" the co-dependent aids the addict in denial, excuses, and spin control. The cover up is everywhere, so the fix of the theatrics can continue. Confusion is and secretiveness is created throughout the system, leafing people powerless to do anything about the addiction.  Workaholic organizations take one more work than they can complete, and eventually the people can not cope with the over-work. Crisis management and tales of disaster are rampant.  People get depressed, tired, and physically ill. People who are balanced and work reasonable hours are seen as troublemakers, as threats to the survival of the organization good co-dependents pretend that getting people to work harder will resolve all problems.  The workaholic boss can evoke such hostility that it creates friction and people around them are miserable.  Co-dependents accede to their every request, including staying late, and perpetuating systems of denial and cover yp.

2. Taking your disease with you into the organization, or the reality of replication.  We repeat behaviors in organizations that we learn in our families. since many families are addictive settings, the disease spreads. Of course, the reverse is also true, our work addictive life infects our home life, with fatal results to many marriages. The addiction of choice of adult children is workaholism. these are dedicated workers, unable to say no to demands, rarely open to options, preferring to do their way, and naturally have trouble with authority (who they see as surrogate. 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.  Being out of touch with their feelings, workaholics are unaware of the effects of their demands on those who work with them. Workaholics seek what the corporate world can not provide: attention, encouragement, and approval for themselves as persons (p. 102). There are all kinds of characters we just learn to put up with. they get away with addictive behavior at home, and why not at work?

3. The Organization as an Addictive substance - Organizations are more than just another context in which we act out addictive behavior (be it process or chemical). Motivational theories practices in complex organizations enmesh with addictions, to the point that the organization is itself an addictive substance. Anything that takes center stage of our life space can become addictive. The addictive organization promises to fulfill our needs, gratify our expectancies for influence, provide opportunities to empower us, and self-actualize. It is a place where life is manageable, and there is equity, even a sense of belonging. For Disney it is the family, then 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, images of work are seductive, the life styles are fast-paced, and the pace is fast, furious, and it hooks us. The recognition, belonging, and approval that came from family life and community life are now corporate experiences.  We go to company picnics, evening socials, and wear company T-shirts. In the company family there are (rigid) rules of behavior, dress codes, and all kinds of control that many of us growing up in dysfunctional families never experienced. Our MBA students attend dress for success and eat for success training programs. And when the work organization does not always seem like a family, when we go along and 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. "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" (Schaef & Fassel, 1988: 124, additions mine).  Over time, the promise of benefits of loyalty and dedication, even when unfulfilled become not only the "con? but an addictive agent or "fix" (p. 125). IN short, motivation theory tells us that when we are working we are most alive. feeling energetic, actualized, and needed. We feed off the adrenaline rush that tricks our body into believing work is fun, and stress is healthy.

4. The organization as Addict - Organizations are systems of addictive processes (motivation theories, ideologies, and schemata) in which you can take this person out, put another one in, and the system keeps on ticking. The illusions, dualism, and the system of denial are systemic, not personality-driven. Organizations can behave paranoid-like, confused, dysfunctional, and obsessive. Harvey (1988) has a chapter in his book The Abilene Paradox titled "organizations as Phrog Farms." A Phrog farm is an organization, in deep trouble, that pretends that it is not knee deep in the swamp. The people are addicted to pretending that they are powerless to do anything about their collective behavior.  People collude in the agreement that they do not talk about their problems, do not confront dysfunctional, and even abusive behavior. People spend inordinate amounts of time and energy justifying hwy 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.

In my own life (David), everything revolves around my work. I am either working or sleeping. Get between me and my computer screen, where I can work 24/7 and you have a fight on your hands. I am productive but know I can publish more and rise in the career ladder. If I attend more conferences, deliver more papers, become more visible, my career grows. I look at others who have 200 or 500 published articles and feel lazy. I complained to someone about 200 messages being too much email, and found this guy answered over 1,000 a day. In short, I can always work harder, do more, and no amount of publishing is ever enough. Since the turn around time for articles takes so long, I have taken to just posting drafts on the web, reworking them till they find a publication home. I try to watch my multi-tasking. Typing on the computer, while talking on the phone, while reading through papers on my desk.  Work is my overriding excuse for everything; why my first marriage failed, why I can not go away for a weekend, why I miss family events.  I combine conference speaking with vacations, so much of the time is spent preparing to give presentations, meeting people about manuscripts. This is Sunday, I should be resting, but this draft needs to be reworked. Grace Ann sets bowls of food next to my computer like I am a dog. Working is my addiction, my fix, and self-con belief that through work I am living the good life. The pace is grueling. I sit at the computer for ten to fifteen hours a day, running back and forth to the bathroom, interrupting to take a call. I force myself to take a lunch or dinner break. If my back did not ache at the end of the day, I would just keep sitting there, stroking away. At the end of the week I am worn out. Sometimes its hard to get through a Friday afternoon, or a Saturday, or Sunday. It is a chore to go to worship on Sunday; it takes too much time away from work.   If I don't take some breaks my work suffers, and I slow down, and the writing gets garbled.  So even breaks is just a way to make the work perform better. I jog five to six miles several times a week. Writers love to run. Immersion into work and into running is an altered state of consciousness; both give me an adrenaline high. Work is a mood-altering addiction, and I can escape from the reality of the present. I do not have to worry about my daughter's exile in Canada, the eldest sons' coming marriage, my youngest son's schizophrenia, or my Dad's life after his second cancer operation, or my second granddaughter Juliet Starr - who I have not seen (Renee Boje web site; Medical Marijuana versus Democracy and Rene; another good show on prison industry and pharmaceutical as well and dumbing down of America;  www.pot-tv.com;  Ray Boje web site).

I am aware I have a progressively fatal disease. It is killing me, and I can not stop. There are too many rewards for my workaholic behavior and too little time. Being a productive member of classroom, university, and academy are important to my identity, to my psyche, to my way of being.

Attached you will find a workaholic survey. Fill it out. I did and my score was alarming, but still I am dedicated to my computer.

Specularity and Motivation Theory

Instead of Maslow, Alderfer or Herzberg, I think Motivation Theory is just spectacularity. We have a counter-story to tell, one where the savage is the higher-order being.  We met a man 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 ne "needed" to buy food in the supermarket, needed to get a car, and needed an apartment with all the 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 breath fresh air, and reach the end of our journey.  Why not be happy every day? The villagers fish for food in the ocean by wading out with a net. They picked the mango and bread fruit off the tree.  The people in the village wore colorful garments, smiled at one another, and we wondered about the need hierarchy.

Popular culture, in magazines such as working Woman and Savvy tout workaholic women, the super beings who can have it all and the message is clear "work like this and you will get ahead" (Schaef & Fassel, 1988: 130).

    If there is a hierarchy of needs, it is a spectacular one.

• 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 house to store stuff, more energy to preserve stuff, more security to guard stuff, and more help to dust stuff. Stuff rules our lives. Our hierarchy of needs begins and ends with a need for more. Motivation theory feeds an addicted society.  Motivation theory, be it need theory (McClelland, Maslow, Alderfer, or Herzberg) or process theory (Skinner's reinforcement theory, Vroom's expectancy theory and House's path-goal theory) – is blindly embedded in a world addicted by spectacle to work and consumption.  Debord's (1967) 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 (work till you drop dead), 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 games of death, terror and addiction.  If there is a hierarchy of needs, then Maslow can be de-coded, new words substituted, greed, jealousy, envy, gluttony, hoarding, and addiction. This is the deconstructed hierarchy of Maslow needs.

What is self-actualization?  It is an illusion, a fantasy that we are more than animals, that our culture makes us different.  We are part of the war machine that Deleuze and Guattari write about in A Thousand Plateaus. It is a war machine fed by desire and will to power, not by need.  We do not need most of the stuff in our closet, our dressers, our garage. We do not need more of what we consume. We don't need most of what we eat, wear, and store. Did Emelda Marcos need 400 pairs of shoes? Did Michael Eisner need a 210 million dollar bonus. Does Tiger Woods need another endorsement contract? Addicts need more and more...

We live in an Addicted Postmodern World

The spectacle of addictive work and accumulation underlies all motivation theories.  For example, at the top of need theory lists are achievement, challenging work, personal growth, self-esteem, responsibility, and recognition/advancement -- all defined by our work, and leading us down the path to addiction. Motivation theory is out of touch with the addicted workplace, the changes in the global theater of postindustrial consumption and production, and the darker side of the postmodern workplace. 

The desire for work is overwhelming, a compulsion to write more, publish more, present more, to go berserk with words. It is a need to work boje to death.  I work at home. I work at work. I work on the plane. I work in the hotel room. I am addicted to work. I am a good citizen. I am a good work. I am self-actualized in my work.  I have converted my private world into a world of work. I dream of work, I wake up working. I go to bed working.

Beneath this theatrical mask, is a speculation that my needs are addictions, my needs are desires gone haywire, and my accumulation is out of control.  I need to motivation theorist to convince me I am empowered, I am growing, I am a high need achiever.  I pretend to be motivated, but my need is a desire for death, a working to death.

I am cultured, working to be more than animal. But, animals do not work themselves to death.  I am higher so I can see the Other as lower, motivated by lower needs.

Here is my thesis, stated as clearly as my glazed and bloodshot eyes can craft it. Nietzsche, Sartre, Debord, and Marx sway the well to power, the need for greed, the addiction of consumption. Marx saw the spectacle of the working day, the vampire sucking the last drop of blood out of labor, killing labor by stretching the working day. Debord saw the Society of the Spectacle as the move from the performativity of production, to stretching consumption over every surface of the body, invading every aesthetic with consumerism.  Sartre worked himself to death, a workaholic to the core, while he pointed at the being that was nothingness, the existential condition that was absurd.  Nietzsche saw the will to power, the man in the cave who had more wisdom than the culture of the town.

We are heated slowly like the lobster. We take shorter vacations and have no legally mandated holidays. Based on a standard test, all of David’s MBA students were workaholics (see  http://www.foxnews.com/health/work/nine_04.sml).  What is the definition of successful manager, if not one who is addicted to work?

Motivation Theory and the Theatrics of Motivation

What we call the theatrics of motivation, is described by Goux (1998: 43-44) in an analysis of a play by Alfred de Vigny.  A poet chooses suicide to "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 Comte wanted to be in alliance with the philosophers in order to exercise moral authority in predatory capitalism (Goux, 1998: 41). Is there 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.

Sweatshops have Stormed the Postmodern Stage – Motivation theories ignore the issue of a living wage.  While we are busily learning to memorize our 5 path-goal valence manipulations, Wal-Mart is setting up sweatshops in China and Netslaves in Silicon Valley. It is estimated that 500 Chinese women commit suicide each day, their choice sweatshop or starvation. Sweatshop is a "Theater of Terror," a "House of Pain" that lives today. As Marx observed the sweatshops in Europe and the U.S., he saw modern management as the "vampire" sucking every last drop of blood and life from living labor (1867: 233). Adam Smith (1976) in the Wealth of Nations, saw the choice about paying each worker a "living wage" was clear, economic and moral (Smith, 1776, CHAPTER VIII Of the Wages of Labour).  Forty-five academics just submitted a research proposal to test Smith's, Marx's, and Taylor's options in the apparel industry (Boje et al, 2000). Frederick Taylor saw a living wage as the due of the high-priced worker, willing to perform like a circus animal while the expert planned the mechanical motions of their working day. 

Terror and Consensus  

Consensus is a form of terror, and those change agents who provoke consensus with spectacle, enact motivational themes that hide the face of power. "To be excluded [by consensus] is also to be outside the sphere of visibility" (Gaillard, 1998: 73).  For example, sweatshop workers and Netslaves are excluded from visibility, but now disrupt consensus, and gain a polity that protests WTO and global consensus.

Apostolidés (1998) links terror and theater, using an example relating to the French Revolutionary Tribunal, a time when many were motivated by the guillotine. In a play by Maréchal about the Tribunal:

Contemporary history is thus duplicated and reproduced in fictive space. State secrets, once a privilege of the monarchy, are now disclosed to the public (Apostolidés, 1998: 138).

The play offers a lesson to motivation theory. The spectators are motivated by the spectacle theatrics, not by the need and process theories we find in the textbooks. In the romantic spectacle of motivation theory, the leaders are heroes, while the workers are vilified and ridiculed, fit for the humiliating motivational machine, the engineered valances and instrumentality levers.

What can be done?

Addictive organizations are hurting ones, as our societies of the spectacle. In both, addictions are progressive and fatal. There are no quick fixes, no easy solutions. Giving up an addiction, exposes us to the life problems that our addictions alllowed us to escape form, and the problems that they created for others.  These are systemic, even global issues, that require collective approaches.

1. Slow Down -  Convivia (from the Latin word for festive) is the name being give to the Slow Food movement that originated in Italy and now has 60,000 members in 42 countries (Isthmus, 2000: 55). Convivia Flag Image. Slowing down can mean writing fewer papers, going to fewer conferences, taking more time off.

2. Send your boss/co-worker anonymous "You're a workaholic card." Actually send yourself this card.

3. Set a limit to work time. Take breaks. It starts with refusing to work overtime and taking weekends off.

4. Ignore motivation theories that set up perfection and workaholism as the goal.  Make progress, but not perfection the goal.

Table 3: What is the INFLUENCE of Work, Consumption, & Convivia Ethics in our lives?

Conclusions

Motivation theory restricts itself to the fictive space of the mechanistic Leviathan, but post postmodern spectacle is a more pervasive theater, one where characters of cruelty and terror masquerade as romantic heroes. As for “true” heroes, in the postmodern world 'they're not here, they're not coming" (Henley, 2000).

Motivation theory 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 the perfect human being, able to fulfill life's satisfactions, and self-actualize through work. Instead of a capitalism that embraces life, ours does war on nature. Motivation theory is a quest for transcendent being through perfection, self-sacrifice, and corporeal control achieved through performativity.

Taylor developed a motivation theory of quotas, levers, time and motion that world control soldiering. Smith would control the beast in man with an internal and impartial spectator.  Nietzsche embraced the beast and death itself in will to power.  For Bataille death is part of life. For Marx, capitalism is the cultural purveyor of death, and in his dialectic theory, death would overtake capitalism, and give birth to an emancipated work.

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