Like The Wire, academics? As How the University Works explains, that's because you're actually living it. Warning: contains minor spoilers for the first half of season 5, which, as every blog post I'm trying to avoid will tell you, came to an end last night.
Quality management takes advantage of the fact that most people don’t behave as the self-interested clots modelled by neoliberal economics. Most people are animated by profoundly pro-social impulses. To a limited but real extent, depending on individual factors, janitors do their work for love of clean floors. And it is the overt, cannibalistic intention of quality management to see that—to the absolute limit of the possible—they do that work for love alone.
Only management, in the quality scheme, isn’t done for love. One can see why. Management in the quality scheme is done for hate–for hate of democracy, equality, and the public, in service of a totalitarian culture of subservience to “leadership.”
In the quality scheme, management is paid more to do something most of us can’t do. Most of us can’t live in mansions while our neighbors can’t afford chemo; most of us really believe that accumulation has reasonable limits.
Only a very unusual person can do what the sleaziest small contractor does–pick up day labor, pay them less than the minimum wage to rebuild a suburban kitchen, collect fifty grand, and then dump the workers back on the street corner.
The task of academic quality management is to find those rare people and make them deans, provosts, and presidents.
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