The other two parts of this series are Massage Therapy Needs Pigs with Wings and Down the Rabbit Hole: Structure. To access the voiceover for this article, scroll down to the section labeled “Basic Assumptions.”
Content warning: There is a list of questions pertaining to assault and harassment of therapists in the “Gender Inequality” section
This article is written to an audience of co-conspirators as opposed to a general group of potentially interested readers.
If you’re reading this article, I’m assuming a few things:
You are deeply invested in fixing what ails the profession of massage therapy.
You’ve realized there are no easy answers, only a lot of hard work.
You’re okay existing in the space between understanding and complete confusion.
This article will provide you with brief introductions to my areas of interest and the questions that plague me (and maybe you, too). After that I leave it to you and your curiosity to decide what to do with the information. The sources I’ve linked are mostly academic literature, not Wikipedia articles or Youtube videos because I trust that you are able to seek alternative sources of information when you feel you need them.
In the first piece, I gave you the short, party-friendly version of my question. Here’s the long version:
Why does a profession that does impactful physical and emotional work with humans and human bodies continue to experience social and economic extraction, knowledge deficits, and fragmented organization— and what keeps that condition in place?
To reiterate: I do not have a graduate degree of any kind. This means that my thought processes are not those of someone with a PhD. My thoughts are not perfectly rational or backed up with solid data. Some of the questions in this article are expressing my opinions, hypotheses, or assumptions.
If you have ever watched a group take an action that seemed mysterious or ridiculous to you, you have experienced someone else’s organizational culture. Things like how members of a group communicate (Email? Carrier pigeon? Yelling down the hallway?) to who gets promoted (The boss’ nephew? The loudest person? The cleverest person?) are the result of culture.
Edgar Schein says that “Cultures are learned patterns of beliefs, values, assumptions, and behavioral norms that manifest themselves at different levels of observability.” He goes on to describe culture as coming from an “accumulation of shared learning.” The very brief version is that groups create culture because at one time they faced a problem and they found a solution that worked. In doing so, they shared a learning experience, and that experience (the solution) was ingrained in their group. Over time, groups forget about the first experience, but the learning remains and becomes what Schein calls “cultural DNA.”
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