The Managerial Destruction of Language

By Paul O’Connor

In our time of ubiquitous digital communication, it seems strange to recall that in 1980s Ireland the cutting edge of technology was represented by the landline telephone. Households could be several years on a waiting list to have one installed. I remember the excitement when my own family got a landline in the mid-80s – a bulky plastic contraption with a rotary dial that would appear positively Palaeolithic today. It was an incredible novelty to ring somebody at a distance and talk to them over the phoneline. In provincial Ireland, these were still the days of ‘two channel land’ – when the only programming available on the television was RTE1 and RTE2. If the past is a foreign country, in some respects 1980s Ireland feels like an alternate dimension.

The company that installed our phone was a semi-state body called Telecom Eireann, only recently hived off from the old ‘Department of Post and Telegraphs’ whose existence was coeval with that of the state. Its name described what it was: the body responsible for telecommunications in Ireland. Just over a decade later, as Ireland was reshaped by rapid economic growth, globalisation, and neoliberalism, the government decided that the phone network should be privatised. Telecom Eireann was floated on the stock market in 1999 under a new name: Eircom.

At first glance this was simply an abbreviation, a snappier version of the old title. But in reality it fundamentally changed its meaning – or rather diminished it. Whereas ‘Telecom’ denoted a specific sector of the economy, telecommunications, as the company’s area of operations, ‘com’ is a non-word with no determinate meaning, although it seems to connote ‘communications’ and perhaps also ‘commerce’, ‘community’ and so on. Meanwhile ‘Eireann’, which is the generative case of Éire, the Gaelic word for ‘Ireland’ and the official name of the Irish state, was replaced by the entirely meaningless ‘Eir’. The association of the company with a particular territory and country was thereby dissolved, replaced by a coinage that seemed to gesture vaguely towards bodilessness, motion, flow…in fact the new world of globalisation and digital communications which was already taking form and which Eircom clearly saw as its future.

In 2015 the company rebranded yet again. It is now simply ‘Eir’, an empty signifier which successfully eradicates both its history and any lingering suggestion of territorial connection or national allegiance. This is of course entirely understandable. An ancestry in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs is as embarrassing for a digital communications company as an association with trade was for an eighteenth-century aristocrat. ‘Eir’ sounds like it could be a newly-minted Silicon Valley start-up, which is obviously much better.

This history was recently recalled for me because the main telecommunications company in the UAE, where I now live, changed its name from Etisalat to e&. Etisalat is an English transliteration of the Arabic word ‘Ittiṣālāt’, meaning ‘communications’ or ‘telecommunications’. Like Telecom Eireann, it was a straightforward descriptor of the business sector in which what was officially titled the Emirates Telecommunications Group Company was involved. ‘e&’ on the other hand signifies precisely nothing, unless we take the ‘&’ to designate an ambition to expand the company’s business into any and every potentially profitable activity (it is already one of the largest telecommunication providers across the Middle East and Africa). On different continents and a decade or so apart, the corporate branding of both Eir and e& - both originating as state-owned phone companies – underwent an identical evolution towards abstraction and placelessness.

They are part of a trend. British Telecom became BT. France Telecom became Orange. Standard Oil, an iconic American institution, became Exxon, a completely invented word with no geographic or product ties. Twitter, a verb suggestive of animated conversation, was replaced with X, an abstract mathematical signifier. In each case the meaning associated with geographic identifiers, functional designations or concrete products was stripped out and replaced by empty signifiers. This simultaneously gestures towards an abstract, frictionless modernity and frees management to invest in any potentially profitable activity unhampered by considerations of a company’s ‘legacy’ business.

This type of corporate rebranding is only one of the ways in which managerialism hollows out language and evacuates meaning. I have cited it here both to show that the generation of ‘non-words’ is not just a feature of political or intellectual life, but extends to almost all areas of contemporary hypermodernity; and to suggest how this is embedded in broader processes of globalisation, neoliberal economics, digitalisation, and managerial governance.

A non-word might be described as a word which has been deliberately emptied of meaning in the service of ideological alignment or corporate-managerial control. One might recall Orwell’s statement in his ‘Essay on Newspeak’ that ‘the special function of certain Newspeak words…was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them’. This remains the case with today’s non-words, whether they are new coinages, abbreviations, or older words that have been repurposed. In each case the motive behind the production of non-words is the reduction of the word to a narrower, often ideological, range of meaning, and the elimination of complexity, nuance and connotation.

It is possible to identify a number of different types of non-words:

Political and ideological non-words: These are words which have been either newly coined or substantially altered to serve explicitly ideological purposes. Such terms have the goal of inculcating an ideologically correct perspective on some aspect of the world, while simultaneously eradicating or memory-holing ideologically problematic or inconvenient ways of thinking. Arpad Szakolczai provided multiple examples in his previous post, such as the substitution of ‘environment’ for ‘nature’. In this case, a whole range of normative, moral, aesthetic and spiritual connotations associated with ‘nature’, often going back many centuries, and now seen as problematic, are banished through the substitution of ‘environment’. This also affords policy-makers, managers and campaign groups greater scope to load the newer term with the connotation they see as desirable.

Marketing non-words: It’s not just pizza – it’s passion. It’s not a salad bar – it’s a food movement. And the guy delivering take-out to your door? He doesn’t just ride a bike, he’s a ‘delivery hero’. Like ideological non-words, marketing non-words aim to shape our perception of the world, and do so by flattening and narrowing meaning. Marketing does so primarily through the grossly exaggerated and overblown description of attributes of products and services. One does not sell a product, one ‘evangelises’ for it; something is not slightly novel, it is ‘at the bleeding edge’ of market trends; instead of providing accounting software, a company provides ‘robust, end-to-end solutions’. Such systematic inflation of language ultimately has the opposite effect of devaluing it and leaving it evacuated of meaning.

Managerial non-words: Perhaps the single most fertile source of non-words in contemporary society are the fields of management, public administration and organisational theory. The most consistent feature of this language is its extreme abstraction. Management-speak is systematically emptied of any concrete referent. This is deliberate: this is a language which dissolves the particular and evades specifics in order to secure managerial control. Abstraction is used to obscure conflicts of interest and differential of power which might create a demand for substantive rather than the procedural ones offered by managers, and assimilate widely different contexts and cases to a limited number of models which can be subordinated to managerial processes and regulation. A few examples follow:

‘Vision’ and ‘mission’

St Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus; as a result, he eventually undertook a mission to spread Christianity among the gentile population of the Roman Empire. In this context a ‘vision’ meant something miraculous and life-changing, and a ‘mission’ a project of evangelisation that reflected a deep ethical and spiritual commitment. Today, every organisation infected with contemporary management theory must have a ‘vision’ and ‘mission’, whether they are a software developer, an ice-cream parlour, or a dental clinic. Often these are publicly displayed on websites or in waiting areas of the business premises. Strangely, no corporate vision statement declares ‘our vision is the get filthy rich’ or ‘our mission is to maximise profit by paying our employees as little as possible, selling a mediocre product at extortionate prices, and evading tax’. Their goal is to claim ethical and social purpose for organisations which typically have little of either. They are invariably anodyne and couched in language that is simultaneously aspirational and vague, with a frequent repetition of fashionable buzzwords. A university might declare its vision ‘to be a globally recognized leader in education, research, and innovation, shaping a better future for society’ and its mission as to ‘inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge through impactful research, and engage with our communities to develop ethical, innovative, and globally minded graduates’. Such formulations rarely convey so much as a single definite idea: they could mean anything and usually mean nothing. This process is also a good example of the successive stages of secularisation: first was the substitution of a human vision and mission for a divine (modernity); second, the complete emptying visible in such corporate managerial ‘vision’ statements (hypermodernity).

Stakeholder

Originally a ‘stakeholder’ was a neutral party who held the stakes in a wager and gave them to the winning party when the contest was over. In other words, the term meant somebody without a vested interest. The reversal of its meaning, so it now signifies someone with an interest or claim in something, may derive from colonial America, where settlers would ‘stake a claim’, asserting ownership of a piece of land by driving stakes into the ground. In twentieth-century management theory, the term was taken up to describe groups like employees, customers or suppliers who were important for a company and whose interests its management needed to take into account. This was eventually extended to anyone who might be affected by, or impact, a company’s achievement of its objectives. ‘Stakeholder capitalism’ is one of the most popular contemporary buzzwords. Like statements about a company’s ‘vision’ and ‘mission’, this is an effort to cover the naked pursuit of profit and managerial control with a veneer of ethics and purpose. Like many managerial terms, it works through heightened abstraction. Specific groups of people with different and often conflicting interests and varying levels of power – employees, customers, local residents protesting against a development, government agencies of different kinds, banks and financial institutions, suppliers – are dissolved into an abstract category of ‘stakeholders’, which levels differences and gives the impression that everyone is equal and on the same side. Sharp conflicts of interest and difficult questions of who gains or loses from organisational decisions can thereby be neutralised through vague gestures to ‘stakeholder engagement’.

Benchmarking

The term benchmarking derives from 19th-century land surveying. A ‘benchmark’ referred to a specific mark made on a permanent surface (like a stone or building) where surveyors would insert an angle-iron to create a ‘bench’ to hold their measuring equipment at a known elevation. From this literal point of reference, the term evolved to mean any fixed standard or baseline used to measure, evaluate, or compare the quality and performance of other things. A company may asses its profit margin against those of others in the same sector; a retailer might compare its fulfilment time for online orders against its main competitors; a university may assess to what extent the course offerings in its programs are comparable to those of other institutions. As in the case of stakeholders, a word that originally had a concrete, physical referent here takes on a much more abstract meaning. This abstraction serves to empower management by obscuring a whole load of questions about these kinds of ‘benchmarking’ processes. For example, why should universities around the world model their academic programs on those of a handful of American institutions? Should program design not instead reflect local contexts, cultural difference, student preferences and faculty expertise? Isn’t diversity a strength in itself, especially in matters of intellectual enquiry? These questions would be unavoidable if university leaderships and accreditation authorities told departments ‘your program should simply copy Harvard and Stanford’. They can be obfuscated when such demands are presented as neutral ‘benchmarking exercises’.

Deliverables

Management, whether corporate, public sector or non-profit, is obsessed with ‘deliverables’. This non-word fits into an entire category of management terms which are abstract yet action-orientated: ‘optimise’, ‘execute’, ‘facilitate’, ‘drive’, ‘scale’, ‘champion’ etc. These combine a high degree of abstraction with an impression of relentless dynamism. Their use conveys the message ‘We’re really busy here! Lots of important things are getting done!’, combined with a studied vagueness as to what exactly has been accomplished. This perfectly matches the role of management, which inserts itself into organisations parasitically, continually elaborating process while contributing little or nothing of substance.

Disruption

Another category of managerial non-words celebrate change, especially disruptive, abrupt, disorientating change, as good in and of itself. These include ‘disruption’, ‘innovation’, ‘reform’, ‘restructuring’, ‘change-management’, or ‘transformation’, including variants such as ‘digital transformation’. The key point about all such words or phrases is that they evoke change as a positive without giving any concrete idea of the direction of change, what it actually involves, or the costs and benefits of the proposed change and how they are distributed. Their repetition serves as a kind of mind-numbing tool to stop thought and silence debate. Again, the non-specificity and abstraction of the language is key. If an organisation engaged in meaningful debate about, for example, the appropriate use of AI, its actual positives and negatives in the context of the organisation’s work, and the potential long-term implications of widespread adoption, management would risk losing control over the process and the outcome might be – God forbid – the organisation ‘falling behind’ its peers in ‘AI integration’. The senseless repetition of phrases such as ‘digital transformation’ prevents this, by presenting the necessity and direction of change as a foregone conclusion, with the only question being the manner of its implementation, which of course is a question for management.

KPIs

Acronyms and abbreviations are commonplace in management-speak, just as in Orwell’s Newspeak. Terms which were already abstract are rendered even more so, and left still more void of meaning, by being reduced to a string of letters. KPIs are a case in point. The phrase ‘key performance indicator’ is already sufficiently abstract and distant from any consideration of the actual impact of an organisation on its customers, employees, or others. The suggestion of careful selection in ‘key’, the connotation of quantitative measurability in ‘indicator’, give whatever the phrase is applied to a bogus objectivity which deflects questions about what an organisation is for, what it is doing, and whether the most important dimensions of its performance can even be measured. The acronym KPI introduces another layer of abstraction which pushes this bogus objectivity still further. The resulting list of KPIs becomes reified and unchallengeable, even as they set the standards by which performance at all levels of the organisation will be measured and rewarded.

Centre of Excellence

Managerial language is frequently performative and proclamatory: it proceeds as though calling a thing X can actually make it so, and frequently uses words as a stand-in for substance. Take the phrase ‘Centre of Excellence’. As a bureaucratic designation for, as an example, a university research centre, this term is absurd. Excellence is, first, relative to kind. One may be an excellent writer, an excellent soccer player, an excellent pianist or an excellent doctor; a cat may be an excellent mouser, there are excellent swimming beaches, and it is possible to enjoy an excellent meal if you are lucky enough to choose the right restaurant. But nothing and nobody is ‘excellent’ in the abstract. Moreover, excellence is a relational term; an excellent performer is one who performs outstandingly compared to others in the same field. Consequently, one cannot found or create a ‘Centre of Excellence’; one can at most facilitate a group of scholars or other professionals in working together on some related projects and hope that, over time, they will indeed ‘excel’ (which means being recognised as achieving substantially more than peers working in the same field – so a pretty high bar). To bureaucratically mandate a ‘Centre of Excellence’ ab initio is therefore impossible, and involves a corruption of language.

Human Resources

Is commentary even needed here? ‘Humans’ should never be treated as mere ‘resources’. But the ubiquity of HR departments, and the existence of an entire discipline of human resources, normalises what should otherwise be unthinkable.

Customer-centric

It seems an anodyne statement that an organisation should be ‘customer-centric’ or in the case of a university ‘student-centred’. Surely any organisation should pay copious attention to those who, so to speak, provide it with its bread-and-butter? The issue is again with the abstraction and inherent meaningless of such phrases. Because what exactly do these terms mean? Nobody knows, so they have to be interpreted by management, who produce various indicators and measures of customer satisfaction or student engagement, and force employees to periodically report on their efforts to achieve them.

Non-Words as a Mechanism of Control

In many areas of contemporary life, such as business, management, advertising, politics, and the media, the greater part of communication has come to consist of various combinations of non-words. Such language has the characteristics – again echoing Orwell – of making speech and writing as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. Today’s managers, marketers, politicians, policy wonks, journalistic pundits and, yes, many academics, have the capacity Orwell described as expected of a party member, namely ‘to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets’. To succeed in any of these fields it greatly helps to be a doubleplusgood duckspeaker – that is, someone who strings ideologically correct but largely hollow phrases together with the rapidity and meaninglessness of a quacking duck.

The imposition of new words, the proscription of certain others, the widespread use of abbreviations and novel compounds, were characteristic of communist and fascist forms of totalitarianism, and this was the historical experience informing Orwell’s conception of ‘Newspeak’. So how comes it that we need to address precisely this phenomenon today, in our democratic, free-market orientated, diverse and pluralistic societies? Unlike in 1984, there is no centralised one-party state dictating how people use language. Yet significant elements of politics, government, media, academic life, business and NGOs seem invariably to coalesce around similar policies and positions and use language as one of their means of implementing and enforcing them across society (the response to the Covid-19 pandemic being a perfect example).

The preponderance of non-words reflects the bureaucratic-managerial characteristics of contemporary society, which requires a tight integration of multiple social domains and the close alignment of individual conduct with systemic requirements across networked social domains. As in the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, the corruption of language and its emptying of meaning are a mechanism of control. Unfortunately, there is no way of escaping non-words: but we should resolve to use them or repeat them as little as possible. Concrete, specific, precise and particular language is indispensable for clear thinking and honest debate, while verbiage and obfuscation are the perennial tools of authoritarians and charlatans.