My Father Speaks Truth

<understatement> My father and I don't agree on much </understatement>. But I'm interested in institutional rhetoric and how institutions create rhetorical perpetual motion machines and bureaucracies to maintain their power in opposition to their mission statements and the public's mythologized expectation of institutions' purposes. Mission statements, of course, have long been useless <redundancy>pablum </redundancy> for administrators to hang in public with noble ideals based on some Americanized myths of meritocracy, etc. 

My father worked for the Goodyear corporation for years. He rose quickly to regional management positions. I can't tell what the mission statement at the time was, but this is how Goodyear brands itself as a corporation today:

Goodyear "Global Purpose" <http://www.goodyear.com/mission/global_purpose.html>

Note the high ideals: increased value; innovation; high quality; for customers and consumers (what's the difference, by the way, between a customer and a consumer? Might have something to do with supply chain and retail). 

As part of the mission, Goodyear has "Common Goals":

Goodyear "Common Goals" <http://www.goodyear.com/mission/common_goals.html>

Again, the claimed rhetoric includes those apple-pie ideals of attracting the "best team of 'associates'" -- not employees, of course, but associates. [Who was the first corporation that recoded its handbooks to call employees "associates"? Walmart? I was a Walmart "associate" one summer. It was hell. Associate hell]. To continue, Goodyear's goals include building long-lasting relationships (because relationships are important; note that these are not capitalistic profit-making relationships, but just "relationships," like any relationship advertised on Craigslist Personals). Driving that "efficient, aligned, and effective" organization [efficient = effective in most cases, doesn't it? They both come from the same Latin participle efficere anyway] is just corporation code for "profit-making at any cost, including cutting labor at the first sign of investor discontent." This is demonstrated by that last statement: "creating a sustainable business model that consistently delivers a strong return on investment."

I wrote my father yesterday asking about his training when he was climbing the ladder. I recall these photographs on his wall -- two dozen or so white men wearing short-sleeve shirts, ugly ties, in front of Goodyear HQ in Akron, staring at the camera, a sign of having accomplished something -- photographs are used by institutions to create a (too often temporary) artifact that can be used in some public relations/marketing plan to demonstrate that someone is doing something and that everyone here is happy. Because institutions have replaced the community; the community once made us happy, but we've been instructed lately that community is bad, dangerous -- kidnappings, rapes, marauding, etc. -- and that we are safe[r] in our homes and in our institutions. The company is now our family, not the community. 

[Quick aside: When I taught middle school, I was consistently frustrated with this kind of rhetoric. The department chair [name redacted] would organize little after-school parties for every event she could find -- department members' birthdays, wedding showers, baby showers, etc. I never went. I was the only male in the department (ELA) and wouldn't have felt comfortable at a wedding shower or baby shower surrounded by too-happy women and more honestly, I was tired after 8 hours with middle school girls and boys and had a long drive home against in traffic. My refusal to attend these events was consistently met with the department chair's response, "But we're family!" No. That's not family. It's a job, a place of work, and to conflate work groups with family only makes the institution's appearance as a substitute for community more threatening to real relationships that last lifetimes, and not the length of the work contract. / End aside.]

Back to my father. Well, just the exchange, verbatim: 

ME: 

Just a quick question. You went to Akron all the time for ... leadership seminars, I suppose. What did you do there? Just meetings and dinner and drinks after?  

I remember so many photographs and certificates coming from those trips. Did you learn important stuff, or stuff that you would have figured out anyway with experience in the stores?   

I ask, because institutions tend to create "training opportunities" to protect/maintain their institutional-ness. They (especially HR and such) create activities to keep their jobs, to show the bosses that they're doing something, often with no research to show that their efforts improve anything.   

Anyway, comments, memories, appreciated.

HIM:

You nailed it in your 3rd paragraph.  

I only recall going there twice. First as a Store Mgr. Trainee and later for a new position at the district office. The first meeting was designed for total idiots that had not ever read a P or L Statement and the second was to justify this new position that they had created. We were treated at both meetings with some condescension as yokels from the provinces.  

Corporate America was very different in those days in all respects from what it is today. You went to work for a company planning on being there for life. Slowly inching up the corporate ladder. In exchange for your soul, you could expect to make a good income and retire with a very good pension and full medical. Management was known by their initials (B. J. Young) and ALWAYS addressed as Mr. Young.  

I've often wondered what happened to all of the people that I worked with when Goodyear collapsed their retail division. Goodyear, Memphis District (West TN, Arkansas and N MS), was 63+ retail stores, two Wholesale Stores and a District Office with warehouse. When I returned to Memphis there was no District Office, no warehouse and only two company owned stores left in Memphis and maybe two in Arkansas. What a surprise that must have been to those who lost their "lifetime" jobs. 

ME:

I love this sentence: "In exchange for your soul, you could expect to make a good income and retire with a very good pension and full medical." 

I don't "see" enough of Corp America today to see exceptions. Forbes and other magazines laud Google, Microsoft, et al's "playground" environment, but I suspect when it comes to the real experience, your soul is just as valuable as the custodian's -- when they need you, they smile. When they don't need you, they show the door.   

The corporatization of the American university is no better. Now that uni's and colleges run on the profit model, squeezing every dollar they can from the students, class sizes are larger, curriculum is sped up, on-line courses teach hundreds or thousands with no feedback except for automated exams, and the public says this is good, yet wonders why we have to import more Indians to do our work for us. I'm in a small battle for an improvement in a) instruction, b) student retention (graduation rates), and c) fair pay for working class students, and the result so far is that the [position redacted] says, "F you" and outsources tutoring to an on-line service, etc. Meeting Tuesday.   

Still interested in those photographs. I seem to remember more than two. If you ever watch the X-Files, there are a few episodes of the Syndicate (bad guys) in the 1970s at secret meetings, and they don't look dissimilar to your Goodyear pics.
  

So, if your Goodyear training was actually a front for conspiracy to work with evil space aliens to colonize the earth, I'd like to hear more about it.  

HIM:

Same as. 

[I knew it! Actually, it makes me very proud to know that my father was not just a cog in the Goodyear machine of "Delivering the highest quality tires, related products and services for our customers and consumers" but instead betraying the human race in preparation for our alien overlords' takeover of the planet. Because that's just so much cooler. Boys have to have their heroes, even if they are part of the Syndicate.]

And so now I'm enmeshed (read: damned) in the thick of the institution protecting itself by creating and maintaining programs that serve the administration and overlook the real needs of students -- their existences, their circumstances, their social, mental, intellectual needs. 

Perhaps the aliens have already started their takeover. Because the institutions certainly aren't on humanity's side.

William Bruce Davis is a Canadian actor and director,
known for his starring as The Smoking Man on The X-Files.
Actually, he looks a lot like my dad.

Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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