More study of group dynamics via email. Before I left for my vacation, I discovered and sent out a link to an article I read that had some resonance for me:
Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank
By JULIE SALAMON
Published: July 10, 2004
Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized against ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism, taken arms against Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed, at various conferences and cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism.
Is it possible there is yet another ism to mobilize against?
Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his life in academia, thinks so, and he calls it "rankism," the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of the world unite! — against mean bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry politicians, belittling soccer coaches and arrogant professors.
"I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word," he said, referring to his choice of the word rankism. "Language is incredibly important in making political change. I always go back to that word sexism and how it became the catalyst for a movement."
Mr. Fuller wants nothing less than moral as well as behavioral accountability from the people in charge, whether of governments, companies, patients, employees or students. And he pitches his quixotic notion in a book, a Web site (breakingranks .net), in radio interviews and in lectures at universities and business gatherings that could be considered breeding farms for somebodies.
"The theory has the potential to explain many things we just ignore as a given," said Camilo Azcarate, Princeton University's ombudsman, who recently attended one of Mr. Fuller's lectures and bought several copies of his book to give to friends. Democracy and education should concentrate on creating virtuous citizens. This is exactly the kind of discussion we need to have."
Mr. Fuller began postulating these theories on the Internet several years ago, and then brought them together last year in a book called "Somebodies and Nobodies" (New Society Publishers), published recently in paperback. He can't answer how, exactly, his lofty ideas might translate into political or legal action. "I don't see the form the movement will take," he confessed in an interview at his home in Berkeley. "But I don't feel too bad about it because Betty Friedan told me she didn't have any idea there would be a women's movement when she wrote `The Feminine Mystique.' You need five years of consciousness-raising before you find the handle."
Ms. Friedan provided a blurb for his book. Other supporting blurbers include Bill Moyers, the political scientist Frances Fukuyama and the author Studs Terkel. So far the book has sold 33,000 copies (including bulk sales); and his Web site totals 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a week, his Web master, Melanie Hart, said.
...
One day Mr. Cabot decided to become Mr. Fuller's patron. For 15 years he paid him to think — and to travel, expenses paid. No rankism there: Mr. Cabot included pension payments, which kicked in two years ago when Mr. Fuller turned 65.
How does Mr. Cabot feel about the way his money has been spent? "I am immensely gratified," he said. "I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse of rankism in Washington, D.C., right now. Our policy in the Middle East is rankism."
Mr. Fuller acknowledges that rankism is harder to pin down than other more apparent forms of discrimination — sex, race and disability. "We try to sniff how much power each of us has by asking: `What do you do? Where did you go to school? Who's your husband?' " said Mr. Fuller. "It's like trying to find out if someone's gay or not, if they're a threat to us or if we can get away with abusing or exploiting them."
Mr. Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, but neither is he simply asking for mere politeness. Yes, national leaders should refrain from cursing at one another in public places; executives should treat subordinates with respect. But more controversially, he would get rid of faculty tenure at universities, which he calls "an outdated sacrosanct privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many nobodies."
He urges people to remember that rank is mutable: you can be a nobody at work and a somebody at home, or vice versa. And, he points out, almost everyone eventually "gets nobodied."
The tall and lanky Mr. Fuller, whose presentation can be stiff and formal, doesn't rouse his audiences with smooth patter and startling revelations of abuse he's suffered. But his reflective, old-fashioned professorial approach to his sometimes glib, populist theories has been taken in some quarters as a refreshing whiff of sincerity in a skeptical age.
When he spoke at Mount Holyoke College last September, Andrea Ayvazian, dean of religious life, was surprised to see how mixed the audience was: students, faculty members, administrators, staff members and campus workers. "Bob's analysis freed people who considered themselves low in the hierarchy to tell their stories," said Dr. Ayvazian, who was a student of Mr. Fuller's 30 years earlier. "I saw this had struck a chord in unpredictable circles."
The second title is esp interesting to me. Amazon even let's you preview the book. Pretty cool feature!
The "Rankism" article generated some heat within certain quarters.
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