Moral Deskilling – or, why you spend more time on admin than doing your job.

At the Sydney Gleebooks launch of Graeme Turner’s new book Broken, an audience member said:

I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. Look at how I’ve grown. Well. Sometimes.

Before I explain, let us go back a few years.

It was one of those Covid lockdowns. Like many others, we built nice rituals. Checking on the garden. De-slugging, by hand in the evenings (ok that was less nice). Bushwalks with such silence that the swishing of the trees seemed very loud. A drink while watching the sunset after a day of zoom meetings – sometimes from the empty outdoor cafe at the eerily abandoned theme park called Scenic World1.

And I was writing Virtue Capitalists.

My days were yet to degenerate into 3.30am starting times, but I was already working before breakfast.

My beloved would call me in to poached eggs2 served on locally made sourdough. I’d finish typing my sentence3 and arrive still mid-thought.

One morning I arrived babbling about the changes to professional work in the 1980s. Previous breakfasts had already included an interrogation of why, in tangible terms, globalisation led to so many more managers (all that flexibility required lots more decisions) and why, exactly, they needed to be ‘tough’. And what this had to do with masculising management and feminising the professions – especially what I had come to call ‘virtue’.

The formula is something like this:

Moral goodness4 was the key characteristic of the old British middle class, from which the professional class was derived. Having colonised half the world to administer Empire, in the settler colonies this moral goodness took on a new urgency – and sense of optimistic possibility. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it also became economic. How? By connecting it to achievement.

Achieving class status was central to the Protestant Ethic. No longer born into a class, expert achievement was the moral way to gain status. It required work and was rewarded by elevated status in formal and informal hierarchies.5

If you ever wondered why your great work is rewarded mainly with more work, this is why.6 So the next formula (important in settler colonies imbued with moral anxieties) was something like this:

Virtue included some pretty questionable stuff (looking at you nursing and ‘purity’), but also things that were – and are – actually needed. Virtue is what ensured engineers chose cladding that wasn’t excessively flammable and were conscientious in the calculations that ensured the bridge didn’t collapse. It was what made teachers prepare well to ensure their students had access to the best current knowledge. It caused doctors to focus their minds on the best pathway to recovery, accountants to put enough time into thorough, honest audits. You know what I mean.

By the 1980s this was something managers made fun of. As hoardes of them moved into organisations, all those experts attached to virtue were an impediment to the logic of ‘management, not science’.

So the split between the P and M of the PMC (professional-managerial class) grew.

Systematising Virtue Seemed Like a Good Idea.

But perhaps not all was lost. When the logic of ‘management not science’ claimed that this needed to be about ‘systems not people’, there was something that kinda made sense.

Professions – all of them – had just had a major moral crisis in the 1970s. Many saw that the hierarchies that came with achievement – a necessarily individualised thing – were responsible for a whole lot of the social problems that now needed to be tackled.

Decolonisation was throwing off the racial hierarchies that had justified imperialism and global inequality. And its logic was being brought to bear on the hierarchies of the professional class.

Systematising what had been virtue seemed like a good idea. Codes of ethics, quality management and risk management not only sounds more modern, but relies less on the good character of each expert – those ones who, like Tilly the Chicken, might also be scrambling over one another to grab all the professional treats.

There were (and are) good versions of systematising virtue. Maximum class size regulations once actually kept tutorials small enough for everyone to participate. Minimum hours of learning certain subjects protects teaching time. Ratios of healthcare workers to patients to ensure they have time to be attentive. Maximum shift hours that ensured doctors are not too tired to do their jobs well.

But why did it work out so badly? This was what I was trying to figure out over that mid-Covid breakfast.

But it turned into managerial control

OK so it seemed like a good idea. But. Systems, not people, I suggested to my beloved, means that those same people were no longer in charge of the central feature of their work.

Systematising virtue handed control to managers. Who, endlessly mistrusting these expert folk who were always trying to do things the expensive way8, converted that mistrust into endless, endless paper work.

It was endless because it broke every little aspect of what had been virtue into tiny components. Fearful of losing control of any scrap of virtue, managers needed to relentless check on every little task.

In academia this has long been known as ‘audit culture’, but I was hearing it everywhere. Healthcare workers said they could barely spend time with patients because the forms were all that mattered. Teachers struggled to prepare deep content or get to know their students because the reporting requirements are excessive.

Because the logic of ‘management not science’ was combined with the logic of ‘work smarter, not harder’, management also sought to find as many corners they could cut as possible. Simultaneous enshittification + too much admin.

Sipping my soy coffee I said to my beloved: it is like management took virtue, broke it into tiny components that they could control and, ideally, reduce.

It is a kind of deskilling.

Deskilling was something we knew from the industrialisation of manufacturing. Rather than artisan work, where the expert (say) baker knew and controlled the entire process of bread making, each step was broken down and put along a factory assembly line. We know from longstanding labour history that this ‘deskilled’ expertise, handed control of the entire process to management (foremen, traditionally) and meant that bosses could reduce wages – and, often enough, job satisfaction.

From the 1980s this happened to professional work, and to virtue specifically.

I called this moral deskilling.

And it not only reduces wages and job satisfaction, just as the normal old deskilling did for artisans, but because virtue is actually important to professional work it also means that no one can really do their jobs. This is now causing massive system failures.

And occasionally really awful things happen: flammable cladding is installed on the buildings of the most impoverished, bridges collapse, students are not given the opportunity to learn, patient anxieties are overlooked with dreadful consequences and accounts or annual reports conceal illegal or immoral management.

F*cking managerial capitalism.9