Humanity's Childhood Ends With Corporate Culture's Strategy of Psychological Ownership
We are creating the future in the present.
In my last post, I described the corporate culture as one that creates social artifice that makes its way into the world at large.
This is not an arbitrary notion. It is written about corporate culture philosophy. I recently re-reviewed a paper for HSSC about promoting psychological ownership in the workforce as a corporate strategy. I am not supposed to talk about the papers that I review so I will keep the paper vague. As I was reviewing the paper, guided by review instructions, it was not within the parameters to consider background stories that I have read about the corporate culture in the country that is the subject of the discussion, a story such as China’s Brutal Working Culture, by Tony Yiu, a content provider on Medium that I follow.
The description of Chinese corporate culture in the research paper and the description by Tony Yiu did not jive, but I couldn’t say that in the review. I bent the rules a wee bit to suggest that Donald Trump could be used as his very own control group, as one who personifies psychological ownership on the job. Trump’s legal defense might be that he truly believed the US top security papers were his personal property, a psychological ownership success story. Trump might also be a model of how corporate leaders can know when their strategy is working- an indicator being that employees take company property because of the belief that it is theirs.
The strategy concept of psychological ownership is not unique to Chinese corporate culture. I only recently became aware of the strategy through my role as a peer reviewer for HSSC. I have not encountered the concept yet on the content provider circuit and so I viewed the concept as arising simultaneously with the disappearance of accessible homeownership for the working classes, which was once a reason why corporate employment was desirable.
However this history was not established fact, just an impression based on the timing of events that occurred simultaneously with my awareness of the concept of psychological ownership and so I decided to look into when the concept first took root.
I immediately came across two papers of interest. One is published in 2016 by Said Business School at the University of Oxford. It is Psychological Ownership: Effects and Applications by Helen Campbell Pickford and Genevieve Joy and Kate Roll
The other is The History of Psychological Ownership and Its Emergence in Consumer Psychology published by two researchers at the University of Minnesota, Jon L. Pierce and Joann Peck in 2018.
The paper by Pickford, Joy, and Roll is written from a purely contemporary stance and begins with the words:
Psychological Ownership of a job or organization by an employee is a feeling of having a stake in it as a result of commitment and contribution. Managers who recognise the ways in which Psychological Ownership may have positive and negative effects can ensure that both employee and organization benefit from enabling employees to increase their effectiveness; this is a powerful tool. Here is what you need to know:
The paragraph above says that psychological ownership is a result of commitment and contribution but all other literature I have read posits psychological ownership as a means to achieve commitment and contribution among the workforce. Despite the last statement at the end of a predictable list “Formal ownership of shares or profits may increase Psychological Ownership, but not necessarily” parsing the sentence grammatically implies that the workers make a commitment and contribute to an enterprise in expectation of having a stake in it- but by virtue of its qualifier the term that is being defined says that the stake is only psychological and not actual ownership, and so the entire definition in the above paragraph might also be intended as merely a psychological definition and so not intended to be parsed but taken as implied meaning, only.
The mistake in positing feelings of ownership on stock ownership is that stock ownership offers only an opportunity for a share in the financial rewards of a business but when talking about the psychology of work, it’s about involvement in a work process and human relationships within that environment. While corporate leadership is busy planning psychological strategies to get the most out of the workers, the workers are busy working their side hustles and developing passive incomes so that they can afford home ownership in the material world and retire early (FIRE Movement).
In identifying the historical emergence of the concept of psychological ownership, the paper by Pierce and Peck is more useful, starting its discussion in the 1980s with Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). (The convention in academic writing seems to be to tell the reader once what the concept means in plain English and to henceforth use only the first initials of the words in the concept to indicate the subject of discussion.)
The paper by Pierce and Peck begins by quoting psychologist William James (1890, pp. 291-292) .
“A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and work, his land and yacht and bank account. All these things give the emotions. If the wax and prosper, he feels triumphant, if they dwindle and die, he feels cast down -not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all”
The paper by Pierce and Puck dives into the discussion by associating ownership with self, in other words, self-ownership, or what one owns oneself. Within corporate culture concept of psychological ownership, the identification of the self merges into identification with the enterprise to the degree that one feels ownership of the enterprise.
In the scientific genre, Childhood’s End by Author C Clark is an apt metaphor for the takeover of human society by corporate culture, An alien culture descends upon earth, embraced first as a utopian solution to all of humanity’s woes including economic security, a path to home ownership, and retirement pension- now slip, slip slipping away for those, not in the upper sector of the economy as wealth inequality becomes more and more extreme across the globe.
The psychology of corporate culture is built on continually scaling up to a larger size. The larger the size and the more layered a corporation becomes, the more layered it is, the more it becomes a hierarchical order, and the more it delimits individual control over the territory until all individualized territory is absorbed in the pod, and ghost suburbs of pod-owned single-family homes are constructed over entire states by statutory mandates written by the pod. The pod is the corporate world order and psychological ownership is a perceived method of the final stages of absorbing the individual into the pod.
One may own stock in a company but most shareholders have minimal control over the direction and growth of the company. Stock ownership is only a monetary reward, necessary but abstract when it comes to the work process itself, which is what psychological ownership is supposed to mine for the company. Stock investments are passive income because there is no work process involved.
Ownership of oneself enables self-direction over one’s self, destiny, growth, realization, and fulfillment. In a hierarchical system, each layer is controlled by the layer above it so self-direction is compromised. Through the loss of control over one’s self, destiny, growth, realization, and fulfillment, control becomes the desire to control others, often irrationally, and operating at cross purposes to the pod purpose as the individual’s ability becomes a threat to the power structure, and yet the corporate motive behind psychological ownership is to get the employee to use their innovative talents in service of the enterprise.
Realizing innovative potential requires believing in one’s own abilities and being able to act on them.
In the narrative emerging from the content-provider domain, control and abuse are the most complained about characteristics of the corporate culture. Control and abuse describe the manifest psychology active in corporate culture, with or without a smile.
The manner in which psychological ownership is written conveys that it is conceived of as a tool to be used by corporate leadership to motivate the workers to give to the corporation what the corporation needs from the workers, but even if successful, the ruse is up. As soon as the corporation no longer needs the workers, the corporation cuts them loose, and the fortunate worker is left with a passive shareholder income but the illusion of ownership and active participation in the enterprise is shattered.
We live in a world wrapped in a paradigm that we were sold a long time ago, based on large corporations that provide security and well-being for all. Science fiction writers and social thinkers have been warning us about where this path leads for decades.
In the classic science fiction novels of the twentieth century, the city of the future enslaves humanity in a cold and mechanistic grid, once promising plentitude to all but now rationing each man’s allotment. The protagonist wanders into the beyond and finds an outlier community that is seedier but more humanistic where human freedom still exists. The utopia inside the grid has morphed into dystopia. The world outside the grid is imperfect but filled with potentialities that come with human freedom, for better or for worse.
In our contemporary moment, we exist in a superimposition of future outcomes. The dominant culture is the one we usually see and is the direction that will continue to evolve by default but alternate pathways have always been a part of the human story. The realization of an alternate choice requires active participation in overriding the default.
Years ago, when I paid no attention to what was transpiring in the largesse of corporate culture I asked the same questions as corporate culture is asking but came up with a different answer.
Andersen Design, the business in the home in which I was raised, followed the road less traveled from its inception, but the less traveled road was my norm. I was raised in a world of designer craftsmen and small entrepreneurs, a laterally structured world rather than a hierarchical one, and so the constant concern of who is above whom, which I have observed all too frequently in recent years, even in matters of small concern, is not so impactful in a laterally structured environment. Small entrepreneurialism is a world in which many people mind their own business, which they own. To my observation when people own themselves, they’re less likely to be concerned about controlling others
.I was in our basement with its rough-hewn stone walls that made the space resemble a cave, where I was slipcasting our line. I loved the space and I loved the process but the line had grown far too large for the small studio and so I envisioned a network of studios imagining that each could focus on a different aspect of the line. Some studios might be interested in functional forms while others prefer wildlife sculptures. Perhaps they could also cycle the line for variety’s sake.
But how would I find people who loved and identified with the process as much as I did? I was immediately aware that there was no way I could separate my identification with the process from the fact that it was a family-owned business and so to recreate that feeling, ownership must be replicated. The studios would need to be individually owned and work with Andersen Design as independent contractors.
I do not know if there are other business structures operating as a network of laterally related independent contractors. If there are I would study them as a model. If there are not any such networks in existence, then it’s time to give it a try. If a ceramic design and slipcasting network can succeed as a human cooperative endeavor, then it can be a model for others. If that sounds crazy- then I hope it rises to the level of “crazy enough to be true”- to quote Neils Bohr- “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct….”. Dare to be crazy enough to be true!
Read more about my crazy theory here.
Also published in Medium's Data Driven Investor