Condición corporal, PV, rendimiento y punto GR

The professional, like any employee, does have conflicts with his employer, but because he is an intellectual employee, he is not free to arrive at just any understanding of the root cause of these on-the-job disputes. Specifically, under normal circumstances he cannot allow himself to view his problems with his employer as an outgrowth of a fundamental conflict of interest, for to do so would sabotage the ideological discipline that allows him to serve his employer s interest in his work and keep his job as a professional. Thus, the professional sees his clashes as originating in conflicting technical judgments over how best to pursue universal interests. He sees conflicting strategies or personalities but doesn't see himself as having a fundamental conflict of interest with his employer—or with the powerful in society in general. That is, he doesn't see his own conflict with his employer as part of a larger conflict between labor and capital. When those who wield power act against his and his fellow employees' interests, the professional does not see them as opponents acting against employee interests, but as incompetents acting against universal interests. Thus, he calls not for breaking down the hierarchy and distributing the power democratically to those who do the work, but for more "intelligence" at the top—an elitist approach, which weakens alliances with nonprofessionals. He challenges the staffing, not the structure. He fumes, "Incompetents! Stupid bureaucrats! Those idiots don't know what they're doing!" In the eyes of the professional, those with authority at worst lack intelligence or information; he dare not admit to himself that those he serves may be smart and well-informed but simply have different class interests—that is, he cannot risk admitting to himself that he has been hired to serve interests that conflict with his own.

This restricted understanding renders the professional weak as a force for his own defense and impotent as a force for change in society. His protestations are impotent because, no matter how militantly stated, they are not threats to break ideological discipline. They don't threaten to affect the political content of his work, as having an independent political agenda certainly would. Even his strongest indictment of decisions made by management—"It's all political!"— suggests a mythical nonpolitical approach rather than an alternative distribution of political power. The louder he shouts his carefully restricted criticisms, the more he proclaims his subordination. No professional maintains perfect ideological discipline, and every straying leads to a run-in with management. Of course, some professionals have more clashes than others. In particular, those who are the least strict about subordinating their own vision to that of the institution that employs them are the ones who find themselves in trouble most often. But these conflict-plagued

employees rarely understand that their poor ideological discipline is the source of their clashes. They avoid such an understanding because it is inherently radical: It exposes their employer's ideology and is critical of it.

To avoid taking such a radical step, professionals come up with other, often far-fetched, explanations of their conflicts with management, as the following discussion of two common types of workplace conflicts suggests. Let's look first at conflicts over employees' demands for excellence and then at conflicts over employers' demands for conformity.

Employers reward mediocrity and punish excellence—at least that's what many disillusioned professionals have concluded. In reality, of course, management has no such operating principle. Yet countless professionals have found that when they take initiative on the job and work with dedication to further the ends they thought they were hired to further, they get criticism from the boss, or they are treated as some sort of threat. Meanwhile, they see that coworkers with take-the- money-and-run attitudes are hassled less.

When devoted professionals complain that they are given grief for doing outstanding work, you usually find that they have decided for themselves which aspects of their jobs deserve the highest priority and the most attention. This assertion of their own agenda, not the excellence with which they pursue it, is what gets them into trouble. The chance to work toward their own goals renews their enthusiasm and inspires them to do what they feel is unusually excellent work. Coworkers typically agree, as do clients, but management is unhappy. Professionals bewildered by their bosses' negative reaction to their special efforts, but unable to recognize the difference between their agenda and their employer's, conclude that the problem is that management is too stupid to recognize quality work. What is really a conflict over goals appears to these professionals to be a dispute over excellence. Other professionals escape such disputes; these are the individuals whose goals match those of the institutions that employ them or who are willing and able to subordinate their own goals.

Institutions demand conformity and obedience and yet hire professionals to do work that requires creativity and questioning. Does this make employer-employee conflict inevitable? Liberals say yes. They enjoy believing that intellectuals are unbridled thinkers and therefore a threat to those in power. (This is a corollary of their elitist belief that nonintellectual workers support the status quo.) But I would argue that institutional demands for political conformity lead to conflict only when individual creative workers have independent political agendas and are not willing to subordinate them. For if professionals adopt their employers' agendas, then their creativity and questioning work toward meeting their employers' goals. The work product in that case is essentially the same as it would be had the employers done the creative work themselves.

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The sad fact is, mainstream professionals don't need political freedom to do their creative work. And they don't demand that their employers allow them to exercise political freedom in their work. Only when professionals have an independent political agenda do they need and demand freedom, because only then might their creative work displease their employers.

Scientists are a good example. During Josef Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers were arrested, imprisoned and sometimes executed. Yet Soviet science advanced rapidly and came to lead the world in many fields, including

mathematics and theoretical physics. Until the mid-1950s, some of the Soviet Union's most eminent scientists worked in prison laboratories. At the height of the repression, Soviet physicists did work that won them five Nobel prizes. One of those physicists, a Soviet citizen named Pyotr Kapitsa, had been living in England for thirteen years when, upon a routine visit to the Soviet Union to attend a conference, Soviet authorities seized him on Stalin's orders and wouldn't let him return home to England. Within a few years of this kidnapping, Stalin had Kapitsa running a Soviet laboratory and doing the most creative work of his career.

As Loren R. Graham, a science historian at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has documented, scientists do not require academic freedom to do their creative work—they just need funding. One haunting image that Graham describes is that of the young scientist Andrei Sakharov sitting at his desk at Arzamas-16 doing his famous work in theoretical physics and gazing out the window at brutal armed guards marching rows of political prisoners to their jobs at the scientific installation, which was the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. Years later Sakharov became a dissident, but that was unusual for a scientist. As Graham notes, even when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the leaders of Soviet science sided with the old order.13

Those naive enough to believe that the professional's creative thinking alone leads to conflict with management probably also subscribe to the myth that the intellectual workers "professional obligations" lead to conflict, too. No one illustrates better than the mainstream journalist that there is no tension between fulfilling a "professional obligation" or doing a "professional job" and institutional demands for conformity and obedience. The reporters who write front-page stories for the New York Times are considered to be among the top journalists in the profession. It is abundantly evident that the paper they work for requires that the stories be written within a framework of general support for the U.S. political and economic system (and that the stories anticipate and head off any possible faith-threatening interpretations of the facts being reported).

Times reporters conform strictly to the paper's politics and at the same time feel that they are

fulfilling their professional obligation to "get the story." There's rarely a serious complaint from either side.

Only when professionals have an independent political agenda do they argue with their bosses about what constitutes a "professional job." When Times editors assign one of their politically reliable, top-of-the-line journalists to cover a sensitive story, they don't worry that professional obligations will lead their reporter to frame the story in a way that skewers the papers

fundamental tenets. Thus, for example, most mainstream media in the end reported the Watergate affair not as evidence of the political system s tendency toward corruption, but as evidence that the system works and cleanses itself.

PREPROFESSIONALS

As we know, not all students become clones of the prototypical professional described above. But those who are headed in that direction are easy to spot, because their subordinate attitude is

conspicuous early on at the training institution. These students scramble to figure out the rules of the game in their university graduate department or professional school, and then they literally compete to adjust themselves appropriately. Being not merely adjustable, but self-adjusting, they are good students in the eyes of the faculty. For the same reason, they will be good professionals in the eyes of their employers. These students do not simply refrain from acts of insubordination, such as challenging the training institution's agenda or criticizing the ways that agenda reflects the needs of the larger system. Rather, they enthusiastically embrace the system of professional qualification and defend the qualifying examination. The personal strategy of these skilled submissives is to play the game: to use the qualifying examination to demonstrate on the system's terms that they are "good" (that is, well-adapted), to be certified with a credential and to get a job with a new set of rules to submit to. In short, this means integrating themselves into the system, being dwarfed by it but surviving, if not as independent forces for change in society, then at least as well-fed biological entities serving the status quo.

These students also subordinate the dreams they once had of experiencing the totality of their subject in all its technical and social dimensions. In what can be seen as a sad attempt to imitate this forgone experience, some students treat the small problem parts assigned to them as if they were interesting enough in and of themselves to play the role of a surrogate totality. Today these assignments are the catechism-like test-preparation problems, tomorrow the narrow thesis problem and thereafter the corporate problem segment.

Many students do resist making the appropriate adjustments and heading down the designated road: Unwilling to reorient their outlook and goals, they find themselves in conflict with one or another action or policy of the training institution. These students usually struggle individually and indirectly, misunderstanding their problems in the training program as simply personal and not the inevitable result of the system-serving nature of the training institution's goals. Though they often leave the training program, they should not be looked upon as "losers," for they have not necessarily been broken and may go on to struggle elsewhere.

The system of professional training is set up to turn students into good self-adjusters or else get rid of them. Through the mechanisms of pressure and scrutiny that I have described in this book, it usually succeeds in doing one or the other. However, students can and sometimes do frustrate the system by both confronting it and remaining, but this is accomplished only through politically conscious, organized action, as I discuss in the next two chapters. At the core of the conflict is an unstated but highly contentious issue: Who will the student become? Professional training programs work routinely, methodically and often consciously to turn students into very different persons, and so individuals who want to control who they are must fight to do so.

NOTES

1. "Popping the 'Strangelove' Myth," Newsline, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of California, vol. 7, no. 5, September-October 1976, pp. 16-17. Parenthetical words in original.

2. "The Young Physicists: Atoms and Patriotism Amid the Coke Bottles," New York Times, 31 January 1984, pp. Cl, C5; or William J. Broad, Star Warriors, Simon and Schuster, New York (1985), p. 47.

3. "For Some Gay Journalists, 'No Marching' Orders," Washington Post, 9 April 1993, p. Dl.

4. For a thorough description of the facts of the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, and for what I consider to be the most honest judgment of those facts, see Stuart Taylor Jr., "Guilty And Framed," American Lawyer, December 1995, pp. 74-84.

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6. Glen Ford, "The Final Betrayal of the NABJ," Philadelphia New Observer, 26 July 1995, pp. 11-12; this is an insightful, biting description of the NABJ's history. See also Wilbert A. Tatum, "Mumia Abu- Jamal and the death knell of Black journalists on white newspapers," New York Amsterdam News, 15 July 1995, p. 12.

7. News release of 12 July 1995, National Association of Black Journalists, Reston, Va. "Journalist group criticized for snub of Death Row inmate," News Dimensions (Washington, D.C.), 14 July 1995, pp. 2, 17. "Pending Execution of Former Radio Reporter Divides Organization of Black Journalists," New York

Times, 17 July 1995, p. B6. For a chronology of NABJ actions in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, see Tatsha

Robertson, "Taking a stand," Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 28 August 1995, p. 6A.

8. "Black Journalist Granted Stay of Execution by the Judge Who Sentenced Him," New York Times, 8 August 1995, p. A10.

9. For reactions to the effectiveness of the pro-Abu-Jamal political campaign, see Hugh Pearson, "Is Jamal Guilty? What the Trial Record Says," Wall Street Journal, 23 August 1995, p. A13, and Doug Grow, "Graffiti thwart executioner, at least for the time being," Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 8 August 1995, p. 3B.

10. Konrad Hugo Jarausch, The Unfree Professions: German lawyers, teachers, and engineers, 1900- 1950, Oxford University Press, New York (1990), p. 3.

11. At the time, the tests had already been confined to underground and limited in size. Further restrictions would have forced the bomb designers to put an even greater emphasis on computer modeling, a less reliable technique (now being pursued with vigor).

12. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, Oxford University Press, New York (1947), p. 113. 13. Loren R. Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian

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