Seinfeld Ethnography (45)—Kramer Gets a Job

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Workin' RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

[b] Manual RF

Kramer's working. It all started in the bathroom before Kramer stumbled into the board room. It takes a while, but Kramer's relationships and career end up back in the toilet, so to speak. Take a look at Kramer's career. It is breathless, to be sure.

Kramer's Job 6:47

The "relationship" angle is almost too well-played. The Seinfeld writers have been a little too cute with this sort of theme, I think. Still, the flurry of Kramer's work career (even if we expand our thoughts to assume a thirty-minute show—twenty two minutes after commercials) speaks to many of the hopes and worries harbored by all of us in the workplace. Most of us have several decades of planning and analyzing, though. Kramer is different. He hasn't had a workplace...and the one he gained in this episode didn't last very long.

Let's think about the nature of work and what it means in "our" society (you should know by now that Round and Square has readers in a hundred of "our" societies, and that comparison is our whole point).

[c] Respite RF

So how do we resolve "work" and "Kramer?" Never the twain shall meet, right? You can't have a round square (Kant, St. Anselm); east and west (Kipling)... Kramer in a suit, tie, and preparing reports (even if only for seventy-two hours)? This is something that Kramer watchers will find befuddling, at the least, since we associate him with Swimming in the East River, hitting golf balls into the ocean, and power-showering.

Let's take a look at a range of readings that go just a little bit beyond our usual anthropological frame. This has a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I am at home in our nation's capital these days, but my home-library is back in Beloit, Wisconsin. This is not a bad thing. It forces me to find things in books that might not otherwise have been my first choices. Any practicing cultural anthropologist could come up with a list linked to "Kramer" and "work," and probably fifty-percent of them would overlap. Not so much with this week's readings. That is part of the fun. I am engaging in a kind of editorial bricolage by looking at the thirty or so books sitting on my shelves in northern Virginia.

[d] Workrest RF

The first reading is from Jim Collins's management book Built to Last. The second is from Peter Drucker's Management Cases, a book related to his classic management text. Our final example comes from a compilation of Song dynasty (CE 960-1279) anecdotes that is one of the most interesting sources I have ever encountered, and has influenced a great deal of my own research over the years.

Built to Last
Jim Collins (1994)

[e] Last ADV

Contrary to business school doctrine, we do not find "maximizing shareholder wealth" or "profit maximization" as the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of most of the visionary companies. They have tended to purse a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one. Indeed, for many of the visionary companies, business has historically been more than an economic activity, more than just a way to make money. Through the history of money. Through the history of most of the visionary companies we saw a core ideology that transcended purely economic considerations. And—this is the key point—they have had core ideology to a greater degree than the comparison companies in our study...

Of course, we're not saying that the visionary companies have been uninterested in profitability or long-term shareholder wealth (notice that we say that they are "more than" economic entities, not "other than"). Yes, they pursue profits. And, yes, they pursue broader, more meaningful ideals. Profit maximization does not rule, but the visionary companies pursue their aims profitably. They do both.[1]

[f] Managing ADV

Management Cases
Peter Drucker (2009)

Rarely has a chief executive of an American corporation been as respected and as revered as Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., was at General Motors during his long tenure at the top—for 1920 until 1955. Many GM managers, especially those who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, felt a deep personal gratitude to him for his quiet but decisive acts of kindness, of help, of advice, or just of warm sympathy when they were in trouble. At the same time, however, Sloan kept aloof from the entire managerial group in GM. That he never called anyone by his or first name and was "Mr. Sloan" even to top executives may have been a a reflection of his heritage and upbringing—he had been born, after all, in the 1870s and was a senior executive, running his own business, before 1900...

Above all, Sloan had no friends within the GM group. He was a warm and had been a gregarious man until deafness cut him off from easy human contact. Although he had had close friends, he outlived them all—he lived well into his nineties. All these friends had been outside General Motors. Indeed, the one friend who had been in GM, Walter P. Chrysler, did not become a personal friend until after he had left GM and had, upon Sloan's advice and with strong support from Sloan, started his own competing automobile company...


"It is the duty or the chief executive officer to be objective and impartial," Sloan said, explaining his management style. "He must be absolutely tolerant and pay no attention to how a man does his work, let alone whether he likes a man or not. The only criteria must be performance and character. And that is incompatible with friendship and social relations. A chief executive officer, who has 'friendships' within the company, has 'social relations' with colleagues or discusses anything with them except the job, cannot remain impartial—or at least, which is equally damaging, he will not appear as such. Loneliness, distance, and formality may be contrary to his temperament—they have always been contrary to mine—but they are his duty."[2]

[g] Anecdotes ADV

A Compilation of Sung Personalities
Chu Djang (1989)

When Ouyang Xiu was in the government, he heard about the name of Shao Yong, but never had a chance to meet him. His son Ouyang Fei (1047-1113), who was about to leave for his official post, would pass through Luoyang. Ouyang told his son to visit Shao Yong on his way to convey his admiration and added that if Shao should invite the latter to stay for a few days, he should accept the invitation and report back the conversation.

When Ouyang Fei arrived in Luoyang, Shao Yong welcomed him with great enthusiasm. He talked to his guest for a whole day about the people he had met, the studies he had pursued, and the activities he had accomplished throughout his whole life in great detail. Upon finishing, he asked again and again: "Can you remember it all?"

Although Ouyang Fei listened with great attention, he did not know why he was told such things. He wrote back to report everything to his father. His father did not understand either.

During the Yuanfeng period (1078-1085), Shao Yong died. The local authorities reported the life history of Shao to the court, requesting the grant of a posthumous title. Ouyang Fei who was serving as the Erudite of the Chamberlain for Ceremonials at that time was given the responsibility for drafting the patent of the posthumous title. Only then did he realize why Shao had recounted his life history to him.[3]

Notes
[1] James Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: Harper 
      Business, 1994), 55.
[2] Peter Drucker, Management Cases [Revised and Updated by Joseph Maciariello] (New York: Collins Business, 
      2009), 125-127.
[3] Chu Djang,  A Compilation of Sung Personalities (New York: St. John's University Press, 1989), 407-408.

Bibliography
Chu Djang.  A Compilation of Sung Personalities. New York: St. John's University Press, 1989. 
Collins, James and Jerry Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. 
     New York: Harper Business, 1994.
Drucker, Peter. Management Cases [Revised and Updated by Joseph Maciariello]. New York: 
    Collins Business, 2009.

NEXT
Wednesday, April 4th

Needle's on Empty

Kramer drives the dealership car down to the bottom of the tank...and discovers new dimensions of culture, personality, and willpower.

Asian Miscellany (18)—Work in Heian Japan

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Miscellany.

[a] Built RF

My last few posts in "Asian Miscellany" have been driven by deadline—and many of them will follow in the coming weeks and months, since I have signed contracts to deliver a whole passel of encyclopedic material to various publishers before a self-imposed deadline of January 30th. As I explained in the introduction, this series of posts allows me to try out a few ideas that I plan eventually to include in various encyclopedias or on-line sites that have asked for my input. They are not the same as the pieces that will eventually be published, but constitute more of a "long draft," meant to work through a few ideas as I work on brief essays that often mandate strict "word counts" of 250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 words. 

For the next dozen or so posts, I have been asked to write about Heian Japan (794-1185). It is one of the most fascinating periods in world history, so I trust that the topics will "connect" for readers of the first ten "Asian Miscellany" posts (almost all of the topics—children, family, urban/rural—are the same). They work well for people interested in a brief introduction to Heian Japan or for people interested in comparative issues. Although an introduction to the Heian period in Japan would require its own introduction, I trust that a reading of these "Heian Japan posts (11-20 in Asian Miscellany) will encourage a few of you to read a bit of the literature of the period.

Click here for other posts in the Heian Japan mini-series:
City-Country    Children         Food-Drink      Entertainment               Sports-Games
Education        Family Life     Work-Labor     Language-Literature     Housing-Shelter

Narratives of leisure dominate the literature of the Heian period. The reader of such narratives often comes to the conclusion that the Heian elite had too much time on its hands. In the narrow sense, this is doubtless true. There are so many tales of court games, displays of fashion, and conspicuous leisure that their descriptions account for quite literally thousands of pages of Heian writing. The careful student of literature, society, and economy, however, will quickly be able to see a picture of work in Heian Japan that is as distinctive as it is laborious. The remaining, albeit far fewer, texts that speak to labor beyond the life of court give us an even deeper picture of what it was to work in Heian Japan. 

Rural Work 

[b] Work RF

Surrounding the capital city like revolving planets were the rural estates (shōen) that supported the refined court life in the capital and would ultimately uproot that very lifestyle. They covered all of the territory in central Japan (the main island of Hōnshū), as well as large swaths of the west and east, at least as far as present-day Tokyo. Although regarded by inhabitants of the capital as boorish and hopelessly countrified, these areas could be said to contain the very approach to labor that over the centuries would reshape the Japanese work ethic. 

The rural estates required farm labor, farm labor supervision, the manufacture of agricultural implements, and many other layers of production and leadership. In time, the estates would require guarding, which led to the creation of entire protective forces that would be the foundation for the samurai culture of future generations. Nowhere is this budding rural work ethic better seen than in a fragment of text from the early Heian period. It shows the devotion of the tato to the lands on which he is employed, as well as the sense of detail he needed to have about everything from field laborers (he is clearly a kind of “foreman”) to his superiors. 

     The husband of the third daughter is a man by the name of Tanaka Hōeki. He is 
     diligent in his farming occupation and entertains no other ambition. He owns 
     several chō of land, and is called the daimyō-tato. He provides his own spades 
     and hoes to cultivate the rich and poor fields, and prepares ahead for dry seasons. 
     He repairs his own domestic-style and Chinese-style plows. He is skillful in his 
     handling of workers…In spring he wastes not a single grain of seed, but in the fall 
     he receives ten-thousandfold in return. From the time he beings planting in the 
     spring to the time he completes his harvest in the fall, he commits not a single 
     faulty step...[1] 

Urban Work 

[c] Modern tato RF

Life in the urban center that was Heian Kyō differed from what we have just read of the rural tato. It is not at all difficult, however, to stretch our historical imaginations and to envision the text above through the eyes of an urban shopkeeper devoted passionately to the family operation. Indeed, there are many texts that show glimpses of this kind of urban work ethic, and most readers will certainly have seen examples (all over the world) of shopkeepers who rise early, work hard, and close late, devoting almost all of their energies to the operation.  

[d] Kyoto carrying (today) RF

Still, we have only glimpses that tell us of shopkeepers, street cleaners, food producers, and other occupations in Heian Japan. It is not hard to see that a wealthy elite could not survive without multiple layers of a service economy to meet their needs. Wealthy people who merely travel from home to court, or court to temple, need transportation, clothing, foodstuffs, offerings, prayer books, and the like. All had to be produced, and almost all of the production took place in the eastern sector of the Japanese capital. The wealth came from the provinces; the production of aristocratic daily life took place in the city. 

Occasionally, a cook or palanquin carrier appears in a Heian narrative. Our best example of the vast gulf between rural and urban work, however, might best be seen in a short historical document from the first century of Heian rule. Already, the provincial economic changes were altering society. It can be seen clearly in a document forbidding Heian nobility from leaving the capital to become local samurai—the protectors of landed estates.
     Lately, those people whose domiciles are in the capital city [of Heian], and who are 
     the children and heirs of princes and of important court officials, reside outside the 
     capital region. Some intermarry [with people from outer provinces] and others 
     engage in agriculture or commerce, and are no different from the people in the
     provinces…If they persist in their disobedience and do not mend their ways, 
     regardless of any connections they might have, they must be banished to distant 
     places.[2]
That moving to the countryside to find work in agriculture (or commerce) would lead to serious penalty should give readers a perspective on how great the gulf was between urban and rural culture. 

Court Work 

[e] Li'l samurai RF

Emperors worked, and often much harder than most of the other members of courtly families. Their “handlers” worked even harder. This could well seem amusing, given the fact that court life was rarely very exhausting for anyone except those who truly were running the operation. “Those” were the Fujiwara family. During the height of Fujiwara power in the Heian period, no figure was greater than Fujiwara Michinaga (966-1027). From the time he came to power within his clan, he struggled to gain more and more influence for himself and his family. This required a peculiar kind of “work.” To begin, a family that controls the imperial family (but does not supplant it) needs daughters. Part of the Fujiwara family’s “work” was to provide daughters to the imperial family who would become the mothers of emperors, making the powerful outsider family inextricably connected to court power. No one was more successful in the history of Japan at this kind of family and political control than Michinaga. He was the father of several empresses, the grandfather of emperors, and the most powerful figure in all of Heian history. 

On top of it all, there were the emperors themselves, with their own very challenging kinds of work. By the time that the Fujiwara family had taken control of the political life of Japan, it was in their best interest to make sure that emperor’s “ruled” only until early adulthood. A more mature emperor could learn the nuts-and-bolts of court politics well enough to challenge his handlers, and a few did, giving pause to the Fujiwara controllers and new ideas to the imperial family. 

The ideal model from the perspective of the “handlers” was to exhaust a young emperor in court ritual (often many different ceremonies every day, requiring painstaking changes of clothing and memorization of ritual texts) before giving way to another emperor who was also related to the “handler” family. In time, the former emperors—many of whom were alive at any one time—gained the upper hand, but not before the entire work and political structure began to crumble, and power moved to the provinces. 

***  *** 

If we only think of “work” as manual labor, we cannot begin to get a full picture of life in Heian Japan. To be sure, manual labor made up the vast bulk of daily life both within the capital cities and throughout the villages and small cities on the rest of the islands. Work exists on many levels, though, and political work figures prominently in Heian life. When we begin to think about the many layers of labor, our picture of Heian society becomes ever richer and more complex.

Click here for other posts in the Heian Japan mini-series:
City-Country    Children         Food-Drink      Entertainment               Sports-Games
Education        Family Life     Work-Labor     Language-Literature     Housing-Shelter

---

[f] Fighting works RF

Notes
[1] David Lu, Japan: A Documentary History (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 100.

[2] Lu, 103.

Bibliography

Lu, David. Japan: A Documentary History. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

Asian Miscellany (5)—Work in Modern China

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Miscellany.

[a] Labor RF

My last few posts in "Asian Miscellany" have been driven by deadline—and many of them will follow in the coming weeks and months, since I have signed contracts to deliver a whole passel of encyclopedic material to various publishers before a self-imposed deadline of December 20th. As I explained in the introduction, this series of posts allows me to try out a few ideas that I plan eventually to include in various encyclopedias or on-line sites that have asked for my input. They are not the same as the pieces that will eventually be published, but constitute more of a "long draft," meant to work through a few ideas as I work on brief essays that often mandate strict "word counts" of 250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 words. 

For today's post, I have been asked to write about work in modern China...in the space of only 1,000 words. I "spend" a little more verbiage than that here, but not much. The approach I have taken is that the classic schema regarding the "levels of worth" surrounding work in China has been flipped on its head...and this "flipping" began at least 1,500 years ago.

Feel free to peruse the other Modern China posts in Asian Miscellany. 

1 One-Child              2 Education             3 Food/Drink          4 House           5 Work          

6 Entertainment       7 Sports/Games       8 Urban/Rural        9 Family Life    10 Children

[b] Working RF

“Work” (工作; gongzuo) is a powerfully loaded term in today’s China. In traditional times, the term conveyed images of labor in fields or on construction projects, often for the benefit of family or the state. Even in the context of family life, it held connotations of “working” the soil or maintaining buildings and fences on a large family estate. The sense of the term was physical, and focused on action in a world of plants, buildings, and family life. Today, the term has taken on meanings that go so far beyond traditional senses of the phrase as to make it almost quaint. To be sure, the term “work” always had a somewhat academic and literary sense. From even our earliest historical records, scholarship and farming were perceived to be near the top of an idealistic hierarchy that demoted artisanal and (especially) mercantile activity. Even in early times, life was much more complicated, but the template stuck for twenty centuries. In today’s China, many people still struggle with the multiple senses of the term “work,” as we shall see.

"Work" in Chinese History

[c] Wok RF

As mentioned above, the traditional schema—which persisted in many ways well into the twentieth century—held that scholarship and farming were the most "useful" occupations,  followed by artisans (who at least made things). The lowest rung was reserved for merchants, who only sold things others had made. Almost as soon as the idealized order was promulgated, the reality of mercantile wealth began to make the ranking seem silly, at best. Still, it persisted in forms that made it difficult even for wealthy merchants to be respected in society. Their “revenge,” if it can properly be called that, was to live far beyond the means of scholars who mocked them and—this is the key strategy—to educate the next generation in their families, so that the family would be both wealthy and highly placed in society.

These four kinds of “work” continue to occupy the minds of many people even today, although the “ranking” system has long been defunct. Teachers are still admired, even if their compensation trails many other professions. Artisans can be divided into wealthy large-scale operations building furniture and other items, on the one hand, and the laborers who work for them. In the same way, merchants range from shopkeepers with a local, streetside clientele to the most important CEOs in China. It has often been said that China today has more billionaires than any other country in the world. It also has more farmers, shopkeepers, and small-income artisans (not to mention an army of teachers and professors) than almost any country in the world.

The range of “work” activities in China is vast. What is often forgotten is that it has always been so. Small shopkeepers were working their trade, as can be seen in the first printed sources in China, from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Farmers have been working the fields since the advent of recorded history, and merchants have dominated the economic landscape on a formidable scale since the first Chinese dynasties. Finally, Confucius was a teacher, and the profession has only gained momentum from his time.

Rural Work

[d] Rural RF

It cannot be pointed out often enough that China—despite the glittering urban scenes from the 2008 Olympic Games or the 2010 Shanghai Expo—remains a profoundly rural and agricultural society. Ideas of “work” in China to this day are profoundly connected to the working of the soil. Although people of lesser means and rural locations, even in an earlier China, do more than occasionally rise to the highest levels of urban success, the “ladder of success” from a rural perspective is literally grounded in the land itself. Land, more than any other feature in the social and economic equation, was the factor that separated the rich from the poor, and families of moderate means from families of ample means.

Westerners were introduced to the relentless logic of land acquisition through the narrative of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, in which the protagonist slowly gains land and moves from poverty to comfort to eventual status as one of the richest men in his region. It is only as a secondary process that he gained additional status through shrewd decisions in marital alliances and the education of his sons. In rural China, even to this day, the working of the land (and the ownership of it—which remains a powerful issue in an economy that is only three decades removed from a very different sense of “ownership”) is foremost, and even those without the benefits of extensive education know that the kinds of “work success” of importance in a rural setting are centered on the soil. A very old poem can still be recited to this day by everyone in China, from the farthest rural country corner to the heart of Shanghai:

Pitying the Farmer (Li Shen, 780-846)

Working the grain beneath the heat of the day

Sweat drips down to the grain-bearing soil

Who can comprehend—that of the food in one’s bowl

Every single grain comes with great toil?

Urban Work

[e] Lineman RF

It would be a serious misinterpretation to assume that urban life in China began in the last few decades, or even the last few centureis. Urban "work" has been a powerful feature of Chinese life since at least the twelfth century, when cities of well over a million began to dot the landscape, and necessities were sold side-by-side with luxury goods. Perhaps the first true metropolis in China was Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), which boasted the beauty of West Lake and an urban culture that mixed its power as a political capital with the economic wherewithal of one of southern China’s most magnificent cities.

It remains so to this day, but it is certainly not alone. In Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and countless other mega-cities, the “work” that has occupied at least a thousand years of city dwellers (small shops, furniture makers, house builders, road construction companies, and so forth) has been joined by things never even contemplated by people of previous centuries. These include car dealerships, department stores, large scale book stores, computer and camera outlets, and large restaurant chains selling not only “worldwide” products (McDonald’s, KFC, Sizzler), but traditional Chinese cuisine on a much larger scale than ever before, such as Quanjude Beijing Duck and other outlets.

China’s largest cities are also the home of another kind of work—that of transnational companies, NGOs, and a wide array of Chinese companies, many of which have become transnational operations in their own rights. Cities such as Beijing house the International Red Cross, major transnational companies, and (not insignificantly) the Chinese central government bureaucracy. The largest provincial cities boast an array of these organizations, combined with the provincial government apparatus. The variety of work, then, that can be found in today’s urban centers in China rival those seen in any of the world’s most influential cities. The Chinese “twist” is not mere overlay. The Chinese economy has its own specific needs, not to mention its own powerful ties to the rural countryside (it is not uncommon for, say, construction companies to hire from kinship networks in the countryside, where workers can be trusted because of their family connections). It is intimately connected on both sides to China’s countryside, which gives it sustenance in many ways, to a globalized world economy that sees China increasingly as one of its leaders.

***  ***

[f] Balance RF

It’s all work, and it always has been. The mistake is to equate work either exclusively with toil in the fields or corporate development in cities. The world’s press has badly misinterpreted the latter, failing to see just how significant the rural workforce is in understanding China’s economy and even political future. As in any other aspect of Chinese life, we will be mistaken if we fail to understand the tricky combination of tradition, rural life, and a vibrant urban present.

Feel free to peruse the other Modern China posts in Asian Miscellany. 

1 One-Child              2 Education             3 Food/Drink          4 House           5 Work          

6 Entertainment       7 Sports/Games       8 Urban/Rural        9 Family Life    10 Children