There's more to work than De Botton suggests

De Botton fails to talk about workers who confuse privileges with rights and rights with responsibilities. He doesn’t mention the power of rumour mongering, narcissism, nepotism, the dynamics of cliques and factions, and the role of epiphany in finding a solution to complex problems. In fact, he doesn’t talk about creativity at all.

I saw astounding examples of bravery as individuals stood up in meetings and took management on. They spoke out against the bullying and scapegoating. I also saw shocking examples of cowardice, born from the fear of losing their jobs. De Botton doesn’t talk much of bravery or cowardice.

All of this is the stuff of the modern workplace. It is political, cultural, economic and sexual. Much of the polity centres around power, who has it, how it is used and to what end.

We are all social anthropologists in our own way. We go off to work, often without a second thought, that we are going to live for between eight and ten hours, in a very different cultural milieu from our home life. Our manners, mode of speech, dress and behavioural interactions are on display, commented on and assessed.

The great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski knew that to gain an understanding of primitive peoples in the Solomon Islands or the Pacific, one would have to live with them for months or possibly years. There are all sorts of problems with this but it is much better than using De Botton’s method of parachuting in and then leaving on the next plane.

There have been some excellent books on organisations. Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisations is still a classic as is Leon Gettler’s Organisations Behaving Badly. But for my salary the Australian writer Max Barry wrote the definitive satire on work in his novel Company, where the workers are guinea pigs in a massive experiment conducted by management.

In the The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work people are portrayed as insubstantial, spectral figures moving below the gantry of the industrial super state. There’s more to work than that.