| Neurologists studying the brainwaves of people who have suffered rejection or exclusion from a group discovered that neurologically, the brain reacts as though the patient has suffered a trauma to the frontal lobe – a head injury.
Looking up from the newspaper report on this study, I spotted through my living room window a young man in his 20s, with worn-out shoes and shabby clothing, pushing a shopping cart laden with pop and beer cans. Surmising that he was headed with his scavenged treasures to the nearest recycling depot, I posited, too, that the homeless man was a victim of the politics of exclusion – that his frontal lobe couldn't handle constant rejection.
We've become resigned to the fact that homelessness is on the rise in Calgary and other Canadian cities. We subscribe to the hypothesis that homelessness stems from social ills, such as unemployment, marriage breakdown, mental illness, alcohol and drug dependency, and we've relegated the task of "managing" the problem to government policy-makers and the non-profit sector that has filled the void created by government cutbacks. These social ills, however, are not the causes but the symptoms of the politics of exclusion, manifestations of the psychological trauma that people suffer as a result of constant rejection, alienation and marginalization by our technological, consumer-oriented society.
Typically, government is criticized and held responsible for failing to alleviate the growing problem of homelessness. But what about the corporations that, through sophisticated marketing strategies aimed at every demographic sector of society, exert influence on how we interact and relate to one another? Real estate clubs have cropped up across the U.S., with members trading tips on "location, location, location," how to renovate in order to realize the greatest profit, etc. But how did we get here? How have we, as a society, become so enamoured with the bottom line that we deny ourselves the sheer soulful pleasure of connecting with another person? The answer lies in the workplace, where the majority of us spend almost half of our waking hours.
Linda Duxbury, a management consultant with a PhD from Ottawa's Carleton University, has identified the soul-destroying organizational culture in Canadian workplaces as the source of low productivity (the past two years, Canada scored a zero for increases in productivity) and a pervasive malaise amongst the workforce that can be attributed to management's failure to address the increasingly serious problem of work-life imbalance. A nationwide survey conducted by Duxbury found that a large percentage of core employees – those with permanent employment and employee benefits – are suffering extreme stress from overwork. Factor in modern-day technology that facilitates employees being on call around the clock, rising consumer expectations and increasing competition due to globalization, and we have a crisis on our hands.
Core or permanent employees, however, typically comprise only 35 per cent of an organizations’s workforce – the balance is made up of contingent employees who work on an "as needed," or contract, basis. As corporations concentrate on the bottom line, putting shareholders' interests over and above those of other stakeholders, such as employees and the communities in which they operate, a divide and conquer strategy is becoming ensconced in the workplace. Resentment tends to build as the contingent workforce covets the secured positions of the core employees, while the core employees suffer from a lack of balance between work and their personal life.
This two-tiered system plays an enormous role in determining the culture or personality of an organization, and has far-reaching ramifications. The contingent or contract employees who lack the job security and benefits of the core staff often feel left out, excluded from the group that makes meaningful decisions about how the work will be executed and, more importantly, how the organization will function.
As I pondered the neurologists' findings about how rejection and exclusion from a group affects our brainwaves, I couldn't help but wonder whether contingent employees in effect suffer a brain injury every time they go to work.
Business administration academics generally concede that the greatest pitfall of such a two-tiered system lies in the organization's endemic failure to instil loyalty in its contingent workforce. Loyalty, of course, is related to trust, and distrust foments fear and anxiety. When we respond to a situation or another person in an anxious way, we lose our ability to perform tasks efficiently or to communicate effectively.
Psychologists have theorized that distrust in the workplace filters down through society so that we, as a society, increasingly fail to harbour loyalty towards our friends, neighbours and even family members. The homeless man pushing the shopping cart in front of my house is someone's son, brother, cousin. One shouldn't generalize about family shunning an individual who can't fit in or has become marginalized by our materialist, technocratic society, but there is little doubt that when a family member falls through the cracks and when the stakes for the rest of us have grown so high, we become complicit in the politics of exclusion.
Television programming has taken the politics of exclusion to an extreme in such highly rated programs as Survivor and Canadian Idol. Every week viewers are treated to another "judgment day," when someone is judged as inadequate, as not measuring up, and is excluded from the rest of the group and loses the chance to win. If violence on television desensitizes us to violence, wouldn't a reality show that elevates isolation from a group to entertainment also desensitize us to marginalization and exclusion of the most vulnerable members of our society?
We need to take a hard look at our values, to consider how such intense competition amongst members of our society renders us all vulnerable to becoming victims of the politics of exclusion. |
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