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The article seems to be exhorting for more crying, but isn't it more likely that the Scandinavian / English / global business culture is spreading and will take

The article seems to be exhorting for more crying, but isn't it more likely that the Scandinavian / English / global business culture is spreading and will take over more and more of the world. Maybe the "advantageous" solution is for more people to gain more control over their emotions and learn to mitigate the negative effects of fewer outward expressions. The article claims English speaking men have only learned to do this in the last few hundred years, but it seems to coincide with exponentially increasing size and power of that group. Moreover, own little tech industry seems to be much less expressive than the industries that we are supplanting and replacing. And frankly, I think that lowered emotional availability is attractive to many of our most talented members and promotes their success.

rsfern 11y ago
I agree that coping skills are an advantage, but you seem to be suggesting that a decline in emotional expression has led to or somehow enabled industrialization. Causality probably runs the other way around. The author suggests a plausible mechanism for this massive cultural shift: factory owners and managers discouraging emotional display in the name of productivity. Do you have an alternative viewpoint? Your statement that lower emotional availability (relative to contemporary office culture) is attractive and beneficial seems counterintuitive to me. So much of our work is done in teams that it seems the stereotypical inscrutable, unapproachable engineer personality is more of a liability. How would you define 'emotional availability', and what makes less of it attractive?
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  It's about making everyone's psychological patterns more similar. Look at how women are forced to conform into a narrow definition of beauty and feminine autonomy to the point of erasing all ethnic and national variation. Same with childhoods which revolve around certain activities and even brands of products. It's not so much an intentional but a side effect of mass production where goods sold are dependent on regular consumption. No regular consumption within tolerances then no goods produced. Men are no less victim to the structure of production than any other demographic. Only the richest members of society may be free to live what we think of today as eclectic life styles (where consumption is a tertiary concern).
- terravion 11y ago
  I think that low level of emotional expression favors the kind of personality with great technical creativity--think the quiet (dare we say, Aspie) nerd, vs. a similarly driven but relationship oriented personality. Is it better to be in world where the CEOs are wearing power suits, crying, and throwing things to negotiate better and the engineers have to keep up, or a world where few emotions are expressed and the CEOs dress down so they don't upset the engineers? I don't think that management all got together one day put out a memo to say no emotions at work, because they felt like it. This article doesn't address that low expression has to be actually beneficial or the stoic Northern Europe / North American economy would not have become dominant over more Southern Europe / global south, which was probably a bigger economy at the time the article identifies as the start of the emotion suppression shift.

rsfern 11y ago

I agree that coping skills are an advantage, but you seem to be suggesting that a decline in emotional expression has led to or somehow enabled industrialization. Causality probably runs the other way around. The author suggests a plausible mechanism for this massive cultural shift: factory owners and managers discouraging emotional display in the name of productivity. Do you have an alternative viewpoint? Your statement that lower emotional availability (relative to contemporary office culture) is attractive and beneficial seems counterintuitive to me. So much of our work is done in teams that it seems the stereotypical inscrutable, unapproachable engineer personality is more of a liability. How would you define 'emotional availability', and what makes less of it attractive?

norea-armozel 11y ago
It's about making everyone's psychological patterns more similar. Look at how women are forced to conform into a narrow definition of beauty and feminine autonomy to the point of erasing all ethnic and national variation. Same with childhoods which revolve around certain activities and even brands of products. It's not so much an intentional but a side effect of mass production where goods sold are dependent on regular consumption. No regular consumption within tolerances then no goods produced. Men are no less victim to the structure of production than any other demographic. Only the richest members of society may be free to live what we think of today as eclectic life styles (where consumption is a tertiary concern).
terravion 11y ago
I think that low level of emotional expression favors the kind of personality with great technical creativity--think the quiet (dare we say, Aspie) nerd, vs. a similarly driven but relationship oriented personality. Is it better to be in world where the CEOs are wearing power suits, crying, and throwing things to negotiate better and the engineers have to keep up, or a world where few emotions are expressed and the CEOs dress down so they don't upset the engineers? I don't think that management all got together one day put out a memo to say no emotions at work, because they felt like it. This article doesn't address that low expression has to be actually beneficial or the stoic Northern Europe / North American economy would not have become dominant over more Southern Europe / global south, which was probably a bigger economy at the time the article identifies as the start of the emotion suppression shift.