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I love The Office, but I don’t believe that the writers actually have some deep knowledge of business psychology and hierarchy. It seems pointless to attempt a

• karmakurtisaani 4y ago
  I think it's often the case that when a story is created, the creator(s) don't necessarily have this detailed philosophical/psychological overview of the characters and the essence of the show. Rather, they have their own life experiences and ideals for the story and characters("there's always that idiot boss and that one guy who does nothing"). Analyses like this one then provide us with a point of view that puts the vision of the writers into a larger perspective. So it's not necessarily like the writers aimed to create something along these lines, rather, what they created fits perfectly to this narrative. That's what makes reading good analyses so satisfying.
  • vasco 4y ago
    I've tried to make this point before in conversation in relation to many forms of art and I just had to comment that your reply is very on the money and very concise. Gonna take some inspiration, as I've struggled many times to convey this. Most people just think that unless the artist "intended it", analysis is worthless.
    • diordiderot 4y ago
      There's a funny quote about Casanova along the lines of "in his literary work is deep philosophy, and in his philosophical work is incoherent rambling"
  • maigret 4y ago
    True. You need to understand something to explain it. You don’t need to understand something to observe and describe it. Obvious example is how birds fly, which was mostly explained recently only.
• jorvi 4y ago
  Pretty much this. It’s the same thing as Lord if the Rings fans trying to ascribe deeper value to the curve at which Frodo tosses his Lembas wrapper away and it signifying the same trajectory as Middle Earth is on. Or The Wire / Breaking Bad fans digging way too deep for meaning. To be clear, I deeply appreciate all three above-mentioned stories, and they do have lots of multi-layer symbology, but sometimes a thing is just a thing.
• dkarl 4y ago
  It feels like an observation that could be more easily made from the outside. On the inside of a company, we're wrapped up in everyone's immediate motivations for every decision they make, and we can see at a micro level that everyone is doing their best in their own eyes to get from it what they can, but from the outside you could see a larger pattern of the attitudes and beliefs of people at different levels in corporate hierarchy. Personally, even if this is not from some deep intellectual tradition of management theory, it helped me see things that I'd been staring at my whole career without understanding. One way it changed my perspective is that it helped me realize that the loyalty of middle management strivers is real, the realest in the company. I used to assume that company rah-rah and loyalty rhetoric was meant to increase the performance and affordability of front-line workers, i.e., that the leaf node employees were the target, and middle management was the delivery mechanism. Middle management parroted loyalty rhetoric to their employees to show upper management that they were carrying out their plans in a capable way and could be perhaps trusted with a promotion. But that never quite made sense. Inspirational company rhetoric is actively irritating to most employees. It's an odd misfit in the front lines of a large company who feels inspired by company boosterism, and they either learn to keep their enthusiasm under wraps, or they are disliked by their fellow workers, who embrace the Loser mentality. Since all the company rah-rah stuff seemed stupid and unproductive, my theory about why companies did it was that it was a peculiar blindness of the otherwise smart people who run companies. But now I realize that if you see middle management as the target, and front-line workers as collateral damage, the cult of loyalty makes a lot of sense. Looking at managers now, I can see that a lot of them buy into it on an emotional and intellectual level, and they believe that it will contribute to their rise in the organization. It works on them! That's why companies do it! I know people who told their managers that they thought company morale campaigns were creating resentment and cynicism among their fellow employees. They did this in a spirit of openness, as something that management should be aware of, and they suffered real though unofficial consequences. From a cynical, utilitarian perspective, the retaliation they suffered was hard to make sense of. It was petty and ineffective. But it makes sense if you realize that they were attacking an intensely felt part of their managers' self-identity, and their managers' reaction reflected personal hurt, not rational calculation. I never understood those things until I read this blog post. I always assumed that the cynicism about company values started at the lowest level of management, that management was a tower of atheists acting out the company religion for the sake of the believing suckers at the bottom. But that was a poor fit for reality compared to the Sociopath/Clueless/Losers structure.
• fullshark 4y ago
  I think they both made well thought out and intuitive choices in storytelling that reflect greater truth, like most great film/TV. British version the more bitter truths of course.
• galacticaactual 4y ago
  Irrelevant. Things resonate with people because they accurately describe underlying structures of reality, regardless of whether an accurate description was the original intent.
• izacus 4y ago
  The writers at some point decided that Michael Scott is a character we should be sympathetic with and started writing episodes that expect us to feel bad for him. It's when I dropped off the show, I like Steve Carell, but I couldn't get past the fact that the show forgot just how the characters are awful people.
  • titanomachy 4y ago
    I haven’t watched all of the show, but I actually kind of like that aspect. Shows with irredeemably evil or incompetent characters are boring, real life is more nuanced. It’s always interesting trying to find the lens through which someone’s actions make sense.