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Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists

• Mikeb85 12y ago
  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
  • amelius 12y ago
    One can also apply that backwards: if there were computers back in that time, one can be sure we would have had web-apps and APIs for dispatching slaves. Unfortunately, we have never come up with a moral code for programmers, like the Hippocratic oath which exists for MDs. And of course, a moral code for managers would be nice to have too.
    • TJSomething 12y ago
      The National Soceity of Professional Engineers has a code of ethics I had to learn in school: 1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public. 2. Perform services only in areas of their competence. 3. Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner. 4. Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees. 5. Avoid deceptive acts. 6. Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession. However, this is less applicable, because we rarely do anything that can directly kill people on accident.
    • Kalium 12y ago
      You mean, like the ACM code of ethics? http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
• allochthon 12y ago
  Am I the only one to cringe at the attitude of the author?
  • calibraxis 12y ago
    One of my hats is manager, and I find it amusingly honest. My job is to command, and they obey. Buying someone (chattel slavery) is worse than renting them (wage slavery), but it's a matter of degree. Ok, I admittedly expend serious effort at inverting my authority... which is hilariously undermined by the devs I manage, because they're trained to be obedient specialist cogs and it's like pulling teeth to get them to act independently outside a narrow range. So there's pressures towards authoritarianism. But I don't manage only devs (and I'm supporting non-devs to become devs), so it's not all bad.
    • fsk 12y ago
      There are some differences between being a chattel slave and a wage slave. If you have a chattel slave, you won't waste money investing in teaching them new skills. If you have a wage slave, why would you invest in teaching someone a new skill? After they master the skill, you now have to pay them market rate for that skill (or they'll leave). So why not just pay market rate from the beginning rather than investing in training someone?
      • Kalium 12y ago
        > So why not just pay market rate from the beginning rather than investing in training someone? Limited availability? Need for combining a skill with other skills? There are good reasons.
      • Gifford 12y ago
        A slave master is highly motivated to invest in a slave's skills, because the master extracts the profit of that investment.
        • nandemo 12y ago
          That's what gp comment is saying. Rewriting it for clarity: "If you have a chattel slave, investing in teaching them new skills is not a waste of money".
  • 12y ago
• walterbell 12y ago
  Article would have benefited from a discussion of transient/nomadic labor, still used in modern times, e.g. http://twc2.org.sg http://twc2.org.sg
• exratione 12y ago
  History is largely outright violence and violent exploitation, and the early growth in complexity in the ancient world is marked by the move from the former to the latter. Primitive states massacred their enemies, their leaders unable to apply force in any more sophisticated fashion. It required more complex states to produce the ability to effectively enslave defeated foes in large numbers instead, but once that was achieved states capable of it thrived at the expensive of others. There is little to chose from between Roman slavery and Medieval serfdom. Long-term colonial economic exploitation had many of the same aspects even where it wasn't outright slavery. The institution of slavery in its broadest sense has proven to be very resilient. It is probably too soon to say whether its comparative absence for a few centuries is a passing thing, or whether it is in fact the symptom of another systematic shift in the sophistication of states. If the latter, then the introduction of modern systems of banking has an interesting parallel course in history. Consider all of the associated means for better extracting wealth from populations without provoking rebellion. One might put forward an argument that suggests these advances make it more practical for the elite to comparatively peacefully farm the local population rather than farming other populations by making and enslaving enemies. Thus more of the elites do this. All of which still leaves us with a very long to go yet in order to become a moral species. I don't see it happening without fundamental engineered changes to human nature, and that isn't a near term thing. It is worth remembering that a thin line indeed separates present elites in so-called civilized regions from those who in the past massacred and enslaved. If today's leaders found advantage in it, they would do it.
• brc 12y ago
  That's the sound of a long bow being drawn.
• csallen 12y ago
  > A comparison of the two is going to provoke, but similarities do exist. It is an uncomfortable truth that both slave owners and corporations... It has always irked me that people are unable to differentiate between comparing two things and equating two things. Despite being completely different actions, it's commonly accepted to treat them the same. This leads to all sorts of misconceptions and invalidates plenty of reasonable points. It shouldn't be "provoking" or "uncomfortable" that any two things share some similarities, because everything shares at least some similarities with every other thing. That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable.
  • jsprogrammer 12y ago
    >That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable. And likewise, just because things aren't exactly the same, doesn't mean that don't share many properties. You are playing word games and have failed to address any of the content. Share owners, slave owners, the phrases differ by two letters. Western culture is a direct descendant of Roman culture, it would be strange if there weren't large similarities, especially at the level of organizational institutions. Why would you expect that the concept of people holding power over other people through directing them on what to do would just vanish? You would do better to point out the actual differences than to fall back on the claim that because a word is slightly different there may be something different between the two.
    • carsongross 12y ago
      phrases differ by two letters Shit and salt differ by two letters as well. I don't see how that's relevant.
      • jsprogrammer 12y ago
        One would want to look at the etymological trees of the words 'slave' and 'share' to see if there are any intersections or common ancestors. Unfortunately I don't know of any resources that have that capability. Do you?
• calibraxis 12y ago
  Knowing some authors, I suspect this author didn't write: "Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists." Editors frequently write such things; and that statement sounds extremely unlikely. (Otherwise, I enjoyed this article.)
  • duaneb 12y ago
    Yea, especially when some of our earliest texts are of managers. More accurate might be "earliest civilization in which we can find a wide breadth of insight into justification, rationale, and advice for managing a labor force. What have we learned since then?" EDIT: Hell, one of the earliest hallmarks of "civilization" is social stratification. I'm betting people have been theorizing about how to use human labor (subjugated or otherwise compelled) far before the written word came about.
• lkrubner 12y ago
  Every single sentence in this article is offensive, and the overall article is also offensive. It also makes impossible generalizations such as this one: "Most Romans, like Augustus, thought cruelty to slaves was shocking." For a different perspective, I'd recommend some of Elaine Pagel's work on the early Christian movement, in particular: http://www.amazon.com/Adam-Eve-Serpent-Politics-Christianity/dp/0679722327/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1427669027&sr=8-10&keywords=elaine+pagels http://www.amazon.com/Adam-Eve-Serpent-Politics-Christianity... In "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity" Pagel's makes clear that slaveowners could rape their female slaves. Some of the early Christian leaders denounced this practice, and argued that slave owners had no right to rape their female slaves. In this, the early Christians represented a dramatic break with the culture of Rome. And this is also why Nietzsche once referred to the early Christian movement as a slave revolt. Unless you don't think that rape is cruel, it is accurate to say that slaveowners believed in cruelty to slaves. From everything I've read, these kinds of horrors were closer to the norm than the exception: "Vedius Pollio, a rich Roman, once invited his friend the emperor Augustus to dinner. The entertainment was interrupted when a slave broke a valuable crystal cup. Trying to impress with his toughness, Vedius ordered the slave boy be thrown to the huge moray eels in his fish pond." And good god, let's not learn management techniques by studying dictators such as this: "But Augustus was not impressed. In fact, he was outraged at this novel form of cruelty. He ordered Vedius to free the slave boy and told the other slaves to bring all the crystal cups they could find and smash them in their master’s presence. He then told Vedius to fill in the fish pond and get rid of the moray eels." This whole bit somehow succeeds at being innocent, stupid, shocking, deplorable, wrong and offensive all at once: "Most Romans, like Augustus, thought cruelty to slaves was shocking. They understood that slaves could not simply be terrified into being good at their job." Here's a cold hard fact: if you are a slave owner, then you are cruel. It is a simple matter of definition: to be a slave owner means that if someone does what they wish with their life, you are prepared to beat them, torture them, imprison them, or even kill them, to be sure they do not have the freedom to do what they want to do with their life. Any article that suggests that it is possible to be a non-cruel slave owner is an article that does not understand what slavery is.
  • duaneb 12y ago
    You are correct—romans did not have some blanket dislike of cruelty. Slaves were property, and they were used as property. This included rape, torture and murder without any cause, etc. If a citizen had a wife and female slaves, he would not be expected to be monogamous, sexually, with his wife, although he would be expected to refrain from embarrassing his wife socially. However, it is important to note that to a roman citizen, decorum dictated their public behavior, not laws. This is why all the bickering that surrounded the change from a republic to an empire seems more like a soap opera, with public insults about the others' masculinity on the senate floor, and sleeping with their wives in private. This is also why you have a huge variety of culture and religion in the empire—Christianity made the empire LOOK bad. Keep in mind that this is a state that, at points in its life, recorded "rape by monkeys" as a punishment. They didn't have many qualms about treating people poorly the way we might today when "justice" was involved. In fact, I would argue our current form of government is not oriented around justice, but ensuring a homogenous culture of morality. Back to the point. Slavery was fairly unrestricted in ancient rome. That doesn't mean that all slaves were actually treated poorly. As noted extensively elsewhere in texts, the romans were pragmatic about how they used their slaves: they may be property, but a slave that you don't treat well will still be cooking your food, maintaining your estate. They're not going to care if they are your property if they decide they'd rather kill you than put up with you, and slaves would often outnumber non-slaves in upper class households. So often slaves would be given wages, asked to raise these children. Saturnalia, the roman "christmas", turned the tables around and had the masters give their slaves gifts and serve them. Now, I don't know how much of the article you read. It seems like you only read the first three paragraphs, from what you quoted, because the article openly acknowledges how brutal Rome can be. You're not going to get much out of an article if you disagree with the first few paragraphs unless you already agree with them.
• littletimmy 12y ago
  The comparison between slaves of old and the wage slaves of today is a good one. Regardless of the shiny veneer of amenity-laden offices and endless vacation time, the fact remains that most people do a job so that they don't starve to death. That is not free work, that is wage slavery.
  • Jimmy 12y ago
    Your thesis seems to be "If (if you don't do X, then you starve to death), then X is slavery", but I don't think that's true. Think of small hunter-gatherer groups that lived before the advent of agriculture. If they didn't go out and find food, they would die. But it doesn't seem right to say they were slaves.
    • littletimmy 12y ago
      Good point. But in the case of the hunter-gatherers a person is not working for someone else who will then provide him sustenance. That is not the case with an office worker. I agree with you in that the topic is more complex than I initially made it seem. In the case of the office worker, hopefully the worker produces something of which then the capital owner takes some and leaves the rest to the office worker. That seems better than slavery, but only marginally. It actually sounds more like indetured sevitude in a feudal system (i.e. plant my land, we split the crop). We could debate whether that's slavery or not.
      • sliverstorm 12y ago
        You still have the option of working for yourself to provide your own sustenance. It's called farming. Maybe our ancestors were foolish to give it up- maybe it's the idyllic lifestyle- but the fact is people voluntarily left it behind. What are you really advocating? Post-scarcity?
        • littletimmy 12y ago
          Ah, that's a good argument. It used to be that you had the option of farming. Back in the old days where all land was not somebody's, you could go into the wilderness and stake out a piece of land to live off like a homestead. This is no longer an option. Where are such pieces of land that I can go and cultivate? I'm an advocate of basic income. Or negative income tax if you want to call it that.
• gnu8 12y ago
  Whatever these morons have done to the links on their web sites has broken command-click to open a link in a new tab. They need to buy some better web development slaves.
• PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  I haven't seen any comments yet on the merits of a company having employees vs outsourcing: And just as a household needed slaves, so companies need staff. Permanent employees, like slaves, are far more desirable than outsourcing to outsiders. The Romans thought external contractors could never be relied on like members of the primary social group.
• notastartup 12y ago
  corporations want to extract the maximum possible value from their human assets, without exhausting them or provoking rebellion or escape some continuously turnover people. their business relies on ripping people off and exhausting them.
• vacri 12y ago
  Did Julius Caesar take his legions off-site to get them to buy-in to his invasion of Gaul? Successful leaders had to stand out from the crowd and use their superior skills to inspire, cajole and sometimes force people to do what was necessary. So JC in the military behaved a lot like... officers in the modern military. They don't fraternise with the enlisted folk, and are all about leadership. In fact, they do less bribing to get the common soldier to do what they want than back in JC's time. Legionnaires were routinely offered loot and land in return for service; it wasn't just "hey, that guy has a striking profile and a commanding demeanour!". The article has quite a romanticised view of Roman slavery - for example, the treatment of slaves in the article is all about household servants. It doesn't really discuss the treatment of slaves in the fields or in the mines, which was pretty brutal.