Saturday, April 22, 2006

Mobbing

I read this article about mobbing in academe and thought, this sounds exactly like a teachers union!

It's a well-written article. Here's a taste:

Max Weber, a founding father of modern sociology, saw bureaucracy as the living embodiment of cool, procedural rationality. In Mr. Westhues's view, mobbing is a pathological undercurrent of irrationality in bureaucracies — a crabby ghost in the machine.

According to Mr. Westhues, mobbing occurs most in institutions where workers have high job security, where there are few objective measures of performance, and where there is frequent tension between loyalty to the institution and loyalty to some higher purpose. In other words, the ghost is alive and well in many academic departments.

2 comments:

Linda Fox said...

Let's state it for what it is - the typical (and stereotypical) behavior of women. Petty, gossiping, exclusionary of those whose behavior isn't in line, and, ultimately, capable of sending its victims to their final reward.

Darren said...

It isn't just women who participate in this behavior, not by a long shot. To me, it's *union* behavior.