Can business respond productively to the virus crisis by making customer interactions more rational?

There is a crisis of American business and society that at present is only likely to be exacerbated by the current demand that basically all work be done by people working individually at home. The problem is poor customer service, and it is that most individuals today have to spend a small but significant part of their time dealing with representatives of companies on the phone or through the Internet, when those representatives are not trained with the skills that would enable these conversations to take place most effectively and efficiently. The most proximate cause of this is a business culture that is organized in an authoritarian manner, including cognitively. That is to say, statements, which as directives, answers to questions, declarations of what is the nature of a problem, etc., play a key role in the management of any business and broadly of the society, — these are treated as knowledge, which the company possesses and will want to share with customers on as-needed basis, which means that the customer at the end of the phone line is basically someone to be managed. Furthermore, in the recent, neoliberal period (dating from the early 1970s), more blatantly hierarchical and authoritarian forms of governance, and personality, were replaced by ones that are superficially more flexible and gentle, but are not more rational. In fact, they are less so, as reason, which is the natural medium of discursive interpersonal management that in principle enables both parties to get what they want, was de-emphasized nearly to the point of nonexistence, and in favor of psychology. Which is also to say rhetoric, as in sales. Every American will recognize that when they call a company to speak to someone about a problem or a charge on their bill, the first thing they will hear is a lengthy attestation of how well the person understands how they must be feeling. Businesses in Europe tend not to do this, but Americans do. This must have something to do with changes in our educational system as well with broad and deep-rooted features of American culture.

We Americans tend to have ambivalent notions about authority, because our history constructed as its contrary not democracy, which can be thought of as partly a mode of social life and interaction based on reason, but liberty, which basically means I am free from your power because I have got mine. This can mean being a business person, or a professional with entitlement to respect based on status in an organization; it can also be a certain way of thinking of oneself as the consumer of entertainments we all are, entitled, as we also are as citizens/voters, to our opinions and lifestyle. Feminist, gay, and racial and ethnic left-liberal politics are also constructed in this way (through what we may call “underdog rights”: demands for recognition “in spite of” one’s “oppressed” status, entitled to a recognized appearance because one is, or was, without it), and these motifs were definitely struck as part of our nation’s history and identity, going back to the early colonies and including the long struggle, not completed, aiming at freedom for the African peoples from slavery and its sequelae. Oppression and injustice make Americans angry, but our society gives us no easy way of addressing them, as might be in a society based on a democratic model rather than the liberal one.

One thing that traditional labor struggles tended to ignore that may come into focus more in the near future is the hidden costs of the reproduction of labor power and so the profitability of capital investment, onto the public at large, treated as “negative externalities,” as is the case with environmental destruction, which is not willed by a central government but tolerated as the accidental effect of businesses pursuing in priority their own individual profits. So too are the costs of transportation to work (in money and time: all those traffic jams), the costs of housing, health care, and food, without which workers cannot work or remain workers, education, etc. There are labor time costs that are also outsourced, and one of them is the phone call that must be made to a company for any matter having to do with the service provided to one as customer, and that are handled by a combination of automatic recordings, long wait times spend listening to depressing music that is clearly meant to maintain the waiting customer in a study of anxious readiness, or the use of an endless circuit of repeating spoken advertisements “for your benefit,” and the difficulties that many of these callers will have when the customer is speaking to a customer service representative. These reps clearly do not have the best jobs, many of them, and they often work in call centers and are trained to spend the least amount of time needed, and often are also not well enough informed nor trained to think in ways that could enable them to help solve any but the more rudimentary questions. Most questions clearly can be answered with a prepared response that the operator simply reads or has memorized. This is efficient when it works, as some questions are routine. Problems arise if too much is given over to this, and then a customer like myself can spend hours, and never really get any help.

Most people will say that the answer is for the phone reps to be considerate and nice. Good listening skills, even some emotional intelligence, which in recent decades was said to have been found to be more important than intelligence of the regular kind (processing statements composed of symbols and engaging in inferences). The arguments made were that emotional intelligence was more important in determining the success of workers in their jobs. But emotional intelligence, like generous asservations of empathetic understanding, are not enough. They are not enough for anyone who wants anything in particular and who is not basically a child in how he or she thinks about it. A child may ask for an orange and may really want you to hand it to him with a warm smile. But if you are talking to someone at a company or agency about a $100 charge they have assessed you that you think is not correct or fair, you probably care more about the money than the smile, even if the person smilingly insisting on the cost with no clear reason is very warm in their smiling indeed.

American education needs not to return to rote memorization of facts, which in fact it never really left behind, as the revolution in social thinking after the sixties was really all about personality (which is style) and feeling (which is a concept or set of concepts that from the Stoics and Epicureans to this day have never been unproblematically defined, the term often referencing whatever is not reason or thinking), and it tended to facilely oppose reason with feeling and order and discipline with flexibility and facile and expressive forms creativity but without much effort to rethink thinking, and in ways that somehow left the field open, via the neoliberal emphasis on training kids for future job success, and for the cheap guarantees measured easily by quantitative test scores that seemed to call for the multiple choice test. That requires most of our school kids to effectively memorization of bits of information, no matter how they are taught; such facts are already constituted in their truth and need only to be represented, including on the exam. True, our primary and secondary educational system is not needed to produce in sufficient numbers university and graduate students, who are increasingly recruited from abroad. But what happened also is that many Americans of recent generations have been seduced into wanting to live in a society that seems, and is, freer in some ways than past models, but somehow not needing to be functionally all that smart. And we may not notice that we are and the people around us aren’t. Or that we are but are not much allowed to be, perhaps as workers and consumers both, and of course it is both those roles that our economy today needs, and you are doing a kind of work when you reply to posts on Facebook, download and listen to a song, and many other things, perhaps ultimately excepting only sleep, as Jonathan Crary argues in his book “24/7”; sleep as the last frontier being perhaps less directly exploited than reduced, leaving many people with risk of burnout. Concerning schools, in France and other countries, students study literature and philosophy and write essay exams, which are graded partly for creativity but still more for logic than mere rhetorical skill, which itself is an evocation of feeling and in a way little more than that.

Soon, no doubt, more people will be working at home. The freelancer and gig economy will only become more so. We will see a decline in numbers of gregarious employments in offices and stores, beginning as soon as in-person business begins to reopen, doubtless leaner and meaner in many cases. I suspect that the world of the arts that drives so much of hard-hit New York, where I live, will rebound in plenitude, but slowly and after some time. For now, it looks like a depression. When the economy starts to recover, more of it will be freelance. And what does that mean for the average worker and individual or family? The lines will blur even further between paid labor and all other activities, as it already has now for some time. The Italian philosopher Mario Tronti, whose famous 1966 book Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital) was at least recently translated in English by Verso Books, called this “the social factory.” Capital still organizes the employment of labor (some Marxists say that that was and is its principle social function), but now everything is labor, everything we do involves some creativity and is entirely exploitable, that is, a source of profits, in various ways that do surely point to possible “socialization” as a threshold that may soon be reached. (For example, what is the need for Facebook to be a privately held company? And how much do we need internet companies to identity and market to us in terms of our individual market niche? As a writer who is also a reader, I like to hear about books I may want to read. Which are not the only thing anyone might market to me, and if it is a private company doing this which only wants money, will they advertise to me the most important books for my purposes?)

In any case, we will be here (those of us left alive), still working and playing and living largely behind our screens. Those are here to stay, surely, and the questions are how we will use them. We will have algorithms organizing the flows of information and activity and perhaps even the structuration of the space and time of our lives and experience (one reason I find cinema still the most important art). And we will interact both with intelligent systems and (hopefully) intelligent persons. Actually, I find it interesting to note that much of what I am wont to complain about would be better managed with the right use of AI than a retraining of persons. But I think persons will be necessary to our lives and work aa long as we need to make judgments that bring into play not just informational data, of numbers and codifiable statements, but also something like worlds. We live in worlds. They are chaotic. They are also bounded forms that autopoietically interface with and emerge out of a more primal chaos. I think that AI will not take over as long as people and worlds are not entirely manageable. And they are not. To be thus, they would have to lack any of that primary vagueness. People who did might still build houses, but they would build boring houses, where they would be bored, and they would not make love, because lovers are autopoietic makers and re-makers of worlds.

My own quarrel with the nature of things today is far more limited. I think that the customer service reps who act like robots should be replaced by robots, and in what remains, we need to rethink what it is to be intelligent and use intelligence. There are lots of concepts that aim to address this problem and don’t. One of them is ‘emotional intelligence’. Most practical psychological theories made use of in therapies are in the same category. That is because they are management techniques. But a therapist who, as many now do, just gives you instructions in how to ‘think’ about your experiences, feelings, and relationships, and even thoughts (there’s a curious idea: we will tell you how to think about your thoughts!), has reduced you to the measure of pre-defined problems. You will learn how to manage will situations like those modeled.
But if someone wants to marry you or give you a job doing anything important, God help them.

Orwell in 1984 has his hero Winston say that he will be free as long as he can say that 2+2=4, even if the government denies it. Today people don’t so much lie about such facts as fail to grasp what they mean.

By that I mean in the “truth-functional” sense of the meaning of statements in analytical philosophy: that a statement, if correctly uttered, is presumed trued. And such truth generally is a matter of one or both of two things: correct observation of a fact in the world (as in “The sky is blue”) or correct inference from other statements (here, definitions of numbers and operations), just as the statement itself has consequences for the truth by inference of other statements made referencing it. Which also means that it has practical consequence, and they are worldly and concern matters other than just whether the worker is doing his job correctly as told. In the sense of “meaning” and “truth” that I am using here, which is standard today in philosophy go language, a person who says, “Yes, you’re right, 2+2=4, and I know that because it says so in my book of what to say” does not know the meaning of truth or (consequently) of the statement. He may think this statement is inferred as true from a command rather than an observation and/or inference. Commands are not true or false, though they may be just or unjust; i themselves, they are merely obeyed or disobeyed, as requests might be acknowledged or ignored, as well as granted or denied.

Our present situation is less a result of a government policy than a properly capitalist deterioration in ability to think based on a mistaken way of construing the difference between thinking to solve problems and managing people using knowledge, which is based on a traditional model of truth as representation. It is a reduction of practice to technique, and of the active and constitutive quality of using language meaningfully to a passive and constituted one. This gives an idea of worlds as readymade things manufactured by a God who gives orders to things and people to follow instructions. (This theory of God and creation has arguably been disproven: people are born, not made, and the process involved includes some amount of chance, which is why even a potent God is not omnipotent or omniscient, and so his existence does not justify evil, or not all evils, at any rate. It does not justify whatever happens, which means nothing anyone does, nor any way things are, is justified by the fact; what is done is one thing and what was rightly done another. Nor of course is what happened the only thing that could have happened, unless you seek an unknown future in a known past.) After all, the consumer is buying something we have already prepared to sell him, and citizens today are consumers, for governments that sell them services in return for votes and the support of interest groups, the stakeholders whom it is government’s business to represent or accommodate. But the figure of the citizen is a better model for workers and consumers than work and consumption are for it. Except in some petty bourgeois utopia, which might figure how much of the capitalist world today would like to think of us all, democracy is more than a method of management, in part because such a model would be that of a business society defined by projects, and so making everyone infinitely responsible since their projects can be identified with their choices. Indeed, it is subjects who have projects (and affects: they do things and things happen to them), while citizens are persons with lives, and a life is part of a form of life, which is never quite given. Forms of life make themselves out of the chaotic informality that is never dispelled; this defines creativity, which ultimately is always the remaking of a world of lived experience. Projects are given, but our amorphically-based creativity is larger than all forms and projects. Socialism and capitalism both construe social life and its production too narrowly so that given projects determine what can be done.

Locally, there is often a need for both more reason and more imagination. Call this thinking. The specific proposal I want to make is this:

Doing business with others, including competitors, customers, and the company's own workers, should be understood as a constructive and cooperative activity of solving problems by thinking together. 

I submit that if you have a company that conceives itself in this way, so that in principle all interlocutors in every conversation are treated not strategically (use the opportunity to get what you want, in response to what you think they will do) but cooperatively, this should make your company more effective and profitable. This also answers of course to a certain idea of democracy.

Thinking alone or together involves a lot of chaos. There is a way of managing chaos that doesn’t demand that it act like it already is an order. We need as a society to teach more workers how to think creatively and what that involves. The benefits will include that people will be happier, and that many things will get done more efficiently.

The ability to do work and business (which I define simply as getting things done) this way was a great missed opportunity of the societies that called themselves socialist. I don't think this should be the main task of the left, but it could be one of its tasks. Socialists lost the Cold War partly because capitalism outperformed them. I don't think that productivity and fairness always together, but they do sometimes. There is something hopeful about that.