The Happiness Industry Read online

  Wherever the economics of mental health become more explicit, the gap between care and punishment tends to shrink. In 2007, the economist Richard Layard laid out the ‘business case’ for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), demonstrating that it could save the UK government money, given the treatment’s brevity and apparent success rate in keeping people in work.16 This was instrumental in the creation of the Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme, which involved a dramatic rise in the number of cognitive behavioural therapists trained and employed by the National Health Service.

  But with the dawning of austerity, this sympathy for talking cures started to look somewhat different. In 2014, the government announced that disability benefit claimants could have their payments stopped if they refused to attend sessions of CBT. People would effectively be forced to receive a talking cure. Quite how therapy could be expected to ‘work’, when it was only being undergone under the threat of losing £85 a week, was not explained.

  To close down every route for the avoidance of work, doctors have had to be conscripted into this policy agenda too. A UK government report published in 2008 complained that ‘the fallacy persists that illness is incompatible with being at work’, which doctors were guilty of peddling.17 A government campaign was launched to dissuade doctors of this, and their official ‘sick notes’ (which were once signed by doctors to declare that an individual shouldn’t work) were replaced by ‘fit notes’, requiring doctors to describe the remaining ways in which an individual could still be employed, despite any illnesses or disabilities. Doctors were encouraged to sign a draft statement scripted by the state, agreeing that work is good for people.

  At the opposite end of the labour market, things look a lot sunnier, but somehow no less brutal. While Atos, A4e and Ingeus grapple with the apparent sluggishness and pessimism of the poor, high-end wellness consultants make large sums of money by teaching corporate elites how to maintain themselves in a state of optimal psychosomatic fitness. Classes such as Dr Jim Loehr’s ‘Corporate Athlete Course’ ($4,900 for two and a half days) introduce executives to elite ‘energy investment’ strategies, which will enable them to achieve a high performance level of physical and mental wellness. The American productivity guru Tim Ferriss sells advice on how senior managers should best employ their own brains over the course of the working day, following an earlier career selling dubious brain-enhancing nutritional supplements.

  This consultancy circuit moves seamlessly among various apparently separate domains of expertise. The psychology of motivation blends into the physiology of health, drawing occasionally on insights from sports coaches and nutritionists, to which is added a cocktail of neuroscientific rumours and Buddhist meditation practices. Various notions of ‘fitness’, ‘happiness’, ‘positivity’ and ‘success’ bleed into one another, with little explanation of how or why. The idea which accompanies all of this is that there is one ideal form of human existence: hardworking, happy, healthy and, above all, rich. A science of elite perfectibility is built on the back of this heroic capitalist vision. The flip side of this, and the real driving force behind many executive wellness programmes, is a set of well-researched risks run by highly competitive businessmen, colloquially known as ‘burn-out’, which includes the higher chance of heart attacks, strokes and nervous breakdowns.

  Of course, the majority of adults living in capitalist societies lie somewhere between the purview of Atos et al. and that of the executive wellness gurus. Is there no scope for a less individualized vision of well-being across the middle swathes of the labour market? Possibly there is. But here too are some brutally competitive injunctions offered to those managers worrying about worker disengagement and its impact upon productivity.

  One of America’s leading workplace happiness gurus, entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, argues that the most successful businesses are those which deliberately and strategically nurture happiness throughout their organizations. Businesses should employ chief happiness officers to ensure that nobody escapes workplace happiness. But if this sounds like the recipe for inclusive community, it isn’t. Hsieh advises businesses to identify the 10 per cent of employees who are least enthusiastic towards the happiness agenda, and then lay them off.18 Once this is done, the remaining 90 per cent will apparently become ‘super-engaged’, a finding which is open to more than one psychological interpretation.

  As the science of happiness has moved closer to the front line of profit-maximizing business, something curious has happened to it. For Bentham, happiness was something which resulted from certain activities and choices. Neo-classical economists such as Jevons and behaviourist psychologists such as Watson assumed something similar, implying that individuals could be lured to make certain choices by dangling a pleasurable carrot in front of them. But in the context of business consultancy and individual coaching, happiness looks altogether different. Suddenly, it is represented as an input to certain strategies and projects, a resource to be drawn upon, which will yield more money in return. Bentham and Jevons’s psychological premise, that money yields a proportionate quantity of happiness, is spun on its head, suggesting instead that a quantity of happiness will yield a certain amount of money.

  One of a new generation of positive psychology management gurus, Shawn Achor, outlines a range of data in his book, The Happiness Advantage, suggesting that happier people achieve more in their careers.19 They get promoted more, sell more (if they work in marketing) and enjoy better health. Happiness becomes a form of capital on which they can fall back amidst the turbulence of an uncertain economy. It is, as the title of his book suggests, a source of advantage in the battle to succeed. If this was the limit of his wisdom, Achor might sound like a fatalist: optimists are just luckier in all regards than pessimists.

  The crucial supplement to the data is that we are all, supposedly, capable of influencing our own happiness levels. Happiness, Achor tells us, is a choice. We can either choose to be happy (and consequently successful) or choose to be unhappy (and suffer the consequences). Neuroscientist Paul Zak, another leading speaker and consultant on these issues, suggests that we view our happiness like a ‘muscle’, which needs exercising regularly in order to keep it in full working order, for when we need it. Lurking within this highly individualized agenda is the capacity to blame people for their own misery and failure, both of which are matters that they have evidently failed to act upon adequately.

  What does ‘happiness’ even mean, once it is being conceived of in this way? It seems to imply a source of energy and resilience, but always directed towards goals other than being happy, such as status, power, employment and money. In the face of workplace ennui and psychological stagnation, the motivational gurus simply demand more willpower. By this account, the activities that might result in happiness, such as socializing or relaxing, are only valuable to the extent that they might restore brain and body to a level of fitness, from which they can then be propelled forwards to the next business challenge. This particular version of utilitarianism means expanding corporate rationality further into everyday life, such that there is now even an ‘optimal’ way of taking a break from work, and simply going for a walk can be viewed as a calculated act of productivity management.20 What is going on? The misery of working people is a serious political issue. How did it become captured in this way?

  The extraction of effort

  The discovery of the ‘conservation of energy’ in the 1840s, which so excited physiologists and philosophers such as Fechner, also unleashed a wave of enthusiasm among industrialists and inventors. If quantities of energy remained the same, as they passed between man, matter, heat and motion, then mathematical analysis could yield ever-more productive technologies. The search for ‘perpetual motion’ machines was a manifestation of this optimism.

  However, this enthusiasm was soon tempered by a more troubling discovery made by the physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1865. It transpired that energy did not remain a single quantity after all, as it changed from on
e state to another. In fact it was gradually diminished. This was the law of ‘entropy’, and it catalysed an outbreak of anxiety and pessimism regarding the very future of industrial capitalism. During the 1870s, as Jevons was converting economics into a form of psychological mathematics, physiologists – and industrialists – were growing increasingly concerned by the problem of physical human fatigue, especially in the factory. The Victorians had tended to view inactivity and unemployment as moral failings, associated with drink and bad ‘character’. But by the 1880s, there was a creeping concern that industrial work was simply grinding people down. Human beings were running out of steam.

  A fin-de-siècle neurosis developed. As capitalism’s human resources were diminishing, the vitality on which Western civilization depended was in terminal decline. The syndrome of ‘neurasthenia’, a form of nervous exhaustion supposedly brought on by the strains of modern urban life, claimed thousands of victims among the European and American bourgeoisie. Progress just seemed like too much effort.

  The science of work at the end of the nineteenth century was not entirely dissimilar to how it looks today. Fatigue was a preoccupation, just as general inactivity (for the poor) or burn-out (for the rich) is today. This was viewed as a matter of national economic priority: variations in national economic output were attributed to differences in the physiology and nutrition of rival national workforces.21 As one study suggested, maybe Britain’s economic advantage over Germany was that its workers ate more meat, whereas the latter’s ate more potatoes. The science of ergonomics developed to study and photograph bodies in motion, in the attempt to spot precisely where energy was being wasted. The muscles, and even the blood, were examined, to try and understand how entropy afflicted the human body in the workplace.

  This was the context into which the mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor launched his career as the world’s first management consultant. Taylor was born into a prominent and wealthy Philadelphia family, with roots stretching back to Edward Winslow, one of the passengers on the Mayflower. This heritage was crucial. It was his eminent family name which granted him privileged access to the industrial firms of the city, in ways that would be decisive for his career. During the 1870s and 1880s, Taylor worked for a number of successful manufacturing and steel plants in the area, achieving automatic promotions to managerial positions, on account of his family connections.

  Taylor was never an industrialist as such – he’d originally hoped to become a lawyer. Like every management consultant who would come after him, this put him in an ambivalent position, both an insider and an outsider. This granted him an unusual view of the shop floor of manufacturing plants, which he was able to look down on from a dispassionate white-collar position, with an air of objectivity. He had power within a business, but he also had scientific detachment. And much of what he saw, from this observational vantage point, looked deeply wasteful. There was no methodical, scientific analysis going into the design of work processes. Managers had a given quantity of resources, and a given quantity of hours in the day, but seemed bereft of any mathematical logic through which to exploit these for the greatest output.

  Taylor never remained in the employment of a single company for very long, again setting a precedent for the consultancy industry that came after him. He kept moving from one Philadelphia manufacturer to the next, amassing insights into what was preventing more efficient modes of workplace organization. It was only in 1893 that he formally established himself as an independent consultant and began to sell his knowledge. His business card read, ‘Consulting Engineer – Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty’.

  In the late 1890s, Taylor was hired by Bethlehem Steel to study the manufacture of pig iron. This was the topic of his first quantitative, scientific analysis of ‘time and motion’ in the workplace, specifically looking at how to increase the amount of pig iron that labourers could load onto a wagon in a given day.22 He not only looked at the process of labour itself, but also the physical conditions of work, and the physical condition of the individual labourers. He broke production down into individual tasks to be logged and rationalized. Even if economics had recently been converted into a utilitarian study of consumption, the problems of industrial management remained thoroughly physical, of how to extract as much produce from as few machines and human bodies as possible. He claimed to have increased the average output of pig-iron handlers from 12.5 to 47.5 tons per day, purely by rationalizing their time, motion and monetary incentives.

  The Bethlehem study turned Taylor into a celebrity in business and academic circles. In 1908, Harvard Business School offered an MBA for the first time, but without much of a clue as to what would go in it. As the world’s now pre-eminent scientist of management, Taylor was invited to lecture on the course and in 1911 published a synthesis of his various theories, The Principles of Scientific Management. Among businessmen, time and motion studies became all the rage, arriving in European factories in the years immediately prior to World War One.

  While the immediate clients for Taylor’s services were interested in maximizing their business revenue, the political appeal of scientific management was extremely broad. American progressives believed that with greater scientific insight, corporations could be harnessed for the common good. Socialists, including Lenin, saw in Taylorism a model for how society itself could be run in an efficient manner, without reliance on markets.

  Taylor himself also attached a loftier social purpose to his new science, believing that scientific management would spell the end of industrial conflict, substituting ‘hearty brotherly co-operation for contention and strife’. One of his professed advantages, when he entered firms as an outsider, was that he could avoid being dragged into industrial conflicts between management and labour and maintain a politically neutral position. In workplaces that had become conflict-riven, the consultant could have a tempering effect – though of course it was never labour that had invited the consultant to intervene in the first place.

  The accident of Taylor’s aristocratic roots created a template for how management consultants have behaved ever since. McKinsey & Co., Accenture, PwC presume a similar form of privilege, promising to sprinkle expertise upon organizations and workplaces, then very often exiting before the results become too apparent. That may be Taylor’s most powerful legacy, because beyond that, the term ‘Taylorism’ has come to acquire some largely negative connotations. Even as companies continue to push surveillance and scientific analysis further into the lives of their workforce, now through digital data analytics and mobile devices, it has been deeply unfashionable for some time to hark back to the hard, scientific analysis of Frederick Taylor. The reason for this is simple: the brutalist approach to management is deemed to make people unhappy.

  It would be perverse to defend Taylorism, but there was at least a transparency about its logic. Workplaces and managers existed to extract value, in the most efficient way possible. Workers were never expected to like this, which was a freedom of sorts. As Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division who hanged himself aged twenty-three, once said, ‘I used to work in a factory and I was really happy because I could daydream all day’. Labourers in a Taylorist factory brought their physical capabilities into work, to be exploited for sure, but were never expected to give anything more personal or intangible. And this is exactly why managers soon turned their backs on Taylor’s version of scientific management.

  Psychology gets to work

  In 1928, a researcher from Harvard Business School sat down with a young woman working in a telephone production plant in Cicero, Illinois, and asked her an unusual question: ‘If given three wishes, what would they be?’ The woman paused to reflect before listing her answers. ‘Health, to take a trip home at Christmas time, and to take a wedding trip to Norway next spring.’

  The reason the question was unusual was that the researcher was not, ultimately, interested in the woman’s life or wish fulfilment. Like Taylor before him
, he was interested in her productivity. The enthusiasm for Taylorism had waned considerably since its heyday in the years prior to World War One, but Taylor’s basic scientific ambitions were still largely unquestioned among management theorists. Only in 1927 Harvard Business School had established a Fatigue Laboratory, containing rooms of various temperatures and state-of-the-art instruments to study the reactions of the human body to different types of work and recuperation. In an economy still dominated by manufacturing and physical labour, physiology and infrastructure seemed to hold the key for unleashing better workplace performance. Managers did not consider the Christmas or travel plans of their employees to be any of their business.

  The man asking the questions in that telephone production plant was Elton Mayo, an Australian polymath of somewhat dubious scholarly provenance. He had dabbled in philosophy, medicine and psychoanalysis, and was seduced by many of the doom-laden cultural critiques published in the years following World War One, such as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Mayo was convinced that civilization was heading for a fall, and that industrial conflict would be its trigger. Trade unions and socialists were thus a threat, not only to management and capital, but to world peace.

  In some of Mayo’s more outlandish theories, socialism was a symptom of physical fatigue and psychiatric illness. ‘To any working psychologist’, he asserted, ‘it is at once evident that the general theories of Socialism, Guild Socialism, Anarchism and the like are very largely the phantasy constructions of the neurotic’.23 He believed that the only solution lay in corporations coming to provide forms of psychoanalytic therapy to their employees, which would soothe them, bringing them closer into the arms of their employers. Employees who resisted the authority of their managers were in need of treatment.