Business-derived self-assessment rituals reproduce the sense that no alternative exists.

Evidence

One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services — and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book Capitalist Realism. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal that comes with these procedures often — managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, “You don’t have to believe in this, but this is what we have to do now. We have to go along with this kind of thing.” And that sense that one has to go along with practices and languages coming in from business — I think that that is a key part of this sense that there is no alternative — that this is how things are done now — and there’s no other way around it. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2105

Categorization

• XREF: The manager’s ‘you don’t have to believe in this’ pre-emptively disarms critique — same move identified in discussions of cynical reason and ideology after the Frankfurt School. — connects to: The logic of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 25; Doing nothing can take the constructive form of alternative world-building — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 661; Self-reinforcing processes progressively narrow choice until no alternative remains. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence:…, 44 (+2 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: bureaucratic self-surveillance in professions (teaching, medicine) as ritualistic compliance that survives even when managers disavow belief in it.

Broader Connections

• Self-reinforcing processes progressively narrow choice until no alternative remains. #corroborates (0.90) — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 44
• The logic of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation #expands (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 25
• Doing nothing can take the constructive form of alternative world-building #responds-to (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 661
• Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices #complicates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 26
• Therapeutic self-transformation fails because no autonomous individual exists #qualifies (0.72)