Functional division of labour makes individual acts multifinal and morally meaning-void

Evidence

All these effects of distance created by the hierarchical division of labour are radically magnified once the division becomes functional. Now it is not just the lack of direct, personal experience of the actual execution of the task to which successive command contribute their share, but also the lack of similarity between the task at hand and the task of the office as a whole (one is not a miniature version, or an icon, of the other), which distances the contributor from the job performed by the bureaucracy of which he is a part. The psychological impact of such distantiation is profound and far-reaching. It is one thing to give a command to load bombs on the plane, but quite different to take care of regular steel supply in a bomb factory. In the first case, the command-giver may have no vivid, visual impression of the devastation the bomb is about to cause. In the second case, however, the supply manager does not, if he chooses to, have to think about the use to which bombs are put at all. Even in abstract, purely notional knowledge of the final outcome is redundant, and certainly irrelevant as far as the success of his own part of the operation goes. In a functional division of labour, everything one does is in principle multifinal; that is, it can be combined and integrated into more than one meaning-determining totality. By itself, the function is devoid of meaning, and the meaning which will be eventually bestowed on it is in no way pre-empted by the actions of its perpetrators. It will be ‘the others’ (in most cases anonymous and out of reach) who will some time, somewhere, decide that meaning. ‘Would workers in the chemical plants that produced napalm accept responsibility for burned babies?’ ask Kren and Rappoport. ‘Would such workers even be aware that others might reasonably think they were responsible?’ Of course they wouldn’t. And there is no bureaucratic reason why they should. The splitting of the baby-burning process in minute functional tasks and then separating the tasks from each other have made such awareness irrelevant – and exceedingly difficulty to achieve. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 292

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key term ‘multifinal’ — functions that can be combined into more than one meaning-determining totality, making the meaning of one’s work determined elsewhere.
• XREF: This multifinality concept is ready-made scaffolding for Islamophobia analyses of how bureaucratic procedures (data, jobs, logistics) feed into exclusionary outcomes its functionaries disavow. — connects to: Divided labor disperses responsibility so nobody feels like a killer — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 697; Division of labour shifts evaluation from moral to technical criteria — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 554; Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612 (+4 more)

Related

• Division of labour shifts evaluation from moral to technical criteria (similarity 0.85)
• Divided labor disperses responsibility so nobody feels like a killer (similarity 0.82)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.81)
• Functional task separation replaces moral responsibility with technical responsibility (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Functional task separation replaces moral responsibility with technical responsibility #expands (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 293
• Division of labour shifts evaluation from moral to technical criteria #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 554
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612
• Systemic complexity disperses responsibility so no individual is originator of an action #expands (0.85)
• Labour’s representation of the working class actively constitutes that class #expands (0.80)