"Death Imagery and the Experience of Organizational Downsizing: Or, Is Your Name on Schindler's List?"

INTRODUCTION: DOWNSIZING, ECONOMICS, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Whatever the ideological chasms between positivism, modernism, constructivism, and post-modernism, they do at least agree on the position that things are rarely what they seem to be, or are officially declared to be. Life is more than meets the eye or ear or nose. It is the additional, and disturbing, legacy of the century of the Freudian revolution, to teach us that our thoughts, feelings, and decisions are made from unconscious stuff to which we have rare and ambivalent access, let alone over which we exercise complete control. We act, but we do not know wherefrom we are acting -- though we insist we are consciously and rationally in charge of our thoughts and destinies. In a sense -- and this is what I shall say over and again in different ways about the subject of "downsizing" -- our depths and breadths of meanings and emotions elude us because we unconsciously wish them to do so. Here is precisely where a psychoanalytic perspective on workplace and wider cultural organization is essential: both retrospectively over the past decade and prospectively toward the millennial year 2000.

I shall make an effort at reclamation of more of the story of downsizing than Americans (of the USA) are used to or are comfortable with. Although I am a citizen of American culture, I cannot turn away from what I have learned through a decade of consulting and writing on the triad of social change, loss, and grief in workplace organizations, including one of its most widespread manifestations, the mass firing of workers.

In this paper on American downsizing, I situate "economics" within culture. That is, I locate it within a broader ideological structure of what life is all about, and within the shared unconscious substrate of such ideological systems, rather than accept economics uncritically as the driving force of biomedicine and of all else in our civilization. I realize that in many circles, this is secular heresy. However, I come to this interpretation inductively, inferentially -- not deductively from theory -- from twenty-five years of ongoing fieldwork inside institutions of biomedical training. My views will take exception from much of our received, official, and often obligatory wisdom about American's health care institutions, corporate decision-making, and their connection to the wider national culture.

I do not ask the reader to accept this counter-intuitive, against-the-cultural-grain, view on faith, but on data -- a different data from spread sheets and computerized profit/loss/production statements. I ask you the reader, rather, to compare our own experience -- your stories -- with mine, and in the spirit of play, to try mine on for size with your own experience in downsizing, reductions in force, restructuring, other forms of massive change, and organizational leadership. I shall ask you to wonder about our own business-related cultural presuppositions, most of which are not articulated in mission statements and strategic plans, to wonder why getting rid of people on large scale in the workplace via upper management decision-making is the first and final solution (the latter, a term upper management often uses) we now offer and implement to organizational problems of profit, loss, productivity, and global competition. Why this? Why now? -- I ask these on a large cultural scale, much as a physician wonders why a patient develops a particular disease at a particular time, and why the patient comes to the office or to the hospital emergency room at this time instead of some other.

Throughout this paper, especially in the vignettes, I shall try to stay close to the speaker's own voice, to offer a more phenomenological rendering of the experience of downsizing, rather than offer "deep" psychoanalytic interpretation (say, from the viewpoints of classical structural theory [id, ego, superego], object relations theory, self psychology, topographic theory [conscious, preconscious, unconscious], or even organizational group psychology [regression, dependency, projection as governing the life of bureaucracies]. In giving voice to the speakers in the vignettes, I seek also to share my own surprise and horror with the reader. No text speaks entirely "for itself," since every quotation in this paper reveals my own voice as well as the speaker's! But I wish to come as close as possible to allowing people to speak for themselves. This is how depth psychology-oriented consultants and social scientists build and modify psychoanalytic theory -- or at least it ought to be.

I should state my premises -- borne of recurrent findings from consultations and from observing modern America -- from the start. Downsizing, Reductions in force or RIFing, restructuring, reengineering, rightsizing, outplacement, outsourcing, and trimming fat, to name but several core words, are not primarily business decisions determined by economic rationality, enlightened self-interest, pragmatism, realism, empiricism, and objectivity -- although our American cultural rule is that we should if not must see them as motivated this way and only this way (see 't Hart, 1991). I hope to show through nine vignettes that "downsizing" and cognate terms are cultural maps and euphemisms. Through them we direct ourselves and are directed by others toward some things and away from others. They make some things explicit and blur others. I hope to show that downsizing and related ostensibly business terms are deeply embedded in unstated psychocultural values (e.g., workers as machines, expendable units of production), perception of time (e.g., short term rather than long term), and unconscious conflict (e.g., about aggression, dependency, identity). I shall argue that downsizing as a mode of decision-making and of induced social change is opaque to comprehension without our first recognizing that it rests upon unstated values placed on human life, well-being, and loyalty, to name but three dimensions.

I shall suggest that, far from being the pinnacle of rational, enlightened self-interest, objective judgment, downsizing is driven by disturbingly and destructively irrational forces (a point made in detail in a longitudinal study of a major hospital's process of downsizing; by Allcorn, Baum, Diamond, and Stein, 1996, in press). Even The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post (e.g., Grimsley, 1995) now feature articles that raise skeptical "second thoughts" about the heady promises advocates of downsizing made in the 1980s' era of corporate leveraged buyouts, raids, takeovers, and mergers. Sometimes sacred, culture-wide solutions turn out in fact to be problems in disguise -- or at least safely so in retrospect.

In our current zeal to "delayer" and "horizontally flatten" workplaces (a paradoxically "vertical" act!), and to brand those "cut" as non-essential "fat," we forget that in the 1970's and 1980's we regarded increasing administrative, managerial vertical layers as solution rather as problem. We once believed in the "fat" we now disdain, cut, and discard. They were to be our organizational police (external superego), to help the corporation economize better! Now "bloating" is our enemy, and "anorexia" is our salvation: yet both of these are our own organizational ideologies.

Downsizing is an inescapable reality and constant threat in American life during the past decade. There is scarcely any American whose life has not been directly touched or at least threatened by it, often multiple times. Many executives as well as workers have been through two, even three, downsizings. Many of these now hold two, three, even four jobs to make ends meet for themselves, their families, and their lifestyles. Downsizing as reality, as memory, as anticipated event, as emotion-charged fantasy, casts many shadows. Having said this, I wish also to be clear that I am not engaging in "downsizing-bashing." The culprit is not a specific mode of massive organizational change, but rather of unrecognized unconscious influences that drive workplace organizational life. Following upon the pioneering work of Diamond (1984, 1988, 1985) and Diamond and Allcorn (1985), I shall argue that business and other workplace organizations in our mixed-capitalist economy, like larger ethnic groups and nations, is largely unconsciously constituted and constructed. Downsizing is a special, and current, instance of this process. Business, policy, economics -- from day-to-day bureaucracy to the upheavals of downsizing -- are not sufficient unto themselves; they rest upon volcanoes.

What downsizing is, is inseparable from what it symbolizes, what it feels like, to all involved. In a formula: downsizing (and its related terms) is a cultural idiom of problem-definition and problem-solving in the language of economic necessity. If in the 1960's, the image of abundance and generosity prevailed in political economy, in the 1990s, the image of scarcity and deprivation dominates. There is not enough of anything (resources, money, love, caring, commitment) to go around in order to survive: this is the central unstated dread of our time.

Downsizing is but a single institutional form taken by bloodless as well as bloody domestic, internal wars now occurring between groups inside the United States (Stein, 1990a, 1994a, 1995a). Since 1990, the Cold War is ended, the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union is but memory. But the aggression that bi-polar world contained is now let loose among us. We all live in Bosnia now. The Balkans and "Balkanization" are not only there but here. Our equivalents to "ethnic cleansing" are conducted in gang wars, in racial and ethnic strife, and in ruthless business competition, to name but three ways we strive to keep a sense of goodness inside and to expel badness outside, to create decisive boundaries in an era of collapsing global boundaries.

Historically, I would situate the downsizing as one expression of our domestic internal wars against a myriad of internal enemies, all of which wars erupted in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the emotionally destabilizing effect of the loss of the Soviet Union as our "shadow," that "Evil Empire" that served so well as a focus and vessel of our disavowed aggression (Stein, 1993, 1994a, 1995). We now shatter into alliances and oppositions, corporate and clinical camps of enemies and allies, as well as ethnic and political ones. In corporate and academic biomedicine, our computers and spreadsheets conduct bloodless wars. But death and thoughts of death abound -- as the vignettes from my participant observation and consultation illustrate vividly.

Before I turn to a more detailed narrative account of downsizing, and to illustrative vignettes, let me state my qualifications and limitations on them, to offer an opinion on so vast and complex a subject as downsizing. I do not claim expertise in downsizology or RIF-ology. I am not a certified downsizologist or downsizer. I am not a health economist, administrator, or policy maker. My experience begins with paying careful attention to the language, the metaphors, the images, the emotions, the clichés, the euphemisms, people in organizations where I work and consult use to describe, explain, understand, and justify their day-to-day work. Some of it comes from reading news-magazines and newspapers and from television and radio. Much, though not all, of my experience comes from academic medical or health sciences centers and community health care practices, where I have taught for twenty-five years. Specifically, hundreds of faculty meetings, case conferences, curriculum meetings, team meetings, quality assurance meetings, departmental retreats, regional and national medical conferences, to name but a few, are treasure troves of the ordinary that hold keys to our understanding downsizings. For the past seventeen years, I have offered an annual graduate seminar, "Behavioral Science in Occupational and Environmental Medicine," to physicians and to physicians' assistants (PAs). They have taught me to pay close attention to workplace culture. Together with Seth Allcorn, Howell Baum, and Michael Diamond, all psychoanalytically-oriented experienced organizational consultants, I am now completing a year-long study of the experience of downsizing at a major urban hospital, a work to be published in mid-1996.

Lastly, in January 1995, the CEO of The University Hospitals in Oklahoma City, Timothy Coussons, MD, invited me to become the "continuous consultant to the crisis" of the three-wave downsizing of the immense teaching hospitals in Oklahoma City. The latter has given me an often harrowing intimacy with the day-to-day preparation for the mass firings and with their long-term emotional and task-performance consequences for the people who remained behind to pave the way for managed care and health care reform. From them, I have learned more what I needed than what I wanted. For me, there is no turning away, no turning back, from what they have taught me.

A brief note on my methodology or modus operandi : I conduct all of my research as an applied medical anthropologist. Organizational consulting is for me applied fieldwork. The process of description, assessment, problem-identification, diagnosis (what, whose; permanent, evolving), problem-resolution, resistance to change, the unearthing of new problems by the solution of others -- these become the after-the-fact data base for my claim to understand something about downsizing. I do not know beforehand what I shall "study," since I study everything in order to try to be of help. I even study the group process of the classes I teach, for the group is part of the lesson! Often I make "process notes" during consultations or meetings; or I make notes later because something about them struck me.

I am a naturalist. I am nosy. I often discover disparities between social realities people espouse and those which I observe or infer (Richards, 1956) from others' words, deeds, and emotions. Much of my most reliable data comes from my own emotional reaction (my "countertransference") during the process of consulting; the observer's or consultant's own subjectivity can be a powerful instrument of objectivity, even as it can be a source of massive distortion. Looking inside the consultant can help him or her to look more deeply outside.

In this respect, as I look back upon my first twenty-five years as applied medical anthropologist, downsizing in the 1990s is no different from any other topic I have found myself exploring: American ethnicity, the New Ethnic Movement of the late 1960's, the unconscious dimensions of physician-patient relationships, the culture of American biomedicine, the psychology of the American/Soviet conflict, the culture of Oklahoma wheat farming and cattle raising families, the culture of the state of Oklahoma, the culture of workplace organizations, and the conflict between urban and rural medicine. Often, to my chagrin, what I start working on -- teaching about, consulting about -- turns out later to be a symbol of something else! Once I, too, thought downsizing was simply a matter of economic practicality. With the familiar news editorialist Paul Harvey, I find myself ferreting out "the rest of the story," now most recently in downsizing.

SCHINDLER'S LIST AS PARABLE OF THE DOWNSIZING OF AMERICA

This paper takes its inspiration from a movie, Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List. For all its historical inaccuracies and understatement, this movie, Schindler's List, was both a box office success and an Oscar winner. It disturbed me enough to see it three times -- but not for the presumed reason that I, an American Jew, could safely once again visit a still raw historical trauma among Jews. The more I watched it the more I saw it as allegory for our America of the 1990s, not only as a quasi-documentary of the Europe of the 1933-1945. Are there any "essential workers" left in America? "Business," ours or that of dandy-porcelain industrialist Oscar Schindler, is high drama, opera, cinema, and grueling reality.

Now, I am aware that for an employer to layoff a large number of employees is not the same as to exterminate, to murder, them by firing squads and in gas chambers. Symbolic murder is not actual murder; equivalence at the unconscious level is not identical with equivalence at the level of reality. Many oppressed ethnic, national, religious, and racial groups now voice their plight and entitlement in the idiom of the Holocaust such that the singular, sinister, vision of the Nazis -- a purified world entirely "freed" of Jews -- is diminished. It is as if there were a sibling competition among peoples for scarce narcissistic supplies. "We suffered as much as you did," goes the protest in an effort to equate all sufferings with that of the Jews in World War II. I disagree with neither of these misgivings. I share them both. I only ask that the people whom I quote here be given the benefit of radical empathy by the reader, that they be heard in their own language, that we begin to wonder why so many people articulate their experience in the symbology of the Holocaust, and that we be not quick to judge and dismiss their language as exaggerated. If an entire nation is using downsizing as a way of problem-solving, clearly there will be many who will be unemployable, uninsurable, who will be left out in the cold -- to be at great risk, to disappear, to go away and die.

Certainly "older" workers (for instance, those nearing or over fifty years) are among those at high risk for expendability. What are experience, loyalty, the sense of organizational history -- for example, what has been tried before and succeeded or failed? --, informal networking, and the girth of one's rolodex if one is regarded by management and younger co-workers as "dead meat" or "corporate fat"? Yet, are the "lean and mean" younger competitors in any more secure position when upper management approaches all benefits and perks begrudgingly?

In this paper I wish to try on my fantasy that we have as an American culture become our own death camp, one where we hope some CEO Oscar Schindler or Daddy Warbucks will protect us with our jobs, our health insurance, and our dignity. But in the movie, even a person with the proper documentation, "papers," an "essential worker," could be summarily pulled out of the work-line and shot point blank dead in the head. In our movie fantasies, we are now all Jews, wandering the corporate halls, industries, and campuses. Even upper management, whom we might fantasize as Nazi torturers and butchers, is not exempt. So we are both Jews and Germans; we vacillate between poles of victim and victimizer. There is no place to hide. We who protect ourselves one day by consuming, soon become the consumed. Spread sheets and profit-loss figures are symptoms in the guise of solutions. We are Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth in our cultural sleepwalk with blood on our hands. Somewhere, if only at night, we know we have killed King Duncan. Downsizing is bloodless, but we know that we have created a trail and a pool of blood.

Schindler's List is parable: what the Nazis did to the Jews is allegory for what we Americans are now doing to our own. Sometimes cinematic and other artistic fiction are truer than sociological fact, if only we know where to look. In Vietnam, the memory of which war still haunts us after over twenty years, we Americans did not know who was friend or foe. All Vietnamese became potentially dangerous "Gooks" -- things, not people -- depersonalized menaces. Today in our American hospitals, corporations, banks, research and development institutions, industries, universities, and even government, we do not know from one day to the next who is ally or enemy. The person whose firings I execute today could fire me tomorrow, not matter how productive or loyal an employee I had been. The living are all disposable waste.

>From a societal viewpoint, when the Department of Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Occupational Health, send out an announcement (No. 572) and availability of funds (if only $300,000) for a project titled "Prevention of Stress and Health Consequences of Workplace Downsizing and Reorganization" (mid-1995), one can be assured that the topic has at least attracted official national clinical attention, and is no longer merely "anecdotal." As a public domain document, its first words in "Background" section set the stage well for the present paper.

If the 1980s are remembered as the decade of mergers and acquisitions, the legacy of the 1990s will be the decade of downsizing and reorganization. The trend toward downsizing began in the late 1980s, but increased substantially in the 1990s, and widened its focus from blue-collar jobs to include white-collar jobs. The result has been a virtual epidemic of job loss due to downsizing across all industries and forced career changes, especially among professional and white-collar workers. It has been estimated that two-thirds of all large firms in the United States (U.S.) -- more than 5000 employees -- reduced their workforces in the latter half of the 1980s. From 1983 to 1988, approximately 4.6 million U.S. workers were displaced, with 2.7 million (57.8%) resulting from plant closings. An estimated 300,000 jobs will be lost in the banking industry alone in the 1990s, and over 200,000 jobs are being eliminated as part of the federal government's "Reinvention" effort.

One of the main reasons for downsizing is economic: to reduce costs. Often, a complementary incentive is to improve company competitiveness in an increasingly global economy. It has been assumed that the main victims of downsizing are workers who lose their jobs, and that the productivity of workers who "survive" (i.e., retain their jobs) will be unaffected by downsizing. However, anecdotal and descriptive reports suggest the latter assumption is untrue. Indeed, employees who survive downsizing often show a significant drop in performance and productivity, and lower job commitment, job involvement, and morale. The effects of downsizing on employee mental and physical health, however, have not been systematically investigated, making it impossible to implement intervention strategies. (1995: 3-4)

One question that immediately comes to mind is why for nearly a decade we have been in the group thrall of the assumptions that the primary motives are economic and that the main victims have been those who have lost their jobs, and why we as workplace organizations have been so sluggish to notice that in the workplace and outside, downsizing is everyone's business. It is culturally very interesting, and very disturbing, that we are surprised by how widespread the suffering might be. Our self-blindedness takes us to the heart of the matter. "The bottom line" (as culture) is not only about "the bottom line" (as economics). As a way of thinking, "the bottom line" cries out for careful dissection. Schindler's List is a warning about what our All-American bottom line is coming to -- a point to which I shall shortly return in the vignettes.

DOWNSIZING AND ITS VICTIMS

What happens to the morale, the spirit, the soul of an organization, when it is guided by such imperative mottoes as "No margin, no mission," "The only bottom line is the bottom line," "Don't tell me what you did for me yesterday; tell me how you're going to benefit the company tomorrow"; or when, after a major firing or series of layoffs, an executive or mid-level manager upbraids a worried worker: "What are you whining about? You weren't RIFed! You still got your job! You should be relieved, grateful, not worried. Forget this nonsense and concentrate on productivity. We've a job to do. We need workers here, not wimps!" What happens to the profit and to the productivity when morale is assaulted by degradation from "survivors"? What happens to profit and to productivity both in reality and in expectation?

Enter now, stage right: the downsizing corps of army, navy, air force, and marines, so to speak, according to the prevailing military metaphor and competitive, war-like, atmosphere. Here, consultant teams serve the symbolic function of "SWAT" teams and of "Special Forces." Economic and military metaphors condense; business comes largely to be a military operation in disguise. The creation of a new, radically different future takes the unmistakable form of annihilation to prepare its way.

Downsizing in business, industry, health care, education, and government, is a culturally "logical" extension of the widespread eradication of all pasts and of an arrogant monochromatic and foreshortened vision of the future. This new vision is one often imagined and imposed by upper-level executives isolated and self-isolated from the rest of the organization. Further, often the owners or largest investors consist of high-risk leveraging financiers who are virtually unacquainted, and who have little interest in becoming familiar, with the day-to-day details of the very industry or type of work done in the place they have acquired.

Downsizing is a widespread institutional solution that is in turn embedded in an orientation according to which life is nothing more than a globally competitive marketplace. It is a Hobbesian image of all social life (not only the workplace) as driven by sudden-death economics. It is also Social Darwinism in corporate rather than (or in addition to) nationalist guise. In the fantasy underlying this work-world, there are no people here, only products, producers (robots), and wished-for profit in the shadow of dread loss and death.

What is the view of the world in which downsizing (RIFing, reengineering, restructuring) makes sense and becomes orthodoxy? If in this paper I proposed downsizing to be a problem rather than a solution -- or as well as a solution --, my cultural point of departure is to understand the view of many Americans that downsizing and reengineering are the preferred solution. Can a whole society be wrong (see La Barre, 1972; Edgerton, 1992; Endleman, 1995; Stein, 1994a)? And wrong in what ways? Is downsizing itself inherently evil (that is, dehumanizing, degrading, destructive), or is it the way it is implemented that is evil? We are creating by result, is not by design, an emotionally vulnerable, unprotected, starved, regressively dependent, and enraged workforce, and we are rationalizing the entire process by insisting that it is necessary for organization economic survival.

Let me now contrast two views of downsizing: (1) the official, obligatory, reality, where social myth and consensus are elevated to sacred fact, where to doubt is to commit heresy and face ostracism. Here, what we think we are doing is not the same as what we are actually doing, but we disavow knowledge of the latter; we are not permitted and we do not permit ourselves to realize what we are in fact doing. By contrast, (2) there is the recognition that downsizing might be a terrible fiction that we use to self-deceive and to deceive others about the motives for carrying it out. Downsizing's Orwellian 1984 "Newspeak" euphemisms and cognates include an entire vocabulary: e.g., reductions in force or RIFs, restructuring, rightsizing, reengineering, displacement of workers, and the belief that the result of these will be increased profit, productivity, and worker morale. The emotional reality is of abrupt firings, staged as surprise attacks, layoffs, betrayal, abandonment of everyone, and plummeting morale. Downsizing is one contemporary expression of what I have come to call "murder of the spirit," a ubiquitous but little-explored non-physical violence in the workplace in which people are experienced and experience themselves treated as things, as commodities, as objects, producers of products, and themselves parts of production lines. Those unnecessary for the performance of functions, are simply thrown away. Here, too, the 1990's come closely to resemble Frederick Winslow Taylor's early 20th century ideal of a totally controlled, impersonally efficient, "scientific management," principles widely adapted by American industry. Moreso now than ever before in my experience, medical practice buildings, their architecture, their decor, and their human interactions, are coming to resemble nothing so much as a factory -- my own brand new (December 1994) Family Medicine Center in Oklahoma City included.

In downsizings, who are the victims? Ostensibly, it is those fired. Officially, and often by fiat, it is no one. Of course, the answer hinges on how "victimhood" is defined. And in today's entitlement-ridden society, there is virtually no one left who does not claim some sort of victimhood: ethnic, national, racial, age, class, gender. I would insist that everyone involved, CEO, CFO, COO, mid-level managers who do the actual face-to-face firing, the surviving rank-and-file workers "in the trenches," the security guards who are summoned to escort those fired to their cars, and so forth. Upper management might "only" be the psychological casualty of its indifference, its psychic numbing, rationalization, and denial, but more often than not, even upper management is eventually consumed by its own relentless revolution. I have seen some of the most arrogant, swashbuckling, intimidating CEOs and CFOs fired by the very corporate board and stockholder supporters who had hired them to do the axings in the first place.

THE EXPERIENTIAL REALITY OF DOWNSIZING: SOME VIGNETTES

Vignette 1

Leaders, researchers, and consultants alike cannot help but be struck by the ubiquity, if not the universality, of death imagery and feelings experiences and articulated by people going through downsizing. For this first vignette, I draw upon an example a consultant colleague told me at an organizational consultation conference. He had been working at a prominent national research and development (R & D) laboratory in the early 1990s. The widely shared image of the RIFing within the corporation was "sudden death." The image took and spread like a prairie grassfire.

The hapless supervisors who did the actual firing were called "angels of sudden death," a bitter twist on the celestial realm: expected mercy becomes unexpected terror. In this context, it will be remembered that the infamous Nazi concentration camp physician, Dr. Josef Mengele, who had "experimented" on thousands of Jews, had been known as the "Angel of Death."

Those who were laid off were fired summarily; they were given absolutely no preparation or anticipation (except, of course, rumor). Security guards escorted the RIFed persons to their cars or other vehicles in the parking lot after they had cleaned out their offices/desks immediately that same day as they had been notified of their firing. Out of upper management's fear that computers and other vital equipment would be sabotaged or stolen, none of those fired were let back into the building after the security guards had led them this one final time to their motor vehicles, and their company keys turned in. The manner or style of the firings was itself traumatizing, and its memory, now amplified in further fantasy and dread, came to terrorize the R & D laboratory, even as everyone aspired and was exhorted to return to business-as-usual, only with redoubled effort. This style of forced "recovery" based on the "inability to mourn" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 1975) makes inner recovery difficult if not impossible.

Vignette 2

Organizational metaphors (and similes) serve as a path to understand how members of a work-group imagine themselves and their situation, what it is like to be there (Stein, 1990a, 1990b, 1994b, 1995a; Stein and Apprey, 1987). They also serve as one among several "Royal Roads" to an organizational unconscious, that is, to widespread fantasies and affects that underlie and organize recurrent images.

Organizational metaphors express and reflect shared intrapsychic social reality (Diamond 1993). "This is what it feels like to work here," is what management and workers say through their metaphors. "Downsizing," "RIFs" [reductions in force], "Rightsizing," "Restructuring," "Reengineering," "Outplacement," "Outsourcing," and the like are themselves widely used metaphors, often euphemisms, for causing, or participating in, great suffering and at the same time gaining vast emotional distance from that suffering. Through euphemisms in the impersonal idioms of mechanics and architecture, we can borrow our conscience from others, cede personal responsibility to "The Organization," diminish the feeling that we are causing harm, and therefore diminish our own sense of responsibility, anxiety, guilt, and shame (see Alford, 1990). Socially shared and justified defenses do not feel like defenses at all: they feel like reality. After all, we restructure cold, dead, things, not real, whole people.

At one Roman Catholic religious sponsored, urban hospital long known for its service to the poor, upper management announced and unilaterally executed large-scale firing without including department heads or chiefs of hospital services in the decision. Many employees called these layoffs "Pearl Harbor" -- and this in an institution whose entire hierarchy had professed the Vatican II values of dignity and subsidiarity (that is, allocating decision-making authority and responsibility not only to the top leaders of church, parish, or hospital, but to the bottom as well). Issues of economics and job security became inseparable from the sense of sham and betrayal, and the consuming rage and despair that shadowed the hospital's future among those who retained their jobs.

In a nutshell, the secular R & D organization in Vignette 1, and the sacred church hospital I just briefly described, were equally suffused by the same narrowly "bottom line" official cultural ethos which made downsizing compelling and unquestioned. But images of the devastating surprise attack of Japanese airplanes on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and of sinister angels of sudden death -- and its implicit allusion to the Nazi doctor, Dr. Josef Mengele -- tell a different narrative tale, one we dismiss at great peril.

These metaphors are not difficult to detect; or, they are difficult to hear or see only if we defend ourselves from taking them in and taking them seriously. For example, as I read a transcript of the first set interviews from a longitudinal study of the downsizing of a large urban general hospital (in Allcorn, Baum, Diamond, and Stein, 1996, in press) I wrote down the following metaphors and similes. I have tried to keep as much of the spirit if not the letter of the quotations as possible.

... Rumors are running amok; I'm afraid that when problems arise, my department will be scapegoated; "Am I the one?" [targeted to be fired]; hospital as the target; Black Friday; D-Day [invasion]; how long can a gun being held to someone's head before they say `shoot'? [reductions]; It was important to hear that the ship was not going down and a message like, "This too shall pass"; flatten the organization [administrative layers]; Everyone was herded like cattle to slaughter into the auditorium [to announce the layoffs]; It is almost like the University and the Medical Center are in a glass bubble. People do not know what is going on in the outside world [boundary issues]; Everyone is feeling vulnerable. There is the feeling that we will never let this (the layoffs) happen again, like the Holocaust....

The listener/reader might say that, in so enumerating and isolating the core metaphors, I am taking them out of their conversational or narrative context. I agree. I do not discount the more obvious sequential, narrative context of the detailed interviewing Seth Allcorn conducted at General Hospital (in Allcorn et al, 1996, in press). On the other hand, if I may be further metaphoric, the official context can be seen as a kind of "smokescreen" to divert attention from the "fire"! And the fire is itself clearest when we consider only the metaphors by themselves, as closest to the underlying, unconscious context. It is emotionally draining to read the above list -- because it feels so overwhelming. There is nowhere to hide. There is no protection from total vulnerability. Perhaps that is what it feels like to work at General Hospital.

Vignette 3

At my own place of employment, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and The University Hospitals (TUH), I learned in early 1995 that in the University Hospitals some 300 people would soon be fired and 300 additional unfilled positions would be eliminated. The rehabilitation hospital was to be closed and position transfers to other hospitals would not be permitted. The campus learned of this decision and of its imminence through the local newspaper in mid-January 1995. I was invited by the CEO to work with the Department of Human Relations, the Personnel Department, and Nursing Administration (among other units) of the University Hospitals to assist a task force prepare the campus for this process and to help them deal with the extended aftermath. My role, eight months later as well as at first, is called "continuous consultant to the crisis."

During an initial two-hour meeting in late January, members of one planning committee said many things that echo and resonate with what was said and felt at General Hospital, the downsized hospital I discussed in Vignette 2 above. The comparative study of accounts of organizational disaster such as downsizings will help consultants and theorists alike to identify and distinguish between local and universal themes, and to learn how to be helpful. Among my notes from the meeting appear the following poignant, but not unusual, phrases:

I'm planning a funeral for somebody who's going to die but doesn't know they're going to die. ... I as a manager I feel it's like World War II. The Nazis have come in and tell us `Point out all the Jewish people' so we can get rid of them. Then tell us the Gypsies, then the Poles.... That's what it feels like. ... We're asked to plan a funeral and we don't know who's going to be attending. ... This is my home (the Health Sciences Center; spoken with tears in her eyes)! ... Nursing is nurturing and difficult to let people go. So how does a nurse tell another nurse she's fired? I'm a manager. How do I work with a shorter staff (and still be nurturing)? If I survive this time around, how do I know I'll be here the next cutback? ... I have vast concerns that I will not be employed here long, and I'm one of the people in charge of the program for the people who are being fired now.

Vignette 4

Around the same time of Vignette 3, the CEO of another multi-hospital system with whose organization I was consulting, said the following of his need to preside over downsizing the hospital at which he had trained and now had practiced for thirty years:

This is the most difficult thing I've been through in thirty years here. It's beyond the direct control of us (i.e., upper management, the "Restructuring Task Force"). It's like the collapse of Union Bank here fifteen years ago. People believed: "This is the High Plains University Hospital, and nothing will happen with it. This is a state job. It can't happen to us." We need to acknowledge we've really struggled with the decision. ... There's a lot of compassionate people in this profession. Nurses and schedulers are now asked to be managers and to carry out a difficult task of deciding who should be laid off. They've never had to do this. A University Hospital job just isn't as secure as the federal government. ...There just was no final solution (pause) -- a poor choice of words! But (hospital) leaders need to help in decisions where there are no simple answers, no final solutions. Americans have this belief in infinity, that there's a Big Totalizator Board out there that makes the decisions. (from notes)

Listen carefully to people's images, words, metaphors, and feelings as they describe downsizings and their roles. These are not inconsequential, epiphenomenal, "icing" on the cake, but they are its harrowing recipe. Even these brief quotations are rich in imagery and in the middle and upper management's ambivalence. The ghost of the Nazi "Final Solution" to "the Jewish Problem" hovers in the language, even as the CEO bristles at his own thought. There lurks the wish for a decisive, definitive "final solution" where decision-makers would not have to feel guilt, shame, remorse, anxiety, responsibility. There are clear allusions to who are the Jews (It can't happen to us.) and who are the Nazis (upper management who regretfully make their decisions). Upper management are symbolized as Nazis who come in and demand to be handed over Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and the ever-next group to be eliminated. If organizational RIFings are indeed bloodless; if the borrowing from what Lucy Dawidowicz (1975) called "the war against the Jews" is allegorical, we must still take seriously the fact that annihilation by Holocaust is a recurrent frame of reference by which people undergoing downsizing articulate what it feels like to experience RIFing.

And middle management? They became the complicit collaborators (German, Jewish, Polish, etc.) with the Nazis, though they see themselves more as twice victims: first, for having been placed (and for allowing themselves to be placed) in the position as executioner; and second, as potential casualties of future layoffs. For me, the "Big Totalizator Board" conjures images of totalitarianism and the impersonal, technological violence of Arnold Schwartzeneger "Terminator" movies and other current moves of this genre. Ultimately, no one is secure from damage in this consuming process. No one is truly exempt, and everyone in some way becomes complicit. Boundaries are unclear and are constantly shifting in the liquid world of downsizing: everyone is a potential Jew, and everyone is a potential Nazi.

Certainly the large scale layoffs at General Hospital and at my own University Hospitals were not the World War II Holocaust designed to eliminate every Jew on earth. But much of the Holocaust's systematic degradation, dehumanization, of non-"Aryans" (non-us; persons manufactured into disposable non-persons, "them") commends analogizing precisely because at the unconscious logical level, if not at the behavioral, the two had similar objectives. But there is still another level that cannot be impugned, what one might characterize as the phenomenological, the way people at General Hospital and elsewhere experience the event and process of downsizing and of being downsized. To live through downsizing, to witness it first-hand, is so horrible, so devastating, that the only consistent image that can do it justice is the Holocaust. The first question is: "Was it real?"; "Did this really happen at General Hospital, to us?" To answer in the affirmative -- whether one be interviewer, outside interpreter, or hospital employee -- is to be able to experience intolerable guilt, shame, anxiety, even terror, rage, remorse, so as to overcome the inevitable denial. The next question is: "What image(s) sustain those feelings, wishes, fantasies, and defenses against being overwhelmed by them?" Those who insist on analogy with the Nazi Holocaust have much to teach us about removing the shroud of euphemism and unreality from the face of downsizing. The metaphor is misplaced only if we are expected to take it literally.

Vignette 5

The following are from my notes from a post-downsizing debriefing meeting of a large urban hospital's middle administration in April 1995. The hospital administration did not question the need for large-scale layoffs, but invited my participation as consultant to try to deal with the human suffering from the outset, to try to help the immediate and long-term process to be more humane. This meeting took place after participants had conducted three two-week "displacement training workshops" for groups of people who had been laid off. Holocaust imagery prevailed in this meeting:

People [at the hospital] are just waiting for the Nazis to come and demand the next trainload of Jews to ship to the camps. We've been through three downsizing displacement training workshops now. What will hospital restructuring do to us? No one tells us. Decisions come down from the top, and we're supposed to carry them out. We might be the next to go, no matter how well we do our jobs. ...

During the three downsizing workshops at St. Gregory's Church, we held a job fair, helped people to prepare resumes, to fill out forms to collect unemployment compensation. We had consultants give excellent career counseling; it wasn't just touchy-feely. We were totally ignored by everyone in the hospital. It was as if we weren't there, as if the RIF hadn't taken place. Nobody talked about it; nobody talked to us. It's like they didn't want to know, even though people in our departments (Personnel, Continuing Education, Nursing Administration) knew full well what we were doing all those weeks. Couldn't a doctor have offered to buy or bring the pizza (emphatic, anguished) for a lunch, for the staff or for displaced people? We go around here [the hospitals], and they [other employees] act like they don't even know us. Nobody else sees what we do. They don't want to know.

Vignette 6

The following are notes from a phone call with the director of a multi-hospital personnel department just after she had spoken by phone with a person from the radio media to arrange a formal interview. I had recommended her to the media interviewer as both heavily involved in the downsizing process, and very articulate about the personal experience of downsizing. The director was seeking my reassurance that she could do the interview even if she "got emotional."

You're right, like you said when we first met as a group in December. We have to deal with the mourning, and we didn't. We're feeling the aftershocks now. When the radio journalist called and started asking questions, it all started coming back -- things I didn't even know I'd remember. The feelings were overwhelming. No one in Personnel wanted to talk about it. They wanted to pretend that it's [the layoffs] all past. It's as if I was the problem because I couldn't get over it. We [the hospitals] didn't want people to remember that people had been thrown away (a phrase she has consistently used since prior to the mass layoffs in February). I kept getting calls from the people we'd fired. They were inquiring about openings, or just calling to talk with someone familiar. I couldn't put it behind me even if I wanted to (ardently, in tears). I didn't realize I was so emotional about it until I started talking with the media interviewer. How am I to tell about this professionally when she interviews me if I'm so emotional? What if I break down? [I talked with her about the dichotomy between "professional" and "emotional," and began to realize that to discount, to hide, the emotional, was to be falsely professional].

[Shortly later:] There's a lot of anger here [in Personnel, in the hospitals], but nobody talks. They let me go to my meetings and to the displacement workshops, but they don't want to hear about the downsizing. What do we do with our guilt? [in tears] But nobody wants to hear it. You're right Dr. Stein. You warned us about the grief, but we didn't listen. ... It's like when the radio interviewer called I was right back in December, January and February and March all over again. I can't stop thinking about it, feeling so bad about the way we handled it -- firing all those people. How can we justify it to ourselves?

Vignette 7

The following are notes from my mid-1995 telephone conversation with the personnel director of a large university hospital system with whom I have served as consultant prior to, during, and following downsizing.

I look back and can't believe some of the things we [in Personnel, in the hospitals] did. We had been talking about having "Panic Buttons" installed for the Personnel secretaries in the outer offices for years. What if someone came in and was physically violent or looked like he could be? We thought of having these red "Panic Buttons" so that somebody in authority or a security guard could be summoned immediately if a secretary out there felt unsafe. But now, all of a sudden in January [just before the layoffs] we got them, gave Panic Buttons to them, and told them to push them if anyone coming in looked suspicious of becoming violent. We talked with them for five minutes, then left them with the Panic Button just before we did the layoffs. No explanation. No preparation. We didn't ask them how they felt, or explain why we were just getting around to it now. Imagine!

Vignette 8

The following are from notes from an on-going, mid-management hospital post-downsizing meeting about seven months after 400 people had been laid off from a workforce of 3000. Here, a veteran nurse, now in Nursing Administration, was talking about the atmosphere in Personnel [the Department where we were meeting]. She had had to walk through the Department to get to our conference room:

Personnel used to be up-beat, where you could go in the hospital to feel good. Not up-beat now. It is worse in Personnel than in other hospital departments. There is a feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness. You want to scream and say: "I'm affected, too! Not only the people who are no longer here. In 1982 there was a hospital RIF, but not in our own Department [Personnel]. Back then there was no prospect of being bought out by MegaCorp and their making one centralized personnel office to run it all [over the country]. There were no raises in Personnel except the internal auditor who showed [to the upper hospital Management Council in charge of the layoffs] what could be done on the computer. He got a raise. "Just get them [the ones being laid off] out" was the message we got. And we don't want to hear about it." No one got any pay or even a compliment for the kind of work we did [the "displacement training" workshops, spending two weeks with four groups of people whose jobs had been eliminated].

Vignette 9

The final vignette emotionally links hospital downsizing with the April 19th 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It consists of a poignant letter I received in late June 1995 from a department head within a large and prosperous business corporation I shall call High Plains Oil and Gas, the main offices of which were located in Oklahoma City. Her own organization, HPOG, had undergone a firing of some 500 employees some six months earlier, leaving some 3400 people behind, all uncertain and anxious about their personal and collective future. I had consulted with her organization during that time; we kept in touch for follow-up. In mid-June, I had sent her (for her and for distribution to anyone whom she thought might be interested) the two articles I had published on the cultural significance of the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City (Stein, 1995b, 1995c). I had said on the phone to her not long before that I had an uncanny feeling there were emotional connections between the downsizing and the bombing even though the two workplaces differed considerably; that I wanted to share with her my thoughts on the bombing; and that I welcomed her and others' thoughts on how the April 19th bombing might become somehow be symbolically connected to the aftermath of their own downsizing and restructuring.

For example, in the downsizing there was no visible blood; it was all "clean," computerized. No one physically harmed anyone else. With the Federal Building bombing, there was real blood, and lots of it. I wondered how the bombing, and its meaning for members of the displacement training workshops, might have affected the thinking, feeling, and working of individuals and task groups in the hospitals, people already overwhelmed with loss and grief.

She wrote the following letter in response. It is extraordinarily moving and insightful. With very few changes, I quote her first three paragraphs.

I wanted to write you a brief note to thank you for passing along your recent articles. How well you said what so many of us have been thinking and feeling about the recent bombing, downsizing, and on-going uncertainty. And your analysis of it all is so thoroughly humane. Thank you for including me in your distribution of this.

Only two days ago I had a conversation with someone [an emergency room nurse friend] who said something to the effect that she was so sick of hearing about the children in the bombing [in the day care center on the second floor] as if they were the only children ever murdered in Oklahoma. She made the point that the bombing was indeed horrific and the loss of children's lives tragic. "But spend one weekend in the Children's Hospital emergency room and see battered children and shaken babies that can outnumber the children lost in the Murrah Building -- children that are sent back to live with the perpetrators. But the public sees that differently. That's families brutalizing themselves. We accept that far more easily than we accept someone else brutalizing our families." This conversation still [is] in my mind. I was immediately struck by what you said in the article: "Children's death -- and the domestic violence long tolerated if not encouraged by the sanctity of the family -- was already in the air."

One of my mid-level managers and I were discussing only a few days ago the bombing and the layoffs and their relation to one another. I said that all in all that I believed I had been more affected by the layoffs than by the bombing, as ridiculous as that seemed. The bombing, however, seemed to present me with a socially acceptable way to mourn my own "loss of innocence" that now felt multi-faceted. As we went on to discuss this, we decided that perhaps this effect from the layoffs at our oil and gas company was not as crazy as we thought. After all, it was in that situation that we were the rescue workers. We were the ones working long shifts, holding hands, bringing in food, teaching our workers how to prepare resumes, how to succeed in interviews, and trying to help people get back on their feet. ...

INTERPRETATION, IMPLICATIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS: WE WILL HEAR ONLY IF WE CAN LISTEN

What do we -- as leaders, managers, consultants, social scientists, vulnerable mortals -- make of these vignettes, and more broadly, of the meanings of downsizing in whose shadow they stand? How do they help illumine the effects, the process, the meaning, the symbolism, and the catastrophic emotions brought to and evoked by downsizing? What do they convey about American culture, about human nature, and about what we ought to do with their message? Do we -- as scientists, clinical practitioners, managers -- shrink, from responsibility for cultural change by taking a schizoid flight to the moon to find refuge and revenge? Do we secretly obtain vicarious pleasure from the destruction of human lives? Is downsizing a modern, highly abstracted, form of human sacrifice: The is, if one lives, another must die? Is downsizing or RIFing our equivalent form of, say, Aztec bloody rites to assure the return of the sun? In downsizing, do we literally try to "buy time" for ourselves and our organization's "survival" through the symbolic death of others? (The very notion of workplace or other organizational "survival" is itself a reification, projection, and anthropomorphization [see Alford, 1990], an example of the logical "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," for no workplace organization is a literal biological organism that goes from birth to death)? The data suggest the answer is a grim: yes, and that no amount of death suffices to assure and regenerate life. There is always some "fat" and "dead meat" that can be cut, trimmed (condensing numerous primitive anxieties from annihilation, to separation, to castration).

Can we acknowledge the enormous loss and grief -- the emotional price and cost -- this specific form of induced social change has caused? Can we, dare we, not retreat into psychology-as-smokescreen, but use psychology as lighthouse to show us where we have done evil, and where we can repent, console, and make amends?

I make no claim, nor can I prove in a rigorously deductive or positivistic way, that the vignettes in this paper are statistically representative of narrative accounts or of metaphors by people involved in downsizing. I have no doubt, however, that they are thematically representative, that they serve as cultural exemplars of events and processes that extend far beyond themselves. If at one the nine vignettes they articulate a minuscule "sample size" of persons and of workplace organizations, at another they tell the story of modern America as refracted through dominant business language and practice.

In this paper, I have tried to keep to the phenomenological, level, that is, the world as experienced and articulated by the interviewee and client, rather than the one mostly interpreted by the participant observer. I have tried to let the vignettes mostly "speak for themselves," rather than to force an interpretation upon them, or attempt to dissect them in terms of a preferred psychoanalytic and anthropological theory (for instance, classical topographic or structural theory, object relations theory, self psychology, textual deconstruction). Still, as Freud and Oppenheim (1911/1958), Koenigsberg (1975), Dundes (1984), Paul (1987), and Stein (1994a) have argued, myth, folklore, fairy tales, political ideology, and legend all contain the outlines of their own interpretation. From folklore we could reinvent everything we have learned from clinical psychoanalysis via the couch, free association, and the dream.

In a sense, although Freud's topographical model of mental functioning -- that of the vertically organized dynamic process involving the triad of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious thought -- is immensely useful, it is also at times a misleading fiction. For "the depth" can often be readily seen and heard at the cultural surface: those who in business and other organizations we observe and with whom we consult are telling us the secrets of their hearts even as they are disguising them!

If by our listening carefully enough to individual patients and clients (both individuals and groups), we learn from them how to treat them and to consult, the same ought to apply to our work with organizations, and specifically to addressing issues of leadership and change. By attending carefully to people's expressed and lived-in worlds, we will learn what to do. It is not the old and wrong-headed anthropological saw that "The native [of the group under study] is always right," but rather the more carefully one listens, the complex texture of the story will emerge. Conversely, it is precisely the neglect of the inner and intersubjective experience of downsizing that has us as a nation in the pickle in which we find ourselves. Our slaughter of innocents comes from not attending to meanings and feelings -- those of others and of our own. And I hasten not to point the finger at downsizing (one stylized mode of decision-making) or at business (a social institution) alone. After all, on "Bloody Tuesday," election day, November 1994, the American electorate (at least, those who voted) voted into office as their psychological as well as political delegates those who vowed to implement their proposed Republican "Contract with America" -- which looks for all the world like a stringent RIFing writ-large. As leaders, as workforce, and yes as electorate, we believed our cherished theories about change and leadership more than we believed in people. Downsizing, which has long looked so appealing as a solution , is emerging instead as an enormous emotional as well as economic cost and casualty of our war with ourselves.

We have made certain that no one is safe for very long, if at all. In Schindler's List is our contemporary wished-for and dreaded biography of a few good and lucky women who make it as "essential workers" -- and even they come to know how precarious their safety is. Ours is no American "Horatio Alger" triumph of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, no American "triumph of the will." The relentlessness with which downsizing is often executed tell us that fathomless rage, sadism, envy, greed, revenge -- among other emotions and motives -- are the "bottom line" designated to eradicate every previously espoused of American culture, a kind of cultural scorched earth policy we practice upon ourselves. Downsizing is part of a social aesthetic that has no place for dandy-capitalist-turned-wily-rescuer Oscar Schindler, his protective list, or a protected cadre of "essential workers." In this ethos devoid of the sentiment of mercy, there are, mercifully, signs of increasing resistance not in the Freudian sense, but in the sense of "underground," on the part of Americans who are coming to have a healthy disgust and even healthier regret for the Hell on Earth we have created in the name of good business, efficiency, streamlining, without so much as spilling a single drop of blood.

In the West, since the Calvinist days of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber, 1930), we have single-mindedly believed that success from one's work was a sign of God's smile in this world, that personal effort would result in upward social mobility, and that ultimately, hard work would set us free of our past and present station. It was the sinister achievement of the Nazi era to transvalue this work ethic, to welcome its condemned slave labor to their labor-to-death camps with the large-lettered sign, "Arbeit macht frei," "Work will make you free." It was the special despair -- joined with identification with the aggressor -- of the doomed inmates, to believe their captors' lies.

It is the special horror of our time in America to have created a latch-key world for ourselves and our descendants, in which no one can make it onto Schindler's List, even if a benevolent CEO or chairman promises that some elect will be spared. The relentlessness of downsizing, RIFing, and its lengthy train of euphemisms is the same message as presided over the gates of Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi slave labor camps: Arbeit Macht Frei, and one dare not question its sincerity. In this world of computerized, stylized, bureaucratized, and economically rationalized hate, work is only good for the production of death.

In the workplace and larger society governed by downsizing and the constant threat of further disruption, the turn toward frenetic work and productivity as "freeing" represents not only an identification with the aggressor, but a short-term adaptive denial of reality. It is a denial that diminishes paralyzing psychotic anxiety. It fuses omnipotence of thought with omnipotence of deed: "If I work hard enough, if I am productive enough, it won't happen to me," one tries to persuade oneself despite to resolve the cognitive and affective dissonance. One desperately tries to un-know what one already knows. These work beliefs serve regressively as magical thinking that bribes the ego into thinking that through hard work one will be spared one's destiny, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that virtually everyone is disposable, expendable. (I owe this insight to Seth Allcorn, personal communication, 12 January 1996). A "text" more parallel with the beliefs held by many doomed Jews in the labor camps in Europe during the Nazi era could not found. There is, of course, sad irony to this adaptation: a defense that works for the short term is powerless to influence the long term to which it submits and, more ironically, is complicit in bringing about.

Personnel departments and outplacement organizations are especially saddled with (that is, psychologically speaking: delegated, projected onto) this task: how to dispose of people, and only secondarily how to find work for disposable people. Those who perform the selections must somehow emotionally adapt to doing their odious task, rationalizing the very nature of their work (including their own aggressive impulses). They know full well they are performing in behalf of upper management and "the organization" the symbolic equivalent of digging mass graves for the soon-to-be-dead (a point I owe to Seth Allcorn, personal communication, 12 January 1996). Both love and the quiet voice of reason are banished, exiled from this Promised Land. Short-lived organizational rebirth and profit draws its nourishment from death, even if "only" symbolic.

Despite the screen of rationality, of necessity, and of computerized impersonality, the selection of who is to be kept and who is to be fired is always personal choice and never mere number. Stylized apologies such as "Don't take it personally" and "Nothing personal," offered to those being laid off, are self-deceptions to distance oneself from one's deeds. Executives in high position, mid-level management, and consulting firms, all appoint or recommend certain people, and not others, to serve on employee selection committees. The process is not entirely alien to that employed by death camp physicians who decided who, in the long lines of people just disembarked from the trains, should go to the left and who to the right, who would live and who would die.

Despairing since the 1960's that the American Dream, the national ideal as embodied in the martyred Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., was forever unreachable, even approximately, most Americans have all but thrown it away. The land of opportunity has now long become replaced by a land of opportunism (Stein and Hill, 1977). We have no Zyklon B cyanide gas chambers, no crematoria and tall smokestacks to belch human flesh's ashes upward, no barbed wire and tall watchtowers around our death camps. But make no mistake about it: downsizing is not primarily about economic competition and survival. It hardened heart is about death, the dominion and triumph of death (Wangh, 1986). It is about endless cycles of sacrifice to keep "the organization" alive, cleansed, and competitive, while consuming, one way or another, everyone in its midst as they chant in unison the company cheer the first thing in the morning: Work will make us free -- secure, productive, profitable, and provide adequate health insurance and retirement for when we are no longer "productive." There is the unmistakable stench of burning human flesh in the air.

Finally -- and with both reluctance and the sense of history's responsibility upon me -- let me offer several recommendations. They follow, I believe, from the assessment, description, and interpretation I have made of downsizing. Short of magical thinking -- that organizational development consultants and their clients are often too willing to provide and to request -- what dare one recommend about leadership and change, about healing in organizations, in the face of the destructiveness, intended and unintended, I have described and ascribed to the very essence of downsizing? At one extreme, one can take the ethical position that since downsizing is inherently evil, one should altogether refuse to participate in any capacity.

I have struggled with this, and have chosen to serve as an internal critic when I function as consultant, to try to make as humane as possible a process over which I am not omnipotent or omniscient. In my role, if I may borrow from the Russian poet Maxim Gorky, "I do not condemn, I testify." I try to help others to see, to hear, to feel, what they wish not to -- and what I wish not to, as well. I try to help them avoid flight into action in order to avoid their dysphoric, "crazy," panicky feelings, specifically, to acknowledge and to express their discomfort with the idea of downsizing as well their attraction to it, to challenge it, to consider if not to seek alternatives to it.

What, then, do I suggest to the listener/reader, the leader who both induces and copes with change?

(1) Recognize that there is no changeless organization or society, one that happily perpetuates "itself" forever over time. There is no civilization without its discontents. Every way of life has its price; every virtue has its vice. At the same time, recognize that downsizing or RIFing is a special kind of change, one experienced as catastrophic, if not designed to be so.

(2) Understand the lure of "downsizing" thinking, un-self critical thinking, in which people become things, extensions of others' wills, disposable producers, extensions of spread-sheets, not real, whole people. Try also to understand why, of all strategies of leadership and change, we are most prone to turn to downsizing or RIFing NOW as the preferred form of problem-solving in change.

(3) Ask yourself and those with whom you work, how downsizing or RIFing thinking fits within a military/business/sports style (metaphor) of problem-solving our entire culture is coming to embrace and prefer. The issue is not whether we think in metaphorically -- all thinking is in terms of some images; rather the issue is whether we are consumed by our own metaphors, compelled to use them without thinking, without feeling, about their implications.

(4) Listen to people's language -- employees, clients, leaders. Take it seriously. Ask about it. Use your feelings, your own emotional reaction, to others' language, as crucial data about yourself and others, rather than mistrust your feelings -- as we have all been taught to do! Use your own reaction to understand what others' words mean. Observe people's non-verbal messages as well.

(5) Avoid the lure (and understand that powerful lure) of organizational top-down unilateral decision-making and the accompanying isolation of top management. Instead, foster and nourish greater participation of the entire workforce in determining everyone's collective destiny of the workplace -- including, but not limited to, the elimination of positions.

(6) The role of repentance, atonement, acknowledgment and emotional reparation for wrongdoing, grief for what one has done, and not to be underestimated in leadership and in truly healing forms of change.

(7) Support Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), or their formal and informal equivalents, whose personnel can help entire organizations deal with downsizing, the threat of downsizing, and the aftermath of downsizing. Do not make the lethal error that, when cut-backs in expenditure are contemplated or needed, EAPs should be "the first to go" when the going gets tough, because they are "fluff" and because they are not directly income-generating.

(8) Work carefully with stockholders and board members to hold CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and other upper management/leaders ethically responsible for the kinds of change they induce, and for the consequences of these kinds of change. Sometimes a good leader can help the stockholders and board of directors to recognize the need to replace some current leadership if the organization is not to languish from RIFing.

(9) Adopt a long term, not only a short term, view of leadership, change, and consequences of downsizing. Keep in mind, also, that the timetable for "getting over," working through, and recovering from downsizing is years, not a few weeks.

(10) Try to think of downsizing as bizarre, strange, alien, rather than as normal, usual. Place some distance between yourself and the concept of downsizing. Think of it as worthy of careful scrutiny and criticism, and not automatically as unquestionably "right" (whether in strictly business or ethical terms).

This does not mean that you will become empowered to change situations magically. The organizational researcher-consultant who approaches downsizing more from Melanie Klein's "depressive position" rather than the "paranoid-schizoid position" (1946) faces with sadness the limits to doing as well as trying to be of help in the face of such vast human suffering.

Sometimes, if we cannot help human workgroups repair internally the emotional as well as economic damage they have inflicted on themselves, we might even suggest "emigration," that is, to leave for a position elsewhere. But in today's atmosphere of nearly universal downsizing in the United States, there may well be no where to which to emigrate. Or at least choices are far fewer than a decade ago. Sometimes all we can do is to know what we know, to bear witness to what we see, to recognize while avoiding the temptation to collude -- and above all, to persevere.