“Culture” Comes From Capitalism
It’s called materialism, stupid
More reporting has come out, this time over at ESPN, about the “deep culture problem” created by Arizona Cardinals team president and owner Michael Bidwill. I wrote about this last month, and rather than rehash the specifics again, I wanted to step back and look at a bigger question: Where do these “deep culture problems” come from? I think most reasonable people would agree that workplaces featuring frequent harassment and abuse are a bad thing — so the question is really why we keep finding them.
One possible answer is that workplace culture comes from the culture at large. That is, people are behaving immorally at work because of declining moral standards about how to behave in general. I’m going to call this the Conservative Answer, because historically it has been central to the argument for conservative politics: specifically the idea that social changes, especially ones precipitated by the government, undermine the natural order and lead to moral decay.
It’s easy to forget this, now that the conservative political party in the US is led by the Most Immoral Man in America, but if you are old enough to remember the Moral Majority, or the conservative outrage at the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or any number of moral panics led by the conservative movement, you likely remember this as undergirding much of conservative politics. Even now, things have not really changed. Although Republicans have abandoned the idea that their political leaders ought to be held to any kind of moral standards, they still cling to the notion that social changes are bad for morality. Look, for example, at the insistence that trans rights undermines “parental rights” or the sanctity of women’s sports; or the concern that modest criminal justice reforms might lead to a crime wave.
And so the Conservative Answer to the question of toxic workplaces is that they are a natural result of the way we have undermined traditional morality. Of course sexual harassment and other abusive behavior will run rampant in a culture that has discarded traditional values.
Sometimes we think this attitude is no longer a part of sports, but when Dabo Swinney says he’s building Clemson football in “God’s name image and likeness” it’s a reminder that a lot of people still think this way. Indeed, one guy who seems to think this way is Arizona Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill, who supposedly put up a cubicle wall to keep players from fraternizing with female employees of the team. It’s hard not to read that as anything but an attempt to enforce an older moral code.
The problem with this line of thinking, as easily illustrated by both this example and the modern Republican Party, is how “traditional values” become little more than a euphemism for “bigotry.” After all, under the old moral standards, workplaces would not even be tolerant of people of color, the LGBTQ community, or women working for a professional football team. Obviously not all modern conservatives subscribe to this way of thinking, but it is a problem with their philosophy that the reason “traditional values” were deemed insufficient in the first place was that they were not inclusive or tolerant. There is simply no old-fashioned culture of supposedly “traditional values” that was both free of abusive behavior AND inclusive of all types of workers.*
*Plus, it’s not even clear that the intolerant, old-fashioned moral system was any good at preventing workplace abuse anyway. Didn’t Mad Men teach us anything?
Another possible explanation for “deep culture problems” is that they are the result of bad leaders in the workplace. Culture comes from the values of people in charge, and if people in charge do not value equality and fair treatment, then a toxic culture will take hold. In this framework, people like Michael Bidwill (or Dan Snyder or Donald Sterling or Sandy Alderson or Jerry Richardson) are immoral people with bad values, and those values permeate the organizations they run. I’m going to call this the Liberal Explanation, partially for symmetry but also because this one accords with modern liberalism’s faith in meritocracy and individualism. This explanation posits that we can solve these problems simply by putting better people in charge, or by educating the ones who are in charge now.
Unlike the Conservative Explanation, then, this one actually comes with a solution. After all, if the problem is the culture at large, then there isn’t much we can do; but if the problem is a few bad actors running the organizations, then we can solve the problem just by replacing or fixing those bad bosses. As a result, the Liberal Explanation is the one that is tacitly accepted by the people hoping for accountability.
It’s even accepted by the same people it blames! Recall how Dan Snyder, when he was being investigated by Congress, tried to deflect blame by insisting he had fixed the problems by firing Bruce Allen and Jay Gruden. Recall how Mark Cuban kept promising to fire people who “crossed the line” prior to the investigation of the Dallas Mavericks. And recall how the Mets conducted their own internal investigation to announce they’d fixed sexism. In all these examples, the “deep culture problems” were due to some bad actor that could be fired.
If you do recall all this, you will perhaps notice a major problem with the Liberal Explanation, which is that it allows for an almost endless passing of the buck. Bosses can continually say they are Listening and Learning, that they are Getting Better and recommitting to a Good Culture. They can even fire people every now and again and say they have Zero Tolerance for abusive behavior.
And yet these things keep happening. It’s now been six years since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, and while many people have been fired, it’s not clear that things have overall gotten better for workers, even as bosses keep pledging to Do Better. The fact that we’re still getting stories like this one from Arizona suggests that problems persist.
Because the problem with the Liberal Explanation is that it never really grapples with why these Bad Bosses exist in the first place. In other words, how do people with such bad values keep ending up in positions of power in the first place? For a time, we could pretend that their presence was aberrational, that it was just a few bad apples who needed to be fired or forced to sell their teams. But the persistence of the problem suggests it is more structural.
After all, as I wrote initially about the Cardinals example, the details there don’t strike me as aberrational. That is, Bidwill doesn’t seem like an unusually bad guy. He’s a terrible boss, for sure — but not in any way that won’t strike most readers as familiar. He yells too much, he’s moody and temperamental, he imposes arbitrary and pointless rules, etc. These are normal boss qualities.
The actual, correct explanation for toxic workplace cultures is the materialist, or Socialist Explanation. In this understanding, “culture” is an extension of the economic mode of production, of the relationships that govern economic power in the society. And in this case, the culture we’re talking about comes from the absolute power of bosses.
If you take a step back and look at all the “toxic workplace” stories that have come out in recent years, many of the details diverge. Sometimes the owner himself is the problem; sometimes it is his underlings. Sometimes the owner is incredibly hands-on; sometimes he is hardly ever there. Sometimes the abuses are sexual in nature; sometimes they are racially targeted; sometimes the owner is an asshole to everyone equally.
But there are two constants in all these stories: 1) employees who are afraid to speak up or push back against abusive behavior because they were worry they will be fired or otherwise punished; 2) bosses who are not bound by the workplace rules they impose on others, or who selectively enforce those rules depending on personal feelings about the employee.
In other words, the “deep culture problems” we are talking about are not really about values, but about power. Bosses have a lot of it, and employees have little to none. In such a culture, it is inevitable that some people at the top of the hierarchy will abuse that power. It is also natural that the people who ascend in the hierarchy are people who aren’t going to make hay about their own boss’ abuses. As a result, bad behavior gets covered up or excused, even by otherwise good people and even when there are official rules against it.
These are problems throughout the economy, but they are particularly acute in pro sports for a few reasons: The jobs are so highly coveted that people are reluctant to speak out or quit; the industry is historically male-dominated, so sexist or misogynistic practices and comments are probably more common; and since teams are not publicly-traded companies, the whims and habits of a particular owner can be more dominant.
But to fix these problems you don’t have to send owners to re-education camps, or take a time machine back to the good old days. Indeed, at many of the teams where the culture is so bad, there ARE official rules and policies in accord with Good Values. Recall what the 2018 investigation into the Dallas Mavericks concluded:
Over the time period covered in this investigation, the Mavericks issued at least three separate employee handbooks… Each of these handbooks contained content regarding sexual harassment and provided accurate statements of what constitutes unlawful sexual harassment. The Mavericks also provided anti-discrimination and anti-harassment training to employees in 2008 and 2015, to supervisors in 2008, 2013, and 2015, and to scouts in 2014. These trainings included an accurate statement of what constitutes unlawful sexual harassment and advised that harassment should be reported to Human Resources.
And yet these “accurate statements of what constitutes unlawful sexual harassment” did little to actually stop sexual harassment because employees understood that the real rules are whatever the boss says they are.
It’s quite obvious how to fix this: Take power away from bosses. Make workplace rules clear, equally enforced, and subject to input from workers. Unions have been doing this for decades. Yet complaints about “culture” often mystify it, making it seem like a wholly new problem with complicated or impossible solutions. But it’s not so hard. It’s just that to address it would mean going after the power of owners and bosses, which is a pillar of capitalism.