Subordination

Conceptual Overview

Various theoretical frameworks address different aspects of workplace subordination. Neo-Marxist theories argue that employers in capitalist societies subordinate workers to maximize profit. Alienated from the means of production, employees are forced to sell their labor and are treated as cheap, disposable commodities. Poststructuralist researchers contend that contemporary workplace surveillance systems can subordinate employees, often rendering them “calculable” selves who collude in their own subordination. Critical writers on leadership show how corporate leaders may subordinate followers through autocratic and coercive practices. Critical management studies perspectives suggest that even highly positive managerial discourses can subordinate employees, fundamentally intensifying work while stifling resistance and labeling dissent as disloyalty. Critical marketing scholars contend that customers can also be subordinated, particularly through sophisticated marketing techniques designed to construct unquestioning consumers with an insatiable desire for particular products.

Feminist studies demonstrate that organizations can reproduce women's subordination, particularly through the sex segregation of jobs. Women often occupy jobs that have few career opportunities and are low status, insecure, temporary, and/or part-time. Gender subordination at work can also be reproduced through unlawful sex discrimination (especially regarding pregnancy) and men's sexual harassment of women. Many feminists use the concept of patriarchy to denote the structural basis of women's subordination, showing how men's dominance of women can be embedded in employment and at home, frequently in mutually reinforcing ways. Some notions of patriarchy have been criticized for neglecting inequalities between women (and between men), particularly those based on important forms of subordination like ethnicity and race. Perspectives like multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and postimperialism examine the ways that historical subordinations (e.g., slavery), the suppression of indigenous peoples, and the exploitation of migrant workers continue to shape contemporary organizational dynamics where race discrimination and segregation frequently persist. When gender, race, and class inequalities are interwoven in organizational practices, subordination becomes all the more intractable.

The experience of subordination can elicit various responses ranging from deference, conformity, and compliance through to dissent and resistance. While Stanley Milgram's classic experiments highlighted peoples' willingness to obey authority, Erich Fromm pointed to the fear of freedom in which individuals try to shelter in the perceived security of being told what to do, viewing this as a less threatening alternative to the responsibility of making decisions for themselves. Both writers sought to explain the Holocaust and the conformist accounts from those involved that they were just obeying orders. The extermination of six million Jews serves as an extreme and stark reminder about the potential dangers of conformity.

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