• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

  • HOME
  • BLOG
  • BOOKS
    • Dancing Prophet
    • Dancing Priest
    • A Light Shining
    • Dancing King
    • Poetry at Work
  • ABOUT
  • CONTACT

Poetry at Work, Chapter 9: The Poet in the Culture of Control

March 12, 2019 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

For most of the 20thcentury, the structure of corporations was based on the technology of mass production. It was a command-and-control model, with managers directing workers, who had a very specific task to accomplish. It was not unlike the military.

In the 1970s, that structure began to break down. It was almost odd – an organizational model that had survived two world wars and the Great Depression was breaking down for what appeared to be smaller factors. Inflation raged almost out control (I remember a prime lending rate of 21 percent); oil embargoes were turning major industries like petroleum refining, chemical manufacturing, and automobiles on their heads. National psychological blows happened as well, contributing to the disruptive environment – the Watergate crisis, the end of the Vietnam War, and the Iranian revolution that led to Americans being held hostage for more than a year. The reckoning started in the 1980s, as company after company reorganized (over and over again), laid people off (over and over again), and often went out of business altogether. At the end of the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee invented what would become the worldwide web.

It was an unsettled time to work for a large company.

To continue reading, please see my post at Literary Life.

Filed Under: Poetry at Work Tagged With: command and control, Literary Life, poetry, Poetry at Work, work, workplace

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Footer

GY



Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

 01_facebook 02_twitter 26_googleplus 07_GG Talk

Copyright © 2023 Glynn Young · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · Log in | Managed by Fistbump Media LLC