Pariah Professions: I

Back when I was an engineer, if you hung around the cafeteria long enough, you'd hear the term "bean counter." It was a term of disparagement. Today, the Wiktionary defines it, quoting the Financial Times, as "A person, such as an accountant or financial officer, who is concerned with quantification, especially to the exclusion of other matters." They note that the term is "mildly derogatory." My own experience is that there was nothing mild about it, especially during layoffs, downsizing, or other resource squeezes. To be a bean counter, from the point of view of an engineer or other product-oriented employee, was to be a member of a pariah profession.

In more general contexts, a pariah is an outcast. (For the etymology of the term, again I refer you to the Wiktionary.) In organizations, we can define a pariah profession as an outcast profession. It might serve an important function organizationally (as financial experts certainly do), but its members are socially excluded from some circles, often solely on the basis of their professional affiliation. This exclusion applies not only to the professionals associated with the mission of that organizational function, but also to all members of that functional unit. For instance, in an enterprise in which the "Business" folks have little regard for engineers of IT (information technology), they would have similar views of the clerical and administrative employees associated with IT.

The costs of these enmities are enormous. Here are two mechanisms that affect collaborative behavior in organizational cultures that tolerate pariahdom for some of their professions.

Distortion of contributions

In meetings and exchanges of communications of all kinds involving pariah professionals, contributions from the pariahs can be distorted in two ways. First, the contributors might tend to structure and time their contributions so as to Disrupted collaborations involving
the pariah profession can
result in inferior outputmaximize the probability of acceptance. For example, they might threaten, temper, cajole, exaggerate, or invoke authority. Second, the recipients of contributions from pariahs tend to interpret those contributions in light of their sources. For example, they might discount, dispute, refute, or disregard those contributions.

These distortions affect the ability of members of pariah professions to contribute the benefit of their expertise to the organization.

Disruption of collaborations

When output of the highest quality requires collaboration among people from several professions, any mechanism that limits or distorts contributions from members of one of those professions can degrade the output. At times, to address this problem, collaborators will reject one member of the pariah profession in favor of another whom they regard as more compatible. Unfortunately, if the role of that profession entails acting as a check or modulator of the group's decisions, such substitutions themselves can degrade the output.

Disrupted collaborations involving the pariah profession can result in output that's inferior, but whose weaknesses lie outside the awareness of the collaborators.

We'll explore pariah-related behaviors that involve information management next time.  Next in this series  Top    Next Issue

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