The Pinstriped Prison: How Overachievers Get Trapped in Corporate Jobs They Hate. By Lisa Pryor. Published 2008 by Picador Pan MacMillan Australia Pty Limited, 1 Market Street Sydney, 272pp.
In the 1950s and 60s, top students from elite universities aspired to careers in research and public service. Today, those same students are seeking jobs as management consultants, investment bankers, and corporate lawyers. What happened?
In a sense, the answer is straightforward. In the past several decades, the salaries of corporate managers have skyrocketed in comparison with those of more traditional professions, such as teachers, engineers, and academics. As a result, careers such as management consultancy that didn’t even exist 50 years ago have become newly visible paths to a six or even seven digit salary.
But to say that students are just following the money is too simplistic. Students today, like those of every generation, want more than just money. They want to do creative, challenging work, and to leave their mark on the world. How then, with all the opportunities before them, do they end up in corporate jobs, which have historically been considered dull, tedious, and of dubious social value? This is the puzzle that Lisa Pryor sets out to unravel in The Pinstriped Prison, an imminently readable, humorous, and occasionally disturbing portrait of the cultural milieus of Australia’s top students, as they pass from prep school to uni to corporate firm.
Pryor’s answer, in brief, is that an increasingly competitive school system has given rise to a blinkered form of groupthink. Students spend their college careers fighting for high ATAR scores, and then choose law programs simply because these have the highest ATAR cut-offs. They spend their uni careers fighting for grades and prizes, and then take jobs at large corporate firms simply because such jobs are only available to those with sterling resumes. In other words, students are so busy climbing the most conspicuous status ladders hanging in front of them that they don’t have time to develop a truly individual perspective on their own talents, interests, and values. The question of what they would really like to do is continually deferred in favor of the need to take hold of the topmost rung that is within their grasp. As a result, many students wind up in corporate law firms and consulting agencies without a clear sense of what the work entails, and without ever having taken the time to fully canvass other possibilities.
While Pryor presents a vivid portrait of this culture “achieve now, think later,” it is regrettable that she offers little explanation as to how this culture developed. We can take a first step in this direction by considering Pryor’s observations in the context of broader socioeconomic trends. For example, it is well-known that the past several decades have seen an unprecedented expansion of Australia’s tertiary education system, with the result that the number of qualified individuals aspiring to upper middle class careers has increased dramatically. At the same time, Australian society does not require a much greater proportion of doctors, lawyers, and engineers today than it did twenty years ago.
In other words, there is an unresolved tension between the egalitarian ideals institutionalized in our education system and the classist reality of our labour market. Heightened competition over desirable jobs is the inevitable result, and is plausibly the root cause of the cultural shifts that Pryor observes. Developing this thesis would require additional investigation into the way that macroeconomic conditions indirectly affect school culture (e.g. via changes in parental attitudes and expectations, university admissions procedures, etc.), and would provide a fascinating supplement to Pryor’s account.
***
If the first half of Pinstriped Prison is concerned with the culture of elite private schools, the second half is concerned with culture of elite corporate workplaces. The picture is, if anything, even more grim. These jobs involve long hours of tedious work in high pressure environments, and many young employees – often top achievers at uni – find themselves understandably dissatisfied. Yet one of Pryor’s most important observations is that it is not simply long hours that are responsible for this dissatisfaction. Rather, it is the fact that these hours unfold in work environments that allow little latitude for independent, principled, or creative decision-making.
If a law firm decides, for instance, to take on a major oil company as a client, the fact that there is no institutional process by which employees can voice objections or opt out of the work means that individuals’ ethical and political sensibilities have no meaningful outlet in the context of their daily work. Pryor also gives more quotidian examples of how the corporate workplace dehumanizes. For example, the convention of charging clients by six-minute “billable units” means that junior lawyers are required to track their day in six-minute slices, carefully stopping the clock to go to the bathroom, answer personal e-mails, or just have a conversation with a coworker, with the understanding that they may not leave work until they have accumulated a preassigned quota of billable units. The temptation to cheat is enormous, and one survey found that 62% of lawyers experienced direct pressure from their superiors to lie on time sheets in order to overcharge clients.
All this raises the question: if corporate jobs are so awful, why don’t people just quit? Pryor seems to view this incongruity as evidence of sheer spinelessness on the part of corporate employees. She theorizes that their past narrow focus on academics and career means that they have had so little experience taking risks and making unconventional decisions that they simply cannot summon the courage to pursue their dreams. While there may be an element of truth to this, I suspect the real reason is more prosaic. Put simply, they are unwilling to exchange a certain (and high) salary for an uncertain (and lower) one, especially if they have families to support or mortgages to pay off. They may find their work unfulfilling, but they simply learn to seek satisfaction elsewhere, in family life and recreational interests.
***
While The Pinstriped Prison gives an interesting and useful account of the anxieties and frustrations present in our schools and workplaces, the book’s major shortcoming is a lack of historical or economic analysis that might help us understand the underlying causes of this dissatisfaction. Nowhere is this weakness more evident than in Pryor’s final chapter in which she counsels disgruntled corporate employees to “be brave and entrepreneurial spirits,” and to “find the strength to take risks and build lives they believe in.”
She gives portraits of three successful escapees from corporate life, one who becomes a successful independent director, one who opens his own restaurant in Perth, and one who leaves a high-level position at McKinsey and Company to become the director of CSIRO (one of Australia’s most established scientific research agencies). Pryor notes that these individuals are much happier since leaving the corporate world, but does not ask the obvious question of whether our economy supports enough jobs as independent film-makers, small business owners, and high-level public sector employees to accommodate everyone who feels trapped by the one-dimensional focus of their corporate job. The answer is almost certainly no.
As John Ralston Saul has written:
The one-third to one-half of the population who are part of the managerial elite are indeed castrated as citizens because their professions, their employment contracts and the general atmosphere of corporate loyalty make it impossible for them to participate in the public place.
In other words, the problem is systemic and cannot be fixed by a few individuals making “brave” and unconventional decisions.
If, as Pryor and Saul both suggest, the anxieties and frustrations of corporate working life stems largely from its lack of public purpose, perhaps it is time to recognize work and thought on behalf of the public good as a basic psychological need which cannot met in a corporatist economy. Can we imagine an alternative institutional framework in which individuals’ ethical, political, and social sensibilities are fully integrated into their work?
One way to achieve this might be to integrate democratic practices directly into the workplace. This would require establishing procedures whereby employees elect their own managers and have direct input on their firm’s priorities and policy decisions. This idea is elaborated in admirable detail by David Schweickart in his book After Capitalism, where he writes
It is a striking anomaly of modern capitalist societies that ordinary people are deemed competent enough to select their political leaders – but not their bosses. Contemporary capitalism celebrates democracy, but denies us our rights at precisely the point where they might be utilized most immediately and most concretely: at the place where we spend most of the active and alert hours of our adult lives.
Under Schweickart’s proposals, there would be regular meetings and reviews at which employees would be encouraged to offer opinions on, say, the desirability of fossil-fuel companies as clients or the system of six-minute billable units. In addition, the fact that employees would all be part-owners of their firm means that employees’ opinions would directly influence their firm’s policy decisions. One may or may not agree with Schweickart’s specific proposals, but it is only through broad institutional reforms of this kind that it becomes possible to imagine a society-wide ‘cure’ for the malaise that Pryor sees at the heart of corporate Australia.
