1998

20.1

Warren Tormey
Discipline and Dilbert
 

 Veterans of the cubicle relate easily to the subject matter of the comic strip Dilbert: company monitoring of employee e-mail; management double-talk; carpal tunnel syndrome; endless and pointless meetings; lower back pains resulting from excessive hours in front of the computer screen; inane team-building exercises; and the rare employee who occasionally beats the system. The strip "strikes a nerve," as Newsweek’s cover story shouted in the issue of 12 August 1996, because it "portrays the bedrock truth of the American workplace, at least in the white-collar caverns where clerks, engineers, marketers, and salespeople dwell" (Levy 53). People love the nerdy engineer, buy his merchandise, and post his strips on their walls and doors because he offers a (tepid) voice of protest to the alienating forces in the corporate world, and people identify with him because we’re similarly resigned to the daily inanities and indignities that we encounter in our jobs. In naming Dilbert one of the most influential people in America for 1997, Time’s 21 April 1997 issue noted that he "appears in 1550 papers in 17 languages and 39 countries, with a daily readership of 150 Million" (59). His "appeal as a working class hero," the write-up notes, is that "we are rooting for him because he is our mouthpiece for the lessons we have accumulated--but are too afraid to express--in our effort to avoid cubicular homicide" (59).

This popularity has also been noted by the sector of the workplace consisting of managers, human resource officers, employment specialists, and perhaps most significantly, companies recognizing the potential value of Dilbert as a corporate trademark. And his creator, former Pacific Bell programmer Scott Adams, has capitalized on the strip’s success in a big way. On one hand, he has become a voice whose value is recognized by management types, who find in the strip a vehicle for understanding worker cynicism. As Management Consultant Tom Brown writes, Adams "take[s] virtually every HR issue of the past 20 years and catapults it to the top of many management agendas via trenchant cartoons and scathing essays in books. . . . Dilbert is about human rights, human purpose, and human potential. It’s what the human resources profession is about, or ought to be, as well" (13). The further success of Adams’s comic lampoons of corporate America, including the 1996 publications The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert’s Top-Secret Management Handbook and 1997’s The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century, is marked by their time spent on bestseller lists and their status as mandatory reading for human resource officers and management strategists.

Adams has taken worker discontent and turned it into a prosperous commodity. An Economist article from 5 April 1997 observes that "There are Dilbert Dolls, Dilbert calendars and ties, a $20m contract for another five Dilbert books, plus plans for Dilbert-based television programmes and computer software. There is even talk of a Dilbertland theme park, complete with boss-shooting galleries. Mr. Adams’s only real worry is over-exposure--and, as he happily points out, ‘you can’t get to over-exposure without going through filthy rich first’" (64). Already a pitchman for OfficeMax and a figure regularly seen on recent bestseller lists, Dilbert’s merchandising clout as an embodiment of worker dissatisfaction is unmistakable.

Naturally, we are brought to questions about the source of the strip’s popularity: What accounts for Dilbert’s continuing influence in spite of the tacit acknowledgment that it’s less than a revolutionary statement calling for rebellion and change? If it is something less than a statement calling for the corporation’s overthrow, is it nonetheless a legitimate paean to disenfranchised cubicle dwellers? Surprisingly enough, the answers may lie in the arcana of French social theory. Despite its overcommodified popularity, Dilbert’s legitimacy may reside in its identification of forms and operations of power in the corporate matrix, varieties of worker suppression, and most importantly, tactics of resistance available to those subjected to the discipline of the corporate hierarchy. Ultimately, Dilbert portrays important contexts for understanding the workplace experience delineated in the post-modern social criticism of Foucault, Bordieu, and de Certeau, each of whom identifies the continuing dialectic between those in power and those subjected to it--the matters addressed most powerfully in Dilbert --as the organizing principles of modern life. In this way, the strip is as legitimate an analysis of --and a guide for coping with--the problems of modern life as are its counterparts in the French academy.

Let’s start with the strip’s Foucauldian elements. It is doubtful that Adams has ever read the theorist’s conceptions of the connection between power dynamics and discursive formation, has any direct awareness of Foucault’s deeming of surveillance tactics as the organizing principle of the social disciplinary matrix, or sees the body as the locus on which the operations of power are inscribed. However, like many who have sat in office chairs and stared at computer screens, he doesn’t need to know the theory to have lived the practice. A strip from 4 June 1994 shows Dilbert’s "Pointy-haired boss," so named for his distinctively Luciferian hairstyle, telling the chagrined engineer that "You’ve got inflation eating you from the bottom and no real opportunity for a promotion." He continues, "and as long as all the other companies are downsizing too, you have no leverage. I can get away with anything!" As Dilbert laments, "I miss the 80’s," the boss jabs at him with a pencil, asking "Does this hurt?" Three key elements--the boss, the engineer, and the pencil--literally capture the Foucauldian premise about the connection between power relations and discursive formations literally. As the boss jabs at Dilbert with pencil, he demonstrates the "functioning of penal power, distributed throughout the social space; present everywhere as scene, spectacle, sign, discourse; legible like an open book; operating by a permanent recodification of the mind of the citizens" expressed in Discipline and Punish (129-30). The whole process of subjection, in Foucauldian terms, includes observation, documentation, timetables and competency exams, but begins with the simple matter of inscription. Dilbert’s docile tolerance of his boss’s abuse underscores his complicitness in the social contract that organizes their hierarchical relation to one another.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how the scale, object, and modality of the eighteenth century individual’s subjection to an increasingly industrial social framework took shape in

a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A "political anatomy," which was also a "mechanics of power," was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others; bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. (138)

Two strips, from 1 April 1994 and 8 April 1995, also allude to the power dynamics which individuate, atomize, and document the production of individual bodies. Both strips assail the cubicle, that particular and endearing feature of white collar workplace organization, which is the frequent butt of Adams’s gags. In the first strip, Zimbu the monkey has been brought into Dilbert’s department to tweak its productivity. He informs the engineer that "Evolution favors monkeys. Eventually humans will be kept in cages as pets." Dilbert replies, "Impossible. We humans will never allow ourselves to be treated like that." In the third frame, the irritated engineer replies, "Now get out of my cubicle" as the perspective extends into an endless expanse of cubicles off into the distance. In a world where humans agree to be atomized into cellularized work stations, the future course of evolution can only yield the body perfectly adapted to this environment. In a strip from March of 1997, Adams introduced the cube shaped employee Rex Tangle, the "square peg" who eats "square meals" and has no social life. (Wally, Dilbert’s cynical cohort, mutters "Meet the future" as the new employee is introduced.) In his own grim way, Rex represents Adams’s futuristic vision of the cubicle dweller, but more importantly, he confirms Foucault’s thesis about "docile bodies" which conform only to the demands of their workplace and to the requirements for economic productivity which are imposed upon them.

Indeed, the equation of the cubicle with the actual processes of labor and the creation of value is addressed in the second strip, in which Dilbert complains to his boss, "Just as I thought, my cubicle is two inches smaller today than yesterday!" The boss replies, "We installed real-time status adjusters in the cubicle walls. Sensors monitor your work and adjust the cubicle size according to your value." In frame three, co-workers sit in milk-crate sized cubicles as one says, "It’s amazing how fast you get used to it." In their world, the cubicle is the locus of the corporation’s subjection of its employees. It cellularizes the body, imposes limits on its spatial and anatomical relations with its environment, demands a verifiable degree of efficiency, and documents its productive motility. It is the satellite to the centralized power anchors; as such, it represents the analytical space of the disciplinary matrix where production, or the creation of value, takes place: each component of the labor process is "characterized, assessed, computed, and related to the individual who [is] its particular agent. Thus, spread out in a perfectly legible way over the whole series of individual bodies, the work force may be analysed in individual units" (145). The partitioning of the corporate work environment allows for its power to assume this form.

And it manifests itself in various trends, measures, programs, and discursive formations which are brought to the bewildered minions of Dilbert’s company. This motley cast is described in the 1997 retrospective Seven Years of Highly Defective People. Each of the strip’s characters was inspired by bits and pieces of Adams’s own experience as an MBA-trained software engineer at Pacific Bell, and much of the strip’s subject matter is supplemented by "war stories" taken directly from reader e-mail (often illicitly written on company time) and visitors to the DilbertZone website (which provides a list of companies which block their employees’ access to it). Each character represents an amalgam, therefore, of actual lived experience. The more significant of Dilbert’s co-workers are Wally, a fellow engineer and "thoroughly cynical employee who has no sense of company loyalty and feels no need to mask his poor performance or his total lack of respect" (217), and Alice, a no-nonsense go-getter modeled on one of Adams’s co-workers who is reflected in her "pink suit, her fluffy hair, her coffee obsession, her technical proficiency, and her take-no-crap attitude" (209). Other characters include the "generic guy" Ted, whose manic work habits go unnoticed by the company bigwigs, and Tina, the technical writer who resents the engineers for their failure to appreciate her talents, and who probably majored in English. This motley cast struggles to withstand the whimsical machinations and inane directives of Dilbert’s dog, the annoying know-it-all Dogbert; his cat, the head of the Evil Human Resources Catbert; the troglodytes of the Accounting Department; the Teflon-coated PR types in Marketing who have no clue about what the engineers do; and ultimately, the "Pointy-Haired Boss," whose coif reflects his ultimately demonic stature as a figure of management inanity and cluelessness. Dilbert and colleagues struggle to decode the forms and face of the power that both marks their subjection to the corporation and inhibits their ability to serve it.

A strip from June 1992 assails the "Quality Engineering" management trend which has in recent years become a focal point of management innovation and concern. In the first frame the pointy-haired boss intones, "We’ve got to make drastic changes to keep up with the competition." Next, he explains, "That’s why I had these little note pads made that say QALITY," not aware that he has misspelled the word. The bemused Dilbert then asks, "Isn’t it spelled with a ‘U’?" The next day’s strip shows the boss inspiring the workers: "What this department needs is a slogan to inspire us." In the next frame, he tells them what it is: "We are Quality." In frame three, Alice replies, "Suddenly I feel like working long hours for no extra pay," to which the boss replies, "It’s working!!" Another strip, from 26 February 1993, shows the boss telling Dilbert, "We’re having a department bowling night tomorrow. It’s my way of rewarding all of you for your performance this quarter." Dilbert responds, "We hate doing things together at night," to which the boss counters, "Well, I wasn’t happy with your performance."

In each case, the authority of management requires those in Dilbert’s division to tolerate motivational ploys and directives, no matter how inane, discouraging, dehumanizing they are. Each strip states what few real-life employees would be in a position to articulate openly--the true substance of manager-employee power plays. Each of the above strips demonstrates how power works to impose a form of discipline--in this case, tacit acceptance of the illogical--as one of the inevitabilities of the workplace to be endured rather than questioned. As the locus of power, the Pointy-Haired Boss represents the source of the disciplinary matrix which seeks to control, through weary complicity, the productivity of Dilbert and his coworkers. His source of power is in his arbitrary and indefinable agenda, which he himself probably would be unable to articulate, but which ultimately seeks to reduce people to producers through a form of discursive control in which the currency of clichés, note pads, and transparent motivational ploys are unlikely to encounter any significant resistance, largely through their mere stupidity. With their own place in the power network to maintain, the employees are much likelier to endure, rather than to resist, the boss’s motives. And his power is ultimately reinforced by the sense of superiority the employees feel for "seeing through" his motives.

In this way the strips recall the discussion of panopticism in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault describes the "calculated technology of subjection" that was the operating principle of Benthamite prison reform. This power apparatus assures the inseparability of human and capital accumulation, and perpetuates the "disciplinary pyramid" which privileges the Pointy Haired boss and his real-life cohorts. This hierarchy

constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination, and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production. (221)

In this way, the strip itself, through its portrayal of the illogical and technologically inaccessible realities of the corporate workplace, validates the "bemused acceptance" of employees toward corporate power dynamics in the place of any real opposition to the disciplinary matrix, and represents vividly the operation of late-capitalist machinery. Yet in its own way, Dilbert itself might represent another "operational schema" which shores up existing hierarchical relations between the empowered and the subjected because its message is so powerfully resonant. And this reading of the strip has not gone unnoticed. In his pop-Marxist critique of the strip, The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh, Norman Solomon contends that

 A lot of fans believe that Dilbert conveys a strong anti-corporate message. For that matter, many commercials on television could be seen as "anti-establishment." But corporate America is not selling us the rope to hang it with; corporate America is selling us the illusions to exculpate it with. To mistake pop-culture naughtiness for opposition to the corporate system is an exercise in projection--and delusion. (12)

However, the strip’s real use to readers is in its portraying the means available to employees to gain distance from, if not resist, the manifestations of power that operate in the corporate workplace. It is a mistake to equate the strip’s popularity and resonance with the mere "co-optation" and "institutionalization" of a corporate rebel. The strip, even while demonstrating its "co-optation" moves beyond this theme, providing workers a tactic of resistance which offers a means to understand the power dynamics better and to use them for personal agency. The forms of "rebellion" that the strip offers are not conceived along the lines of traditional Marxist thought, but instead provide the individual a means to understand what is needed to gain agency and mobility within the corporate power matrix.

Adams isn’t the first to conceive of rebellion in these terms. French social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau offer ideas which help to illuminate the context in which Dilbert offers a template to those seeking to "work the system" more advantageously. While he is vaguely aware of his alienation from the processes of his own production, Dilbert is also intuitively in touch with his complicitness in his subjection to corporate discursive formations. Told to "utilize" words like "paradigm" and "proactive’ to reflect his "empowered" status as an employee, he regularly laments but steadfastly endures endless meetings, perpetually shrinking cubicle space, inane directives from above, and other manifestations of power which limit and also reinforce his service to his employer. Ultimately, Dilbert represents a benign but ultimately real threat to the inane fads, trends, discourses, and technological tyranny that he perpetually endures. Few merchandising icons have the power of this corporate Everyman who struggles to negotiate the power hierarchies he inhabits.

Because the strip borrows so heavily from lived experiences, readers are exposed to a tactics of negotiating the corporation’s disciplinary matrix. A survey of the DilbertZone website illustrates how ideas which favor the individual’s agenda over the corporation’s are made accessible. As mentioned before, access to the website is blocked by some companies which deem its content subversive to their agenda; these companies are listed in the site’s "Pointy-Haired Boss Index ." The site is censored for good reasons, as a survey of its content provides a virtual clearinghouse of information which might disrupt traditional power networks. Some of the website’s recent "lists of the day" include "ways to get your boss to cancel bad projects," "methods for avoiding bad assignments," and "best ways to end co-workers conversations next to your cubicle" (April, 1998). Each of these lists foregrounds the employee’s desire for autonomy and meaning in the work we do, and allows employees an avenue to "move beyond" mere complicitness to the corporation’s power dynamics.

This focus on the individual’s desires to resist the corporation’s disciplinary matrices assumes a fuller shape in Dilbert’s effort to "decode" the face of corporate power. One thing that Dilbert and cohorts understand very well is the need to look busy and productive--in short, to create the conditions in which their activities are "misrecognized" as actual work. And this skill begins by knowing what forms of power must be dealt with. A strip from 19 February 1995 shows various "Boss types" and decodes the power relations that employees must negotiate; Dogbert invites you to "find your boss on this handy reference." You might work for the "hostage taker [who] traps you in your cubicle and talks your ears off"; the "fraud [who] uses vigorous head-nodding to simulate comprehension"; the "motivational liar [who] has no clue what you do but says you’re the best." The "over-promoted [boss] tries to mask incompetence with poor communication" (the frame shows such a boss offering a nebulous strategy to his workers: "Let’s qualitize our paradigm so we don’t over-inundate with datums"); the "weasel...takes credit for your hard work"; "Moses...waits for clear signals from above"; and finally, the "perfect boss" has the good sense to "die of natural causes on a Thursday afternoon," making possible a three day weekend.

The strip recognizes, or more appropriately, "misrecognizes" interactions with authority for what they really are: a coercive politics in which one must endure the boss’s personality, decipher it, and develop a series of tactics to advance one’s own position. The practice of "misrecognition," as developed in social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, is an ordering principle of social interaction and power relations and a contingent, temporal group activity poised on the margin between discursive, or "official," and non-discursive, or "informal," behavior. The "officialized," "misrecognized" forms of discourse which operate in corporate power relationships are part of "the objectifying process through which the group teaches itself and conceals itself from its own truth, inscribing in objectivity its representation of what it is and thus binding itself by this public declaration" (21-22). In short, misrecognition belies what really goes on in subject-object power relations, and the matters of Dilbert, such as knowing what sort of boss you have to deal with and what is in store for you when you do, reflect the activity of identifying and decoding the truth that is concealed in everyday corporate discursive practice.

The 1997 publication Dogbert’s Top-Secret Management makes a similar effort to decode the face of corporate power, or more accurately, to validate the interpretation of it that many already possess. The book begins with a warning: "If you are not a manager, put this book down right now. There are some things you’re better off not knowing." The introduction continues: "You need to develop the distinctive mannerisms and practices which will distinguish you from the exploited masses," implying the need to cultivate those skills which will ultimately go misrecognized as initiative, motivation, or service to the greater corporate good. The first chapter, titled "Acting Like a Manager," includes sections on "The Management Zombie Stare," in which Dogbert, the interpreter of the misrecognized, observes that the manager "must learn to hide every trace of comprehension and compassion in your expression. Your face should send this message: Logic is Futile." Other sections in the chapter address matters that reflect the forms that the manager’s power might assume, including "Being Late for Meetings," "Talking Too Long," and using "Manager Language" ("If you hear a new management buzzword," Dogbert explains, "jump on it like a starving squirrel on the last peanut on earth"). Later chapters detail how to maintain one’s facade of power, offering sections on "Blundering Your Way to the Top," "Encouraging People to Quit," and "Creating a False Sense of Urgency." Based essentially around decoding for an imagined audience of managers (and a real audience of their alienated subordinates) what usually goes unrecognized, the book explains what many Dilbert readers know: how they are kept docile, productive, and out of the manager’s hair.

Identifying the reality behind what is misrecognized enables the alienated employee to develop a strategy for coping, if not directly exploiting, the power dynamics for personal gain and advancement. In a strip from 26 July 1995, Wally addresses the assembled boss and co-workers in a "briefing session": "My proposed work plan for the year is to stress-test our product under severe network conditions. I will accomplish this by downloading large image files from the busiest servers on the net." The wavering boss apparently rejects his proposal, because in the next frame Wally laments to Dilbert, "I was this close to making it my job to download naughty pictures." Dilbert replies, "It’s just as well; I would have had to kill you." One "silver lining" to each layer of technological innovation in the workplace is that it enhances opportunities for individuals to do something that "looks like" work but is not directly related to any sort of production process.

Escaping real work is a constant topic in Dilbert. In a chapter in The Dilbert Principle titled "Pretending to Work," Adams claims that he "studied with the masters" during his tenure at Pacific Bell: "During that time the stock price of Pacific Bell climbed steadily, so I think I can conclude that my avoidance of work was in the best interest of the company and something to be proud of" (112). Yes, not working, for some, can be just as profitable and beneficial as working. Among the strategies Adams suggests for creating voids in the workday are facilitating delays (strategies include asking "illiterate ‘outdoorsy’ managers to review huge documents in detail, placing orders for ‘vaporware’ products that will be ‘available soon’ according to the vendor, and asking for meetings with co-workers who have poor time management skills") (115). Other work-avoidance tactics suggested in the chapter include changing jobs frequently and complaining constantly about one’s workload. Voice mail, that technological breakthrough, opens one to a whole range of tactics for looking busy (including returning messages during one’s lunch hour and during "nature calls" in the middle of the night so as to seem always at work; and keeping the number of stored messages near the system’s limit, so as to appear inundated and preoccupied with work matters). A judicious use of one’s voice mail system, Adams reveals, can make one appear not only busy and motivated, but also conscientious.

Other sections in The Dilbert Principle provide "how to" pointers on arriving to work early and leaving late (of course, with hidden voids in the middle of the day), keeping a messy desk, working on a long-range project (which "will probably get canceled or altered beyond recognition before it’s completed anyway--so there’s no harm done if you don’t do your part"), looking incompetent (the risk here is being "recognized as an imbecile and promoted into a management job"), avoiding meaningless assignments, and planning vacations strategically so as to miss particularly busy periods (118). If asked to produce a mission statement, the cyber-connected needn’t expend any labor. We need only to visit the DilbertZone’s "Mission Statement Generator," a program that randomly spews out mission statements from a collection of 17 adverbs (i.e. quickly, proactively, professionally, synergistically), 26 verbs (including engineer, leverage, and revolutionalize), 39 adjectives (value-added, market-driven, seven-habits conforming, multimedia based, etc.) and 20 nouns (infrastructures, methods of empowerment, meta-services, intellectual capital). If we use Dilbert to walk the walk, and talk the talk, we have probably got a decent shot at management.

The matter of telecommuting opens up new realms of possibility for anyone seeking to appear busy while actually doing something else. In a series of strips from February 1995, Dilbert himself is given a telecommuting assignment, which leads him to question what the corporation ultimately "gets" in exchange for his services. On day one, he converses at home with Dogbert: "I have an ethical question about telecommuting, Dogbert. Do I owe my employer eight productive hours, or do I only need to match the two productive hours I would have in the office?" Dogbert replies, "Well, when you factor in how you’re saving the planet by not driving, you only owe one hour," to which Dilbert adds, "and this meeting counts." The next day finds an unshaven Dilbert at his computer. His journal entry reads: "Day two of telecommuting is going smoothly. I have eliminated all optional habits of hygiene. My co-workers are a fading memory. I am losing language skills. I talk to my computer and expect answers. For reasons that are unclear, my dog wears a gas mask and shouts tarzan like phrases." By day three, Dilbert spends his morning throwing his pen in the air. "The afternoon," he observes in the next frame, "is spent in silent appreciation of how much better this is than being in the office."

As the strips show, the corporate workplace provides many opportunities to look busy without actually doing anything. This practice has been named la perruque by social theorist Michel de Certeau, who defines it more fully in his Practice of Everyday Life as "a worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job" (25). In Dilbert, as the above strips illustrate, la perruque assumes a milder form, that of an artificial busyness which occupies a liminal space somewhere between labor and recreation. The greater the technological and organizational sophistication in the cellularized workplace, Adams suggests, the more opportunities exist to create the false image of actual production and the documentation to validate it as production. In the workplace Adams chronicles, actual production is of secondary importance to la perruque, and Dilbert offers to workers the practices that create the experience of work and the documentation procedures to validate it.

Again, Dilbert enthusiasts are likely already to recognize such a tactics of time-wasting. It happens during meetings where no clear agenda is apparent; it happens when folks mill about the copier or coffee machine; it happens when a supervisor gives a malcontent a glowing review to get the person transferred out of a department; it is evident when one disguises a computer game of "doom" or solitaire by pushing the "boss key," which replaces the screen with an official looking spreadsheet. While the strip stops short of offering any tactics of practice which might be termed "subversive" or revolutionary, it does offer avenues to allow one’s private agenda to be misrecognized as work by uncovering channels that allow one to weather the corporation’s disciplinary network.

So, critics who assail Dilbert as co-opted rebellion which shores up existing power structures miss the point. Solomon, for example, contends that "Instead of being a weapon against mind-numbing corporate blather, Dilbert is a tool for propagating more of it" (31). But Solomon’s critique is wrong; he assumes that the agency to resist and ultimately overcome the capitalist machinery must act outside of its range of operation. What he overlooks are the many agencies that are identified daily by those in the corporate world which not only help one to cope with the machinations of late capitalism, but also to identify the channels to use the system to one’s advantage. The strip’s popularity, and ultimately its resonance, stems not from its power as commodified dissent, but from its expression of a tactics of resistance which moves beyond traditional Marxist notions of rebellion. Adams presents in comic form both the problems of and the strategies for surviving the post modern disciplinary networks in which it is often no longer clear what one produces or why one produces it. Informed by the ideas of post-modern social theory, Dilbert helps to restore what late capitalism has lost--an agency for locating meaning in work which moves beyond mere Marxist notions of alienation. Ultimately, the effectiveness of Dilbert’s message lies in its willingness to address what working people in corporate suctures worry about: the concern for what work is, what it does, and how the individual’s relationship to the institution, and one’s socioeconomic mobility within it might be defined and, more importantly, manipulated. More than solidifying one’s subjection to the disciplinary apparatus by offering a marginally legitimized "steam valve" for worker frustrations, Dilbert serves to clarify how one might recognize and operate within the disciplinary apparatus in a corporate environment.

Warren Tormey
English Department
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132