an affabale complaisance................

 Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provide by, for example, a carpenter's level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame.  The rise of "teamwork" has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Manager themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to.  The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn't care what he majored in.  He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance.  Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy?  There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we've been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work