In unequal relationships, the less powerful party does most of the work of understanding the other, because the powerful can afford not to.
Graeber developed it in a 2012 essay and in The Utopia of Rules (2015), drawing on feminist standpoint theory. Subordinates must anticipate the moods and wishes of those above them, so they come to know their superiors far better than they are known. He argued that bureaucratic procedure and the threat of force both create zones in which the powerful need not interpret anyone.
In practice
- A personal assistant knows her manager's preferences, allergies and moods, and the manager could not name her children.
- A tenant rehearses a conversation with the landlord for a week, and the landlord has forgotten it by the afternoon.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is dependence: those who rely on another's goodwill have every reason to read them closely. Another is that power substitutes for understanding, since the powerful can impose outcomes without persuading anyone.
- In its favour
- Matches experiments in which people made to feel powerful take others' perspectives less, such as Galinsky and colleagues' 2006 study.
- Against it
- Much of the support is anecdotal or comes from brief laboratory manipulations of felt power, and some studies find powerful people read others accurately when it serves their goals.
- Standing
- Compare B******t Jobs, Graeber's other entry, and the Peter principle.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline