Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/what-roman-slave-owners-knew-about-managing-staff/

by gajju3588 • 11 years ago

44 54 11 years ago

Mikeb85• 11 years ago

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

amelius• 11 years ago

One can also apply that backwards: if there were computers back in that time, one can be sure we would have had web-apps and APIs for dispatching slaves.

Unfortunately, we have never come up with a moral code for programmers, like the Hippocratic oath which exists for MDs. And of course, a moral code for managers would be nice to have too.

TJSomething2• 11 years ago

The National Soceity of Professional Engineers has a code of ethics I had to learn in school:

1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.

2. Perform services only in areas of their competence.

3. Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.

4. Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.

5. Avoid deceptive acts.

6. Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.

However, this is less applicable, because we rarely do anything that can directly kill people on accident.

Kalium4• 11 years ago

You mean, like the ACM code of ethics? http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

allochthon• 11 years ago

Am I the only one to cringe at the attitude of the author?

calibraxis2• 11 years ago

One of my hats is manager, and I find it amusingly honest. My job is to command, and they obey. Buying someone (chattel slavery) is worse than renting them (wage slavery), but it's a matter of degree.

Ok, I admittedly expend serious effort at inverting my authority... which is hilariously undermined by the devs I manage, because they're trained to be obedient specialist cogs and it's like pulling teeth to get them to act independently outside a narrow range. So there's pressures towards authoritarianism. But I don't manage only devs (and I'm supporting non-devs to become devs), so it's not all bad.

fsk• 11 years ago

There are some differences between being a chattel slave and a wage slave.

If you have a chattel slave, you won't waste money investing in teaching them new skills.

If you have a wage slave, why would you invest in teaching someone a new skill? After they master the skill, you now have to pay them market rate for that skill (or they'll leave). So why not just pay market rate from the beginning rather than investing in training someone?

walterbell2• 11 years ago

More interesting would have been a discussion of hierarchy: how were "management" tiers motivated, where did ordered delegation stop and palace coups begin, what are the modern equivalents of that top tier boundary?

walterbell2• 11 years ago

Article would have benefited from a discussion of transient/nomadic labor, still used in modern times, e.g. http://twc2.org.sg

exratione• 11 years ago

History is largely outright violence and violent exploitation, and the early growth in complexity in the ancient world is marked by the move from the former to the latter. Primitive states massacred their enemies, their leaders unable to apply force in any more sophisticated fashion. It required more complex states to produce the ability to effectively enslave defeated foes in large numbers instead, but once that was achieved states capable of it thrived at the expensive of others.

There is little to chose from between Roman slavery and Medieval serfdom. Long-term colonial economic exploitation had many of the same aspects even where it wasn't outright slavery. The institution of slavery in its broadest sense has proven to be very resilient. It is probably too soon to say whether its comparative absence for a few centuries is a passing thing, or whether it is in fact the symptom of another systematic shift in the sophistication of states. If the latter, then the introduction of modern systems of banking has an interesting parallel course in history. Consider all of the associated means for better extracting wealth from populations without provoking rebellion.

One might put forward an argument that suggests these advances make it more practical for the elite to comparatively peacefully farm the local population rather than farming other populations by making and enslaving enemies. Thus more of the elites do this.

All of which still leaves us with a very long to go yet in order to become a moral species. I don't see it happening without fundamental engineered changes to human nature, and that isn't a near term thing. It is worth remembering that a thin line indeed separates present elites in so-called civilized regions from those who in the past massacred and enslaved. If today's leaders found advantage in it, they would do it.

brc• 11 years ago

That's the sound of a long bow being drawn.

csallen• 11 years ago

A comparison of the two is going to provoke, but similarities do exist. It is an uncomfortable truth that both slave owners and corporations...

It has always irked me that people are unable to differentiate between comparing two things and equating two things. Despite being completely different actions, it's commonly accepted to treat them the same. This leads to all sorts of misconceptions and invalidates plenty of reasonable points.

It shouldn't be "provoking" or "uncomfortable" that any two things share some similarities, because everything shares at least some similarities with every other thing. That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable.

And likewise, just because things aren't exactly the same, doesn't mean that don't share many properties.

You are playing word games and have failed to address any of the content. Share owners, slave owners, the phrases differ by two letters. Western culture is a direct descendant of Roman culture, it would be strange if there weren't large similarities, especially at the level of organizational institutions. Why would you expect that the concept of people holding power over other people through directing them on what to do would just vanish?

You would do better to point out the actual differences than to fall back on the claim that because a word is slightly different there may be something different between the two.

carsongross• 11 years ago

phrases differ by two letters

Shit and salt differ by two letters as well. I don't see how that's relevant.

meric• 11 years ago

I agree. There are similarities between manager/employee and master/slave relationships, just as there are similarities between these two relationships and that of parent/child, ruler/subject, big-country/small-country, guest/host, older-sibling/younger-subling and even in (m/f)spouse/(f/m)spouse. Social hierarchy in human beings is as inherent as the number of fingers we have on each hand.

On another note, all of those relationships have the similarity of having no equality. If it's uncomfortable, it's only because it is what we can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html For every relationship there are roles and obligations we must fulfil in order to remain in that relationship, and when the obligations are broken by either party, e.g. a master punishing instead of rewarding a slave who did right by their master, the relationship will be imperilled.

jeffdavis• 11 years ago

Both are forms of juxtaposition, which carries meaning by itself. Logically, juxtaposition does not need to carry meaning, but to humans it does.

For instance, try comparing the next person you meet with a hyena. It's not likely to be taken as a neutral thought experiment.

calibraxis2• 11 years ago

Knowing some authors, I suspect this author didn't write: "Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists." Editors frequently write such things; and that statement sounds extremely unlikely. (Otherwise, I enjoyed this article.)

duaneb2• 11 years ago

Yea, especially when some of our earliest texts are of managers. More accurate might be "earliest civilization in which we can find a wide breadth of insight into justification, rationale, and advice for managing a labor force. What have we learned since then?"

EDIT: Hell, one of the earliest hallmarks of "civilization" is social stratification. I'm betting people have been theorizing about how to use human labor (subjugated or otherwise compelled) far before the written word came about.

lkrubner• 11 years ago

Every single sentence in this article is offensive, and the overall article is also offensive. It also makes impossible generalizations such as this one:

"Most Romans, like Augustus, thought cruelty to slaves was shocking."

For a different perspective, I'd recommend some of Elaine Pagel's work on the early Christian movement, in particular:

http://www.amazon.com/Adam-Eve-Serpent-Politics-Christianity...

In "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity" Pagel's makes clear that slaveowners could rape their female slaves. Some of the early Christian leaders denounced this practice, and argued that slave owners had no right to rape their female slaves. In this, the early Christians represented a dramatic break with the culture of Rome. And this is also why Nietzsche once referred to the early Christian movement as a slave revolt.

Unless you don't think that rape is cruel, it is accurate to say that slaveowners believed in cruelty to slaves. From everything I've read, these kinds of horrors were closer to the norm than the exception:

"Vedius Pollio, a rich Roman, once invited his friend the emperor Augustus to dinner. The entertainment was interrupted when a slave broke a valuable crystal cup. Trying to impress with his toughness, Vedius ordered the slave boy be thrown to the huge moray eels in his fish pond."

And good god, let's not learn management techniques by studying dictators such as this:

"But Augustus was not impressed. In fact, he was outraged at this novel form of cruelty. He ordered Vedius to free the slave boy and told the other slaves to bring all the crystal cups they could find and smash them in their master’s presence. He then told Vedius to fill in the fish pond and get rid of the moray eels."

This whole bit somehow succeeds at being innocent, stupid, shocking, deplorable, wrong and offensive all at once:

"Most Romans, like Augustus, thought cruelty to slaves was shocking. They understood that slaves could not simply be terrified into being good at their job."

Here's a cold hard fact: if you are a slave owner, then you are cruel. It is a simple matter of definition: to be a slave owner means that if someone does what they wish with their life, you are prepared to beat them, torture them, imprison them, or even kill them, to be sure they do not have the freedom to do what they want to do with their life.

Any article that suggests that it is possible to be a non-cruel slave owner is an article that does not understand what slavery is.

duaneb2• 11 years ago

You are correct—romans did not have some blanket dislike of cruelty. Slaves were property, and they were used as property. This included rape, torture and murder without any cause, etc. If a citizen had a wife and female slaves, he would not be expected to be monogamous, sexually, with his wife, although he would be expected to refrain from embarrassing his wife socially.

However, it is important to note that to a roman citizen, decorum dictated their public behavior, not laws. This is why all the bickering that surrounded the change from a republic to an empire seems more like a soap opera, with public insults about the others' masculinity on the senate floor, and sleeping with their wives in private. This is also why you have a huge variety of culture and religion in the empire—Christianity made the empire LOOK bad. Keep in mind that this is a state that, at points in its life, recorded "rape by monkeys" as a punishment. They didn't have many qualms about treating people poorly the way we might today when "justice" was involved. In fact, I would argue our current form of government is not oriented around justice, but ensuring a homogenous culture of morality.

Back to the point. Slavery was fairly unrestricted in ancient rome. That doesn't mean that all slaves were actually treated poorly. As noted extensively elsewhere in texts, the romans were pragmatic about how they used their slaves: they may be property, but a slave that you don't treat well will still be cooking your food, maintaining your estate. They're not going to care if they are your property if they decide they'd rather kill you than put up with you, and slaves would often outnumber non-slaves in upper class households. So often slaves would be given wages, asked to raise these children. Saturnalia, the roman "christmas", turned the tables around and had the masters give their slaves gifts and serve them.

Now, I don't know how much of the article you read. It seems like you only read the first three paragraphs, from what you quoted, because the article openly acknowledges how brutal Rome can be. You're not going to get much out of an article if you disagree with the first few paragraphs unless you already agree with them.

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

The world is not black and white. Cruelty is a matter of degree. A slave owner who cares about the well-being of his/her slaves is objectively and inarguably less cruel than one who tortures them for entertainment. They are both awful people, sure, but if I were a slave I know which one I would rather have as my master.

rewqfdsa• 11 years ago

Every single sentence in this article is offensive, and the overall article is also offensive.

While I can't say "this article is not offensive", since "offensive" is subjective, I can say that if articles like this one violate your delicate sensibilities, you are not a person who can particulate in a free exchange of ideas. If everyone were like you, we would make no intellectual society at all.

littletimmy3• 11 years ago

The comparison between slaves of old and the wage slaves of today is a good one. Regardless of the shiny veneer of amenity-laden offices and endless vacation time, the fact remains that most people do a job so that they don't starve to death. That is not free work, that is wage slavery.

Jimmy• 11 years ago

Your thesis seems to be "If (if you don't do X, then you starve to death), then X is slavery", but I don't think that's true. Think of small hunter-gatherer groups that lived before the advent of agriculture. If they didn't go out and find food, they would die. But it doesn't seem right to say they were slaves.

littletimmy3• 11 years ago

Good point. But in the case of the hunter-gatherers a person is not working for someone else who will then provide him sustenance. That is not the case with an office worker.

I agree with you in that the topic is more complex than I initially made it seem. In the case of the office worker, hopefully the worker produces something of which then the capital owner takes some and leaves the rest to the office worker. That seems better than slavery, but only marginally. It actually sounds more like indetured sevitude in a feudal system (i.e. plant my land, we split the crop). We could debate whether that's slavery or not.

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

people do a job so that they don't starve to death

So that's why the long-term unemployment rate never rises above zero. Thanks, I'd been wondering why all those predictions of recessions causing high unemployment never panned out.

Also, there's also the fact that the power imbalance between employer and employee these days is a bit less than the imbalance between slave and owner was.

Besides the existence of non-starving unemployed people, I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days.

phaemon• 11 years ago

I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days.

I would like to note it too, but unfortunately it still exists. Google for it.

stretchwithme2• 11 years ago

Every organism has to do things or starve to death. Welcome to the nature of reality.

wavefunction• 11 years ago

yeah that's true but not very insightful

nickbauman2• 11 years ago

Wage slavery is a huge cost efficiency over customary slavery. With wage slavery you're not responsible for someone's shelter, feeding and care when they're sick. In the civil war, the south in preparing for war with the north couldn't compete with a slave economy man-for-man because of this. Canal diggers in the north were paid very little, often in rum, and died from disease so quickly and were replaced by a constant churn of immigrants. Doing that kind of work with slaves would be much more costly.

bilbo0s2• 11 years ago

??? Slavery was extremely economical. That was the entire point. Slaves dug numerous canals in the south. The reasons the south's infrastructure could not compete with the north's were two-fold. Geography and, in a word, "technology".

The canal era in the US was really initiated with the completion of the Erie in NY. All of a sudden, Georgians watched NYC become America's premier port city because of the Erie canal, and concluded that Georgia must build canals if it was to compete. The geography in the South, however, was all wrong. (At least, by the standards of 19th century engineering. And even by today's standards really.) The S-O-A Canal is a very good example. It was started... and less than a year later, southern engineers had to concede that every route from the Piedmont to the Tennessee border was impractical for canal construction. Even in the face of geographic realities like this, slaves were still able to carve out numerous canals in the south. Canals that would have been highly unlikely to have been carved out by any rational means. In the north they would have done the survey, determined the geographic problems and moved on to another project. Slaves proved resourceful and determined problem solvers on many of the canal projects. (The slaves promptly began using many of these canals as escape routes North as soon as they were completed... but that's another story.)

The other reason canals were bad business in the South AND the North was technological. The reality is... railroads simply had a manifest superiority to canals as infrastructure assets.

Between 1825 which is, I believe, when the Erie was completed to about the 1850's, which is when everyone seemingly conceded the superiority of the railroad - the South wasted a lot of time on canal construction. In fact, it could be argued that what held the South back was its insistence on building canals after witnessing the success the North was having with them. It took them a lot of time before the South fully considered the gift of geography the North had been given in their analyses. (The upper midwest sits on something like 20% of the GLOBAL freshwater supply. And that's just for starters. Look at a topographical map of NY State and trace out the Erie Canal on it and you'll see what I mean.) The correct strategic response to Northern canals would have been to invest heavily in railroads. But because the South had so much slave labor at their disposal, they tried to build canals to match the North, as that was more economical. They took quite a bit of time to realize that canals were a stop gap technology. Railroads should have been the real goal from the outset. By the time they realized that... it was too late.

So the reason canals were more successful in the North was not because the South had slavery. In fact, for what we now realize were reasons of their own, slaves would prove to be some of the best canal diggers the world had ever seen. Putting canals in places that were seemingly intractable. And they died FAR less than natives or immigrants to boot. No... the reason canals were less practical in the south was down to geography. The reason the South believed they could conquer that geography was slavery. And the slaves were, for a variety of reasons, ALMOST able to pull it off... but in the end... physics is still physics. And many southern canal projects didn't work out as well as their backers hoped. (They didn't work out as well as the slaves had hoped either. But the slaves made judicious use of those that did.)

I always thought that if the South had invested heavily in railroads as soon as they identified the threat that the Erie Canal presented in the 1820's... they would have done far better in the Civil War. They probably still would not have won. They would, at least, have beaten the North's Eastern Armies, which looked pretty and marched well... but were fairly inept. The South and the North EAST would, in the presence of more southern railroads, have been evenly matched. The problem was... the North's Western Armies were hyper-competent. Far more capable than either the Eastern or the Southern Armies. Grant's guys were, well informed, (Pinkerton made sure of that), and REALLY meticulous about infrastructure. So I doubt railroads would have made a difference once the Western Armies were let off their leashes. But the South could definitely have performed better in the War. They may have held out a bit longer at a minimum.

gnu8• 11 years ago

Whatever these morons have done to the links on their web sites has broken command-click to open a link in a new tab. They need to buy some better web development slaves.

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

I haven't seen any comments yet on the merits of a company having employees vs outsourcing:

   And just as a household needed slaves,
   so companies need staff. Permanent employees,
   like slaves, are far more desirable than
   outsourcing to outsiders. The Romans thought
   external contractors could never be relied on
   like members of the primary social group.

notastartup• 11 years ago

    corporations want to extract the maximum possible value 
    from their human assets, without exhausting them or 
    provoking rebellion or escape

some continuously turnover people. their business relies on ripping people off and exhausting them.

vacri• 11 years ago

Did Julius Caesar take his legions off-site to get them to buy-in to his invasion of Gaul? Successful leaders had to stand out from the crowd and use their superior skills to inspire, cajole and sometimes force people to do what was necessary.

So JC in the military behaved a lot like... officers in the modern military. They don't fraternise with the enlisted folk, and are all about leadership. In fact, they do less bribing to get the common soldier to do what they want than back in JC's time. Legionnaires were routinely offered loot and land in return for service; it wasn't just "hey, that guy has a striking profile and a commanding demeanour!".

The article has quite a romanticised view of Roman slavery - for example, the treatment of slaves in the article is all about household servants. It doesn't really discuss the treatment of slaves in the fields or in the mines, which was pretty brutal.

Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists

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