By Dr Brandon Vaidyanathan –
While studying global corporate workplaces in India and the Middle East, I came across a peculiar set of ideals, norms, and expectations that were widely shared across companies. Together, these constitute a distinctive model that (thanks to Ashwin, the IT professional I mentioned in my previous post) I call the Mercenary.
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This model of the Mercenary is easily identifiable though the interactions, practices, and discourses of day-to-day life in these workplaces. Listen to how Anil, another consultant I interviewed in Bangalore, described how these norms and expectations are reinforced at work:
“All of us in the rat race are shoulder-to-shoulder with, you know, ‘Hey, what’s happening with you, what’s happening in your life?’ And the conversation usually is around, ‘How many flats or condos or apartments do you own?’ ‘What are the investments you make?’ ‘What are the stocks that you are tracking?’ ‘What’s your next jump gonna be?’ You usually orient your success around percentage of hikes you get every year. Salary-oriented. A lot of weightage to titles and designations…
“So those become the handles or levers for success that you see. ‘Are you a manager yet? Are you senior manager? Are you director? VP? AVP?’ So those are badges or flags you wave. Of course salary’s important. Flashier cars. Fancier houses. So that’s usually the discussion that’s there in corporate life.”
The goals that Anil’s colleagues articulate are shared, understandable, and seen as legitimate; their validity is rarely called into question. They are taken for granted, reflecting their successful and thorough institutionalization.
The Mercenary is a recognizable character in the corporate workplace. When I say “character,” I mean something like stock characters in a movie: “hero,” “sidekick,” “villain,” etc. This character represents the cultural norms of the corporate workplace of today—what it takes to thrive and succeed in their work environment, what it means to “play the game” well.
When I speak to corporate professionals in India about my research, nearly everyone is able to recognize the norms and expectations of the Mercenary as dominating their work environments. Such characters serve as crucial points of reference. It is especially important to note that even when people in these contexts distance themselves from such models, they recognize that they are breaking from the mold—“I’m not like everyone else here,” they would say.
The Mercenary is a new character on the scene. Different eras and contexts have their own respective models. Scholars who studied corporations of the 1950s described the character of the loyal “organization man”—risk-averse, conformist, faithful to the company. In the 1980s, others identified another such character—“the manager.” Operating in turbulent environments of massive restructuring and downsizing, the manager was charged with achieving efficiency and profit-maximization at any cost. One of the professionals that sociologist Robert Jackall interviewed for his book Moral Mazes expressed this normative pressure: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.”
But today’s Mercenary is concerned neither with stability nor with maximizing profit nor with being loyal to the boss. As Ashwin said, “I don’t work for loyalty, right? I’m not loyal to the company. I work for the cash!”
But it isn’t simply a blind pursuit of money; rather, money is part of a combination of goods, including reputation, status, and ultimately, mobility. The benefits sought here may be oriented towards securing the well-being of one’s family and kin: many Christian professionals combined Mercenary injunctions to maximize mobility as a means to fulfil their vocation to their families.
What matters most, at the end of the day, is mobility: the ability to secure better position, pay, and status somewhere else, when one eventually leaves the company. Professionals like Ashwin are already prepared for departure from the moment they arrive. Sticking around too long is seen as “stagnancy”; plus, the company isn’t going to be loyal to you, so why should you be loyal to the company?
The influence of the Mercenary norm leads professionals to expect everyone in the workplace to similarly care about maximizing mobility above all. This leads to an unwillingness to form meaningful friendships with colleagues with whom one may spend 12-14 hours a day. It is “wise” to mistrust others; one is afraid of being vulnerable with colleagues in any way. For Christians, especially as a minority in India, this certainly affects how they relate to their colleagues, and what they disclose about themselves and what they hold most dear.
The normative orientation of the Mercenary—the central logic of how one “ought to” conduct themselves in the workplace—is thus what I call an “apprehensive individualism.” More on this in my next post.
Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He was born and raised in the Arabian Gulf. He holds an M.Sc. in Management from HEC Montreal and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research, published in several journals, examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions. He also facilitates Design Thinking workshops to foster innovation and problem-solving in organizations.