I've begun to consider that - in analyzing the affects of the contemporary corporate model and discussing the model overall, perhaps to develop a sort of macrosystematic point of view about business, in broad - that we should include the actions and community effects of layoffs, in structuring that view.
As much as any contemporary environmental policy has included views of desultory effects - and if ever, positive effects - of industry on the natural environment, I think we must also address the effects of layoffs and of corporate work structure overall, in analyzing the effects of the corporate model on social environments.
After the jump, just a little bit of illustration about how I may personally relate to that.
(What follows, I hope, could serve as an explanation for my lack of literary citations, here.)
That thought occurred to me, upon reading this article, yesterday. I didn't watch the video - it seems too painful to me, honestly. It seems that I've yet to develop enough of an objective view about the corporate model, enough that I could even accept it as a "widget" in the business world, without feeling bad about its negative effects - which one may be able to at least intuit, to some extent - on the social environment.
I've not had a lot of exposure, personally, to the corporate model. My family is a blue collar family, almost entirely - mechanics, truck drivers, carpenters, warehouse laborers - with one manager in the family. In my family, I'm kind of the black sheep, I suppose, but I think that's rather beside the point. Personally, I'm still working on developing a plan for how to combine creativity, technical aptitude, and a deep respect for academia, then into a successful, positive, constructive mix, namely in the contexts of computer systems, business, society, and things. "Working on it."
I consider that I no less understand the corporate model, in some terms, objectively - mainly, as it being a sort of bureaucratic model, enacted in the corporate economic context as a matter of business practice.
Speaking of that metasystematic view that I mean to propose, academically: I understand, as well, that the corporate model is not the only known, functioning model of business management. I would say that I understand that, presently, as a matter of long-term exposure to news about corporate events, and as a result of having studied some qualities of corporate business structure, in and after attending a small business management course, in college, a number of years ago. In following on that: C corps, S corps, and LLCs, those are corporate models of some kind, in the US economy. In business, there's also the model of the sole proprietorship, the partnership, and the limited liability partnership. (At some level, a lot of it seems to boil down to some matters of state and federal tax codes and other regulations contingent on business - the kind of stuff lawyers are payed to handle for laypeople, one could say.)
Those are all some formal business models, in the context of tax codes and other regulations - in all the bureaucracy of formal, modern business. Certainly, then, the relevance of business is broader than for how businesses must adhere to regulations. In a sort of multi-layered view of business, there's also the operative layer - in which a business makes products and/or services - and the cash flow layer (in which a business is payed for products and/or services, and pays its staff and suppliers, and pays taxes and so on) and the seldom addressed social interactions layer, in which a business defines a community (of some kind).
As well, there's also the carbon footprint layer. That one's got some more attention, recently - these decades after the first Earth Day, these days when changes in the climate - in terms of weather and its effects - could seem to have taken up some political connotations, in how any concerns about climate change could be leveraged for industrial change. I would rather leave that discussion to the qualified scientists. My concern is for the social ramifications of corporate activity.
I think that we can take care to recognize that a business is a social entity - and not necessarily a perfect one, at that, but certainly a common kind of one, as an actor in the social environment. Broader than the social environment defined by any one business, then, and even broader than a business' interactions with the outlying community, there is the very shape of business, in the social sense - the workday as we may define it, conventionally, and in this context I mean to refer to the workday for any given role in the prototypical corporate hierarchy - and how we must structure our lives around the workday (or within the workday, if one would be however personally involved, at work).
In the metasystematic view suggested in the previous, there are more models for business' social, economic, and pragmatic organization, more that would be defined by any one business. I think that that, in turn, could be something that an entrepreneur could take to mind, in structuring a functional business organization. Business models may evolve, too.
Thank you for your attention to my rambling discourse, here. I promise to be more discrete, when it comes to writing for anything formally academic. Good day, then, and cheers.