Not so long ago, there was an office in most large company buildings with the word Personnel on the door; some had instead the name Employee Relations. Today those doors are rare; they’ve been removed and replaced by another, one which usually reads Human Resources.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, The Bard tells us; and yet something smells rotten in this name change. My father comments on it often. What does this change reflect? Why was it made? Personnel ultimately means the people who do this, that is, it is the office which works with the people who make up the company. Employee Relations is a bit different, perhaps: it says that this company has a relationship with the people who work for it, and is dedicated to meeting their needs. But what does Human Resources actually imply? It says that this office is dedicated to managing those corporate assets which happen to be people. In the change of the name is reflected a change in the attitude. We have gone from companies made of the people who work in them and companies actively maintaining a relationship with those people, to companies attempting to best utilize certain assets labeled employees, as they similarly utilize capital and machinery and land. Personnel was personal; Employee Relations related to employees. Human Resources is about what the company can get from and do with assets.
Lest you think this example is unfair, that I’ve insinuated some sort of nefarious conspiratorial secret from what is only a trendy change in terminology, let me note that this is not the only term that has changed in this direction. Hospitals used to employ someone called a Head Nurse, who was responsible for overseeing the nursing care in a particular department of the hospital (still in most places called a floor, even if there is more than one department so designated on the same physical floor of the hospital, such as having the obstetrics floor and the pediatrics floor adjacent to each other). Today there are few with that title; they have been replaced by a Nurse Manager. A Head Nurse was the leader among peers; she was a nurse, like the others, from whom they took their guidance. In that sense, she (usually she, although men often have had the job) was like a team captain or a quarterback, calling the shots but part of the team, working together with the others to see that everything was done. But a Nurse Manager is something entirely different. This is a manager, a person who may have a degree in nursing, but is not really there to care for patients. She (again, it may be he) is there to organize nurses, to see to it that they do their jobs. The idea of the Head Nurse represents nurses working together for the company; a Nurse Manager represents the company controlling the nurses.
I’m sure if you examine your own industry, you will find name changes which, on consideration, have changed more than the name. The implication of the title is itself a new job description, and one which moves the employees away from being people and toward being assets.
But I’ll say this in favor of the new terminology: it is honest. Better that they should use labels that imply what they actually intend than that they should keep labels which have other implications and change the jobs.
It seems to me that there are two opposite ways to use this in your game worlds, and I would recommend both, in different contexts.
If in designing your worlds, you can create these subtleties, these labels for things that reflect not merely a function but an attitude, do it. Establish a Population Management Office to license marriages and issue birth and death certificates, or a Criminal Elimination Bureau charged with what is in essence martial law.
On the other hand, it can be more interesting to create labels which obscure the function of the department. This works particularly well for government bureaucracies. Internal Revenue (or Inland Revenue, I believe, is the British version) is an example of just this sort of thing, rendered useless by time. Originally it had the flavor of the office that controls how the government earns its money, but now everyone knows that the government doesn’t earn money at all, but just takes what it wants from its citizens. To recover this false feeling, call it the Ministry of National Income, the Citizen Gifts Collecting Agency, the Income Redistribution Office. Make it sound palatable when it isn’t.
C. S. Lewis played up this idea significantly in That Hideous Strength. The evil organization scheming to take control of the world had the name National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, generally rendered N.I.C.E. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. Re-education of the maladjusted meant experimenting on criminals; free education in an experimental school meant experimenting on children.
It was once called propaganda. Today they call it spin; the people who do it are called spin doctors. It is the art of phrasing something in a way that makes it sound good when stated strictly as facts it would sound bad. Hide genocide under population management, persecution of dissidents as mental health care, military aggression with home safety. Use acceptable names for unacceptable actions, positive words for negative outcomes, favorable labels for unfavorable conditions. Let the players work out that the words conceal the reality.
The examples here are often extreme. The subtlety of a phrase like Human Resources is difficult to manage and equally difficult to penetrate. But the idea is worth pursuing.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
