Limits of Servitude

Limits of Servitude

        The trouble with thinking of oneself as providing services-either in the service industries or in the service industrie-is s or in the customer-service sectors of manufacturing and retailing companies-is that one almost inescapably embraces ancient, preindustrial modes of thinking. Worse still, one gets caught up in rigid attitudes that can have a profoundly paralyzing effect on even the most resolute of rationalist.

         The concept of ''service'' evokes, from the opaque recesses of the mind, time-worn images of personal ministration and attendance. It refers generally to deeds one individual performs personally for another. It carries historictal connotations of charity, gallantry, and selflessness, or of obedience, subordination, and subjugation. In these contexts, people serve because they want to (as in the priestly and political professions) or they serve because they are compelled to (as in slavery and such occupations of attendance as waiter, maid, bellboy, cleaning lady).

          In the higher-status service occupations, such as in the church and the army, one customarily behaves ritualllistically, not rationally. In the lowerstatus service occupations, one simply obeys. In neither is independent thinking presumed to be a requisite of holding a job. The most that can therefore be expected from service improvements is that, like Avis, a person will try harder. He will just exert more animal effort to do better what he is already doing.

        So it was in ancient times, and so it is today. The only difference is that where ancient masters invoked the will of God or the whip of the foreman to spur perfomance, modern industry uses training programs in either our methods or our results.