We hear this term “passive-aggressive” used a lot in conversation, but I rarely hear or see it used correctly except in the literature I receive from those organizations that assume that because I was once chair of my department I am an administrator—and of course in the organizational/industrial psychology literature. I receive tutorials every other day, informed by psychology, on how to deal with the “passive-aggressive employee.” I think you will find the actual meaning of the term interesting—and, I hope, maddening.
The concept emerges from the concept of “soldiering,” which has its origins in the work of early industrial psychologists, particularly Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered the father of scientific management (“Taylorism”). Taylor conducted studies on worker productivity and efficiency in factories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Taylor observed that some workers deliberately slow down their work pace or withhold effort to avoid being given more tasks and as a protest against what they perceived as unreasonable demands from management. They even encourage other workers to do the same, shaming those who work at a fast pace as “rate busters.” Taylor came up with the term “soldiering” to refer to this phenomenon, likening it to soldiers who would appear to be working diligently but who were actually avoiding exerting themselves fully.
Taylor’s observations were later redescribed and expanded by psychologists and psychiatrists in the mid-20th century using the concept of passive-aggressive behavior, which involves expressing negative feelings indirectly through actions such as intentional inefficiency, procrastination, quarrelsomeness, resentment, and stubbornness.
It was inevitable that psychiatrists and psychologists would explore how passive-aggressive behavior manifest in various contexts beyond the workplace to include everyday interactions and relationships. Thus, while Taylor’s original concept focused primarily on productivity in industrial settings, the shrinks expanded the notion to explain the motives of individuals who resist authority or express dissatisfaction in less overt ways.
Passive-aggressive continues not merely in its afterlife as a popular term. The notion of passive-aggressive behavior is still used by organizational psychologists to describe and explain interpersonal dynamics. The shrinks will tell you that it highlights the complexities of human behavior and the various ways individuals may respond to perceived pressures or conflicts in their social environments.
What you need to consider, then, is how psychologists in the service of the capitalist and managerial classes have effectively medicalized class conflict as a depoliticizing maneuver, delegitimizing the reason workers resist exploitation and oppressive control by psychologizing their motive, i.e., by dissimulating the social antagonisms that lie at the heart of the capitalist mode of production.
There is a disturbing parallel here in the work of nineteenth century physician Samuel Cartwright who identified a disorder he termed “dysaesthesia aethiopica,” previously known as “rascality,” which described a neurological disease that caused laziness and sluggishness among black people. (Cartwright also identified as disease he termed “drapetomania,” which he described as a mental illness characterized by the desire of slaves to escape captivity.)
I want to add that the dissimulation of exploitative and oppressive power—redescribed as authority based on assumed legitimacy or validity—is not just aimed at extracting more value from the labor of blue collar workers. The labor of the professional-managerial class has also been Taylorized and legitimized by depoliticizing the cause of resistance among those ranks.
We see this in the university system with the quantification of academic publishing, not just with numbers of publications, but also in attention to journal rankings and number of citations. Chairs, deans, provosts, and chancellors don’t actually read faculty scholarship. They review the metrics and make determinations on this basis. In this way, through calculability, bureaucratic logic undermines quality of scholarship by fetishizing quantity of publications. They want large numbers of pubs so they can brag about how productive their faculty is. Those who operate with academic freedom in mind become passive-aggressive.
There are many other rationalizations to explore here beyond efficiency regimes (productivity). There’s uniformity, credentialism, and so on, but I think I’ve given you enough to chew on for today.
freedom and reason 