Zusatztext Provocative . . . highly readable . . . refreshing . . . [and] practical. . . . An exhilarating complaint against work. The Los Angeles Times [Maier] has become a countercultural heroine almost overnight by encouraging . . . workers to adopt her strategy of 'active disengagement.' The New York Times A graceful attack on the corporate world [and] a trenchant dissection of 'corporate culture' [with] practical suggestions for subverting the workplace. The Village Voice Informationen zum Autor Corinne Maier Klappentext Your company wants you to be loyal. You should feel lucky-after all, your job is a privilege (think of all those who would like to have it). And you know (despite what you've read about Enron and WorldCom) that management has your best interests at heart. Your goal is to devote yourself to the pursuit of corporate profit, make your company number one, and reap the benefits of its success.Or is there something else you want to do with your life? Bonjour Laziness dares to ask whether you really have a stake in the corporate sweepstakes, whether professional mobility is anything but an opiate. It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the implacable law of usefulness. In short, this book explains why it is in your best interest to work as little as possible. Leseprobe Business Speaks an Incomprehensible No-Man's-Language The most striking thing about the business world is its jargon. It does not have a monopoly on this, since we live in a world of claptrap. Universities, the media, and psychoanalysts are masters of the genre. Still, business jargon is particularly deadly, enough to utterly discourage the workplace hero, the Stakhanovite, lying dormant in you. (Never mind if you don't know the meaning of "Stakhanovite." Read blithely on, for hero workers didn't make the cut in the casting of this book. In fact, they are very rare in the business world. There used to be some in the Soviet Union, but it's anyone's guess what became of them.) Hello, Gibberish_ When I first started working, I didn't understand a word my colleagues were saying, and it took me a moment to realize that this was normal. A superb example of this ridiculous language is found in French novelist Michel Houellebecq's book Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatever), a work that influenced a whole generation (my own): Before I joined this firm, I was given a voluminous tome entitled Development Plan for the Ministry of Agriculture's Data-Processing System. . . . It was intended, according to the introduction, to be an "attempt to predefine various archetypal situations, developed in the context of a targeted objective." . . . I quickly flipped through the book, underlining the funniest sentences in pencil. For example, "The strategic level consists of the creation of a system of global information promulgated through the integration of diversified, heterogenous subsystems." Such is the nature of gibberish. It is the ground zero of language, where the words no longer mean anything at all. This is because the business world has a dream: that human language, far from being the window or mirror that certain bright intellectuals believe it to be, can be reduced to a mere "tool," a new code that is the essence of pure information, so long as one masters the key. This fantasy of a transparent, rational, simple-to-acquire language translates into a true no-man's-language. Pretending to be dispassionate and unprejudiced, and purged of all imagination, this language envelops all statement in a cloud of scientific detachment. Words no longer serve to convey meaning and actually obscure the links between events by covering up the causes that produce them. This deliberately abstruse and incomprehensible no-man's-language ends up resembling an im...

Autorentext

Corinne Maier

Klappentext

Your company wants you to be loyal. You should feel lucky-after all, your job is a privilege (think of all those who would like to have it). And you know (despite what you've read about Enron and WorldCom) that management has your best interests at heart. Your goal is to devote yourself to the pursuit of corporate profit, make your company number one, and reap the benefits of its success.Or is there something else you want to do with your life?Bonjour Laziness dares to ask whether you really have a stake in the corporate sweepstakes, whether professional mobility is anything but an opiate. It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the implacable law of usefulness. In short, this book explains why it is in your best interest to work as little as possible.

Zusammenfassung
*INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “provocative ... highly readable ... refreshing ... [and] practical" book (*The Los Angeles Times) that explains why it is in your best interest to work as little as possible.

Your company wants you to be loyal. You should feel lucky—after all, your job is a privilege (think of all those who would like to have it). And you know (despite what you’ve read about Enron and WorldCom) that management has your best interests at heart. Your goal is to devote yourself to the pursuit of corporate profit, make your company number one, and reap the benefits of its success.

Or is there something else you want to do with your life?

Bonjour Laziness dares to ask whether you really have a stake in the corporate sweepstakes, whether professional mobility is anything but an opiate. It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the implacable law of usefulness.

Leseprobe
Business Speaks an Incomprehensible No-Man's-Language

The most striking thing about the business world is its jargon. It does not have a monopoly on this, since we live in a world of claptrap. Universities, the media, and psychoanalysts are masters of the genre. Still, business jargon is particularly deadly, enough to utterly discourage the workplace hero, the Stakhanovite, lying dormant in you. (Never mind if you don't know the meaning of "Stakhanovite." Read blithely on, for hero workers didn't make the cut in the casting of this book. In fact, they are very rare in the business world. There used to be some in the Soviet Union, but it's anyone's guess what became of them.)

Hello, Gibberish_

When I first started working, I didn't understand a word my colleagues were saying, and it took me a moment to realize that this was normal. A superb example of this ridiculous language is found in French novelist Michel Houellebecq's book Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatever), a work that influenced a whole generation (my own):

Before I joined this firm, I was given a voluminous tome entitled Development Plan for the Ministry of Agriculture's Data-Processing System. . . . It was intended, according to the introduction, to be an "attempt to predefine various archetypal situations, developed in the context of a targeted objective." . . . I quickly flipped through the book, underlining the funniest sentences in pencil. For example, "The strategic level consists of the creation of a system of global information promulgated through the integration of diversified, heterogenous subsystems."

Such is the nature of gibberish. It is the ground zero of language, where the words no longer mean anything at all.

This is because the business world has a dream: that human language, far from being the window or mirror that certain bright intellectuals believe it to be, can be reduced to a mere "tool," a new code that is the essence of pure information, so long as one masters the key. This fantasy of a transparent, rational, simple-to-acquire language translates into a true no-man's-language. Pretending to be dispassionate and unprejudiced, and purged of all imagination, this language envelops all statement in a cloud of scien…