O "accountability sink"

 

"The relationship between experts, decision makers and the general public had become completely dysfunctional. This wasn't really a crisis of managerialism or a crisis of political legitimacyit was a crisis of accountability. 

...

Consider, for example, the following situation. A characteristically modern form of social interaction, familiar from the rail and air travel industries, has become ubiquitous with the development of the call centre. Someone - an airline gate attendant, for example - tells you some bad news; perhaps you've been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you're brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can't do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you're told that's not company policy.

The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It's often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can't really blame the person you're talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage, and they may give some lacerating feedback online. Meanwhile, the managers who made the decision to prioritise Gold Elite members are able to maximise shareholder value without any distractions from the consequences of their actions.

They have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion."

 Trechos retirados de "The Unaccountability Machine" de Dan Davies.