Joana Santos, 32 years old, swears that she will never forget, “even if she lives 100,000 years”, the first phrase she heard when she was hired for her first job. “The Human Resources person told me: ‘Joana got the job because she has the mindset what we are looking for, the skills right for the place and we are sure that with your inputs will help us achieve our goals’.”
Although she already had a good command of English, especially because it had been a language that had accompanied her in her university studies in economics, Joana was shocked by so much Englishism. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m the daughter of a Portuguese teacher or if it was because I found it completely unnecessary to use clichés in English in this way that seem to have taken away even more meaning from that phrase, to the point where I momentarily forgot the happiness it was to achieve the my first job”, he reminds me at the pastry table.
(Since we’re into English, fun fact about my meeting with Joana: it was scheduled for five in the afternoon and she drank black tea.)
Business language has always had its own “crutches” and rules and it certainly shares this specificity with “football”, “legalese” or “politician”. But it is distinguished from other areas of cultural, social or political life by the predominance of English, which has taken business life by storm, pushing the Portuguese language into a corner of uselessness.
Before you call me a reactionary and conservative, I warn you: this newsletter is not a manifesto against budgets (budgets), the meetings (meetings), the calls (calls), the assessments (reviews). This startup only serves as hall input for the call corporate bullshit (See what I just did?).
In Portuguese, I propose we dive into the conversation about business bullshit, which is how we would translate the corporate bullshit. It is not a minor issue. Deciphering language is perceiving the world. “Those who want don’t have the say, those who can have the say”, is a phrase that often echoes in my ears, since the long-ago Semiotics classes taught by Moisés Martins in the Communication Sciences course at the University of Minho.
If it were a pure theme goat’s woolthere would be no books as Corporate Bullsh*t – Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in Americapublished precisely one year ago. It collects 150 years of quotes from social policy and the economic world of the USA to show how control of the collective inevitably involves mastering the language, how one speaks, what one says.
But corporate bullshit It is not about replacing Portuguese words with English ones – this practice is, at best, a symptom of a fall into corporate bullshit, which is closer to dangerous propaganda, lies.
In an academic article recently released in August, Shane Littrell, from the University of Toronto, Canada, defines this “semantically empty rhetoric, which appropriates abstruse business world buzzwords and jargon in such a way that it ends up misrepresent or hide some aspects of organizational reality”.
“Although sometimes it seems harmless, this conversation can negatively affect both the organization and the workers’ income, firstly by obstructing effective communication, increasing worker absenteeism, tarnishing the company’s reputation and even exposing it to legal and financial risks .
Littrell is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. THE working paper (sorry) which was released in the middle of summer and still needs peer review (do you prefer peer review?) It begins with a quote that is attributed to George Bernard Shaw – but there is no conclusive proof that it is his.
The phrase is this: “The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.”
It’s a graceful detail. The widespread belief that it is a Shaw phrase is “probably bullshit, like many other things you find on the Internet”, points out Littrell in the first footnote he wrote for this analytical and reflective work, and which he directed to a subject that, according to him, has become “a topic of rigorous scientific questioning”, especially in the fields of social and behavioral science research.
Different studies carried out over the last 20 years have focused on two key points: the tendency to produce trash talk (defined conceptually as the frequency of bullshit) ; and the tendency to fall into this conversation (receptivity to bullshit).
Summarizing this theoretical body, bullshit is all obscure and impossible-to-clarify discourse, represented by dubious information whose intention is to distort in order to impress, persuade or engage.
It turns out that the work environment is “fertile ground for situations that encourage and facilitate trash talk.” And that is why we cannot ignore the widespread adoption of English expressions and words in companies, as if this language were the lingua franca and the only way to make ourselves understood. Why? Because “bullshit mimics, as closely as possible, authentic business discourse”, to hide its lack of authenticity.
The nearly 50 pages of Littrell’s work are available online (yes, in English, here in pdf format). And without intending to go deeper, I highlight what is relevant for managers, bosses, workers in general: the greater the receptivity to bullshit, the less analytical thinking within an organization. In this sense, the tendency to engage in or indulge in bullshit is negatively correlated with individual and collective performance: the more bullshit, the worse the result, because the attempt to persuade overrides the need to reason.
In a work full of examples, but which has limitations recognized by the author himself (one of them, the “centrism” of Western culture), Littrell concludes: “(…) it is clear that the effects of corporate bullshit on the success of employees and organizations can vary from something benign to ruinous from an operational, reputational and economic point of view.”
The scientist creates a “bullshit receptivity scale” and ends with the suggestion that this work could be used in recruitment processes. Therefore, for those who are going to a job interview soon, this translates into the following scenario, or rather, the following warning: do not show great receptivity to corporate bullshit and platitudes, if the position you are applying for requires thinking critical and analytical skills. If the recruiter is aware of recent studies in these areas, it is unlikely that they will be enthusiastic about the many texts on your LinkedIn filled with buzzwords. Unless the company and the place you have in mind prefers employees who are receptive to trash talk. And in this case the problem doesn’t disappear – quite the opposite: ask yourself if you really want to work in an environment like that.
As for Joana Santos, she spent seven months in her first job. “I quickly got fed up with that work environment where everything seemed fake, not just the way people spoke in meetings,” he tells me. Today he works at a private school that sends any child who speaks with a Brazilian accent to speech therapy sessions because they are heavily exposed to videos in Brazilian Portuguese on YouTube (but this may be the subject of other newsletters).
Extra work
IMF criticizes IRS Jovem and defends different cuts in IRC
On the eve of the Government delivering its counter-proposal to the PS for negotiating the 2025 State Budget, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) entered the debatewith a repetition of criticism of the IRS Jovem, an appeal not to reduce the IRS any further and a suggestion to reduce corporate taxation that is different from that intended by the Government.
Seven questions (and answers) to understand what changes in the IRS by the end of the year
If you are a dependent worker in Portugal, you have certainly noticed that you benefited from a significant increase in your salary for the month of September. The same will happen in October, as salaries for these two months will be paid based on the new IRS withholding tables. Then, in November and December, withholding taxes change again. The two sets of new tables, approved by the Government to alleviate the monthly tax collection on salaries and pensions in the last months of the year, were published on the Finance Portal at the end of August. But let’s go in parts… and continue reading here.
