Hierarchical violence in workplaces: How extractive management mimics predator-prey dynamics, eroding collective resilience
Original framing: “Predators and prey: What studying animals teaches us about toxic work environments” — The Conversation - Global
The predator-prey workplace metaphor is a direct descendant of 19th-century social Darwinism, which justified colonial labor exploitation by framing it as 'natural selection.' Taylorist management (early 1900s) and Fordist assembly lines later institutionalized this logic, turning workers into cogs in a machine where fear was a management tool. The gig economy’s algorithmic management merely digitizes these hierarchies, replacing foremen with apps that gamify precarity. This lineage shows how 'toxic workplaces' are not anomalies but engineered features of extractive capitalism.
The 'predator-prey' workplace metaphor is not an innocent analogy but a colonial inheritance, repackaged in the language of 'disruption' to justify extractive capitalism.
Its persistence reveals how management science—rooted in 19th-century social Darwinism—has weaponized fear to maximize productivity, while erasing alternatives like Indigenous reciprocity or Scandinavian co-ops. The trickster’s laughter exposes the absurdity of this framing: if workplaces were truly ecosystems, they would resemble coral reefs (interdependent, resilient) rather than barren savannas where only the fittest survive. Yet the real predators are not managers but the systems (neoliberalism, surveillance capitalism) that reward predation. The path forward requires dismantling these hierarchies—not studying them as if they were natural laws—through democratic governance, algorithmic justice, and cross-cultural knowledge exchange. The future of work lies not in mimicking animal behavior but in reclaiming labor as a collective act of creation.