| However, to answer your question: if someone can determine whether you get to keep your job, whether you like it or not you are that person's subordinate. It's interesting how two different perspectives on what is largely the same arrangement can yield such different answers. By organization, if someone can fire you, you are their subordinate. By productivity, the "subordinate" is not necessarily subordinate at all. The working relationship may be much more than of peers, where the pair of them manage to both get things done, and keep people informed of what is going on. It might even be that the subordinate in the traditional sense is anything but in the tangible sense. What sucks is that the traditional organizational arrangement has a very difficult time representing this. It mandates a strict hierarchical arrangement of staff, even if the staff themselves does not view themselves as hierarchical. Because, in this arrangement, one person is usually granted the ability to terminate the employment of the other, there is necessarily an adversarial component to their relationship. Even if they work as peers, one has to report to a chain-of-command about the other. For people and teams who don't need this sort of arrangement, having it imposed absolutely sucks. But, because it so entrenched in corporate tradition, it emerges anyway. I rail against it as well. There are people who don't need it, but those who don't need or want this arrangement get it anyway, regardless of the detriment it causes. I get the sense this happens simply because of the perspective that it must necessarily happen, because people have all these preconceived notions about management and subordination that they have a hard time letting go. I think we'd lose the adversarial perspective if we lost the notions, and that would be a good thing. |