Work

The age of industry began in shipping and trade. Under the OED’s fourth definition, the earliest examples of agency refer to activities in distant places. The dictionary cites Jonathan Swift (1745), whose character would rather not be “at the charge of exchange and agencies,” and a document from 1800 referring to “foreign houses of agency.” The next definition, “An establishment for the purpose of doing business for another, usually at a distance,” cites examples starting with Reuters Agency in 1861. The first agency of government comes two decades later.

Business in the industrial world is complicated. Nobody can do everything, and that’s one reason markets work. Opportunity appears where something can be done that others are not doing or are not doing well enough. Many of those opportunities are representational in the sense that agency, in the form of work, is handed off. We hire agents to work as extensions of ourselves.

Democracies too are representational arrangements. Democratic governments are agencies of their people. That these agencies should also have agencies makes sense.

But agency is personal in the first place. Having agency makes us effective in the world, which includes the marketplace. This raises some interesting questions. What does it mean for a customer to have full agency in the marketplace? Is it just to show up with sufficient cash and credit? Is it enough to be known as a good customer only within the scope of a company’s CRM system? That’s the current default assumption, and it’s woefully limiting.

Take, for example, my agency as a customer in the airline business. Most years, I fly more than a hundred thousand miles. I bring to the market a portfolio of knowledge, expertise, and intent (that is, agency) that should be valuable to me and valuable to the companies I might deal with. I know a lot about the science and history of aviation; about many airlines old and new; about many airports and their cities; and about geography, geology, weather, astronomy, and other relevant sciences. I’m a photographer whose work is known within some aviation circles and to a small degree adds value to flying in general. I am also a fairly easy passenger to please. I require no assistance, have no dietary restrictions, show up early, and don’t trouble airline personnel with rookie questions. I prefer certain seats but don’t freak out if I don’t get them, and I’m often one of the first to trade seats if it helps a couple or a family sit together on a plane. I am also willing to pay for certain privileges. Yet, only the first item—miles flown—is of serious interest to the airline I usually fly, which is United. That I’m a million-mile flyer with United is unknown and uninteresting to all but that one airline.

Thus, I have a measure of agency only within United’s system and somewhat less than that with other members of the Star Alliance, to which United belongs. My self-actualization as a passenger is not my own, but that of a “1K” (100,000 miles per year) or whatever it says on my United Mileage Plus membership card in a given year. I am a high-value calf in their well-tended corral. It’s nice that my one-company status gets me some privileges with other airlines in the Star Alliance. But, since the IT systems of Star Alliance member airlines are not entirely communicative, those privileges are spotty. Asking any Star Alliance airline to be a cow for the calves of other airlines makes each of them groan.

The other airlines don’t know what they’re missing because they can’t know what they’re missing. All their heuristics are confined to their own CRM systems, plus whatever speculative “personalized” jive they buy from data mills. None of that milled data comes directly from you or me. If Delta buys data about me from, say, Acxiom, my agency is nowhere to be found. All of the agency is Acxiom’s, and it is not even acting as an agency for me in the representational sense of the word. I’ve offloaded no work on it at all, but it is doing work on my behalf, sort of.³

We can only do better if agency is ours and not theirs.

Self-Actualization

To consider what self-actualization means in the marketplace, it helps to examine the business sections of bookstores and libraries. They are full of books about self-actualization for companies and their employees, but there are few if any books for customers. There is nothing, yet, about what it means for you and me to be self-actualized as customers. If there were, what would it say?

In A Theory of Human Motivation, psychologist Abraham Maslow placed “the need for self-actualization” at the top of the list of human motivations—above survival, safety, love, and esteem.⁴ Specifically,

Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.

This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.⁵

Let’s forget for now that Maslow wrote this in 1943, that he later revised it, and that others take issue with it. Let’s just recognize that Maslow helps us understand a few things about what human beings wish to be.

Being customers is part-time work for most of us (even for shopping addicts). Yet, we bring more to market than fits into the scope of any seller’s current systems, which accept only a small range of signals from customers. How much more can customers bring, and vendors embrace, if the range of signals and actions on the customer side are freed up? We don’t yet know, but we’re starting to find out.

In Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, author Clay Shirky examines the effects of social networking tools, a disruptive fact of marketplace life for which the business world reached maximum thrall in 2011. (And with good reason: Facebook alone boasted 750 million users.) “None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead…most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared—relative, that is to the direct effort of the people they represent.”⁶

While Clay’s focus is on the social, the personal remains more than implicit. Each of us has far more agency in the networked market than we could possibly enjoy in the industrialized marketplace. Since the two are becoming one, our agency will become valuable to industry.