This morning I shared an observation with a friend of mine who teaches women’s studies: business language tends to reduce relationships to the form subject + transitive verb + direct object. A management consultant never refers to something; he references it.

She pointed out to me that this is the inverse of what happens in science writing. Scientists are encouraged to write in the passive voice, in order to minimize the role of subjects and subjectivity in the content. In science the agents recede as far as possible behind the words in order to focus attention on the objective matter at hand.

Despite the obvious divergence, a commonality exists here: a preference for separating as completely as possible the active role of agents and passive roles of the recipients of action. It is possible to see these two linguistic styles as reflecting a shared preference for exaggerated difference in status between agent and object. This allows business and science to snap together into a complementary system. In business (and technology) an agent performs actions on objects. In science objects are acted upon and observed. In scientific modes of understanding, all entities whether human or material are understood objectively, which means as objects receptive to an agent’s actions.

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It is interesting to note that traditional religious symbol systems invariably assign to the masculine the status of the active and temporal, and to the feminine the passive and spatial.

It is also interesting that conservative political movements tend to idealize highly differentiated sexual roles, where progressive political movements idealize androgyny.

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The real struggle now is not between the powerful few and the powerless many. It is between those who affirm hierarchical power orders where the powerful act upon the less powerful (embraced equally by the powerful and the loyal powerless who identify with those who command them) and those who oppose such hierarchies and who instead prefer a complex matrix of power relationships, where roles of agency and receptivity are variable and contextual.