Premise
It’s been almost two years since COVID19 pandemic containment and quarantine protocols began in the United States. Since the protocols such as masking and travel restrictions began, I’ve had the luxury of traveling and living between two areas of the country that have had completely different attitudes levels of strictness from the very beginning. The first is a suburb of a large metropolitan area on the east coast (Metroburb), and the second is a medium sized town approximately 60 miles away from the metropolitan suburb (Medtown). As I’ve been about my business in both of these two areas without a mask for a very long time, only in Metroburb have I been actively harassed for not having a mask. To recount my experiences in Metroburb over the past 6 months:
2 x kicked out of a store for not having a mask
2 x followed by employees urging me to put a mask on
2 x cashiers refusing to accept my payments without a mask
1 x employees debate me on mask wearing
1 x people taking pictures of me without a mask to upload online
Many x dirty looks for not having a mask on
In Medtown, nothing has happened to me over the past 6 months for going about without a mask. As of last week, Metroburb has taken away it’s mask mandate, however, that hasn’t stopped the dirty looks or operations of enforcement for a rule that no longer exists. It’s strange to observe such social enforcement in one area, but not the other. Although I recognize that there can be a plethora of reasons why these two areas have varied so much in their approach to the enforcement of containment measures. I want to highlight a reason that many probably haven’t considered regarding this topic.
A Hidden Reason for Differential Enforcement of Mandates
As I was working at my desk at my day job (biomedical research), I was watching our nurse manager power walk back and forth down the hallway informing the other nurses on our team about a new training or something that had to be done soon. An hour later, I saw her repeat the same pattern informing the nurses on a policy change that came down from the higher-ups. Once I thought about it, I realized that the majority of her job is simply to relay information to the other staff members, something that could be done via emails, but it left her with a managerial role over others. My company that’s separate from the nursing organization that we work with, we have a supervisor for every 3-5 employees in the company who is also responsible for relaying information from higher-ups to us in addition to their regular duties as scientists for the company. In a 3rd example, I was speaking to a friend of mine about how many positions at his financial company there were despite his organization being very small at just 12 employees. He mentioned that the ladder in his company went from Analyst, Senior Analyst, Associate, Vice President, Director, Managing Director, and Executives.
When I heard about this bloated ladder for such as small company, it struck me as odd that there would be so many middle management positions in such a small company, but nonetheless for this company almost half of the personnel are middle-managers. According to Glassdoor, middle management is a position that lies in-between entry-levels and executive-level employees and are responsible for being a liaison for informing entry level staff about the company’s objective and working towards them [1]. In other words, middle managers are responsible for A) taking orders from the executive-level employees and B) giving orders to entry-level employees. In many cases, from my experience, middle managers have almost no input into the orders that they receive, but are expected to carry them out without issue. How this carries into mandates is a rather interesting link in my opinion. It has to do with the lack of distinction between life and work for people who would consider themselves “professionals.” For example, it has been long noted that people who engage in professional level careers have trouble separating between their personal and professional life[2][3]. Furthermore, the increased onset of working from home greatly diminished the work-life dichotomy by removing separate physical spaces between work and life [4]. So, this concludes the first piece of this puzzle, we have a population of people who are responsible for receiving orders without input and giving orders to others without pushback. Additionally, they have a problem separating work from their home lives. So, when orders came from governments about mask mandates and other quarantine measures, these people resorted to the receiving the orders, and giving the orders as they would in their work environments.
But does this really have such an influence over how people come to enforce mandates from officials en masse? Going back to my previous example about the 12-person financial firm, 5 of those employees are mid-level managers, but this company is located in a rural area in the mountains. This means I doubt that these 5 people can exert significant influence in enforcing social mandates. However, what if we lived in a metropolitan area such as Metroburb where there are a high number of professional organizations such as consulting firms, legal firms, hospitals, and other large business service firms? Then we can assume that the number of middle managers in your area would be much higher, especially once we consider just how many employees in a company would be considered middle managers. For example, let’s examine an example organization chart that I found online below:
At first glance, it may or may not be exactly clear where the middle managers are at, so I’ve highlighted them below with a red square. We can see that a large portion of the company is actually occupied by middle manager positions.
When applicable to another large city, such as New York City, we know that there are at least 100 consulting companies in the city that likely have a similar organizational structure [5]. In terms of legal firms, there are at least another 100 legal firms with offices in New York, and there are 62 hospitals in the same city [6][7]. This leaves thousands of middle managers in a small area left to enforce a mandate that may or may not be reasonable due their inability separate life and work.
This would also help explain why a less developed area like Medtown would not be affected to the same degree as they would have a much lower concentration of these types of companies and types of people circulating in the area engaging in unnecessary enforcement behavior.
What I can’t completely explain is how these middle managers influence the culture of an area at large as many of my hostile experiences were caused by entry level employees at service organizations like stores. My best guess is that many of the service workers have had poor experiences with middle managers as customers who may attempt to enforce the company policies of the service organization back to the employee despite not even working there. In turn, they may be more precautious about external mandates under the expectation that if not them, then a middle manager customer would intervene to enforce a rule causing embarrassment to the worker.
References
[1] What to Expect in a Middle Management Position - Glassdoor Career Guides [Internet]. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/guide/middle-management/.
[2] Hall J. How To Balance Your Personal And Professional Lives [Internet]. Forbes. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2019/07/14/how-to-balance-your-personal-and-professional-lives/.
[3] MTP: The Balancing Act Between Personal and Professional Life | Acclerate: Resources for Research [Internet]. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://accelerate.ucsf.edu/training/mdp-seminar4-worklife.
[4] Tips to regain your work-life balance [Internet]. Mayo Clinic. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/work-life-balance/art-20048134.
[5] Top 100 Business Consulting Companies in New York City | November 2021 [Internet]. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://themanifest.com/business-consulting/firms/new-york.
[6] NYLJ 100: Large New York Law Firms Tightly Controlled Head Count Growth [Internet]. New York Law Journal. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2021/07/12/large-new-york-law-firms-tightly-controlled-head-count-growth/.
[7] 62 acute care hospitals in New York City [Internet]. [cited 2021 Nov 11]. Available from: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/lists/62-acute-care-hospitals-in-new-york-city.html.