Connect/Eddie Holt: You know Mrs Gallagher? She's the hatchet-faced harridan in a TV ad for a mobile phone service. She's having a manicure when she phones wholesome Jane and demands a response to an e-mail. The pair are cartoon characters, respectively nasty and nice. Hard-working Jane exposes the inefficiency of the prattish harridan who has forgotten to attach the necessary document.
The nasty boss is a staple of television advertising. There was, for instance, an equally nasty and nice male combo in an ad for a 'flu remedy. Mr Nasty was pruning a bonsai tree while peering pretentiously over half-glasses and wondering accusingly how allegedly 'flu-stricken Mr Nice could have worked his way "through Far Eastern futures". Again, nice turned the tables on nasty.
Banks, car manufacturers and a coffee company have also used the combination to flog their wares. Because the nasties - invariably thin-lipped, mean-spirited and thoroughly reptilian - are so obnoxious, sympathy for their would-be victims is assured. The message is that technology, pharmaceuticals and general efficiency are on the side of the nice, hard-working subordinates.
As advertising goes, it's an obvious ploy, of course. There are, after all, more subordinates than bosses even though it's bosses who commission these fatuous and putatively self-deprecating morality dramas. Placing the wares you're trying to flog on the side of the angels, while flattering your potential customers, is cynical, sleazy and disingenuous - but presumably it works.
Still, the fact that nasty bosses proliferate in television advertising is telling. It suggests that these reptilian creatures, forever pulling rank, are considered stereotypical. As with all propaganda, advertising works best when it gets purchase on some notion already in public consciousness. In turn, it inflates - for its own ends - a perhaps half-formed notion into a full-blown stereotype.
Now however, after racism, sexism and ageism, there's a new "ism" which addresses the stereotype of the obnoxious boss. It's called "rankism" - the bullying behaviour of people who think they are superior. The term has been coined by 67-year-old Robert Fuller, a retired American who has spent most of his life in academia and has written a book titled Somebodies and Nobodies.
"I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word," Fuller has said. So he has chosen "rankism" with its connotations of pecking order and stench. Mind you, it's not just nasty business bosses that Fuller indicts. Power-hungry politicians, arrogant professors, condescending lawyers, hectoring teachers, disdainful doctors - all bullies, really - are his target. Fuller wants moral as well as behavioural accountability from people in charge of governments, companies, patients, employees or students. "I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse of rankism in Washington right now. Our policy in the Middle East is rankism," he has said of the US government and its attitudes towards the world's main energy-producing region.
By last week Fuller's book, endorsed by, among others, the feminist Betty Friedan, the commentator Bill Moyers and the author Studs Terkel, had sold 33,000 copies. Its associated website is attracting 3,000 hits a week. In the US, such figures are relatively small but not insignificant. Clearly, bullying is not confined to children and teenagers. It risks becoming an adult epidemic too.
Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, which he sees as natural, necessary and right. But he wishes to see an end to what he believes is the spiralling abuse of position and is not demanding mere politeness. "Democracy and education," he says, "should concentrate on creating virtuous citizens.
This [the implications of rankism] is exactly the kind of discussion we must have." It is. In a world in which great power has become routinely abusive, weaker and even puny power is too often following suit. We've seen it in European democracies - Italy, Spain and Britain, for instance, where political power ignored the voices of the majority of voters - even vast majorities - over attacking Iraq. "Giving leadership," was the excuse for ignoring voters' wishes.
Comparable, albeit smaller scale bullying, occurs daily in workplaces. No doubt some of it is justified, for employees too can slacken unduly and thereby abuse employers. It's not always a case of nasty Mrs Gallagher and nice Jane. But much - probably most - of the increased bullying bespeaks a growing culture not of the exercise of reasonable authority but of rank rankism.
All societies, not least Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Ariel Sharon's Israel, engage in bullying and brutalising. In Ireland, for instance, the decisions to foist mega-dumps on unfortunate rural communities are a form of bullying. Sure, they have to go somewhere but perhaps those who would make the largest profits from such dumps should be required to live closest to them.
Whether or not "rankist" ever becomes as damning as "racist", "sexist" or "ageist", Fuller has identified a growing threat to democracy's egalitarian ideals. His term is really just another word for bullying. But when television ads, albeit disingenuously, are holding the bullies up to ridicule, you know that millions of people have had enough of prats defending bullying as "productivity".