The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh

by Norman Solomon, Tom Tomorrow (Annotations)

Argues that the Dilbert comic strip actually promotes negative images of employees and reinforces the positions of management

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

101 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, antiwar activist, and former candidate in 2012 for the United States House of Representatives.

Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).

In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and served as its executive director until 2010.

Solomon's weekly column, "Media Beat", was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Norman Solomon's The Trouble With Dilbert is an extended essay critiquing Scott Adams' popular comic strip. It's easy to forget, now that Dilbert is as anodyne and toothless as Garfield, that in its mid-'90s heyday the strip was considered a cutting-edge, even subversive attack on capitalism, with Adams hailed as a brilliant satirist with his finger on the pulse of corporate America. Solomon, a media watchdog and cultural critic, demonstrates here (in a book written in 1997) that Dilbert is actually a "cynical placebo" against workplace woes. Rather than offering substantive criticism of corporations or mistreatment of employees, Adams takes easy shots at annoying coworkers and clueless middle management, positing apathy as the appropriate response to exploitation. Although Solomon's arguments feel a bit strained in spots (does Adams noting that corporations downsize to save money really make him "in favor of downsizing"?), he's generally convincing when showing how easily Dilbert was coopted by corporations, viewing it as a sort of "controlled opposition" that allowed workers to vent without seriously endangering workplace harmony. And that Adams' failure to address substantive corporate issues, from racism and sexism in the workplace (except when dismissing it through the violent Alice and whiny "Tina the Brittle Tech Writer") to unfair wages and a lack of union rights, undercuts its pretensions to satire. Adams was apparently quite offended by Solomon's criticism, accusing him in a later book of being a communist with "squirrels living in his skull" - clearly, just another "inDUHvidual" too stupid to appreciate Adams' MENSA-level genius. Certainly, Solomon's polemic did little to dent Dilbert's popularity; but in light of Adams' spectacular public implosion, its criticisms certainly seem prescient.

[Dana B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a rare critical analysis of a comic. I thought the author made an excellent point and I will never look at Dilbert again without feeling vaguely used and manipulated. However, the way that Solomon builds his arguement seems a bit repetitive to me, and I feel I would have been just as convinced by a 30 page article on the same topic, and that 100 pages was a bit of a stretch.

[Abbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reasoned argument of how Dilbert represents the many factors causing people to be complacent with their employers' terms instead of getting all IWW and asking for more.

[Fishsanwitt]

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