Manager illness

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Under Manager illness or entrepreneur disease means the disease since the early 1950s, cardiovascular system due to permanent physical and psychological overuse and thereby caused vegetative disorders (especially with people in authority). If death occurs as a result of the manager's disease, this was formerly known colloquially as manager death .

Manager illness and manager death , which cannot be statistically proven as illness and excess mortality of professional elites ("managers"), are not medical terms, but media buzzwords that were mainly used in the vocabulary of the 1950s and 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany during the time of the economic miracle are to be assigned.

Definition and Zeitgeist concept

Since the term manager's disease does not represent a uniform clinical picture, but was seen from different aspects - doctors did not agree on which symptoms belong to it and which do not ( Kury 2012, p. 115) - there are several definitions. For example, in 1971 the Brockhaus Encyclopedia defined :

"Manager's disease is a clinical picture that does not form a circumscribed unit, but rather includes various disorders, especially of the circulatory system , which are initially based on a functional and later on an organic basis (e.g. high blood pressure , heart complaints and pain, angina pectoris , heart attack , nervous over-excitability). The term manager's disease was originally set up on the assumption that life expectancy for people in managerial positions is less favorable than for others due to the burden of responsibility and agitation. In addition to occupational overexertion, exogenous damage (e.g. alcohol , nicotine ) is likely to play a role. Recently it has been pointed out that it is primarily the failure in professional work that is decisive for the development of the manager's disease. "

The term, coined by Michael Bauer in 1950, was indicative of the time of the beginning economic miracle and established itself as a media catchphrase in the zeitgeist of the time, first in Germany and Austria, later and under other conditions then also in Switzerland ( Kury 2012, p. 110 ) In parallel with the term manager disease , entrepreneur disease was also used. A connection between manager illness and the economic miracle was recognized very early by some authors. After the 1960s, the mention of manager's disease decreased and the term is rarely used today. Instead, medical literature and the media prefer to use more precise medical terms for diseases, the symptoms of which can be identified in general and across professions - i.e. not only in executives and managers.

A historical-medical summary of the perspectives on manager's disease can be found in Patrick Kury in Der überburden Mensch: A history of knowledge from stress to burnout .

Medical perception, comments, reactions

In 1953 Michael Bauer described the manager's disease as the “best witness” for various “damage to civilization” and blamed it for “overexertion to exhaustion, lack of sleep and real relaxation, excessive demands on performance, little exercise, excessive use of luxury foods of all kinds”. As President of the German Baths Association, his suggestion for treatment was obvious.

Max Hochrein , who from the 1930s onwards generally dealt with “fatigue research” and cardiovascular diseases, defined in 1955: “[as] manager or entrepreneur disease is the early mental breakdown and the premature and unexpected death of people of all social groups Understood layers that have an excessive sense of responsibility, feel committed to a high work ethic, and who get into a state of overtiredness as a result of non-stop work . "( Kury 2012, p. 117)

The doctor and professor Alfred Marchionini reacted to the increasing media spread of the manager's disease by founding the society “Free Weekend” in 1956 in Munich based on the principle of the English weekend with the aim of “cleaning up Saturday and Sunday from to carry out all mass events, congresses and political meetings ”(with the exception of religious and sporting events) and also to“ put an end to the Saturday-Sunday hunt for overtime ”. The "Free Weekend Campaign" was intended to counteract the manager's disease, but even then it was not only intended to benefit managers, but everyone.

Other locations

The retinopathia centralis serosa is sometimes referred to as a manager's disease of the eye .

View: An elite phenomenon

The manager's disease, especially fatal, was perceived as an “elite phenomenon” in medical circles, but medical professionals who took this view usually put it in the room without substantiating it with concrete figures. ( Kury 2012, pp. 118–124) Also a study carried out in 1953 by Otto Graf on behalf of the German Health Museum Cologne on a vague empirical basis with the title The Disease of Those Responsible. Manager's disease came to the same conclusion.

Analysis: Not an elite phenomenon

But there were also critical indications that manager death as a consequence of manager illness should be viewed in a more differentiated manner and then recognized as a "fable". The basis was, for example, the investigation of insurance data from Victoria Insurance in 1954, which led to the conclusion: “The material examined (around 25,000 senior persons with 1,179 deaths in three to five years of observation) did not provide evidence that at present in the Federal Republic of Germany in general and For a longer observation period there is an excess mortality of the leading personalities ... "Even the opposite was found:" There was a far lower mortality among the managers in the economy (commercial and technical managers) than would be expected from the mortality tables of the insurance companies An exception were members of the Bundestag , who “showed a very high excess mortality compared to the table expectation , in all age groups”. “The highest excess mortality even among forty to fifty year olds. The risk to life increased with each year of membership in parliament. "

Among the physicians who contradicted the early analyzes of the “elite phenomenon” and who discovered the “manager's disease” also in “small employees” were the Frankfurt occupational physician Herbert Warning, who examined 4,000 employees of the Frankfurt city tram and who examined this work environment and the people in it Requirements "hotbeds for the development of managerial illness in the little man". In her dissertation published in 1957 at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, Christa Gamnitzer also came to the same conclusion as Warning, using more ideological arguments.

Perception in the media

The death of Gustav Dahrendorf at the age of 53 was perceived in the media as a "manager's death".

Despite the statistical results and medical research results in the first half of the 1950s, the term manager's disease survived for about two decades in the media and aroused admiration and recognition, because its mention emphasized “the willingness to perform and the sense of responsibility of those men who belong to the upper classes in the social hierarchy counted and of which it was assumed that the fate of the young Federal Republic was in their hands. "

If the manager's illness caused by occupational agitation, stress and an unhealthy diet ended fatally, in the 1950s there was talk of manager death , which "mercilessly filled gaps" and through which "this or that business leader was torn out of his creative zeal at a young age".

This type of death was particularly perceived by exposed personalities such as Waldemar von Oppenheim (1894–1952), Gustav Dahrendorf (1901–1954) and Richard Uhlemeyer (1900–1954) and in 1954 these few examples led to the conclusion that “our economy is rampant the manager's death ".

Use in popular culture

Manager illness

In addition to the medical examination of the manager's disease, there were also more or less humorous approaches to the topic.

  • In guides for life, recipes against manager's disease were offered.
  • The Landesfischereiverband Bayern published an article in the Allgemeine Fischerei-Zeitung with the title fishing, a remedy for manager's disease .
  • A book on the working methods of chief secretaries was preceded by an unassigned quote attributed to Ferdinand Sauerbruch : "The best protection against manager's disease is a good secretary."
  • The Peterlesboum Revival Band from Nuremberg dealt musically with the topic on the CD of the same name in 1997 in the 10th song Manag Krankheit .

Manager death

The cliché of the successful manager who suddenly dead collapses in the prime of life were, in the novella The Stoic (dt. The Stoic ) by Theodore Dreiser (1947) and also in the film The schemers (1954) based on the novel Executive Suite of Cameron Hawley (1952) used.

Delegated Use

In later years manager death was occasionally used in a figurative sense: manager death as the professional end of a manager (or an entire management team) combined with the loss of the position or after a necessity no longer exists.

Karōshi

In Japan , Karōshi ( Japanese 過 労 死 , "death from overwork") describes a sudden job-related death , usually a stress- induced heart attack or stroke . Here, too, the rapid economic rise after the Second World War is considered to be the socio-economic background . In contrast to the view of the manager's death in the 1950s and 1960s, Karōshi was and is simply understood as a consequence of overhaul - regardless of the professional hierarchy.

See also

literature

  • Otto Graf: The illness of those responsible. The manager's disease. Publishing house Dt. Health Museum, 1953.
  • Paul René Bizé, Pierre Goguelin: The mischief of overload. Work and life design for busy people. Managers, however, remain without a manager's disease. Translated from the French by Hans Kaltenhäuser, Kaserer and Kurt Salzer. Schuler, Stuttgart 1959, OCLC 611571436 .
  • Richard Lewinsohn: A world history of the heart. Eroticism, symbolism, surgery, physiology, psychology. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1959, Chapter 20: The manager's disease .
  • Patrick Kury : The overwhelmed person: A story of knowledge from stress to burnout. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39739-9 .
  • E. Merck (Ed.): Medical monthly mirror. A journal for the doctor. 2nd year, January – December 1953. (including IH Schulz: The manager's disease as a medical-psychological problem ; H. Schroeder: On causes and prevention of manager's disease, etc.)

References and comments

  1. ↑ Duden: Manager Disease
  2. ↑ Martin Wehling: Clinical Pharmacology . Georg Thieme Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-13-160282-4 , p. 79 .
  3. ↑ a b c Patrick Kury : The overwhelmed person: A history of knowledge from stress to burnout . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2012
  4. ↑ Brockhaus Encyclopedia . 12th volume. 17th edition. FA Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1971.
  5. ↑ a b The Sick Heart - Death on the Labor Front . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1962 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Sabine Maasen, Jens Elberfeld, Pascal Eitler, Maik Tlassung: The advised self: on the genealogy of therapy in the "long" seventies . transcript Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1541-8 , pp. 146 .
  7. ↑ Viktor Emil Frankl: Handbook of the theory of neuroses and psychotherapy . Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1957.
  8. ↑ Axel Schildt: Modern times: Leisure, mass media and "Zeitgeist" in the Federal Republic of the 50s . Christians, 1995, ISBN 3-7672-1218-8 , pp. 418 .
  9. ↑ The plateau . Radius, August 1999, p. 52 .
  10. ↑ Carl Troll: The Great Herder . Herder, 1952.
  11. ^ Danièle Beltran-Vidal, François Maniez: Les mots de la santé: influence des sociétés et des cultures sur la formation des mots de la santé . Presses Universitaires Lyon, 2005, ISBN 2-7297-0766-2 , pp. 140 .
  12. ^ Section industrial and industrial psychology in the professional association of German psychologists (ed.): Psychologie und Praxis . 1956, p. 10 .
  13. ↑ a b A-th: Free weekend campaign . In: Die Zeit , No. 19/1957.
  14. ^ Ngram viewer manager disease. 1940-2010
  15. ↑ Michael Bauer: The German bathing system and its organization in the service of the prevention, treatment and elimination of diseases and the consequences of diseases. In: Anniversary edition of the Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift. Volume 95 (1953), pp. 126-128.
  16. ^ Max Hochrein, Irene Hochrein-Schleicher: Entrepreneurial disease: emergence and Contraception . Thieme, 1955.
  17. ^ Paul Langford: Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 . Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-19-924640-8 , pp. 32 .
  18. ^ Pt .: English weekend . In: Die Zeit , No. 34/1956.
  19. ↑ https://www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de/2014-08/manag Krankheit-des-auges-sehstoerungen-durch-stress /
  20. ↑ https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2014/daz-44-2014/manag Krankheit-des- auges
  21. ↑ a b c d Patrick Kury : The manager's disease as an elite phenomenon? In: The overwhelmed person: A history of knowledge from stress to burnout . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2012, pp. 118–124
  22. ^ Otto Graf: The illness of those responsible: Manager illness . German Health Museum, 1953.
  23. ↑ a b c d W.F .: MPs die faster. Disaster statistics of the Bundestag - manager illness a fable? In: The time. January 14, 1954 (No. 2).
  24. ↑ Hartmut von Hentig: Correctives in society . In: Die Zeit , No. 30/1964.
  25. ↑ Smokers live dangerously . In: Die Zeit , No. 3/1964.
  26. ↑ WS: Be moderate, Mr. Manager . In: Die Zeit , No. 42/1958.
  27. ↑ Alexander Rost: The thoroughbred of Schlenderhan . In: Die Zeit , No. 29/1969.
  28. ↑ a b c M .: A bitter lesson . In: Die Zeit , No. 45/1954.
  29. ^ Fritz Heinrich Ryssel: Recipe book against the manager's disease. Tried and tested. Drawings by Wilfried Zeller-Nahrungsmittelberg. Werner Classen Verlag, Zurich 1956.
  30. ↑ Norbert Bartnik: Lazing around: a happy dictionary for cheerful people, those who enjoy life, daydreamers and everyone who would rather live in peace and comfort than be saddled with manager illness and the addiction to exercise. Drawings by Peter Ruge. Tomus, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-8231-0152-8 .
  31. ↑ JE Fischer: Fishing, a cure for manager's disease. In: Max Eisenberger, Julius Staudinger, Bruno Hofer, Friedrich Fischer, Curt Heinrich Weigelt: Allgemeine Fischerei-Zeitung. Landesfischereiverband Bayern, 1953, p. 401.
  32. ↑ Helga Pfeil-Braun : The secretary gives relief to the boss. Verlag Moderne Industrie, Augsburg 1971.
  33. ^ Ih: literary multimillionaires. Theodore Dreiser's last novel . In: Die Zeit , No. 35/1953.
  34. ↑ Kyra Stromberg: The Pathos of the Great Entrepreneur . In: Die Zeit , No. 39/1954.
  35. ↑ Wilhelm Hankel: Nabelschau is trump today . In: Die Zeit , No. 28/1975.