Every work I can think of that depicts the life of a middle manager at a large corporation is a comedy that uses the the setting as a farce (The Office, Office Space, Fight Club, Horrible Bosses etc.). What are some examples of works of fiction that show life in the middle rungs of a giant corporation more positively?
Better Off Ted is about a sympathetic, morally centered mid-range executive in a comically inept and corrupt megacorp.
It’s portrayal of a middle manager might be sympathetic but it’s definitely not a sympathetic portrayal of middle management
The managers in Extract are portrayed very sympathetically. Though, it’s in a small business not a megacorp
Yes, it’s relatively easy to find positive portrayals of small businesses. I was looking for examples from MegaCorps.
In Good Company - Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace are mid level executives in an ad agency. IIRC, they are both portrayed sympathetically, with most of the conflict being personal, not professional.
But much of the plot comes from the managers interacting with their employees, not interacting with their customers/competitors.
500 Days of Summer does a good job, though it doesn’t get too far into the middle management area. It does show a manager and work environment at a large company that are generally pretty decent and tolerant with respect to the main character. When he has his big blow-up and tells the conference room what he “really thinks of the company” it comes off more as the problem being with him.
What’s interesting is that Lundberg doesn’t really “do” anything to Peter in Office Space. He asks him to work on a weekend, which sucks, but certainly not out of the ordinary. And he bugs him a couple times about his TPS reports (presumably some sort of time/expense report) being filled out incorrectly, which would be part of his job. And he is actually pretty tolerant of Peter’s flakeyness. Really the only thing wrong with him is that his personality is a little weird and Peter happens to find him annoying because he hates his job.
He is kind of a dick to Milton though.
In Dead Like Me, George once refers to Rube as “middle management”. He is shown pretty positiviely.
Ikiru
Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past” features a government bureaucrat who shows up pretty well.