Strategic disengagement

"Contractors are never full participants. As experts practioners in their respective fields, they may function like employees and may well be full contributors to the larger goals of the client. Their marginal status, however, demands strategic disengagement, evident in their interactions, which keeps them apart."


This is a snippet from "Freelancing Expertise: Contract Professionals in the New Economy", a book I have yet to read but already sailed through the many pages available in the Amazon preview. This is already one of these rare book you flip through, stop at some pages, and get the sudden awareness and thrill that "gee!, this is talking about me!" There are no "Interpreters on the job - Getting better at it" book I am aware of. And when it comes to the broader category of independent contractor, you are seemingly left with the kind of "How to make 6 figures as freelancer", "Working at home in pajamas", and in Japan where self-deprecation and the corporate mantra are the massive norm, "How to work on thrift for your own and relish precarity".

I seems that there are no interpreters listed among the contractors the author Debra Osnowitz interviewed but this doesn't matter. Broadly speaking, we are all in the boat. That's where similarity may end as there are many boats with many shapes, but they do share common specs and are distinguished by inner and at large factors.

I love this expression, strategic disengagement. It made a tild sound that resonates even now when reading it.

You prop on the scene, deliver the goods, pack up and say goodbye, as last Friday. There is no reason to match the steps of the pack of people belonging to one side of the interaction now closed until there is ,maybe a next time. The sidelines, the snippets of conversation they have, planning for their dinner, their night, their concerns, the giggles, the puns they exchange, the elation that it is Friday evening and the work and the week is being wrapped soon to be stored until Monday, all this is none of your business. Your unique point now is to leave in
style, not surreptitiously as often seen. Someone, even more than one, wrote about how Japanese are bad, from a Western point of view that is, at leaving the showroom. I don't exactly agree on this. They are bad doing it alone, they need assistance, then everything get classy. But you are alone and seeking assistance is not the main point. Exchanging reckoning cues is what matters. Here, training at formal Japanese interaction theatrics comes handy. Strategic disengagement is also at play when leaving the room. You don't belong and that is a fact that can't be negotiated. That is why interpretation, like any contracting service, pipe cleaner, electrician and the likes, is a matter of performing alone. Now, where is the serious and valuable book about Strategic disengagement?