Having been in the work world for a while, I feel like this is new to an extent. I feel like harsh competition to the level of people being willing to sabotage their own projects and so-forth, is a phenomena of a gradually intensifying market-driven pressure that has been unleashed on society through a variety of forces (take-over focused hedge-funds and investor, market-efficiency ideologies, etc).

But reference than anecdotes, I'll give references:

David Gordon documents how downsizing produces expertise in sabotaging other rather than efficiency: http://www.amazon.com/FAT-AND-MEAN-Managerial-Downsizing/dp/...

The Gervais Principle perhaps summarizes the predatory new order. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

But the point is this a somewhat new order. Of course, competition-so-ruthless-it-produces-bad-behavior has been around forever. But some circumstances allow that truly blossom and I think can argue we have those circumstances now.

In the book Fat And Mean, (http://www.amazon.com/FAT-MEAN-Corporate-Managerial-Downsizi...) David Gordon essentially argues that corporate downsizing often involves survival of the most bureaucratically adept rather than the most productive. Overtime, more complexity and less productivity result.

You could apply this reasoning in the rest of the article also...