Bloody hormones
Apr. 13th, 2009 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahMeh, I've done very little of the work I intended to this weekend. I did some reading, set up a couple of wikis, and helped one of my fellow students with a piece of software. I have to write an essay outline, which is assessable, and I'm having very little inspiration at the moment. The topic I've chosen relates to power in organisations, and can also encompass "empowerment". While I'm very tempted to go on a rant about how empowerment is very often used as a cheap "stroking" technique used to make workers feel engaged in their work, or, equally bad, ends up throwing a bunch of additional requirements onto people without their having the skills and resources to adequately discharge them, unfortunately, the essay question doesn't have quite that latitude (although I'll allude to some of that).
When it comes to power in the workplace, I'm all in favour of workers owning as much of it as they can (and by "workers", I include such non-typical categories as non-executive management). There are two issues with it, though, in terms of the areas where more self-management is devolved to workers. One is that many people are not enculturated to want it (or, they're psychologically averse to it, for whatever reasons), unless they specifically want to get into management. "Too much responsibility." "Why should I do my manager's job?" "It makes me feel insecure." "Who gets the blame when something goes wrong?" "Why should I do more work that I'm not paid for?" The second, and much more pertinent issue, is that not much real power (including resourcing, strategy, etc) is devolved to workers, even in incremental ways. Heh, this is even true for middle management in our organisation (and I really wonder what their function is sometimes). This is hardly a surprising issue, given the setup of most enterprises, and, in a more general sense, our being accustomed to hierarchy and top-down management.
While it might be easy to assume that nothing much will fundamentally change in that area, think of the changes our societies have gone through in the last few hundred years. We no longer believe that the monarch is directly anointed by God, nor do we believe our rulers have absolute rights over our lives. We believe in the notion of individual rights (which is a pretty recent innovation). Companies have also dramatically changed in the last couple of hundred years. You are not supposed to run businesses on slave labour. People must be paid in money and not kind, have reasonable time off, and so on. These kinds of things are enshrined in law, but the law was made because people's attitudes to exploitative and even paternalistic company cultures changed.
Then there are cool trends like the "recovered factories" in Argentina (after the early 2000s peso crash) and elsewhere. These businesses are run by the workers themselves as co-operatives. I find those kinds of enterprises fascinating.
My god, this is the most thinking I've done all day. I discovered dubstep.fm's online stream today (the "iTunes/Winamp" aka .pls stream plays in VLC -192kbps works for me), and I've been listening to that while staring at VLC's "goom" visualisation. No drugs involved either, except Neurofen.
...OMG, I just found out that one of my favourite groups evah, Red Snapper, has a new album out, A Pale Blue Dot. I've been listening online, and while it's not as compelling as some of their earlier music, it's still decent. They've always been in the trip-hop/acid jazz area, but this album is definitely more into the downtempo acid jazz area (but not as anodyne as some of that stuff can be). ETA: I'll revise that last comment, because I said that before I listened to the third-to-last and final tracks. ICK. God, it looks like I won't be buying this one. I'll have to do a post on their greatest hits shortly.
When it comes to power in the workplace, I'm all in favour of workers owning as much of it as they can (and by "workers", I include such non-typical categories as non-executive management). There are two issues with it, though, in terms of the areas where more self-management is devolved to workers. One is that many people are not enculturated to want it (or, they're psychologically averse to it, for whatever reasons), unless they specifically want to get into management. "Too much responsibility." "Why should I do my manager's job?" "It makes me feel insecure." "Who gets the blame when something goes wrong?" "Why should I do more work that I'm not paid for?" The second, and much more pertinent issue, is that not much real power (including resourcing, strategy, etc) is devolved to workers, even in incremental ways. Heh, this is even true for middle management in our organisation (and I really wonder what their function is sometimes). This is hardly a surprising issue, given the setup of most enterprises, and, in a more general sense, our being accustomed to hierarchy and top-down management.
While it might be easy to assume that nothing much will fundamentally change in that area, think of the changes our societies have gone through in the last few hundred years. We no longer believe that the monarch is directly anointed by God, nor do we believe our rulers have absolute rights over our lives. We believe in the notion of individual rights (which is a pretty recent innovation). Companies have also dramatically changed in the last couple of hundred years. You are not supposed to run businesses on slave labour. People must be paid in money and not kind, have reasonable time off, and so on. These kinds of things are enshrined in law, but the law was made because people's attitudes to exploitative and even paternalistic company cultures changed.
Then there are cool trends like the "recovered factories" in Argentina (after the early 2000s peso crash) and elsewhere. These businesses are run by the workers themselves as co-operatives. I find those kinds of enterprises fascinating.
My god, this is the most thinking I've done all day. I discovered dubstep.fm's online stream today (the "iTunes/Winamp" aka .pls stream plays in VLC -192kbps works for me), and I've been listening to that while staring at VLC's "goom" visualisation. No drugs involved either, except Neurofen.
...OMG, I just found out that one of my favourite groups evah, Red Snapper, has a new album out, A Pale Blue Dot. I've been listening online, and while it's not as compelling as some of their earlier music, it's still decent. They've always been in the trip-hop/acid jazz area, but this album is definitely more into the downtempo acid jazz area (but not as anodyne as some of that stuff can be). ETA: I'll revise that last comment, because I said that before I listened to the third-to-last and final tracks. ICK. God, it looks like I won't be buying this one. I'll have to do a post on their greatest hits shortly.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 05:53 pm (UTC)