12.15.2007

Extra Credit Blog

What did you think about the blog assignment? Should I keep it, modify it, or get rid of it? Did you like writing papers in this format rather than the traditional way? Anything you would change, expand or reduce about the class?

  • Overall, I enjoyed the blog assignment. I am always open to trying new things and I thought that doing this compared to writing papers was much more exciting and entertaining. I also thought that because we had to go in depth with the answers - talking to a new audience who didn't know the concepts that we were studying - I learned a lot more about the concepts and can talk about them a lot better than I would be able to otherwise because I am more familiar with them. I also enjoyed using my creative side like we were able to do with Intercultural Comm and the topical dictionaries.
  • I definitely think that you should keep the blog posts. However, the only adjustment that I would make, for your sake as well as ours, is to either shorten the questions down and do them every other week, or only have a few more in depth ones throughout the semester.
  • I definitely like writing on a blog compared to writing a paper the traditional way. I think that the main reason is because I get to be more creative. Also, we all have to write papers in the traditional format for most of our other classes, thus it is nice to have a change from the norm
  • I really enjoyed the class overall. I liked the topics that we covered and I definitely enjoyed the more discussion format. It was nice to hear what everyone had to say as well as hear new experiences from all different levels. I honestly wouldn't make any changes expect what I suggested for the blogs.
Thanks Dr. Berdayes!

Ques 8 Part II: Gender

As I mentioned before, I also believe that gender is a huge issue at AMG. This is because the environment of AMG, and car companies in general, consists of mainly “manly” characteristics. While I was working as an intern this summer, there were only 6 female interns compared to the 17 male interns. It was very intimidating at times and there were several instances were I doubted my ability to function in a car company atmosphere because I am a woman. I can tell however, that this is a feeling that not only the female interns felt, however.

Identity is defined as how individuals position themselves in the world through language and action. Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.
3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.
4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.
5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.
7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.

Gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts. Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.

Men seek status by engaging in raport talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:
• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality
• conversational command
• direct and assertive expressions
• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through matching experiences
• providing support responsiveness
• conversational maintenance
• tentativeness
• personal, concrete details

Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles.

Power and ideology impact how various aspects of one’s social identity are valued. Within most organizational settings, “members tend to enact dominant norms and communication styles during everyday interactions. As a result, organization members may negatively judge persons who do not meet (or do not seem to meet) expectations related to white, middle-class values and attitudes.” While organizations have traditionally favored masculinity, issues of class, race and age and ability impact how individual men as able to enact a valued identity at work. Negotiating multiple identities simultaneously is an ongoing project for most individuals. That negotiation process often takes on heightened importance for some organizational members, particularly for those who are other than the assumed norm.

Overall, the women at AMG general definitely take on more manly features, actions and even ways of talk. My boss was a prime example of this. Although she was a very strong woman (as I mentioned she was only one of two women who held managerial positions within the offices at SPLO), she made herself strong by taking on more masculine qualities in order to adapt better with her environment.

Although I do give her credit for putting herself in a position like this, I believe that overall it may be hurting her feminine qualities. For instance, she very rarely wore female style clothing. She adorned herself in blazers, trouser pants and had her hair cut very short and stiff. Her personality was also on the rough and tough side and she didn’t seem to take trouble from anybody. I think that in order to better herself in the AMG general atmosphere, she shouldn’t have lost sight of what and who she really was. This goes for all of the women who hold managerial positions. I believe that this can better AMG general because in turn, it may soften the rough and tough attitude of AMG and the Hummer and open itself up to a vast new consumer audience.

What is AMG?


The organization that I have spent sufficient time at is AM General, the makers of the Hummer and HUMVEE vehicles. For the past two summers, I have worked 40-hour weeks at SPLO (Service Parts and Logistics Operations). SPLO is a branch of the AM General family that has a warehouse which supports an inventory of over 30,000 part numbers and on-hand inventory of over 15,000 parts. The Field Service Representatives are the customer’s direct link to AM General. They provide up-to-date technical expertise and hands on training to customers all over the world. The SPLO facility is also the location of the training program which helps improve vehicle performance and extends the vehicle’s service life.

While at SPLO, I worked specifically with the RECAP program. As a program that was only on its second year when I first joined in, I was able to make serious contributions to the various different test runs of the project. The RECAP program deals with refurbishing HUMVEES that have certain unusable parts. Unlike the RESET program that they are attempting to also start, the RECAP program takes apart the trucks but then puts them back together with the same parts, replacing the unusable ones at the same time.

Since the RECAP program was brand new, there was only one person working on it directly. Denise Richards was my boss for the past two summers and having her direct me as well as teach me about how such a powerful vehicle manufacturer can work was very insightful. It was not just insightful due to the fact that I learned to use several new systems like SAP, an inventory program used all over the world, it was also insightful because Denise was only one of two women holding a higher level position. Another very interesting thing about SPLO, and AM General as a whole, was the fact that they were a very structured, traditional and hierarchical company. I believe that in some ways, this is very harmful to not only AM General, but also all other companies that go by those particular standards. Thus, the two things that I would change most about AM General are the lack of females holding managerial positions and the strict hierarchical system throughout the company.

Ques 8 Part I: Hieracrchy

From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, organizations functioned much like empires. Today, we can still see the close relationships between homes and factories in some regions, and we can also see how wealth and status allow a family to move farther away from the site of production. Thus, social control is effectively produced in part by the relationship between the location of industry and neighborhoods.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) popularized some early notions of empire and pragmatism in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. It is primarily a collection of parables and quotations that elevate hard work (called “industry”), independence (the accumulation of wealth on individual, corporate, and national levels), and the virtues of planning, organizing and controlling one’s life through work.

Frederick the Great (1712-86), King of Prussia, organized his armies on the principles of mechanics: ranks, uniforms, regulations, task specialization, standard equipment, command language, and drill instruction.

Eli Whitney’s (1765-1825) groundbreaking demonstration of mass production in 1801 was based on the production of guns, whose purpose was to maintain order and extend the power of empires.

Adam Smith (1723-90), a philosopher of economics and politics, published Wealth of Nations in 1776, which praised the divisions of labor evident in factory production.

As Karl Marx (1818-83) would demonstrate in the mid nineteenth century, division of labor was essential to organizing corporations and societies along class lines.

Overall, effective communication in the nineteenth century meant giving orders and emphasized the downward transmission of information. The top-down flow of information in hierarchies also led to the emergence of domination narratives, which ascribed particular readings of how truth, power and control were constituted in everyday conversation.

Whereas the South supported a racial hierarchy, the increasingly industrial North favored one governed by social class. For white slaveholders in the South, slavery was justified on economic and moral grounds. They believed they had a right to a cheap source of labor to farm their lands and that their accumulation of wealth was at the heart of Calvinist moral advancement. Thus, any slave attempt to challenge white authority was viewed as a challenge to the moral order.

One feature of societal dialogue, resistance to domination, helps us understand organizational dialogue. Resistance to domination is defined as any action on the part of oppressed individuals to lessen the constraints placed on them by those in power.

James Scott (1990) points out how the accounts of the powerless can function as hidden transcripts of the other side of the story. Hidden transcripts include themes and arguments that are well known by members of the oppressed group but kept out of the public eye for fear of reprisal from those in power.

In addition to slave narratives, other forms of resistance to dominations came with the slave songs, ditties, and dirges that would later become known as “the blues.” This, in turn, would lead to two other musical forms of resistance to domination: rock and roll and rap music.

The rise of the modern factory during the industrial period was an extension of a social (and racial) class structure that sought to stabilize power relations among people by controlling the means of production and consumption in society. The organization of work and communication in the early factories was highly influenced by the then-emerging concepts of division of labor and hierarchy. Division of labor refers to the separation of tasks into discrete units; hierarchy refers to the vertical arrangement of power and authority that distinguishes managers from employees.

With science came much more than a highly ordered method of explaining phenomena: From explanation emerged the ability to predict, and from the ability to predict came the potential to control. Thus, the underlying theme of the classical management approach to organization is the scientific rationalization of control.

Frederick Taylor (1865-1915) was a pioneer in the development of scientific management. His book The Principles of Scientific Management (1913) is based on the assumption that management is a true science resting on clearly defined laws, rules, and principles. Taylor’s goal was to transform the nature of both work and management. He hoped that cooperation between managers and employees would bring a new era of industrial peace.

Instead of industrial peace, scientific management led to increased conflict because it reinforced hierarchical distinctions and further objectified the already downtrodden worker. Even so, Taylor’s work ushered in a new focus on the relationship between managers and employees as a key to organizational productivity, and remains a bedrock principle of contemporary theory.

More specifically, Taylor’s model ushered in a systematic approach to the division of labor that has gone far beyond the design of work for which it was originally developed. In short, scientific management assumed that some employees are better suited to “thinking” work and some to “doing” work, thus laying the groundwork for the class-based distinction between white-collar and blue-collar employees that we know today.

Similar to Taylor’s scientific management theory, AMG is a very hierarchical company. There are definite distinct lines dividing each of the separate positions by title, office spaces and privileges. For instance, my Uncle is a senior buyer, thus he has the privilege to take out a Hummer basically whenever he wants to. Also, AMG follow very traditional management rules and can almost be deemed “old fashioned.” They simply do not grow with the new advances in our business society. Instead, they stick to their old ways because they know that they work.

I believe that AMG can become a better company if they take more risks and break out of the traditional scientific management role. I think that by being so restricted and strict with their management rules, dress and overall actions that they defer their employees from creativity. Those who work in the warehouses and factory do not have any way to relate with those who work in upper management or the offices. This is a huge hindrance because many of the managers work with those in the warehouses and factories on a daily basis. Overall, I believe that if the company blurred the traditional lines that they put between certain positions and possibly make an attempt to develop with the new technology and societal advances that they will have both happier employees as well as increase their success rate.

Mindless versus Mindful Communication

In order to understand what we have learned throughout our organizational communication course, I find it key to review several important points in the final chapter of the book. Chapter 11 talks about how our communication needs to be mindful throughout our lives. Each conversation that we have does have an impact on the listener and the way we present ourselves within our communication can make or break a situation. Overall, when communicating throughout life, especially in the workplace, the best thing a person can do is focus on the main characteristics that all employers are looking for.

While many people believe that communication is mostly a conscious activity, studies have demonstrated that this is not the case. Unlike having thoughts, thinking implies a willingness to listen and be open to beliefs beyond what one already knows. Thinking is crucial in true collaboration and innovation, and is the essence of authentic dialogue.

Three new metaphors – “discourse,” “voice,” and “performance” – are at the forefront of organizational thinking.
Discourse invites us to examine organizations as texts, and to bring to such examinations the well-developed logic of literary and conversation analyses. Thinking of what we say and do in a literary way open up new possibilities for finding creative solutions to age-old organizational challenges.
Voice invites us to consider who has the right to speak in organizations and what a “chorus of diverse voices” or “singing solo” may mean in relations to the logics of power and suppression at work.
Performance asks us to consider dramatic enactment as a new way of thinking about coordinated activities, storytelling, collaborative practices and identity work in organizations.

Overall, a mindful approach to organizational communication enables us to understand talk “as a mental and relational activity that is both purposeful and strategic.” Elaine Langer (1998) found that when we become more conscious of our communication, we become more mindful and that when we become more mindful we will likely become more ethical as well.

Integrity is a mindful state of acting purposefully to fulfill the promise and commitments you make to others. It is a term that we associate with women and men who consciously make choices about treating others fairly and equitably, and who understand that in today’s turbulent business and social environment those who lead have obligations to those who follow them as well as to the bottom line and stockholders.

Whether your position inside or outside the company involves communicating with customers, clients, patrons, donors, bosses, employees, and/or peers, there is no doubt that interpersonal integrity and relational mindfulness form the core communication competencies in the workplace.

12.11.2007

Gender differences

Option #3
Recently, we have been discussing the gender aspect of organizational life. Discuss some ways in which gender is acted out within organizations. You can use our readings for examples of how gender appears in everyday organizational performances, such as costuming, forms of talk, as well as other practices. Close by discussing to what extent you think organizations are gendered – is there any part of an organization that isn’t shaped by assumptions about gender? Use chapter seven and our readings by Deborah Tannen and Rosabeth Moss Kanter to answer this question. (See previous post for answer).

Here is an interesting video on gender roles in society in general

12.09.2007

Gender in Organizational Communication

Organizations are primary sources of meaning in contemporary life. Through our attempts to coordinate our activities with others, we come to understand both who we are and who we might become. Thus, organizational meaning-making processes tend to create, emphasize, and value “differences that make a difference” as they are constructed around issues of race, sexuality, class, age and gender.

Before industrialization, notions of the self were largely fixed and mainly unitary; an individual’s self-definition came largely from his or her craft, locale and family and did not vary much throughout the course of life. In contrast, classical management theories regarded the
individual as an inhuman cog in a complex machine, a state accomplished through the bureaucratic separation of the personal and public self. In recent years, powerful organizations have lost a great deal of their ability to control what individuals can become, thus allowing for a broader range of employee identities.

Interestingly, many young people are seeking to reintegrate their work selves with their personal selves, producing a greater continuity of identity across public and private contexts. This trend is propelled by a growing desire for authenticity or being real and honest is how we live and work with othe
rs. Whereas earlier notions of identity referred to an individual’s ability to look inside oneself to find one’s real self, contemporary ideas of authenticity focus much more on the ethics and consistency of one’s behaviors. In other words, we must reveal our true selves not only in personal relationships and during our personal time, but also through our choices of professional and organizational affiliation. Overall, there is not a clear, consistent or consensual model available.

The proliferations of multiple possible identities makes it even more critical that we select some “horizons of significance” toward which to orient ourselves. Not all identities however are equally welcome in the world of work. For many reasons, organizational members use identity markers to create and highlight differences between people, and then use these marked differences as reasons for treating them differently.


Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.

3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.

4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.

5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.

7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.


A focus on gender as a difference that makes a difference organizational life points to the complexities of identity construction. One of the key reasons that feminist organizational communication scholars have been interested in the question of identity at work is because of the marginalization women have experienced historically in public organizational life, particularly through wages, access, and mobility inequities.
Feminist research takes on a variety of forms and is influenced by several different traditions.

Whereas liberal feminists are most interested in changing government and company policies to level the playing field for women in organizations, radical feminists might be more interested in dismantling those very organizations and replacing them with feminist-inspired, nonhierarchical structures.
Feminist scholarship on identity, particularly in the context of organizations, is united by the assumption that the socially constructed split between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home has led to significant symbolic and material consequences for both men and women.

The public/private split has resulted in several implications for men and women in contemporary organizational life, including the

• exclusion and control of women in the public sphere;
• denial of women’s domestic work as legitimate and values labor;

• devaluation of feminized labor in the public sphere
• reduction of men’s participation in domestic work and family life;
• construction of work/family conflicts as a private problem rather than a public or social issue. One direct outgrowth of their interest in this divide is focused attention on work/family conflict or, more recently work/life conflict.

The term work/life conflict refers to the simultaneous influence of work on members’ lives away from work – at home, at leisure, and in families and communities – and the influence of personal life responsibilities and aspirations on members’ experiences at work.
Karen Ashcraft (2004), a leading feminist organizational communication scholar, outlines four approaches or “frames” that are particularly relevant to questions regarding the public/private spheres, work/life balance and gender concerns. Work/life identities are ongoing accomplishments that are continually informed and constructed by discourses of gender, power, and organization. Yet, each frame adopts a different way of considering the relationships among communication, gendered identity and the organization. Each frame also constructs the “problem” of gender in a particular way, and in doing so, also suggests a potential solution to the “woman question” at work.

Frame 1: Gender Differences at Work
The first frame assumes that gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts.
Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.

Men seek status by engaging in report talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:

• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality

• conversational command

• direct and assertive expressions

• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through matching experiences
• providing support responsiveness

• conversational maintenance

• tentativeness

• personal, concrete details

Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles.
While much of the early research treated women’s communication style as a deficit or a liability at work, some scholars attempted to demonstrate the utility, perhaps even the superiority of women’s ways of knowing, being and leading.

Further, in contrast to traditional models, narratives by and about women tend to value:

• fluid boundaries between personal life and work life

• relational aspects of work

• a balanced lifestyle

• a nurturing approach to co-workers

• a network of relationships within and outside the organization

• a service orientation to clients

• work as a means of developing personal identity


Frame 2: Gender Identity as Organizational Performance

Treating gender as a fixed biological or learned source of communication behavior overlooks the ways individuals create their gendered identities through communication in everyday interactions. Karen Ashcraft’s second frame foregrounds gender as an ongoing accomplishment, as an identity that is accomplished through “doing” rather than “being.”
Feminist scholar Judith Butler suggests that we do gender in an through everyday performances or micropractices that are carried out to the organizational stage. Micropractices refer to the moment-to-moment behaviors, actions and communication messages that we use to bring ourselves into being in everyday life. Overall, gender is not an essential or “natural” or fixed aspect of our identity, “but practices learnt and enacted in appropriate occasions.”

Frame 2 suggests that gender is an aspect of our identity that is negotiated and renegotiated anew each day, across a variety of contexts. Thus, how a person performs masculinity or femininity will change depending on the context.
One of the main questions is why do organizational members go to such lengths to perform “appropriate” gender identities? The answer is that successful gendered performance is richly rewarded. Those who fail to perform their gender correctly are routinely punished. There are severe penalties for failing to enact or perform an appropriate organizational gender, including lack of upward mobility and less access to employment. Employees who embody a preferred gender identity and are more attractive than their counterparts are more likely to receive job offers and higher starting salaries.

Another current inquiry that points to the performed character of identity is emotion labor. Emotion labor refers to a “type of work wherein employees are paid to create a ‘package’ of emotions.” Emotion labor can be damaging over time as employees become estranged from there “real” feelings after performing “fake” commodified, instrumental and organizationally controlled feelings. Moreover, extensive emotion labor has been linked with increased stress and burnout.

Frame 3: Gendered Organizations

The assumption is that organizational forms or structures, “like gender identity – are constantly in process, brought to life, sustained and transformed by interaction among new members. Simultaneously, organization guides interaction, predisposing and rewarding members to practice in particular ways.”
Here, gender is a fundamental feature of organizations that influences identities in a variety of taken-for-granted ways. In a foundational essay, sociologist Joan Acker argued that far from being “neutral” backdrops, organizations are themselves gendered structures that reflect and reproduce patriarchy or the systematic privileging of masculinity. To say that an organization is gendered means that “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between males and female, masculine and feminine.”

The gendered organization emerges out of at least five processes, including:

• The social construction of divisions of labor, positions, and types of work along gendered lines, The types of work that women and men do are often differentiated in organizations such that women assume support roles and men assume leadership roles.

• The social construction of symbols and images that reinforce gender divisions. Images of leadership often rest on a masculine model.
• The mundane communication interactions between men and women, men and men and women and women often reproduce gender divisions in ways that reinforce men’s powerful position. Women’s speech is often presumed to be ill suited to organizational life.
• The ways in which individual actors often take up identities that reinforce the three processes described above. Career choices, style of dress, interaction patterns and everyday performances result in gendered identities.

• Gender is, then, a fundamental element in “organizational logic” or a “gendered substructure that is reproduced daily in practical work activities.”

Frame 4: Gendered Narratives in Popular Culture
Frame 4 directs our attention outside the organizational context to the broad social discourses that shape both gendered organizational forms. This frame "shifts attention from communication in organizations to communication about organization or how a larger society portrays and debates its institutions and the very notion of work" and workers.

The assumption is that social texts that exist outside the organization, such as those found in popular culture, reveal and reproduce cultural understandings about the nature of work, life and identity. In other words, the meanings we assign to ourselves, our work and our organizations are significantly influenced by the texts - films, books, television shows, news reports, magazines, fashion and even scholarship - we consume in our everyday lives.

Through these processes, organizational structures, jobs and even bodies are gendered in specific ways. For women, embodying the “ideal” worker is difficult, as that which is associated with the private sphere and domesticity is excluded from organizational logic. Thus, women’s bodies – female sexuality, their ability to procreate and their pregnancy, breast-feeding, and child care, menstruation and mythic emotionality are suspect, stigmatized and used as grounds for control and exclusion.

information taken from Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint by Eric Eisenberg, H.L. Goodall Jr. and Angela Trethewey

12.08.2007

just an FYI...

I had issues with my computer yesterday and now it won't turn on. I had written my entire blog on it and now cannot access it, thus I might be a day or two late with posting it since I have to write my blog again - sorry!!!

11.30.2007

Organizational Culture

Option #1 Chapter five in our textbook identifies several components of organizational culture, including artifacts, stories, rituals, and ceremonies (these elements of organizational culture are listed on page 128-129). Think about an organization that you have been a member of or are familiar with, and discuss how organizational culture contributes to people’s sense of membership within that organization. Close by discussing whether the organization actively attempts to shape the organizational culture, as in the examples discussed in class, and what this might accomplish.

Within every national culture there are thousands of smaller cultures based on religion, ethnicity, geography, and a myriad of other factors. Whether people create groups or communities, a culture inevitably develops. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1976) defines culture as meaningful orders of persons and things. Thus, we learn about a culture not only by what its members say, but also by what they do on a regular basis (e.g., staff meetings, performance reviews, bowling leagues) and the things they choose to display in connection with their work.

Clifford Geertz (1973) defines culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”

Edgar Schein (1994) offers this variation: “An organizational culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions that have been invented, discovered, and/or developed by a group as it learns to cope with problems of external adaptation and internal integration.”

Not all members of a culture accept or practice those beliefs in the same way, however. Like religions, most cultures include various sects or subcultures that share the common order but whose ways of understanding or carrying out their beliefs differ.

The term organizational culture stands for the actions, ways of thinking, practices, stories, and artifacts that characterize a particular organization. We study the culture of an organization through close examination of its symbolic environment (e.g., the arrangement of parking lots, office cubicles, and conference rooms) as well as through its use of symbols (e.g., topics of conversations, key vocabulary and jargon, treasured accomplishments and awards).

Organizational cultures emerge from organizational members’ individual and collective symbol-using practices. Scholars and practitioners often focus on one or more of those symbolic expressions, referred to here as cultural elements, to learn more about or to transform an organization’s culture.

Metaphors are figures of speech that define an unfamiliar experience in terms of another more familiar one.
When I worked at Old Navy last year, our managers used to say that we were the “Old Navy family.” This sort of metaphor was used to construct the experience that I had while working there as well as supposedly make me want to work with the rest of my fellow employees in a family style manner.

Rituals “dramatize” a culture’s basic values and can range in scope from personal, day-to-day routines for accomplishing tasks to annual organization-wide celebrations to top performers. New product launches, office birthday celebrations, sales conferences and performance evaluations are all aimed at reinforcing organizational values.
Every weekend at Old Navy (Friday-Sunday) during the summer was considered “flip-flop weekend.” Even though our store’s flip flops are the most popular, due to their low price and quality, we were only allow to wear them on the weekend. If we did wear them, however, we needed to pay a dollar, similar to dress down days when I was in high school. Then, the money made would go to the charity that our store was supporting that month.

Storytelling is an important cultural activity because stories convey to member what and who is valued by the culture, how things are to be done, and the consequences for cultural compliance and/or deviation.
On the Gap.com website, it tells the story of Doris and Don Fisher. In 1969, Doris and Don Fisher opened the first Gap store in San Francisco with the goal of creating a store experience that was easy for the customer and offered a wide selection of fits and styles. They then went on to create three other lines, including Old Navy. In 1994, the Founder of Gap, Inc. and the CEO were visiting Paris, France and came upon a place distinctly named Old Navy and it struck a chord with them. (The Old Navy official site says, "Old Navy was named after a bar in Paris.) A branding consultant, two weeks before the trip abroad, had presented them with the name 'Elevator'. The concept name was received with mixed reviews. It has been said that the name was chosen because the stores were to imitate the look and feel of a traditional military surplus store. While this motif was quickly dropped, many stores retain a warehouse-like/urban decor and the name Old Navy stuck.

Artifacts, or the tangible and physical features of an organization, contribute to its culture. Office décor, spatial arrangements, corporate art, dress codes, and even graffiti are markers of culture.
Old Navy is known for its very urban/ware-house-like décor with certain distinct sections for their various styles. It is also a store known for its hip and upbeat music. Although its employees are not required to wear its clothing, they do encourage it and with the great discounts, most employees can afford to do so. The store also is known for its long running history of commercials (over 60) with the dog Magic.

Heroes and heroines are members of an organization who are held up as role models. They embody and personify cultural values. Often heroic figures are organizational founders or hail from managerial ranks.
While in training, new employees watch a video on the history of Gap Inc. and learn about the story of Doris and Don Fisher. This allows them to see where Old Navy all began.

Members often engage in dynamic, ongoing, and creative communication behaviors as they construct cultures. Performances center on rituals, passion, sociality (or organizational etiquette), politics, socialization of new members, and identity.
Each day before the morning shift began at Old Navy, all of the employees met in the break room to discuss certain issues. At that time, the manager on duty also reminded us to push Old Navy Cards. She/he would then go on to congratulate certain employees for their efforts and would sometimes even physically congratulate them by writing their name on a counting board.

Values represent a (more or less) shared set of beliefs about appropriate organizational behaviors. They are often derived from charismatic leaders or founders or organizational traditions.
One of Old Navy’s biggest value is that it offers great fashion at great prices for everyone.

Overall, cultural approaches bring the symbolic life of organizations to the forefront. Organizational cultures are constructed through language, everyday practices, and members’ meaning making. Several cultural elements combine to create an organization’s unique sense of place, including metaphors, stories, rituals, artifacts, heroes and heroines, performances, and values. While several different and sometimes competing approaches to organizational culture exist, a communication perspective on organizational culture provides a useful, but complicated and dynamic, framework for understanding, participating in, and transforming organizational communication.

While at Old Navy, I became very close with the other members of my “family,” because of the environment that we were put in. We not only had activities going on in the store, but we also had other charity events that we attended as a store, outside. This allowed our store to bond and become closer, thus resulting in a better environment to overall work in. Everyone got along and worked well together and the day’s work was almost always accomplished.

I do not believe that Old Navy necessarily tries to completely actively shape the organizational culture, however I do believe that through the outside events previously mentioned as well as the other in store contests the culture formed in its own way.

Information was attained from “Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint” (5th. Edition) by Eric M. Eisenberg, H.L. Goodall Jr. & Angela Trethewey

10.19.2007

Empowerment Continuum of Work Teams

Option #2 The chart on page 238 of our textbook identifies a range of organizational policies and procedures that teams of workers can take responsibility for. The items placed higher and toward the right of the chart reflect a greater degree of responsibility and empowerment among work teams.

Examine this chart and draw a line at the point that you believe that worker involvement is either impractical or improper (you can also draw circles around several policies rather than a line at one point). For your post, describe this point on the chart and discuss why you believe the rest of the items are not practical. For instance, you might believe that some procedures should be left in the hands of managers because they undermine the ability of a company to be profitable or because of likely conflicts between workers, or resistance from managers, etc. Be careful and detailed in your reasoning ad try to use concepts from the text to describe your point of view.

Finish the post by discussing what your views suggest for the possibility of establishing participatory and democratic workplaces. Does this mean that some of the theories we have discussed in class so far are invalid or unrealistic? Which ones? Note that you might think that all the items on the chart are practical, in which case discuss how workplaces would have to be reorganized to make workplace democracy a real possibility.

To answer this question, you will have to be familiar with the sections of our textbook that discuss “participation” and “participative management,” as well as “workplace democracy.” Most, but not all of this information is in chapter 8 of our textbook.

After looking at the chart on page 238 of our textbook “Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint,” it is clear to me that the point in which worker involvement is either impractical or improper is right after “Equipment Maintenance and Repair.” There are several reasons why I believe that after this point worker involvement is impractical.

1. The first reason deals with the simple definition of organizational communication. Organizational communication is required to direct a group toward a set of common goals. There is not one single company out there that does not have a central goal, thus is everyone had the power to “Hire Team Members,” “Schedule Vacations,” and “Make Compensation Decisions,” the company would not be able to function as one single being. Instead, the goal would most likely be lost among the crowd and the company’s system would fall apart
2. The second reason deals with the various definitions of dialogue. Dialogue has three levels representing an increasing degree of collaboration and respect for the other however, only the first two relate to this topic: dialogue as (1) equitable transaction, and (2) empathic conversation.
i. An equitable transaction from a communication perspective is one in which all participants have the ability to voice their opinions and perspectives. According to the text, “In defining dialogue this way, we call attention to the fact that not everyone in an organization has an equal say in making decisions or in interpreting events (p. 48).” However, nowadays, organizations are taking on and using the “teamwork” concept more often than not, which opens doors for more people to speak their mind. This nonetheless, still does not change the fact that everyone has their own separate positions and responsibilities and thus do not all have the right to make company decisions
ii. In defining dialogue as empathic conversations, we refer to the ability to understand or imagine the world as another person understands or imagines it. Achieving empathy is difficult for people who believe that their view of reality is the only correct view and that others’ perceptions are misinformed or misguided. Although this sort of situation can occur within upper management, is still makes more sense having at least one person “leading” the group than having various different clashing personalities fighting over the power.

3. The third reason is because, as stated on the question sheet, I do believe that some procedures should be left in the hands of managers because they undermine the ability of a company to be profitable as well as it takes away the chance of conflicts between workers. For every single job, organization or even schooling system I have belonged to, there has always been a hierarchical system of management. At work there are the employees, the managers, the head managers, and so on and so forth. In organizations, specifically school-related, there is a president and vice president, an advisor and the school which funds the organizations. Finally, in the schooling system there are the teachers, the principle and the board of directors. Not one person can handle all of the responsibilities that entail a job like those that I described, however several people trying to handle the same job would not work well either. It is human nature to work at things the way WE want to do it, and we don’t always necessarily think about other people around us.

According to the chapter in our book titled “Teams and Networks: Collaboration in the Workplace,” in order for there to be democracy in the workplace, a multiple stakeholder model is key. The multiple stakeholder model asserts that organizations ought to be concerned with the interests of many different individuals and groups and not just shareholders or stockholders.

Along with this thinking there are also four steps towards workplace democracy in which shared decision making among stakeholders is crucial. They are (1) create a workplace in which every member thinks and acts like an owner, (2) the management of work must be reintegrated with the doing of work, (3) quality information must be widely distributed, and (4) social structure should grow from the bottom rather than be reinforced from the top.

Even though these concepts seem promising in the eyes of your average employee, they are still very unrealistic and will most likely not be implemented any time soon. Overall, my views on the possibility of establishing participatory and democratic workplaces are very pessimistic and I do believe that the theories that we have touched upon involving democracy are invalid or even unrealistic.

10.18.2007

News Media: It's less about me and more about we

Our class has only focused on talking about teamwork in major corporations and minimum wage jobs since the topic began, however we have forgotten one other important area where teamwork is important – in the sciences. In the article that I found titled “More teamwork crucial after HIV vaccine flop,” it goes to show that every aspect of the world, not only those dealing with sales, need to learn how and when to use teamwork aspects.

According to our book, “Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint,” teams are groups of employees with representation from a variety of functional areas within the organization. (e.g. sales, manufacturing, engineering, etc.) to maximize the cross-functional exchange of information. Team-based organizations encourage informal communication and view all employees as capable of making decisions about how to manage work tasks. In the scientific world, teams are very similar.

In the article, Alan Bernstein, the founding president of Canadian Institutes of Health Research, who has now been appointed first executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise heads off the group. The group of people also involved include academics, drugmakers, governments and regulators who are all brought together for a common strategy. As also stated in the article Bernstein makes the point that, "The AIDS challenge is too important for anybody to say they have a right — whether it's public or private money — to keep things secret."

In Chapter 8: Teams and Networks, it states that there are various different types of teams within a workplace. Not all groups in an organization are necessarily the same kind however…
Project teams help coordinate the successful completion of a particular project, which has long been used by organizations in the design and development of new products and services.
A work team is a group of employees responsible for the entire work process that delivers a product or service to a customer.
Quality-improvement teams goals are to improve customer satisfaction, evaluate and improve team performance, and reduce costs.
Virtual teams consist of a group of people who work together across time and space.
As it is evident in the article, the type of team that is trying to be put together is a project team. This teams main “project or goal” is to find a vaccine for HIV. As you can see though according to Bernstein, "We need a mechanism for everybody from scientists to volunteers to get around the table and talk and agree on a common way forward," however this isn’t always the case with project teams.

Project teams struggle at times because people lack the communication skills needed to collaborate across significant functional divides. Collaborative behaviors are hard to learn; hence, while many project teams are formed with great optimism, few are managed for success. Hopefully, however, this new group of people can work together as a team and find a vaccine.




After class today I also thought that this link would be interesting to you, Prof. Berdayes... it is on "teamwork artifacts"

9.30.2007

Human Relations vs. Human Resources

For the fourth post, discuss the differences between the human relations and human resource approaches to management. Pay particular attention to how they approach the issue of worker participation. Remember to define your concepts and provide quotes to substantiate your argument. Concrete examples also help.

What is human relations? Human relations thinking emphasizes the interpersonal and social needs of individuals and marks a clean break from earlier points of view. Mary Parker Follett, Elton Mayo & Chester Barnard first founded it in the 1920’s & 30’s. They examined the employee-manager relationship in an entirely new way. Their work provided the foundation for the human relations approach and became the precursor of contemporary thinking about management and leadership.


Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) believed that “genuine power can only be grown…for genuine power is not coercive control but coactive control” & that workers at all levels in any organization were sources of creativity whose loyalty “is awakened…by the very process that creates the group.” The democratic ideal, she believed, was achieved by integrating organizations, neighborhoods, & communities through teamwork and by encouraging individuals to live their lives fully.

Elton Mayo stressed the limits of individual rationality & the importance of interpersonal relations. Mayo held that
1. Society comprises groups, not isolated individuals
2. Individuals are swayed by group norms & do not act alone in accord with self-interests; and
3. Individual decisions are not entirely rational, but are also influenced by emotions.

Chester Barnard asserted the importance of cooperation in organizations: “Organizations by their very nature are cooperative systems & cannot fail to be so.” The key to cooperation, he argued, lay in persuading individuals to accept a common purpose, from which all else would follow.

Over time, Mayo & his colleagues realized that the productivity improvements they had measured had little to do with the degree of illumination or other physical conditions in the place. Instead, they found that the increased attention given to the workers by management & researchers was the key to increased productivity. This finding, that increased attention raised productivity, has come to be known as the Hawthorne effect. For the first time, it was shown that individual workers were complex beings, sensitive to group norms & possessing multiple motives, values, and emotions.

According to Chris Argyris (who wrote On Organizational Learning & Personality and Organization), the principles of formal organization, such as hierarchy & task specialization, are incongruent with the developmental needs of healthy adults. Research that applies human relations thinking to the relationship between management and organizational effectiveness has been inconclusive and disappointing. Its underlying ideology has been interpreted as an unacceptable willingness to trade profitability for employee well-being.

What is human resources? While, incorporating most of the assumptions of human relations, the human resources approach is concerned with the total organization climate as well as with how an organization can encourage employee participation and dialogue. According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people’s basic needs for food, shelter, and belonging must be satisfied before they can move toward achieving their full human potential, which Maslow calls “self-actualiztion.”

Maslow poses the question, “What kinds of management and what kinds of reward or pay will help human nature to grow healthily into its fuller and fullest stature?” The problem of management is that of setting up social conditions in the organization so that the goals of the individual merge with those of the organization. Maslow’s ideas permeate contemporary management theory and practice. If designed correctly, the workplace becomes a site where individuals can realize their full potential and remain continually motivated to do so.

Douglas McGregor (1960) argued that classical approaches are based in part on an assumption that the average employee dislikes work and avoids responsibility in the absence of external control. He calls the control-oriented, bureaucratic style of management “Theory X
1. The average human being has an inherent dislike of work & will avoid it if he [or she] can
2. Because of [their]…dislike of work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, [or] threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organizational objectives
3. The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, & wants security above all

McGregor advances an alternative set of assumptions or principles in his “Theory Y
1. The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest
2. External control and threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward organizational objectives. [People] will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which [they are] committed.
3. Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement (including the reward of self-actualization)
4. The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but [also] to seek responsibility
5. The capacity to exercise…relatively high degree[s] of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population
6. Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potential…of the average [person is] only partially utilized
Unlike the “Theory X” manager, the “Theory Y” manager has a more participative & facilitative management style that treats employees as valued human resources.

University of Michigan professor Rensis Likert has contributed to our understanding of high-involvement organizations. Likert’s principle of supportive relationships holds that all interactions within an organization should support individual self-worth and importance, with emphasis on the supportive relationships within work groups and open communication among them. Likert divides organizations into four types, or “systems,” based on degree of participation:
System I – explorative/authoritative
System II – benevolent/authoritative
System III – consultative
System IV – participative

The human resources approach continues the human relations tendency to treat all organizations as similar, which opponents in the institutional school and the cultural approach view as inappropriate. Moreover, while human resources emphasizes employee participation in organizational decision making, it does not explain the pragmatics or politics involved in establishing such a voice for employees.

As already stated, human relations consists of increased attention given to the workers by management, which was the key to increased productivity. Human resources, on the other hand, is concerned with the total organization climate as well as with how an organization can encourage employee participation and dialogue. Although very similar, each approach to management focuses on one certain ideal.

Human relations is that of increased productivity. Human resources is that of the organizational climate. Human relations is more focused on giving the employees just enough to keep them happy for the benefit of the company, for example see the Hawthorne Studies. Its major thrust is to improve the productivity of the individual for the benefit of the corporation rather than help the human being to grow
Human resources does just the opposite. They too want increased productivity, however the type of attention that they give to their workers is to first and foremost benefit the person and then the company, similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This can include, but is not limited to health benefits, vacations, retirement plans & better work atmospheres. The human resource management serves various functions – hiring, payroll, evaluation and performance management, promotions, public relations, compensation & planning.

Information was attained from “Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint” (5th. Edition) by Eric M. Eisenberg, H.L. Goodall Jr. & Angela Trethewey

Classic - A Must Watch

9.28.2007

Organizational Comm & Classical Management

Question # 3: Discuss which approach or approaches to Organizational Communication seems most closely connected to the Classical approaches to management and discuss why this so.

Organizational communication is the interaction required to a direct group toward a set of common goals. There are four different approaches to organizational communication.
The information-transfer approach views communication as a metaphoric pipeline through which information flows from one person to another. It sees communication as a tool that people use to accomplish their objectives. This version of communication theory rests on the following assumptions: (1) language is capable of transferring thoughts and feelings from one person to another person, (2) speakers and writers insert thoughts and feelings into words, (3) words contain those thoughts and feelings, and (4) listeners or readers extract those thoughts and feelings from the words (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 29).
The transactional-process model asserts that in actual communication, clear distinctions are not made between senders and receivers. Rather people play both roles simultaneously (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 30).
The strategic-control perspective regards communication as a tool for controlling the environment. It sees communicators as having multiple goals and recognizes that while people may have reasons for their behavior, they cannot be expected to communicate in ways that consistently maximize others’ understanding (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 32).
The definition of organizational communication as the balance of creativity and constraint is the moment-to-moment working out of the tension between individual creativity and organizational constraint (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 36).

Classical management approaches are represented by a collection of theories that share the underlying metaphor of organizations modeled after efficient machines (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 64). There are five theories that fall under the classical management approach.
Division of labor refers to the separation of tasks into discrete units (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 71).
Hierarchy refers to the vertical arrangement of power and authority that distinguishes managers from employees (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 71).

Scientific Management is based on the assumption that management is a true science resting on clearly defined laws, rules and principles (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 72).
Fayol’s Classical Management articulates the five elements of classical management: planning, organizing, commanding (goal setting), coordinating, and controlling (evaluating) (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 75-76).

Bureaucracy has the following characteristics: (1) a fixed division of labor among participants, (2) a hierarchy of offices, (3) a set of general rules that govern performances, (4) a rigid separation of personal life from work life, (5) the selection of personnel on the basis of technical qualifications and equal treatment of all employees and (6) the participants’ view of employment as a career; tenure protecting against unfair arbitrary dismissal (Eisenberg, Goodall, et al. p. 77).

After looking at the various Classical Management approaches and comparing them to the approaches to Organizational Communication, I believe that due to the definitions in the book, the two sets are very different and there are no real connections between them. The approaches to Organizational Communication are very fluid with very little to no rules. The Classical Management approaches on the other hand are more structured and rigid.

If you break down the approaches to Organizational Communication however, there are a two Classical Management approaches that might fit. For example, the strategic-control perspective, which states that communication is a tool for controlling the environment, is very similar to the communication in the Hierarchy system. In a hierarchy, tasks and rules travel in a downwards motion from the “top of the pyramid to the bottom.” Thus, communication can control various environmental issues within a company from upper management to the factory workers.

Finally, the balance of creativity and constraint perspective, which states that communication is the moment-to-moment working out of the tension between individual creativity and organizational constraint, is similar to that of the Division of labor. This is true due to numerous reasons. First off, nowadays companies have been getting rid of the traditional single responsibility jobs. Instead, people have their own responsibilities as well as working in a “team” and accomplishing larger goals. Secondly, although these teams are comprised of people with varying personalities, they have to all work toward a single goal, thus balancing creativity and constraint.

9.24.2007

The replacable worker

After talking about McDonalds and how their employees are handled, I thought that it was very funny to run into this -

As I was driving down to Indy this past weekend, I stopped at a McDonalds to grab some coffee. The drive-thru line was quite long so I decided to go inside. Thank God I did, because I was able to witness exactly what we have been talking about in class!

Standing there waiting for them to bring my coffee out, a young guy - probably in his late teens, early twenties walked into the restaurant. He was holding his uniform and shoes and placed it on the outer edge counter and said to the worker standing there, "I quit, I can't handle this any more. Make sure that they get this uniform so that it isn't taken out of my paycheck." He waits until he makes sure that a few people have heard that and then leaves. Who would have thought?

9.21.2007

Flip that Burger

Question #2: Select someone with extensive work experience and ask them about efforts to increase worker productivity that they have witnessed or been a part of in some way (remember that these efforts can include the coordination of physical effort as well as the coordination of belief). Ask them to what extent they believe these efforts were successful and how it felt to be involved in them. Apart from their effects on productivity, did these efforts tend to improve the quality of the workplace for workers?

One after the other burgers are flipped until they are perfectly cooked, the exact amount of ketchup is squirted out and 2-3 pickles are added, then on the bun it goes – wrapped up and placed in your McDonald’s bag. Other than Henry Ford’s car making process founded in the early Industrial Age, no other major corporation uses this process so blatantly. However, does this sort of process of “Fordism” or “Scientific Management” only show its face in the factory and fast food world? I think not. I believe that throughout the decades this process, created by Frederick Taylor, has been molded and formatted to fit any and every type of job in the world.

What are Fordism and the Scientific Management and how are they important in the scheme of organizational theories?
Fordism is a word that was coined by Henry Ford in 1910 to describe his successes in the automobile industry. He improved mass production methods and was the first to introduce assembly lines in his factories.
Scientific Management also known as Taylorism is a method in management theory, founded by Frederick Taylor, which determines changes to improve labor productivity. “Taylor’s goal was to transform the nature of both work and management. He hoped that cooperation between managers and employees would bring a new era of industrial peace (Eisenberg, Goodall, et. all. pg. 72).”

In Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, he describes scientific management as thus –
“It is no efficiency device, nor is it any group of efficiency devices. Scientific management is no new scheme for paying men, it is no bonus system, no piecework business, no premium system of payments; it is no new method of figuring costs. It is no one of the various elements by which it is commonly known, by which people refer to it. It is not time study nor man study. It is not the printing of a ton or two of blanks and unloading them on a company and saying, ‘There is your system, go ahead and use it.’ Scientific management does not exist and cannot exist until there has been a complete mental revolution on the part of the workmen working under it, as to their duties toward themselves and toward their employers, and a complete mental revolution in the outlook for the employers, toward their duties, toward themselves and toward their workmen.”

Thus, when interviewing my mother – Amy Peterson, a 46 year old Manager of Thomasville Furniture – I wanted to see if, “Scientific management does not exist and cannot exist until there has been a complete mental revolution on the part of the workmen working under it, as to their duties toward themselves and toward their employers, and a complete mental revolution in the outlook for the employers, toward their duties, toward themselves and toward their workmen.”

Q: Have you witnessed any efforts to increase worker productivity or been part of any?
A: Yes. The store I work at, Thomasville, uses a process known and used at numerous other commission-based stores as “Concept Selling.” Concept selling is a technique where when you greet a customer you start social and stay social, thus building a relationship with them. It is not until later on that you start to talk about the products offered in the store.

Q: To what extent did you believe these efforts were successful?
A: I believe that this process is very successful and has been extensively proven depending on the salesperson.
Here is another example of the use of concept selling.

Q: How did it feel to be involved?
A: Jokingly my mother says at first “Totally invigorating.” Then, however, she proceeds to say that as a manager it is an extremely positive experience. Furthermore, when the process works and sales are up, that means that her bonuses as a manager also increase.

Q: Did these effects improve the quality of the workplace?
A: Definitely, when it is commission sales people are up, the employees are happier and thus want to keep doing a good job. Also, people doing the same selling technique, customized to fit their own personality, creates an equal playing field for all. Finally, sales increase when the employees are happier.

Overall, after talking with my mother, you can see that Scientific Management and Fordism have both shown a bit of their faces in the more corporate world. Even though their processes have blended a bit with other organizational theories, the overall underlying theories are Fordism and Scientific Management.

Here is a fun visual of the assembly line - brought to you by Coca Cola