Biblio
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(1995). Social Organization of Work.
"Alienation occurs when work provides inadequately for human needs for identity and meaning. Work is alienating to the extent that one does it only from economic necessity, not from its intrinsic pleasures." (p. 56)
"A common response to alienating work is passive resistance through making work into a game (Burawoy, 2000), restricting one`s output (Roy, 1952), or focusing on aspects of work tangential to the main productive activity (Collinson, 2003). For instance, workers often adjust to alienating situations by focusing on interactions with their peers. Managers label such behavioral responses 'poor performance.' However, such behaviors do not necessarily result from incompetence or laziness: rather, they may be straightforward responses to having a job that is tedious, repetitive, or alienating. These responses are difficult to predict from workers' levels of job satisfaction or commitment. Workers who are very committed to their work may be the ones most likely to resist alienating conditions. Those who are less committed may simply exit or grudgingly suffer in silence." (p. 68)
"A common response to alienating work is passive resistance through making work into a game (Burawoy, 2000), restricting one`s output (Roy, 1952), or focusing on aspects of work tangential to the main productive activity (Collinson, 2003). For instance, workers often adjust to alienating situations by focusing on interactions with their peers. Managers label such behavioral responses 'poor performance.' However, such behaviors do not necessarily result from incompetence or laziness: rather, they may be straightforward responses to having a job that is tedious, repetitive, or alienating. These responses are difficult to predict from workers' levels of job satisfaction or commitment. Workers who are very committed to their work may be the ones most likely to resist alienating conditions. Those who are less committed may simply exit or grudgingly suffer in silence." (p. 68)
(1994). What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement.
"It is a disturbing idea that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it is my job to help a depressed patient to feel both happier and see the world more clearly. I am supposed to be the agent of happiness as well as the agent of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think that her world is better than it actually is." (p. 199)
(1994). The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.
"People stay with roles that frustrate them because of the dynamics of the structure. Something about their own lives, relationships, or position makes each person 'right' for the part he plays. It all seems so predetermined, yet the factors that create this may, individually, be quite inconsequential. People may even be drawn into the roles which clash with their personalities. Then, horrifyingly, their personalities may change over time to match the role they have been given." (p. 412)
(1994). The Unwritten Rules of the Game: Master Them, Shatter Them, and Break Through the Barriers to Organizational Change.
"The orthodox wisdom tells us that if we want major and rapid changes in behavior, then the only way to achieve them is for people to feel that their jobs are on the line. So, we are supposed to engineer circumstances that will create a sense of urgency—let us be honest, a sense of fear—within the body of our organizations. And with that stick we can beat our employees into a new mindset.
The established dogma is a lie. Worse, it is a self serving and dangerous lie. It has become a myth that we have all been told for so long by so many people, that we in turn have passed it on to our own colleagues and so reinforced the apparent validity and common sense of the gospel." (p. 137)
The established dogma is a lie. Worse, it is a self serving and dangerous lie. It has become a myth that we have all been told for so long by so many people, that we in turn have passed it on to our own colleagues and so reinforced the apparent validity and common sense of the gospel." (p. 137)
(1994). Working Without a Net: How to Survive and Thrive in Today's High Risk Business World.
"Self-disclosers explain to others who they are, not just what they do. No one builds relationships unless they reveal more than job-related facts. Contrary to the old paradigm—which held that others don't have the right to know about your personal life—the new paradigm says that it's a necessity that they know." (p. 71)
(1993). C.G. Jung and the Problem of Evil: The Strange Trial of Mr. Hyde.
"To the extent that we are egocentric we live in fear, under a sense of constant threat. We also live out and fulfill only a small portion of our personalities, because the egocentric life is a cramped life. It is like living inside a walled, heavily defended castle. Here we try to feel secure, but it does not occur to us that our castle is also our prison." (p. 133)
(1993). Human Relations in Organizations.
"One approach in dealing with the problems of individual versus organization in the bureaucratic model is to develop an impersonal approach to human relations. Managers become more impersonal in their dealings with employees and attempt to ignore individual differences and focus on the task accomplishments. This leads to individual dissatisfaction because the employees believe that the organization is impersonal and is using them like a machine." (p. 75)
(1993). The Psychodynamics of Organizations.
(, Ed.).
"A wide variety of approaches that guide investigation of organizational life have openly and strongly challenged the assumption that organizations behave as rational systems." (p. xiv)
(1993). Quality connections: transforming schools through Total Quality Management.
"In common practice, managers believe that employees are motivated by merit ratings and performance evaluations—that people have to be enticed into high performance with rewards or punished for low productivity by probations, demotions, layoffs, and so forth. In the transformed setting, we believe that people intrinsically want to do a good job. They take a great deal of pride in workmanship. According to Deming, goals, slogans, performance pay, and incentives actually destroy motivation for doing good work." (p. 10)
(1993). Snow Crash.
Stephenson's dark social satire illustrates what an anti-ROWE future might look like:
"You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever comes in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is—as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms—having problems.
Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a workstation in the morning, it's not like the central computer doesn't notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything....You're only required to be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would definitely be noticed..." (p. 282)
"You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever comes in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is—as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms—having problems.
Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a workstation in the morning, it's not like the central computer doesn't notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything....You're only required to be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would definitely be noticed..." (p. 282)
(1992). Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science : A New Model for Healing the Whole Person.
"Dr. Diane Fassel and I wrote The Addictive Organization. Since the publication of that book, thousands of people have spoken or written to us about their recovery and what has happened to them in their addictive organizations as a result of their personal recovery. Their words differ, and the stories are essentially the same. They go like this: 'I'm an addict [alcoholic, workaholic—whatever kind of addict, it doesn't matter]. I am in recovery and I feel good about my recovery. It's going well. My life has really improved and I basically feel happy. Because of my recovery and, I believe, the changes in me, my family is changing. We are all actually getting better. But...I am not sure that I can maintain my sobriety and continue to work in my addictive workplace. If I really put my sobriety first, I cannot continue to work where I do." Often, I suggest to these people that they attend Al-Anon, with the workplace as the addict in their lives." (p. 192)
(1992). Learned Optimism.
"It's a disturbing idea, that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it was my job to help depressed patients both to feel happier and to see the world more clearly. I was supposed to be the agent of happiness and of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think his world is better than it actually is." (p. 108)
(1991). Frankenstein.
(1990). Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration.
"As William James wrote in Great Men and Their Environment, 'The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.'" (p. xxiii)
(1990). The Fifth Discipline.
"All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team's collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person's view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it's usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn."
(1990). Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal.
"When work, the productive process, becomes display, its meaning becomes lost. Its performance as part of the organizational drama becomes the only meaning it has. Accordingly, the parts it plays in the organization's transactions with the world become irrelevant. When this happens, work loses its adaptive function and becomes mere ritual. At the same time, the rituals that serve to express the individual's identification with the organization ideal, especially those connected with rank, come to be infused with significance for the individual. They become sacred. Thus, reality and appearance trade places. The energy that once went into the production of goods and services of value to others is channelled into the dramatization of a narcissistic fantasy in which the organization's environment is merely a stage setting." (p. 61)
(1990). Working With Difficult People.
Phenomenal advances in technology have led to a demand for speedier production. Couple that with hiring and firing in the labor market, and stress may become overwhelming. Even patient people can appear apoplectic."
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