McKay, M., & Fanning P.
(1994).
Self-Esteem : A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing and Improving.
"Within a given profession or social level, our culture next awards worth based on accomplishments. Getting a raise, a degree, a promotion, or winning in a competition are worth a lot. Acquiring the right house, car, furnishings, boat, or college education for your kids—all those accomplishments are worth a lot, too. If you get fired or laid off, lose your home, or in any other way slip down the accomplishment ladder, you are in deep trouble. You lose all your counters and become socially worthless.
Buying into these cultural concepts of worth can be deadly. For example, John was a bank examiner who equated his worth with his accomplishments at work. When he was late in meeting an important deadline, he felt worthless. When he felt worthless, he got depressed. When he got depressed, he worked slower and missed more deadlines. He felt more worthless, got more depressed, worked less diligently, and so on in a deadly downward spiral." (p. 88)
Middelton-Moz, J.
(1990).
Shame & Guilt: Masters of Disguise.
"Children who grow up in shaming environments quickly learn that one must blame or be blamed. There are very few compromises in shaming environments. It often feels like we are playing 'emotional hot potato' in our adult relationships...Passing the blame to someone else is our attempt to protect an already injured self from more wounds." (p. 82)
Kaufman, G.
(1985).
Shame: The Power of Caring.
"Defenses against shame are adaptive. They have been the client's only ways of surviving intolerable shame. Strategies of defense aim at protecting the self against further exposure and further experiences of shame. Several of the most prominent strategies are rage, contempt for others, the striving for perfection, the striving for power, and internal withdrawal. Both perfectionism and excessive power-seeking are strivings against shame and attempt to compensate for the sense of defectiveness which underlies internalized shame. None of these are unitary strategies; rather, they become expressed in unique and varied ways, with several often functioning together." (p. 128)
Mackay, H. B.
(1993).
Sharkproof: Get the Job You Want, Keep the Job You Love...in Today's Frenzied Job Market.
"So you got fired.
You can take the hurt and anger you feel and use it constructively. To prove they made a mistake when they let you go. Think. And do. Prove those critics wrong, wrong, wrong. Keep the vision of their pinched little faces handy, where you can get at them when you need them. Make them eat their words. Show them your stuff. Get mad. Get going. Get even.
Payback time is coming." (p. 248)
Klein, N.
(2008).
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
"'The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism
and justifies "severe" measures—as well as strongly reinforcing
the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal.
The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued
that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal.'
—Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977" (p. 177)
Stephenson, N.
(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)