RCRG
Syndicate
] "The philosophy of management by directive and control--regardless of whether it is hard or soft--is inadequate to motivate because the human needs on which this approach relies are today unimportant motivators of behavior. Direction and control are essentially useless in motivating people whose important needs are social and egoistic. Both the hard and the soft approach fail today because they are simply irrelevant to the situation." (p. 260)
"Techniques of control in the workplace became increasingly important as the body became the central problem of production. The early industrial employers needed to regulate, direct, constrain, anchor, and channel bodily energies for the purposes of sustained, often repetitive, productive activity. Still struggling to establish their legitimate authority, they invented techniques designed to control the laboring body. The French historian Michel Foucault has argued that these new techniques of industrial management laid the groundwork for a new kind of society, a 'disciplinary society', one in which bodily discipline, regulation, and surveillance are taken for granted." (p. 319)
"In the evolution of work design, employees are becoming increasingly more controlled by situational factors as opposed to exerting control over their work environments. As the research on mental health and stress revealed, the reductions in self-regulation (feeling 'out of control') impairs psychological well-being (Murphy, Hurrell, and Quick, 1992)." (p. 324)
"In the original American concept of internal and external sources of control, the implication is that the outer-directed person is offering an excuse for failure rather than a new wisdom. In other nations it is not seen as personal weakness to acknowledge the strength of external forces or the arbitrariness of events." (p. 149)
"You're stuck in a cube with a desktop computer and a phone with a cord so you can be there in person should your manager walk over to check up on whether or not you're working. The game becomes looking busy instead of working hard and solving problems and contributing. It's a game no one wins. You lose your freedom, your motivation, your soul, and in exchange for control over your life, your company gets little more than a show of work." (p. 28)