[EAS] Competition and Erosion
Peter J. Kindlmann
pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Tue Nov 29 03:11:34 EST 2005
Dear Colleagues -
A sobering announcement about a just-to-be-released report from the
National Academies Press "Rising Above The Gathering Storm:
Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future":
http://www.crn.com/components/weblogs/article.jhtml?articleId=174401510&printableArticle=true
If you've seen the 1987 movie "Broadcast News", do you remember the
growing-up scene early on where Aaron Altman (played by Albert
Brooks), later to become the star reporter among the three
protagonists, is beaten up by high school toughs? In helpless rage he
shouts at them "You'll never earn more than nineteen thousand
dollars." As his tormentors walk away, one says to the other,
"Nineteen thousand - not bad!" Not a particularly good metaphor for
international competitiveness, I'll grant you, but a charming movie
if you haven't seen it.
More seriously, and hardly ever talked about because of the primacy
of economic arguments, are the "quality of life" issues of the "new
capitalism." One of the exceptions is Richard Sennett's benchmark
book "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work
in the New Capitalism" (Norton, 1998). A sociologist at the London
School of Economics and New York University, Sennett contrasts the
vanished world of rigid, hierarchial organizations where what
mattered was a sense of personal character, against the brave new
world of reengineering, risk, flexibility and short-term teamwork. He
sees the positives of a dynamic economy, but also the steady erosion
in the workplace of a sense of sustained purpose, a sense of
integrity and trust in others -- attributes that an earlier
generation understood as essential to personal character. Put
differently, seldom if ever can parents now bequeath to their
children any sense of their work ethic. As Studs Terkel puts it in a
jacket quote "a worker has become ... as dispensable as Kleenex."
--PJK
More information about the EAS-INFO
mailing list