Where Economics and Sociology Meet: Motivation

[Willravel]

I invite you to enjoy the following video, which is an animation added to a talk given by career analyst Dan Pink (bio here)



I want you to think about the argument Mr. Pink (no relation to Reservoir Dogs) makes, because it's important. Traditionally, in basic economics, consumers and producers are treated as "rational actors", individuals who automatically balances costs against benefits to arrive at action that will maximize personal advantage, which in capitalism, is most often money. The basic, basic theory is if people have an opportunity to get more money for an amount of work that's most efficient for that pay level, they will take the opportunity. Enter Linux and Wikipedia and Apache, demonstrating at least some people are able to factor into the equation personal growth, imagination, and fun, not simply more money.

Hopefully this doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea to you, as money should be a means to an end and not an end in and of itself, but if you're like me part of you internally replied, "Holy crap!" when hard data started entering the picture. Challenge, mastery, and contributing something can all be very real, even measurable incentives just the same as money. It seems like in the scramble to understand how economics work, we can forget personal fulfillment and purpose.

What are your thoughts?

[Baraka_Guru]

My thoughts are that I don't have any of those things, which is why I'm not motivated at the moment.

However, the book has merit. HR pros have been looking at these things for years. It's not always about the money.

[ASU2003]

I am at that stage of my life now. An extra $1,000 or $10,000 won't change my life. I wouldn't do anything different (yet if I attempted to make a little bit in the market and lost it all, that would have an effect). Having an extra week (or month) of vacation time would be a good motivator.

I'm not sure I would want to work at a company that would allow me to do anything and then take my non-related ideas. But, I like the concept of companies helping their employees start businesses on the side or coming up with products that benefit society.

[Vaultboy]

I agree 100% - Its about more than money.

As a civil servant, I'm always confronted with an attitude that civil service is ineffective and that the private sector is so productive, because a
a) individuals in the state have a higher level of job security than those employed in the private sector, leading to a lack of motivation to perform. (which I interpret as performance is motivated by fear)
b) individuals in the private sector are driven by performance bonuses or performance-based contracts (which I interpret as performance is motivated by reward - not money)
c) individuals in the private sector are driven by achievement, and the state constantly underachieves (which I interpret as performance is motivated by recognition).

To which I have the simple response that none of the elements they refer to - fear, reward or recognition - are actually financial, yet everybody deems it to speak about money. None of them are unique to the private sector either, or even capitalism. How is it that the Soviet union produced so many outstanding individuals? Produced so many technological advances? The view that personal motivation stems purely from personal financial gain is one of the great fallacies of popular capitalist interpretation.

[astroid60]

This teacher is truly a genius! As the late Adrian Rogers said, "you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on this plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

[SecretMethod70]

Made up stories that are sent in e-mail chains contribute nothing to meaningful conversation. Let's not ruin an otherwise interesting topic with meaningless posts.

[Tully Mars]

You don't like A Rogers? Who could discount a guy who once said-

“I believe slavery is a much maligned institution; if we had slavery today, we would not have this welfare mess.”

Oh, yea and as to the rest of the "story" it's urban legend, proven false repeatedly.

[Jinn]

Thank you Will for sharing this. I love these RSAnimate videos, at least of the ones I have seen. The topic especially resounds for me, because at least anecdotally I can verify it with everyone "skilled" worker I know dissatisfied with their work despite being paid extremely well, and similar friends who are paid dirt but love it as a result of the autonomy and mastery available. Even my own work could be considerably more rewarding if they'd allow more autonomy and mastery. As is, they're paying me stupidly well but I have no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum required.

[roachboy]

this is an interesting clip. and if you come out of a marxian background at all, there's nothing surprising about the results. what is surprising, if you think about it, is the pervasiveness of a division of intellectual labor at the center of capitalism that requires it's own ineffective implementation in order not to collapse the system as a whole---top-down command systems, fragmentation of tasks, deskilling.

the replacement of the complexity of social beings with the idiocy of profit-reward/loss-punishment hydraulics in "theories" of motivation. the main culprit in institutional terms for these idiotic "theories" is economics programs, laboratories for capitalist pseudo-science. court astrologers. charlatans. **especially** at the level of the baseline models.


since the 1970s, the period at which capitalist organization began to spill over the traditional nation-state boundaries that made of it an aspect of at least one viable-ish period of social organization (fordism) it's been important to not talk much about actual production in the backwater of the american media-scape. this because globalizing capitalism benefits holders of capital as a production process. we had to be persuaded that indices of capital circulation were indices of overall economic well-being.

remaking the image of people in the image of capital flows...wholesale subordination of human beings to money. that's where we live, sports fans. and capitalist theories of motivation are just a particular instance.


why are there artists? one of the main reasons might just be that art provides maximum space for autonomy. people make stuff all the time without money being a motivation.
the incentive systems fall off the edge of the blinkered little world of capitalist ideology. artists are a Problem.

so there's a series of claims about what motivates people that cannot account for most of the objects which surround those who make these claims, at the level of design. they cannot account for anything that the speakers take pleasure in doing for the sake of it, including, maybe, making stupid statements about human motivation.

another way--->there are two conflicts that are as old as capitalism. they get collapsed into each other in part because it was politically expedient for marx to do it when outlining what turned out to be the main texts that defined class conflict as an imaginary construction. the one is the tendency to create a mass of underpaid, brutalized interchangeable workers/wage slaves as a function of the way production is organized on its own. the other is involves skilled workers who find themselves in often protracted conflicts over the preservation of professional and personal autonomy.

this is not new that autonomy matters.
it's only surprising now in the states---maybe---because of the extent to which we live in a dysfunctional ideological context.

[Willravel]

While I enjoy the deconstruction, when I watch the video the first thing that comes to mind is how to go about "fixing the system" on a small-scale. What would a business model look like if it factored in the above? Equal (but of course reasonable) pay for non-physical jobs but time set aside to be purely creative, as was mentioned above?

[roachboy]

what kind of bidness do you have in mind, will?
other folk may disagree, but i would think that the model would be pretty tightly linked to the exact process you'd be about and would be about finding ways to maximize autonomy within that process.

[Willravel]

I hadn't really considered what kind of business this might work with. My first high school job was at Radio Shack and, though I do remember many boring and tedious days there, I'm not sure being invited to be creative in how to better pester customers or wear a blue dress shirt from Sears would have really made the experience more rich or fulfilling. I would suppose a job for which you've had an education would be a good place to start, a job one chose to a certain degree and at least once had a passion for.

[Baraka_Guru]

I think the best kind of business for this sort of thing is one that is predominantly production- or process-oriented. I think it's a bit more difficult if it's a sales-oriented or service oriented, but it's still possible even in those cases. Certain environments are counterintuitive when it comes to creativity and autonomy and such. Radio Shack, for example.

However, in the culture industry, there is much process- and production-oriented work: producing books, designs, films, stage plays, for example. Where you grant employees the things mentioned in the video, I can see people becoming more motivated.

But even in manufacturing and tech environments, I think you could have the same thing. There are forward-thinking companies that have prided themselves on giving rewards to people who come up with new ideas for improvements, etc., and the rewards aren't always monetary.

I guess that sort of thing.

[roachboy]

is there space for autonomy in a "service economy"?

i don't think so because finding stuff isn't the same as making stuff.

but i don't know if that explains my point.
trying to figure out how to explain it better.

[Baraka_Guru]

There is, rb, but it's not as easily defined or permitted, I don't think.

With production, you produce a product which is then sold.

With service, you are the product, as it were.

Autonomy within a service in many cases would mean inconsistency with the "product."

At least with production, you can set a standard for the end result. With service, much of what you do is the end result. Not always, but I imagine that's what makes it more difficult.

[roachboy]

well, with non-capitalist forms of production. non- or post-
whatever that second may turn out to be. though it is the case that there are already lots of ways of making stuff that are way beyond the classical long production runs of standardized commodities that was the paradigmatic older capitalist organization. toyota-ism is well past that--adaptable heads at the center of assembly lines, quality teams...not like the ford model. but still capitalist. back in the day, the usual counter-point to toyota was udivalla (spelling?) which was a volvo factory that embedded into its organization hybrid autonomist/social democratic features that resulted in a very different culture than did mutant kanban.

Enriching Production: Perspectives on Volvo's Uddevalla plant as an alternative to lean production - Munich RePEc Personal Archive

more later...stuff to do in the mines, sadly.