🚀 go-pugleaf

Daniel Ritsma (ritsma@yu1.yu.edu) wrote:
: Dale Worley comments that much of the "fear" that people talk about could be
: eliminated if people *expected* to change employment frequently, thus
: opening up communication with management.

: 1:I don't think workers fear *changing* employment so much as being put
: off and not finding other employment.The fear is one of unemployment
: rather than change.Unemployment is a very real fear for many as
: advances in technology permit society to produce more with less yet does
: not ration out available work.For example, my son works 15 hour days

Another fear-inducing element of job change is that, in our society,
staying in one job is frequently regarded as a Virtue, and there's a
widespread feeling that we don't have as many Virtues as we used to.
Americans have always preferred invididual, rather than structural,
explanations for things that happen to people.Saying that someone left
a particular job because the demands of the job market changed is an
example of a structural explanation.Saying that someone left a
particular job because he didn't display Appropriate Job Behavior
(defined the same way it was in the 1890's) is an example of an
individual explanation.Saying that someone left a job to get another
job that paid more would be another kind of individual explanation;
whether traditionalists would regard it as positive or not would depend
on the individual's social status position at the time of the change (if
it was high, then the individual would be considered to be motivated by
Achievement Motivation and Industriousness; if it was low, then the
individual would be motivated by Self Orientation and the Immediate
Pattern of Gratification).When a company closes down or restructures
and puts people out of work, we say the people "lost their jobs"; note
that the people are regarded as subjects, not objects, here; this
terminology reflects the preferred American view that individuals are
completely responsible for what happens to them.It also reflects the
fact that a transition from being employed to not being employed carries
a large amount of social stigma in our society, which, regardless of what
some conservative commentators say, values the work ethic VERY highly (in
fact, more highly than many countries that are outperforming us
economically).

In short, if we're going to restructure our economy in such a way that
frequent job changes become necessary (and I think we're going to have
to), we're also going to have to restructure part of our national system
of moral values, to the extent that tenure on a single job is no longer
seen as a measure of character.Many traditionalists will regard this
process as a cultural war (in the sense that Patrick Buchanon used the
term at the 92 GOP convention); the more extreme of them, unable to
recognize any differences between any beliefs that they hold, will regard
the process as an attack on motherhood and apple pie (just as 17th-century
Vatican officials viewed Galileo's theories of planetary motion as a
threat to the virginity of Mary (I'm not making this up)).We're going
to have to think of turning the clock forward to the 2000s rather than
turning it
back to the 1950s, and we're going to have to do it while a plurality of
the population grew up in the 1950s and therefore regards that period as
a Normal that we need to go Back To.We're going to have to do things
that many influential people will label "politically correct" or "socialist"
(in this context, these concepts are equivalent to the schoolyard bully
concept of "cooties").We're going to have to let accusations of
"lowering standards" roll off our backs.

In many ways, what we have to do is redefine our concept of "success."
We're going to have to stop thinking in terms of "upward mobility" (which
requires bloated, multi-level hierarchies; for example, the equation of
competence with promotion in the U.S Air Force has caused the number of
lieutenant colonels to exceed the number of lieutenants) and start
thinking in terms of "forward mobility."It will be a challenge, but I
think it's one that we as a nation are up to.We've had cultural change
before; in fact we've had it since the Revolution.Our culture is not
what it was in 1776, 1876 or even 1976.An anthropologist would
summarize this by describing us as an advanced society rather than a
primitive one.Some will say that this is a slam at America because it
means that we "lost" our original culture; I say it's no more of a slam
than saying that a person no longer behaves the way he did when he was
two years old.