William Greider, "Work Rules," and:

• Lani Guinier, "Second Proms and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule" and Steven Johnson, "The Myth of the Ant Queen"
• Jon Gertner, "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness"

Greider, Guinier, Johnson and Self-Organization

William Greider's essay describes the workplace as a space that has the potential to confer various sorts of pleasure and satisfaction to a group of people engaged in a common enterprise. The office, the factory, and their equivalents determine, he claims, the civic engagement of Americans by “socializing” them into patterns of behavior that become routine. Let's assume Greider's proposal is feasible and the workers of the world own the businesses that currently employ them. Based on Greider's text, how might such a world of worker-owned business challenge, complicate, or confirm the ideals, difficulties, or consequences of the models of self-organization, democracy, and decision making discussed by Johnson and Guinier?

Brian Page, Fall 2005

Greider & Gertner: Individualism and the Socialization of Powerlessness

Context: William Greider argues that the American workplace is reminiscent of the feudal system of lords (management) and serfs (lower workers) in Work Rules . He stresses that workers have long since acquiesced to this social environment since “the loss of freedom goes largely unnoticed because it is so routinely part of their lives.” (Greider 213)

 Question: Greider argues that the “socialization of powerlessness” is an intrinsic trait of the American workplace, where individualism and freedom are unacceptable. How is the workplace, as discussed by Greider, impacted by the theories that Gertner discusses?

 Thoughts to consider while answering this question:

 Consider this quote:

Our culture says, if your hands are involved, you can't have a brain,” Ronald Blackwell, an AFL-CIO official and former clothing-union leader, observed. “The seamstress and the machinist and nearly every kind of job involves brain as well as hands, but the intellectual content of working with your hands is ignored.”

-Has the advent of the information age (i.e. the Internet) perpetuated this thought?

-Does society value white-collar work rather than blue-collar work? If so, how has this thinking lead to a “loss of freedom” in the workplace? Think about how some people feel that the only way to success (or happiness ) is through a high paying job, regardless of a possible loss of freedom.

Justin Auciello, Fall 2005

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Greider link-o-mat.

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