[Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?

Fri Aug 8 03:16:43 PDT 2014

Huw,

my responses between the lines below:

CRISTINA: > My interviews to the employers and managers begun by questions
like "What
> does this enterprise do? what are the goods produced? how work is
> organized? assembly line or machine tools?" etc.
> So I interpreted their answers as a description of the business in which
> the enterprise is involved. That gave me information and data to classify
> the enterprise by referring to the typology I had elaborated about the
main
> strategies of production. As I wrote in one of my previous emails, the
> strategy of production is what I consider the object of activity of the
> firm.
>
>
HUW: Your attributing an object of activity to a company (?) seems a bit
awkward
to me in terms of locution.  A strategy is a plan -- a sets of goals etc
-- but it is the (ongoing) stable relation that the plan is designed to
achieve that would consititute something like the object of activity (do
you agree?)  i.e. a specific form of production with the character
demarcated by the manifest plan (the real strategy, which might be
different from the claimed strategy).

CRISTINA: yes, I could have used the locution "form of production". I have
preferred the term "strategy of production" to give the idea that companies
are always in a process of denifition of their object because they have to
respond to a globalized competition. Mass production can be seen as a form
of production, but if I use this locution, I give the idea that this form
is stable. The workers have to deal with the strategy and not the form of
production. They have to make sense of the strategy has it emerges day by
day through the assigned work and tasks.

HUW: With respect to (personal) activities mediating between the
individual(s)
and the demands, I would locate the individual's objective imagination as
centrally applied to both.  The acitivity of the individual is maintained
(held steady) through their objective imagination, which is used to
negotiate (and is partially derived from) the demands of the situation
(demands of mass production, lack of sleep etc).

CRISTINA: I absolutly agree. This is what emerges from the interviews. The
older workers have an image of the object, and their actions and operations
are influenced by this imagination.

HUW:Hence a hierarchy of motives might resolve to a hierarchy of relations
of
psychological functions, yielding objective imagination (Vygotsky again),
depending on your meaning of hierarchy of motives...

CRISTINA: I am not sure I agree with you. Maybe we give different meanings
to the hierarchy of motives? indeed when I refer to the latter, I have in
mind "hierarchy of personal sense of motives". I have found useful this
concept because it leads to look at a) what is the personal sense of
working in that enterprise for each older worker? does the motive/object of
the company have a sense for the older worker? and b) can the older worker
have contact with the motive/object?
The second question has led me to discuss the taylorist managerial
principle of separation between conception and execution and develop the
hypothesis that the more work is organized according to this principle, the
less the older workers can be aware of the object of the activity, and make
sense of it. Difficult to summurize the findings of my empirical work here:
I can say that older workers make sense of their work according to the
image of the object they manage to develop. And there are some interesting
differences between the two case studies.

CRISTINA> My interviews to the older workers started by asking to tell me
when they
> begun to work, as a way to prompt a narrative of their life.
> The personal sense of motive - that is the subjective way to relate to the
> motive and oject of the activity of the firm - has emerged through the
> emotions, feelings, thoughts which the older workers were expressing while
> they were talking about their tasks.
>

HUW: Yes, although if it is a "classically western" structure (strategy of
production), then the needs of the workers will not actually figure within
it (much)!  The fact that you did research (for them) suggests that they
are a bit more "advanced" than classically western, i.e. that they are
groping for relations between strategy of production and the needs of the
workers to foster effective learning.  Out of interest, did the
organisation have some initial stimulus for the interest, e.g. problems in
effective learning?

CRISTINA: I chose the two enterprises to analyzed as case studies because I
found them interesting for my research. I asked the owner and the ceo the
permission to interviews some older workers. The owner and the Ceo did not
ask me to do the research for them. They did not show interest in the
findings of my research.

2014-08-08 3:29 GMT+02:00 Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>:

> How is it then, Martin, that there is a women's movement? which even
> includes working class women?
> And how is it that there are dozens of different political currents in the
> workers' movement, even rival trade union federations?
> I do not agree with the dichotomy objective (=class, or state, or
> whatever) vs personal. Universal and individual are either mediated by the
> particular or they are meaningless.
> I do not agree that classes step on to the stage of history as ready made
> subjects with self-consciousness and a political program.
> For a loyal Stalinist of course all these matters are settled. Women like
> men are guided by the Party. There is only one party of the working class.
> Individuals must subordinate themselves to the state, the object of the
> activity of a firm is to meet the 5 Year plan.
> Why be surprised about what I think, Martin? What do *you* think?
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>
>
> Martin John Packer wrote:
>
>> I'm surprised to hear you say this, Andy. I would think that an argument
>> could be made that the motive, the interest, of a class could be considered
>> objective, in the sense that it confronts individuals as something
>> independent of their personal motives. And even that the interest of one
>> class in particular could be considered objective in the sense that it
>> aligns with - or drives - a historical movement towards greater equity and
>> lesser exploitation.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On Aug 6, 2014, at 10:18 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> What is an objective motive? Or to put it another way, what motive is
>>> there which is not personal?
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

-- 

Maria Cristina Migliore, Ph.D.

Senior Researcher

IRES Istituto Ricerche Economico Sociali del Piemonte

Via Nizza, 18

10125 Torino – Italia

Tel. +39 011 6666463

cell. 348 0454272

Fax.  +39 011 6696012

e-mail   migliore@ires.piemonte.it

skype mariacristinamigliore

IRES web www.ires.piemonte.it

LinkedIn Maria Cristina Migliore

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