well, there are some bad managers out there..
one of the points of the book is most people start out as eager, happy, excited.. and with poor management, they become disgruntled, sullen workers.. and management often complains and tells them to buck up.. they see it at as a morale problem, when in reality it is often a larger problem
(and sometimes it can't be "managed")
one old examplein the book, involve miners in south african mines. Most were blacks. most were unskilled, but a small percentage were the skilled operators of the "face" machine- a huge machine that ground the face of the rock. the noise was deafening.. so workers were required to wear elaberate hearing protectors.. only they didn't..
and when they didn't, they went deaf! you'd think, they'd really ought to wanna wear hearing protection!
the real problem, was status. since the job of operating the face machine was a high skilled, and high paying and high status job, the men who did it wanted to be recognized.. and one mark of the job, was going deaf from operating the machine. at the time (the book was written in early 1970's,) there were very few ways for black south africans to "strut their stuff" and show off their skill and high status.. but going deaf was one way.
men would choose to not to wear hearing protection, go deaf,and 'mark' themselves in their community as a high skilled worker. there pride of their status was more important to them than their hearing!
until management recognize why the men wouldn't wear hearing protection, they couldn't solve the problem, and get them to change. (managment in this case, tried to create evident visual sign to note the mens status.. first off, they started to require them to were uniforms.. and since only the face workers got uniforms, (which they never wore in the mine, they were to hot and uncomfortable) but could wear on the street) the uniform of the face machine operator gave the men a hazzard free way to proclaim their status!(you might ask why they didn't use the money they earned to buy status, but since the men lived most of the year in a dormatory on the work site, there was little they could do to show off their status)
kids often act 'out of their own best interests' too, and many times, when you find people doing things that seem, like they really ought to know better than to do, there are often reasons-- not ignorance, but some other factor that is working against them behaving a certain way.
i was "ignorant" about how to clean the sump pump in our first house.. even though, with out it, i couldn't do laundry. I never could learn how to shut it off, lie down on the celler floor, reach into the stagnent water, grab the slimy filter on the bottom of the pump, slide it up, and clean the slime off.. I remained ignorant- i learned to do remain ignorant, my ex had already displayed his ignorance about changing babies diapers..
people often motivated to remain ignorant!
