Rivethead -- a Riveting Read Quite Often, Essay

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Rivethead -- a Riveting Read

Quite often, management textbooks tend to fall into two categories. The first typical style of a management textbook takes the form of a quantitative text. It deals with employees as sets and reams of numbers, and attempts to analyze and make generalizations about computed processes and statistically tabulated results. What standard operating procedures produce the greatest quantifiable increases in productivity under different economic circumstances? The second type of management textbook tends to be vague, full of sociological and psychological assertions, steps to follow, principles, and manifestos, all filled with words like 'motivation' and 'goals.'

The differences between the appearances of these books, in heft and weight, and design may seem considerable, but there are also many similarities too -- none of the workers in the statistical tables seem to take drugs, none of the workers in the thirteen or fourteen power principles like to curse. All stress-related disagreements are managed carefully and cleanly between employees, with the aid of members of competent human resources staffs, with a certain percentage of efficacy.

Suddenly, into this pristine classroom atmosphere comes a former General Motors Quality Control man named Ben Hamper. One can almost hear Hamper striding into a business classroom, throwing a management textbook into a metal wastebasket, and flinging his book Rivethead onto a nearby student's desk. Try to stop him from saying what's on his mind and you're likely to be greeted with a "shut the fuck up," an example of the profanity that frequently occurs in the text, but never gratuitously.

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(46) Rather the harshness of Harper's language reflects what it is like to dwell in the world of an assembly line plant, to dwell in a work of men and monotony and what Hamper calls car, windshield, car windshield, drudgery piled atop drudgery -- the realities of everyday working life in mass production in meat and potatoes industrial America.

Rather than attempting to provide a theory about what works, Rivethead show the reality from the point-of-view of employees on the floor of a GM plant. It gives the reader the ability to draw conclusions him or herself from the anecdotes portrayed. Unlike a textbook, it gives the unique feeling of what it is like to work in a particular industry, rather than to make generalizations about management and industry in either quantitative or qualitative theory. Why don't you just ask us what's wrong many workers complain, when greeted with mysterious directives from management that they believe to be misguided? Ben Hamper does not ask to be heard, he tells.

However, this is not to give the impression that Hamper disliked his work. His description of the life he lead in the auto industry is also poignant in the love he began to feel for his job GM and the desperate possessiveness he felt for the company. He loved the masculine and blue-collar edge of his work, because it was the source of his self-esteem, despite its routine nature. GM 'was' the town. The work even seemed to affect the way….....

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