Posts Tagged ‘Frederick Winslow’

About Vocation

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

vocationsA person’s happiness and satisfaction in life is a function of how he perceives work. People perceive their work in three general categories: jobs, careers, and vocation. People who perceive their work as a Vocation report the highest Satisfaction with Life in general.

A job is just a means of earning an income. When people have a job they look forward to breaks, quitting time, the weekend, holidays, and vacation. Outside of working hours, little or no thought, time, or energy is devoted to the work.

The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, or voice – meaning to follow the voice of God, or to do what we are called to do. Young children know their calling but the System of Education and often their Parents make it very difficult for them to follow their Heart.  The main reason is that schools and many parents limit the vision of the child to a specific Career.

The word “career‘ has its origins in the Latin word for a Race-Track. A career is a race and the sad thing is that in a race only one person wins and many lose. People become highly frustrated and demotivated when they realize that they will not win the career. When this happens their work changes into a job or they start to look for their real vocation.

The most important difference between a Vocation and a Job is Direct Feedback. When you are a Nurse the positive response of the patient is the reward you are looking for. When you are an Artist or a Craftsman the enthusiasm of your customers for your product is a stimulus to move on. It is not strange that people who are experiencing their work as a job spend a lot of time in contexts (e.g. a soccer-club) where direct feedback is happening.

During the Industrial Revolution work became dehumanized and compartmentalized. Every worker controlled a small part of the production chain and/or was totally controlled by the production chain. The Feedback between the Result of the Work and Work is almost completely disappeared. Humans need Feed-Back. This is the main reason why the Employees in a Burocratic Factory Organization consider the Manager of their Career, their Boss, as their most important Customer.

When you want to understand Your real Vocation You could visit a Vocational Psychologist.

The creation of Vocational Psychology is linked to the emergence of the large commercial cities in which the factory system changed the keystone of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing. The factories needed specialized workers to operate and maintain the machines. The factories were managed by the principles of Scientific Management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Scientific Management, the extreme drive to work Efficiently, is still the driving force behind the Automation of Work.

child labor

During the Industrial Revolution many young man left the countryside and went to the big cities to find a job. They worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Far from home and family, they lived and slept at the workplace. Outside the shop open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, lovers for hire and abandoned children created a non-secure environment.

YMCA HistoryThe Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London, England, on June 6, 1844.

The YMCA created Dormitories, Gyms, Swimming pools, Bowling Alleys, Meeting Halls, Employment Bureaus, Libraries, Psychological Tests, Training Courses and Vocational Guidance Programs for the workers in the factories.

One of the important products of the YMCA was the Find Yourself Program that was transformed into a book by C.C. Robinson in 1912.

General Electric, the major manufacturer of light bulbs, had preliminary evidence that better lighting of the work place improved worker productivity. In 1924 AT&T’s Western Electric Hawthorne plant located in Cicero, Illinois, was chosen as the laboratory. The scientists detected that work was not only a physiological activity. The huge interest of the management in the workers of the Hawthorne Plant simply increased their productivity. This was a break with the Scientific Management School that saw work productivity as “mechanical”, and led to the decision to learn more about the psychology and the personality of the worker.

John Holland began his career as classification interviewer for the Army. In 1959 he published his Theory of Vocational Choice, in which he first described Six Types of Vocational Personalities.  In 1969, he and his colleagues at the American College Testing Program discovered that the Six Types fit a circular ordering of correlations called the Holland Hexagon. John Holland discovered that work is an Expression of the Personality.

Realistic people like well-ordered activities, or enjoy working with objects, tools, and machines.

Investigative people like activities that involve creative investigation of the world or nature.

Artistic people like unstructured activities, and enjoy using materials to create art.

Social people enjoy informing, training, developing, curing and enlightening others.

Enterprising people enjoy reaching organizational goals or achieving economic gain.

Conventional people enjoy manipulating data, record keeping, filing, reproducing materials, and organizing written or numerical data.

There is a strong relationship between the Holland Codes and other “circular” personality theories like the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, The Big Five and the Worldviews of Will McWhinny. Statistical research shows that the spread between the different personality types is almost constant. Personality Types are also inherited from the parents.

Since the development of the Holland Hexagon in the seventies the statistics show a high stability in the nature of occupations. The often discussed dramatic shift in the nature of work is not apparent in these data.  Although employment in the Investigative area, the Researchers, doubled over a period of 40 year it remained only 6% of employment. The Realistic Work Type, the Craftsman, has still the most occupational titles and the largest number of individuals employed. The Artistic Work Type (the Creators, 2%) has the fewest occupational titles and the fewest number employed.

What is Happening?

Work is an Expression of the Personality and the Personality is an Expression of the Work a person is Performing.

Personality Types and Work Types are distributed according to an almost constant distribution.

Personality Types and Work Types are inherited from the Parents.

The distribution is Not Without Any Sense.

There are Many Workers (Sheep) and just a few Shepherds needed.

Somebody has to Take Care of the Shepherds and the Sheep.

Somebody has to Keep the Books.

The Mythics, The Creators, The Artists, the Goats, Shape the Future but it takes a long time before the Sheep and the Shepherds follow the Creators.

The Creators (2%) are extremely Obstinate and Willfull. They want to take Care of Themselves, don’t accept any Leader or Helper, don’t care about Bookkeeping and Money and don’t want to Collaborate. They just want to find out Everything by Themselves.

The Creators are always remembered when they are dead.

That’s Life.

LINKS

About the History of Work

About The History of the YMCA

The History of Vocational Psychology, Mark Savickas, David Bakerf

A Short Introduction in Vocational Psychology

About the Hawthorne Effect

About the Big Five

About the Enneagram

About Myers-Briggs

About The Statistics of Myers Briggs

About the Holland Hexagon

A  Holland perspective on the U.S. workforce from 1960 to 2000

A Holland Perspective on the U.S. Workforce from 1960 to 1990

A Beautiful Visualization of the Changes in the Workforce between 1890 and Now

About Mythics and World Views

About The Industrial Revolution

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

industrial revolutionThe Industrial Revolution started with the mechanization of the textile-industry (1740-1790) in England.

A new collaboration concept the Mill, later translated in the Factory, is invented. The Industrial Revolution is preceded by the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is a Creative Phase.

The Industrial Revolution is a Social phase. A Social phase changes the way people cooperate.

Small scale cooperation structures were destroyed and replaced by large-scale cooperation structures.

The Industrial Revolution not only changed the way people cooperated in labour. It also changed the way Cities and Countries cooperated.

At the end of this phase (the Second World War) Europe and the World (UN, China, and India) started to Unite. Cooperation on the Level of the World became possible but was finally not realized.

The French Revolution (1789) breaks the power of the Aristocracy. The Bourgeois (the merchants, the entrepreneurs, the middle class) use the Mill to produce cheap standardized products on a large scale. They became the new Rulers of Society.

The mill and later the factory not only destroyed the Aristocracy.

It also destroyed the Small Scale Collaboration Structure of the Guilds. The Guilds, operating on the level of the City, took care of almost everything at that time.

They operated hospitals, educational facilities and insurance. When the mills turned into factories many people lost their job. The big cities were populated with very poor and hungry people.

Nobody took care of the sick and the old. They became the Prolitariat, the Under-Class. The existence of the Prolitariat produced a huge tension in society.

russian revolution2This tension was resolved when many pressure groups or movements (Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, and Communists) finally agreed upon new large scale institutions.  

The State, Parliament, Democracy, Voting, and The Union came into existence.

The Social Welfare State was constructed. Government took care of almost everybody.

The first Cotton Mill was opened in 1742. In 1762 Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny. It was operated by hand.

With the invention of the steam-machine (1769, Watt) manual labour was not needed anymore.

In 1785 the first mill was opened that used a steam-machine (the power loom).

The Steam Machine became a Major Paradigm. It highly influenced Physics (ThermoDynamics, Entropy) and Psychology (Freud).

steam_engineIn 1781 Kant wrote his book Kritik der reinen vernunft. He excluded the Imagination (illusions) and the Emotions (love, care, values, quantity) out of reasoning and introduced the concept of mechanized thinking (Logic). Kant excluded Art (Imagination) and Religion (the Emotions) and invented Science.

Mechanized (Scientific) Thinking was used to Optimize the Mill. Slowly it grew into a (big) factory. At the end of the Industrial Revolution Logical reasoning produced its most briljant artefact, the All Purpose Computer. The Computer became a major Paradigm.

The-Railroads-Of-The-World-124Between 1790 and 1840 the world was covered with Railroads. They facilitated the spread of the Industrial Revolution.

Cities flourished and died according to the distance to a railroad station (A node). Many infrastructures were created in this period (Telephone, Sewers, Water, Gas, and Electricity). Later the concept of the railroad was implemented in Traffic (Highway) and Computers (networks, hubs, servers). The Railroad Network became a major Paradigm.

Mechanic thinking resulted in Standardization. Between 1890 and 1940 Mass-production, Mass-consumption and Mass-media dominated society.

TFordThe first step was set by Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor with the production of the T-Ford. The theories of Taylor are until now (most of the time not recognized) used in many forms to optimize work-processes.

The end of optimization is reached when everything is turned into a Utility. A Utility is a Network that operates without Human Beings and transports Objects.

When we look at the Industrial Revolution from a higher perspective we can see the elements of the Cycle at work.

A phase of Creativity is followed by a Social Phase. It is the phase of Power Conflicts (Competition) and the construction of new Movements, new Groups and finally of new Institutions (The State, The Corporation).

The Hierarchy was the major control paradigm of this period. Everybody wanted to move to “the Top”. The Race to the Top was also visible in architecture. The SkyScraper with the Management at the Top became the Symbol of Power.

watching tvThe Industrial Revolution gave the Masses, the Slaves of the Middle Ages a better place. They changed from a Slave into a Consumer.

The Slave was dominated by his Owner. A Consumer is dominated by his Senses. On the Macro-level we see a move from the world-view of Control/Social (Master/Slave) to a Sensory/Social-pattern.

Will Mc Whinny called the Game of Sensory/Social The Game of the Market. The Industrial Revolution produced the Game of the Market.

At the end of this period the Masses controlled the Market. We are now in a demand oriented economy. This created a big problem for the mass-producers.

They controlled the masses and are desperatly trying to keep their position by Manipulation of the Media.

What is Going to Happen?

stock marketOn the level of the Kondratiev-cycle (Period 50 years) a phase of Creativity and the Individual was started in 1950.

This phase ended around 2000.

The move to the Individual challenged the structures of Mass-Production. People wanted to be treated as a Unique Human Being.

Industry found a solution to this need. They invented Mass Customization and User Involvement and went on with the Game of the Market.

This phase is now followed by a Social Phase (Start 2000). The Customer (the new Ruler) is organizing itself in Smart Customer Networks.

The Very Long Cycle (Precession, Period 25.000 years) and the Cycle of Culture (Periodicity 1250 year) is also changing its focus.

On the level of Culture we are moving to the Centre. We are converging on a new and unknown level, Earth. During the Social Phase of the Industrial Revolution huge collaboration structures were formed (EG, UN, NATO, China, India, …). These structures are challenged by the Individual in the Next Phase. The solution of this conflict is a network of small local structures that is part of a large global network (“Think Global, Act Local”).

The precession cycle is moving from the Dark Phase into the Light. This is the most interesting and unknown development. Current Human history has never experienced a shift from the Kali Yuga to the Golden Age. The Golden Age is a period of intense spiritual development, a movement to a New Level of Conscioussness.

It shows itself in a move to religion and mysticism but also in a new awareness about what is really happening in the world.  This new awareness is frightening to most of the people. They cannot understand the major changes that are visible. The predictable future is gone. Everything is on the move and the movement is excellerating culminating in Point Omega, the Big Leap into Nothingness.  

Long Term Phases always dominate short term phases. The effect of this will be tremendous and almost unpredictable.  An unpredictable future is a Future without a Perspective.

Some people expect a dramatic negative change. They are waiting for the Apocalyps. Some people expect the Return of Paradise and a jump to a higher consciousness.

I really don’t know what will happen.

If you read my blogs I am constantly trying to find the solution of this very complex conjunction of cycles. I keep you informed.