Want people to behave better? Give them more privacy

“Team members had a kind of collective privacy—they were hidden from the constant scrutiny by management and other workers, even though within their shared workspace they were still visible to each other. The effect was to shrink the size of the surveillance audience and confine it to people the workers had a personal connection with. This kind of ‘privacy within team boundaries’ has been associated with better results in many workplaces, from Google to hospital emergency rooms.” David Berreby quotes research suggesting that workers often are more productive in an environment that does not monitor their every move.

www.psychologytoday.com

Kleptoremuneration

“There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most useful workers tend to be paid least and treated worst.” While this inverse relationship doesn’t always hold, George Monbiot still maintains that our lives are damaged not by the undeserving poor but by the undeserving rich.

www.monbiot.com

World processor

“Such are the perverse rewards we reap when we permit tech culture to become our culture. The profits and power flow to the platform owners and their political sponsors. We get the surveillance, the data mining, the soaring inequality, and the canned pep talks from bosses who have been upsold on analytics software.” Jacob Silverman critically examines today’s employment practices using past issues of Processed World as a guide to the great digital reorganization of work.

www.thebaffler.com

How did Germany become the new champion of Europe?

“Would he ever consider buying a foreign car? Too polite to say no, Schlüter gave a slightly apologetic smile. After decades of industrial neglect and regional decline, Britain has a long way to go before such popular pride in homegrown products goes without saying”, Julian Coman reports. This story captures some of what it should mean to be German.

www.theguardian.com

However, given the current state of the Eurozone, Germany’s outlook might not be so bright after all.

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