Re:Deutschland AG rethinks workers’ role in management
by TeMPOraL on Sunday February 02, 2020 @04:55AM
(#22216140)
On the extremes, I see two ways of doing negotiation - or in general, reconciling conflicting interests: a competitive one, and a cooperative one.
What you're describing is the competitive one: you have sides focusing solely on their local, direct, short-term interests, in hopes that as they all fight each other, the aggregate state of the system will be a decent compromise. The cooperative way would be if all parties got together, did a global optimization across all their goals, and went along with the result until something changes and it needs to be readjusted.
For some reason, the competitive way is the most common one. It's in what you say about worker representatives vs. company. It's how the whole market works. The good side is, such system is very dynamic and quick to respond to shifting preferences (and shifting landscapes). The bad side: it's ridiculously wasteful, and it turns people against each other.
I suppose the reason the competitive model is more common is because you can't just get random people to do global optimization together - it's hard to ensure honesty and mutual understanding of all participants.
RE wastefulness, I like to compare it to the issue of active vs. passive stationkeeping in physics[0]. Imagine that your village wants a new fire tower. You want to have a few cameras 50 meters above ground for spotting fires. There are two ways to approach it. You could build an actual 50m tower and place cameras there. Or you could go to the store, buy a large quadcopter (and a lot of spare parts), tether it to mains power and keep it continuously flying at 50m. Building an actual tower has a much bigger up-front expense, but then it's essentially free. Getting a camera-equipped drone flying is cheap, but keeping it flying for days, weeks, years would waste absurd amounts of energy, very quickly exceeding all the energy put into building the tower.
Obviously, cooperative approach is like building the tower - the desired goal is made explicit and free to maintain. Competitive is like flying that drone - the desired goal emerges from opposite forces fighting, and requires the battle to go on forever.
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[0] - it's not the real name of the consideration, it's just how I call it. I wonder if it has a proper name.
What you're describing is the competitive one: you have sides focusing solely on their local, direct, short-term interests, in hopes that as they all fight each other, the aggregate state of the system will be a decent compromise. The cooperative way would be if all parties got together, did a global optimization across all their goals, and went along with the result until something changes and it needs to be readjusted.
For some reason, the competitive way is the most common one. It's in what you say about worker representatives vs. company. It's how the whole market works. The good side is, such system is very dynamic and quick to respond to shifting preferences (and shifting landscapes). The bad side: it's ridiculously wasteful, and it turns people against each other.
I suppose the reason the competitive model is more common is because you can't just get random people to do global optimization together - it's hard to ensure honesty and mutual understanding of all participants.
RE wastefulness, I like to compare it to the issue of active vs. passive stationkeeping in physics[0]. Imagine that your village wants a new fire tower. You want to have a few cameras 50 meters above ground for spotting fires. There are two ways to approach it. You could build an actual 50m tower and place cameras there. Or you could go to the store, buy a large quadcopter (and a lot of spare parts), tether it to mains power and keep it continuously flying at 50m. Building an actual tower has a much bigger up-front expense, but then it's essentially free. Getting a camera-equipped drone flying is cheap, but keeping it flying for days, weeks, years would waste absurd amounts of energy, very quickly exceeding all the energy put into building the tower.
Obviously, cooperative approach is like building the tower - the desired goal is made explicit and free to maintain. Competitive is like flying that drone - the desired goal emerges from opposite forces fighting, and requires the battle to go on forever.
--
[0] - it's not the real name of the consideration, it's just how I call it. I wonder if it has a proper name.