2018年经济学人 自由交流:企业老板如何高效控制员工(2)

 

Workers and labour activists¹ have often attacked strict discipline as coercive, unfair and potentially counterproductive.

工人和劳工活动人士一直以来都在批判纪律苛刻，认为这是强迫性、不公平且可能会适得其反的东西。

Text-book economics suggests, though, that in a competitive labour market any attempt to coerce² people into working harder than they want will fail, since workers can simply switch jobs.

虽然教科书式经济学揭示，在充满竞争的劳动市场中，任何强迫工人更加努力工作的举措都将遭到失败，因为工人会直接跳槽。

Studies of factory work paint a more complicated picture, however.

然而，一些对制造业工作的研究展现出更为复杂情况：

People would like to work hard and earn high wages, this story goes.

人们更愿意努力工作，以赚取高工资。

But they struggle with self-control and do not work as hard as they wish they would.

但他们自制力不高，不能如像想象那般努力。

They consequently choose to work for firms that use disciplinary measures to push them.

因此，他们选择去实施纪律措施的企业，以此来促使自己努力工作。

During industrialisation, workers “effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder”, says Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, in a seminal³ paper on the subject.

加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校经济史学家格雷戈里克拉克(Gregory Clark)在这一领域有重大影响力的一篇论文中写道：在工业化期间，工人“有效地受雇于资本家，让自己工作更努力”。

If that seems an implausibly sunny description of life in 19th-century factories, researchers have found evidence for such behaviour in modern contexts.

如果这看上去是对19世纪工厂生活的生动描述，有点让人难以置信的话，研究人员在当代制造业也发现了这类行为的证据。

Supreet Kaur, of Columbia University, and Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, of Harvard University, ran a 13-month experiment using data-entry workers,

哥伦比亚大学的苏普瑞特·考尔以及来自哈佛大学的迈克尔·克雷默和行为经济学家塞德希尔·穆来纳森进行了一项长达13个月的实验。

who were paid according to the amount of work successfully completed.

该实验的对象是数据输入员，其工资取决于他们成功完成的工作量。

Some struggled with self-control, the authors deter-mined, as shown by their tendency to slack off for much of each month but put in more effort as payday approached.

研究人员发现，一些自制力差的人会在每个月的大多数日子里偷懒，然后在领工资日前努力工作。

When workers were offered contracts that penalised them for failing to hit performance targets,

如果提议让员工签署合同，规定若未能达到绩效指标便实施处罚，

those who struggled to stay on-task disproportionately accepted, and achieved big gains in output and pay as a result.

那些难以保持工作状态的员工大部分都会接受，最终他们的工作投入和工资会大幅增加。

In many settings, pay is less clearly linked to performance.

在很多情况下，工资并不直接与绩效挂钩。

1 activists   

n.（政治活动的）积极分子，活动家( activist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• His research work was attacked by animal rights activists . 他的研究受到了动物权益维护者的抨击。
• Party activists with lower middle class pedigrees are numerous. 党的激进分子中有很多出身于中产阶级下层。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 coerce   

v.强迫，压制

参考例句：

• You can't coerce her into obedience.你不能强制她服从。
• Do you think there is any way that we can coerce them otherwise?你认为我们有什么办法强迫他们不那样吗？

3 seminal   

adj.影响深远的；种子的

参考例句：

• The reforms have been a seminal event in the history of the NHS.这些改革已成为英国国民保健制度史上影响深远的一件大事。
• The emperor's importance as a seminal figure of history won't be diminished.做为一个开创性历史人物的重要性是不会减弱的。