Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their book, "Schooling in Capitalist
America," showed that supervisor ranking of employees mirrored teacher
evaluation of high school students. Both schools and companies rewarded
those who were punctual, deferred gratification, showed school (or
company) spirit, deferred to authority, were perseverant, etc. Those
penalized were aggresive, creative, and the like.
Michael Yates
Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> >position and under a lot of stress. To some, getting a
> >university degree is very much like acquiring that
> >Mercedes. I have seen some of the students in this
> >category suffer because it is not where their talents
> >lie. To add insult to injury, they all want an A. I
>
> NY Times, March 19, 2001
>
> Companies Turn to Grades, and Employees Go to Court
>
> By REED ABELSON
>
> An increasingly popular technique for evaluating employees is prompting
> lawsuits charging discrimination at three big companies.
>
> At issue is the ranking of managers, professionals and sometimes
> lower-level employees from best to worst, or grading them on a bell curve,
> and then using that ranking to help determine pay and sometimes whether to
> fire someone.
>
> In their suits, all filed over the last year or so, employees at Microsoft,
> Ford Motor and Conoco say the rating systems are unfair because they favor
> some groups of employees over others: white males over blacks and women,
> younger managers over older ones and foreign citizens over Americans.
>
> A growing number of companies are turning to grading systems, also known as
> forced rankings or distributions, as a way of making sure managers evaluate
> employees honestly and make clearer distinctions among them. At companies
> that do not compare employees with one another this way, nearly every
> employee can come away feeling above average, like the children of Lake
> Wobegon. But under the grading system, managers are forced to identify some
> people as low performers.
>
> At General Electric, for example, supervisors identify the top 20 percent
> and bottom 10 percent of their managerial and professional employees every
> year. The bottom 10 percent are not likely to stay.
>
> As John F. Welch Jr., General Electric's chief executive, wrote last month
> to shareholders, "A company that bets its future on its people must remove
> that lower 10 percent, and keep removing it every year - always raising the
> bar of performance and increasing the quality of its leadership."
>
> Ranking or grading employees is also common at technology companies like
> Cisco Systems and Hewlett- Packard. But recently the concept has been
> catching on more broadly, according to management consultants. One reason
> is that as the economy slows, companies often lay off employees. Cisco, for
> example, announced earlier this month that it would let go as many as 5,000
> workers - and would use grading as one way to identify people to lay off.
>
> "Companies are playing their version of `Survivor,' " said David Thomas, a
> professor at the Harvard Business School.
>
> Full article:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/business/19GRAD.html?searchpv=site01
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
