HCJ - The New Industrial State by John Galbraith

I have decided to focus my reading on the motivation chapters in Galbraith’s book. This included the general theory of motivation, motivation in perspective and motivation and the technostructure.

The New Industrial State was published in 1967 after the Wall Street Crash and The Great Depression of 1929. Galbraith’s purpose for the book was to describe the economy as it was. His son wrote in The Guardian that his father had tried to, “deflate the faith in the market and to foster understanding of a world dominated by the technostructure.”

Galbraith says that the technostructure is a small group of technicians, managers, executives etc within an enterprise, with considerable influence and control in economy. He says that it is these people that have the true power over the organisations and not the share holder or the shares market because they are the ones that make the decisions. The share holders are simply there to keep the organisation growing and earning more money.

Galbraith defines an organisation as a “system of consciously co-ordinated activities or forces of 20 or more persons.” It means that the participating individuals are persuaded to set aside their individual purposes or goals and pursue the organisations. This is exactly the view of the Utilitarian movement, that people have to think of the greater good for the greatest number of people.

The executives of an organisation are the inner circle of the organisation with the roles lessening in importance as they spread out of the core. Linking this to motivation Galbraith believes that the closer an employee gets to the core of the circle the more they believe in the organisation’s goals, ambitions and want to help the company do this. What drives them to progress through the ranks of the organisation can be for four different reasons.

These reasons are: compulsion, pecuniary motivation, identification and adaptation. Compulsion is when the person fails to accept the goals of the group and will be punished. Galbraith quotes, “behind the man with the spade is another with a club.” This means that the person will work towards the goals of the organisation but will not accept them, they only work towards them because if they did not they would be punished. This would have normally been a slave but I think it could also be related to a person who has to do community service in modern times. They do not take on the goals of the cleaning agency but they clean the roads because they would be punished if they did not. If someone is under compulsion they will never see the organisation’s goals as superior to their own. Galbraith also says that, “what is compelled can not be a matter of choice. Alienation not identification will be the normal result.” Thus meaning that the person is never going to accept the organisations goals when they are being compelled to work towards them, and not done by choice.

Pecuniary motivation is when the employee accepts that the common goal may be purchased, that accepting the goals will bring an affirmative reward, most of the time, in the form of money. Pecuniary motivation is what drives a lot of people to work at an organisation, accept their goals and work towards them, for a wage.

Identification is when the individual finds the goals of the organisation far superior to their own and believe that they surpass their own goals. With identification the employee does not work because they have to or because of the monetary reward but because they believe that they would be serving better goals when taking on the organisations than following their own. This may happen in the services as the soldiers, sailors, RAF etc will follow the organisations goal of protecting Queen and Country over the own goals of maybe growing old with a family and a good job.

Adaptation is described as a person believing working for the organisation is an effective way of altering the organisations goals to more accurately reflect their own.

Galbraith also makes the point that the richer the country the better the unemployment compensation. Welfare is normally provided to lessen the compulsion to avoid unemployment. Meaning that it is better for the citizens to be working than it is for them not to be working. However, this may not be true under our government or at least the last Labour government as there were many articles depicting that for the some people they were better off financially than actually being in work. They would have more money living on benefits than if they worked for a wage. I know this is not true of all people but of quite a few it has been reported that they are better to avoid employment than to be part of it.

Identification and adaptation work together, when one is high the other is very low. For example if identification is low, adaptation will be high. The individual will want to alter the organisations goals to fit with their own. While if it is the opposite, that adaptation is low and identification is low, their own goals will be temporary forgotten so they concentrate and perfect the organisations goals.

Galbraith has some great ideas on why people are motivated to work towards goals and work towards more money. Some of them, such as the identification I can completely understand, as I believe this is a main reason for most people having a job and is definitely plausible. The other motivations, although I do not share in them yet can also understand why some people may have them. I think it depends on your career and your own goals in life. Overall a good few chapters to read and I recommend them to anybody.