Sorting the Self: Assessments and the cult of personality
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
Ultimately behavior arises in context of disagreement whenever interesting behavior is important. And therefore behavior is a matter of dynamics not the statics of a single identified category. It's best to think of interesting behavior pair-wise say in a team, family, and so on.
Here [1] is far more useful, and far more practical. The salient analysis arises like this, say in the context, of a team:
* teams fail because individuals fail
* individuals fail because they refuse to change
* individuals refuse to change because the change the environment desires conflicts with the self-esteem of the stubborn individual. To change the stubborn individual would have to admit that their sense of things is wrong.
* Until the individual changes, the individual will often exhibit defensive behavior to delay or defray change e.g. play off the problem, criticize others, play the victim. All these behaviors have the same goal: as long as one is putting the focus elsewhere, it's not on me, and I don't have to change because I'm not wrong.
Example: the boss wants a team member to have more control, competence in sorting out a task, which he/she doesn't see. This is a conflict over control. There are any number of realities underlying this,
* the boss feels overworked and doesn't want more work. he/she feeds undervalued, under payed, disrespected. So the boss pushes harder.
* the worker feels the work is unimportant, feels micro managed, or feels they are made to suck up crappy work that previous workers never did right. The worker refuses to change.
Until and unless the feelings and contextualization of this conflict is engaged, it will not be resolved. As Human Element correctly notes, good teams have a valuable asset of adaptability. There need not for example be an alpha leader, common vision etc (more static idealogical constructs) to getting things done, if these other deeper ideas are pursued.
"The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
The key work in Human Element is, in a practical way as possible, getting that deeper realization in which problems that seemed impossible become doable. It rings true to me; there is no magic solution. There is no easy HBR article about the alpha guy with the right vision to make teamwork run well. It depends on the ability of individuals in a team to learn about themselves and co-workers and evolve.
For example:
> The polish applied in adjectival designation inclines one to believe that a definition has been achieved, a conclusion won. A pile of qualities furnishes a synoptic view of the whole, and so begins the slippage from the conditional mood to the declarative.
Sorry, me too dumb to parse. This is just one sentence picked at random
“Once your ‘personality type’ has been found, it feels like you know something definitive about who you are. You only answered some small number of questions about small segments of your life, but the quiz authoritatively asserts it has seen you to the core. In this way the quiz turns ‘when X happens I do Y’ statements into ‘I am X kind of person so I always do Y’ statements. This is probably bad.”
Just bad writing.
Besides, it's a bit rich to complain of excess length after the author has handed you his entire thesis by the end of the second paragraph. If you keep going after that despite not caring for the style, you're either a glutton for punishment or not paying attention.
You might not want to assume that. There are other reasons to write ambiguously with excessive and unnecessary ornamentation:
* Everyone else in your field does it, and you want to write in a familiar style
* You hope people confuse the advanced vocabulary in your writing with an advanced argument and it will bolster your credibility
* Pretension: you want to feel clever whilst writing it, or appeal to those who will feel clever whilst reading it
All of those are perfectly valid to my mind - even writing verbosely for the sheer love of the language is fine.
I just don't think this article does any of that well.
What galls me is really just the lack of critical engagement. Whining about an article being "too long" is the tantrum of a Tiktok-addled child. Complaints that add up only to "this isn't meant for me" are well suited to the self-centeredness of a teenager. The questions of who this is for, then, and why, and what that might say about something else, are actually interesting, and around here somewhat tiresomely rare in the asking.
Interestingly enough, I'm finishing up an article about open office plans and return-to-office, and I realized that the people who decide these things are overwhelmingly Extroverted, in MBTI terms. They think those Introverted types who like some private space to think need to be dragged out into the open where they can Communicate.
There actually are scholarly articles about which MBTI types should be leaders and managers. I won't burden you with them here.
FWIW, the sentence you’ve selected scans even with no context (I haven’t [yet?] read the article).
Disclosure: I have professional experience in literary critical theory.
I could expound on the grammatical structure and syntactical components of the sentence but I have to confess I’m too lazy to do so.
Basically, humanities have their own specific discourse communities and looking at an article that assumes prior knowledge can be usefully compared to starting with a paper on relativity theory without having understood Newtonian mechanics.
My apologies to any scientistic types I may have offended.