Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/17/these-19th-century-textile-mills-behavior-blocks-were-made-to-shame-employees-exceeding-naughtiness.html
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It’s still in use. Or rather variations thereof.
I see it frequently in K-12 settings.
I think at call centers, too.
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The Human Resources Culture tends to maintain certain concepts long past their expiration dates. See also Myers-Briggs.
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I checked the source and it’s still really unclear to me whether this was referring to drinking at home (in which case, how would he know?) or drinking in the workplace. Seems like that’s a pretty important distinction.
Or was this one of those situations where the workers lived in company-owned housing and they weren’t entitled to any level of privacy at all?
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So, did the Silent Monitor work? Owen thought so. Over time, he observed a gradual shift from black and blue to more whites and yellows, indicating better behavior — or so he believed.
Most of us would assume that, like any performance rating system that I have had experience with, people learned to “cook the books” over time.
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Everyone lived on site in a community. There was privacy to some degree but a lot of self policing.
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You forgot the /s.
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Owen was an interesting man- He cared about the welfare of his workers, but in a way that seems today to be profoundly controlling and paternalistic. He was a stand-out for his time, believing that it was possible to run a profitable business and treat his workforce far better than the other industrialists of the era.
He also thought that people were moulded by their environment and the conditions that surrounded them, which led to his drive to build a better town for his employees to live in, as well as this bit of crass behaviourism.
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Ok, ok, I get it! But what were the other two sides painted? I have to know!
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I see a colored cube
And I want it painted black
No colors anymore
I want them to turn black
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A tetrahedron, then?
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From Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy, by William Lucas Sargant (1860):
@frauenfelder , your link doesn’t work.
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