Choice vs. control: The metaphysical tug-of-war that work often is

Here’s a halfway decent article about how employers need to provide employees with choice. There are other terms for choice, often “autonomy” being one, or “the ability to work on one’s own.” If you’ve ever worked in white-collar, you know that basically how the game works is you come in, you get tested a little bit (relative to what level you came in at), for a while you can work with a decent degree of choice and autonomy, and then usually the first/second time you fuck up, virtually all choice and autonomy is stripped from you and you have to file 52 tracking documents just to go to the bathroom on a Wednesday. That’s kind of how the game is played. Along the way some people get put on the ol’ PIP, which usually leads to the ol’ PIPE down the road, and some others — usually top sales guys and people that high middle managers trust — can operate with impunity, i.e. tons of choice.

If you want to truly understand the different back-and-forths of the working world, you need to start with a list of concepts like this:

• Choice
• Autonomy
• Status
• Relevance
• Control
• Productivity

That’s six terms. There is a complex interplay between the six that determines how any…