Workplaces Quotes

While the rich reap most of the benefits of technological development, the poor bear an unequal burden of dealing with the consequences of the resulting increased pollution. The poor continue to live in greatest proximity to the sources of pollution, the infrastructure and machinery of industry. They work in the most polluted and physically dangerous workplaces. And these same individuals, living and working closest to the sources of environmental catastrophe, are also the ones most lacking decent health care. ~ James H. Cone

When people aren't producing, companies typically resort to rewards or punishment. "What you haven't done is the hard work of diagnosing what the problem is. You're trying to run over the problem with a carrot or a stick," Ryan explains. That doesn't mean that SDT unequivocally opposes rewards. "Of course, they're necessary in workplaces and other settings," says Deci. "But the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating." Instead, Deci and Ryan say we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish. ~ Daniel H. Pink

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers
its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks
are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power. ~ Howard Zinn

New business models are altering workplaces everywhere, in for-profit and nonprofit sectors alike. Enterprises must constantly evaluate and change their business models to survive. ~ Timothy Clark

Positive psychology is the study of what constitutes excellence in individuals, communities, and workplaces. It incorporates the study of productivity, resilience, motivation, emotions, strengths, team dynamics, and more. ~ Margaret Greenberg

Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep "celibacy tax. ~ Steven D. Levitt

Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades. ~ Fritz Todt

Just as important as our society as a whole are our small communities: our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. ~ Jens Stoltenberg

A company that cannot successfully implement the 5S's cannot expect to effectively integrate JIT, re-engineering, or any other large-scale change. Good workplaces develop beginning with the 5S's. Bad workplaces fall apart beginning with the 5S's. ~ Hiroyuki Hirano

At a time of global instability we have become distanced from each other and the environment.
We have lost the immediacy, comfort and truthfulness of the literal and actual, and need to find alternative ways to consume and connect.
Hygge describes a way of being that introduces humanity and warmth in our homes, schools, workplaces, cities and nations. ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

A balance is necessary in life. To achieve this we must move away from broad definitions of workplaces as functional and households as emotional. Similarly, home, the haven in a heartless world, as defined by men, cannot be used by them as an antidote to the workplace's discomforts and demands, if this means having the wife as a servicer. ~ Eva Cox

We have some real political differences among us, but we all share the same goals: clean air and water, injury free workplaces, safe transportation systems, to name a few of the good things that can come from regulation. ~ Fred Thompson

We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married." She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn't enough - institutional support is also necessary. "Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media - they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another. ~ Kate Bolick

We can't fool ourselves that they will ever be enough to overthrow Capitalism. If we're serious about that we need to organise ourselves in our workplaces and communities, making the links with other workers internationally. ~ John Blair

Personal growth and professional development require mostly being treated like an adult, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens in most workplaces. People need to be able to make decisions. To do that effectively, they need information and training in how to use it. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly. ~ David Graeber

The U.S. Congress can do a lot to support America's workplaces and the family. By working together in a bipartisan fashion, we can ensure our constituents get jobs they need while helping employers make smart decisions about their workforce. ~ Charles B. Rangel

Technicians are triply invisible. First, they have traditionally been invisible to historians and sociologists of science. . . . Second, they have been largely, if not entirely, invisible in the formal documentary record produced by scientific practitioners. Even when one is committed to doing so, it is extremely difficult to retrieve information about who they were and what they did. Third, technicians have arguably been invisible as relevant actors to those persons in control of the workplaces in which scientific knowledge is produced. . . . Technicians have been "not there" in roughly the same sense that servants were, and were supposed to be, "not there" with respect to the conversations of Victorian domestic employers. ~ Clifford D. Conner

Engaged, productive employees do not work in a vacuum. They need workplaces that help them bring out the best in themselves - mosh pits of creativity where energy and inspiration can flow freely. ~ Carson Tate

The single biggest barrier to effective leadership is, in my view, the leadership industry itself. Instead of telling people the skills and behaviors they need to be effective in getting things done, we tell them almost the opposite - blandishments about how we wish people would be, and how we wish workplaces were. That information is worse than useless as, to the extent people believe it, they often wind up losing their jobs. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

History will see this as the residential commodification era, in which housing provision seemed to lose all contact between supply and demand of housing as a utility and simply focused on supply and demand of investment - and that is worrying.
Investment is good for the economy, but the investment you want is investment that goes into creating homes, workplaces and infrastructure, not investing in owning them and inflating asset prices. ~ Peter Rees

Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, that's not how things work at all. Companies aren't big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals' seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.

Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war.

Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines – habits – that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day's work done. ~ Charles Duhigg

If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future.

If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives. ~ Eli Clare

I completely reject the idea that working adults need to be treated like infants or worse and not told the realities, harsh or not, about the world of work. Keeping people in the dark and filling them with stories that are either mostly fabricated, unusually rare, or both, doesn't do anyone any good. It is one of the reasons that workplaces and careers remain in such dire straits. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

Our duties naturally emerge form such fundamental relations as our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, our state or nation. Make it your regular habit to consider your roles-parent, child, neighbor, citizen, leader-and the natural duties that arise from them. Once you know who you are and to whom you are linked, you will know what to do. ~ Epictetus

Hi. I'm here to enlist.
You can't. You aren't human.
You see, little fella, we don't do sociological stuff like "interspeciated workplaces." We're a crack company of space mercenaries. We do "hurting people" and "breaking things."
Sounds like my kind of fun.
-Schlock & Lieutenant Der Trihs ~ Howard Tayler

We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We "think different" (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer's famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions - our schools and our workplaces - tells a very different story. ~ Susan Cain

We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problems - dangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of people - is partly responsible for the fix we're in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into. ~ Alfie Kohn

In our fast-forward culture, we have lost the art of eating well. Food is often little more than fuel to pour down the hatch while doing other stuff - surfing the Web, driving, walking along the street. Dining al desko is now the norm in many workplaces. All of this speed takes a toll. Obesity, eating disorders and poor nutrition are rife. ~ Carl Honore

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. ~ Annie Dillard

It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Jean Railla puts it even more bluntly: Workplaces are still very sexist
it's hard to be a woman in the workplace. ~ Emily Matchar

Hollywood is an illusion. These intense workplaces, with very close relationships, a few months at a time - and then it ends. ~ John C. Reilly

Ugliness, squalor are breeding grounds for revolution. Beauty is conducive to tranquillity, happiness. Beautifying of homes and places of worship began with the dawn of civilization. Beautifying of workplaces is only in its infancy. Yet, since men normally spend more than half of their waking hours at work, surely it is important that adequate attention be devoted to elevating their working environment, whether office or factory, foundry or machine shop, mine or warehouse. Beautiful surroundings subtly encourage beautiful living. Drab surroundings, bad air, bad light, evoke bad reactions. ~ B.C. Forbes

Ok to ban smoking from workplaces, but not to ban smoking. ~ Mike Huckabee

As we get older, a lot of societies, education systems and workplaces make us feel that playing is a waste of time. We end up suppressing stupidly brilliant questions for what we think are more serious responsibilities. ~ Jessica Walsh

It appears that the epidemic of active disengagement we see in workplaces every day could be a curable disease ... if we can help the people around us develop their strengths. ~ Tom Rath

Kuhnen and Brian Knutson have found that men who are shown erotic pictures just before they gamble take more risks than those shown neutral images like desks and chairs. This is because anticipating rewards - any rewards, whether or not related to the subject at hand - excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly. (This may be the single best argument yet for banning pornography from workplaces.) ~ Susan Cain

Modern Australian trade unionism and the unionist that I am doesn't rely on a class war view that somehow that the interests of employees and managers are in two separate spheres and they're irreconcilable. I believe that when people can go to work and be happy, satisfied, engaged, where the employer is getting employees who feel their interests are aligned with the employer, you get productivity. This is the future of Australian workplaces. ~ Bill Shorten

It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bonafide workplace apart from a classroom, and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and under appreciated. ~ Liza Mundy

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time
we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true. ~ Mitch Albom

We must examine the ways in which we have attempted to turn our own ministries, workplaces, and mission fields into the playgrounds of our own personal struggles. We must search our hearts for the ways in which our own insecurities and wounded egos sabotage the gospel message that we have been entrusted with. We must become leaders who are deep in a society of the spectacle that produces shallowness. ~ Mark Sayers

[On women in previously all-male fields:] I think it will change in a lot of workplaces. I'm not so sure it will ever change on Capitol Hill until more women are in powerful positions. Because this is the last plantation for men. ~ Andrea Mitchell

They have eliminated rigidity, both physical and psychological, in order to support more fluid processes whereby temporary teams are created to deal with specific and ever-changing needs. They have simplified roles into minimal categories; they have knocked down walls and created workplaces where people, ideas, and information circulate freely. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

We need to be doing a better job preparing our teens and young adults for employment during their high school and college years. But just as importantly, we need to be educating workplaces, job coaches, corporations, and business leaders about the benefits of hiring a person on the spectrum. ~ Chantal Sicile-Kira

Absolute freedom doesn't exist and never did. Just as we don't spit on the floor at work, swear at customers, or send out letters full of misspellings, so too we might have to 'watch our language.' It is odd that the request for unbiased language in schools and workplaces is considered intolerable when other limits on our freedom to do whatever we want are not. ~ Rosalie Maggio

I advise people to avoid workplaces that prevent Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) visits. ~ Steven Magee