Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I'm interested.
Define buzzword, scientifically, and think tanks. And the standard of proof required for each element.
My main caveat would be if buzzwords were previously defined or studied without being called buzzwords prior to a think tank popularizing them you would lose the wager.
|
Well that the moved the goalposts quite a bit.
From the dictionary
"an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buzzword
First official use, 1946, Harvard. It's history an amalgamation of many efforts involving worker efficiency and marketing. Developed incrementally from the 20's to the 60's. The effectiveness of small phrases on workers and consumers was analyzed and used as office speak in the workplace and buzzwords in commercialization and media.
This an excerpt form an article on the history of officespeak and the involvement of think tanks;
"In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, a book with one goal: destroy worker inefficiency. His theory, often called “Taylorism,” was all about maximizing every action on an assembly line. “There was a shift to the logic of science and efficiency,” Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School and soon-to-be-dean of Harvard College, told me. “Divide work into its smallest component parts, figure out the timing, remove any unnecessary efficiencies. That was the way work was organized, and that had a huge impact on the way corporate culture was organized.” The words used to talk about workers in books and boardrooms were accordingly mechanistic, emphasizing accuracy, precision, incentives, and maximized production.
This idea started to shift in the late 1920s and ’30s. In 1924, the Australian sociologist George Elton Mayo started running a series of experiments at Hawthorne Works, a large factory of the Western Electric Company in the suburbs of Chicago. He set out with a simple task: figure out how the brightness of the lights in the factory affected worker productivity. But his team got some surprising results: Whenever the lights changed—no matter whether they got dimmer or brighter—workers got better at their jobs. They concluded that the workers’ physical environment wasn’t what made them better—it was that they thought their bosses were paying attention to them.
Mayo and his team quickly changed their focus: Instead of thinking of workers as cogs in a vast machine, they began thinking of them as living units of a large, complex social organism.
"In the 1930s, you begin getting this human relations perspective, in many ways in opposition to the scientific imagery,” Khurana said. “This is really about this notion that managers don’t understand the psychology of workers. By treating them as machines, they not only deny their humanity; it actually results in ineffective management, social disorganization, lack of cooperation, and an increase in tensions between labor and management.” Although the methodology of the Hawthorne experiment has since been criticized, the results triggered a shift in how researchers thought about workers.
This seemed to come at just the right time: The Great Depression had set in, and industries were in an existential crisis. “Alienation, abseentism, labor turn-over, wild-cat strikes—these came to be associated not with meeting the workers’ economic needs, but their psychological and social needs,” Khurana said.
World War II liberated these theories from the halls of academia. Suddenly, organizational science was seen as a possible tool for understanding what had happened to nations like Germany and Japan. “What was it about the culture of those societies that led them to suddenly shift from what was seen as quite enlightened and advanced to suddenly becoming very authoritarian? The government became interested in this, and they started funding all sorts of studies.”
At the same time, American companies were changing. “Most of the large organizations that were emerging at this time were not in any single business,” Khurana said. “They were large, diversified conglomerates that had been created as a consequence of World War II and of the huge mergers and acquisitions activity that took place in the 1950s and ’60s. Firms like Pepsico owned trucking companies, even though they were in the food business.”
This made it more difficult for workers to feel a connection to their companies, Khurana said. “What people were very much focused on was: How can we get workers to feel differently about their jobs?”
For academics, this was as much a question of sociology as efficiency. It soon became a question of money, too: “As a manager, how can I maximize profits by creating a certain emotional atmosphere at my company?”
In trying to answer this question, office speak was born.
In the 1950s, two schools of thought began to emerge. At Carnegie Mellon, academics were working on what they called management science—a theory of decision-making inspired by the computers that had come out during World War II. Meanwhile, at MIT, three professors—Douglas McGregor, Edgar Schein, and Richard Beckhard—were creating a new field called organizational development.
Schein, now 86, is largely credited with coining the term organizational culture (the linguistic cousin of corporate culture). “In the 1960s, there was an emphasis on humanistic psychology, involving the worker, because then they would work better,” he told me. “We were interested in how groups and leadership could be made more effective. So we started something called the human relations lab.”
A pair of hypotheses rose out of these labs. As McGregor explained in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, managers could think of their employees in one of two ways: as lazy work-haters who need to be closely supervised (Theory X), or as ambitious self-motivators who thrive in an atmosphere of trust (Theory Y). “This introduced the idea that effective managers believe in their people and trust them and don’t feel that they have to monitor them all the time,” Schein said.
Although the researchers didn’t necessarily favor one theory over the other, Theory Y fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of the 60s. It drew on Abraham Maslow’s increasingly popular theory of the hierarchy of needs, which positioned “self-actualization” as the highest goal of human life. Inspired by Maslow, Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 to nurture the burgeoning Human Potential Movement, and Look magazine’s George Leonard helped bring it into the mainstream. Theory Y extended this worldview into the realm of work: Jobs, much like meditation and mind-enhancing drugs, were seen as a way to discover untapped inner power and find personal fulfillment. Over the years, the idea has stuck: In 2001, The Human Side of Enterprise was voted the fourth most influential management book in the 20th century by the Academy of Management.
In the decades that followed, academics continued to come up with memorable buzzwords. British psychologist Raymond Cattell repurposed the word synergy, which was originally a Protestant term for cooperation between the human will and divine grace. The UC Berkeley philosopher Thomas Kuhn popularized the term paradigm shift in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And, much later, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen coined the term disrupt, which has become a favorite in today’s climate of start-up worship. But more importantly, academics have had a big effect on how workers work, all thanks to one group of people: consultants.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...-speak/361135/
Think tank:
"A think tank or policy institute, research institute, etc. is an organization that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture"
http://thinktank.mit.edu/
More?
