The Challenges Faced In Employee Motivation Commerce Essay

The Challenges Faced In Employee Motivation Commerce Essay One question that is frequently asked by managers in many organisations is How do I motivate my emloyees? The concept of motivation is complex with numerous researches carried out and various theories put forward in order to explain and attempt to understand it. Many definitions exist for motivation, but the common definition is that motivation is a pychological process within an individual that drives a certain behaviour to achieve set goals. Currently, motivation is a source of frequent debates and is an issue of great significance and concern for both employees and organisations. Whilst reliable information systems and the latest technology are important, in todays expanding service industry, employees remain the most precious assets in any organisation. How well employees perform and their commitment at work are crucial factors to the success of their organisation; and in todays modern work, where there is increasing competetion worldwide, organisations simply cannot afford to ha ve a demotivated workforce or even lose good employees to poor motivation. Therefore, motivation of such employees is an essential role of any manager, yet it is also amongst the most challenging tasks to perform effectively. Managers must clearly understand and be aware of the sort of factors that define motivation of their workforce because, by doing this, they are able to focus employees efforts to work efficiently and effectively to achieve desired goals of the business. Managers must also be aware of the fact that each employee is different and unique in their own sense, hence they need to take account of these variations when motivating them. According to the Self-Determination Theory (2), a useful way to understand the concept of motivation is to divide it into extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation relates to motivation coming from others and the environment, where the individual behaves in a certain way in order to get something (e.g. pay) or because of external pressures (e.g. managers instruction). Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, relates to motivation coming from within onself (3), where the individual acts in a certain way because of and actual interest in the act itself (e.g. satisfying need for competence). Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management, had greatly influential views about motivation of workers. He believed that paying employees high wages, which is one of the sources of extrinisc motivation, was a sufficient incentive to motivate them to work harder and be more productive (find ref). This was possibly the case when organisations generally only sought complianc e from their employees, and extrinsic rewards provided by managers were an easy answer to problems with staff motivation and ensuring they did their work and followed the rules properly . However, in todays world and in the modern workplace, where employees are expected to self-manage and have more responsiblities, issues with motivation have become much more complicated and demanding. Motivating staff is indeed a difficult taks and is normally easier said than done. Currently, many organisations are motivating their employees by using extrinsic motivators such as financial incentives. However, this is not always sufficient to maintain the right level of motivation, as it only satisfies them indirectly. For this reason, employers need to also pay attention to intrinsic motivators, which serve to satisfy the direct needs of the employee, and consequently encourage better performance on a particular task. Monetary incentives and other extrinsic rewards are no longer sufficient to main tain staff motivation since employees are now required to show more commitment and creativity (1) . This, in turn, would depend on deeper sources of satisfaction that are more meaningful to the employee that extrinsic rewards would generally fail to offer on their own. In todays work setting, intrinsic rewards have a vital part in staff motivation; these include psychological rewards such as recognition and a sense of appreciation, which provide employees with a greater incentive for higher productivity and achievement. For most, if not all employees, financial security is a strong motivator and will remain as such for a long time, but managers must be aware that it stops to be the only motivator at some point, and even could stop to be a motivator all together depending on an individuals circumstances and variations. The different factors that can motivate the employee in the workplace can be expressed as needs which subsequently become motivators for greater productivity when they are fulfilled. Different things can motivate different people and be given different priorities. The manager must identify and then fulfill the needs for the employee, in order to form an environment in the workplace that encourages motivation. The various needs and expectations at work can be categorised into extrinsic and intrinsic motivation: EXTRINSIC MOTIVATORS INTRINSIC MOTIVATORS Salary Sense of challenge and achievement Job security Receiving appreciation Promotion Positive recognition Contract of service Good treatment Work environment Growth and advancement Social interaction Responsibility Health benefits Extrinsic motivation relates to actual rewards such as salary, security, promotion, contract of service and work environment; these are often outside the control of an individual manager; intrinsic motivation relates to psychological rewards such as the sense of challenge and achievement, receiving appreciation, positive recognition and good treatment at work; these can usually be determined by the actions and behaviour of the individual manager(4). These sources of satisfaction differ from an individual to an individual and between different circumstances. They are interlinked, and therefore, cannot be isolated from one another, but must be used as a combination of motivators in an organisation. MOTIVATIONAL THEORIES For many decades, theorists have been trying to understand what motivates an individual to behave in a certain manner in the workplace. However, this is a subject that has seen many conflicting debates as some researches believed that individuals do not lack motivation but certain incentives that motivate them are missing, while others argue that motivation originates from within the individual regardless of the environment and other external influences (9). Theorists have researched the subject of motivation by addressing two main concepts. First is the content of motivation itself, which concerns factors within the individual and the work environment that define and shape certain motivated behaviour. Second is the process of motivation, which concerns the perceptive process that an indivdual has for motivation in a specific setting. This has led to the development of numerous content and process thoeries about motivation in the workplace. CONTENT THEORIES In the 1940s Abraham Malsow, a psychologist, developed the concept of Hierarchy of Needs (10), which later became one of the most popular and influential theories of motivation. He proposed that there are five levels of needs that existed in a specific order, and that each level must be satisfied in turn in order to motivate the individual to satisfy the need at the next level. His argument was based on the fact that Individuals always had the desire for more, and for an individual to be motivated to pursue the next step, the needs at the previous level have to be fully satisfied. Therefore, certain lower-order needs needed to be fulfilled before other higher-order needs became motivators for the individual. According to Maslows model, these needs are physiological needs (basics for survival, e.g. food or water), safety needs (physical and emotinal safety), social needs (sense of love and social belonging), esteem needs (sense of recognition, respect and value) and self-actualisation (achieving ones full potential) (11). (rbs full) In the context of the workplace, there are potential ways that could satisfy an employees needs: Self-actualisation includes providing challenging tasks that would promote creativity and evolvement. Esteem needs includes recognition, praise, social status, self-respect, delegating responsibility and accomplishment Social needs involves social interaction, group work and pariticipation. Safety needs include job security, financial savings and living safe working environment. Physiological needs include providing adequate breaks during work and a salary that allows workers to afford life essentials (4). There are a number of identified problems in applying Maslows theory to the work place. In reality, other areas of life, beside work, can add to the individuals satisfaction, therefore the manager needs to also have knowledge of the employees life outside work. Also, the fact that individuals are different means that they place different values on the same need; and that some rewards at work can satisfy more than one need, and not necessarily satisfy one need at a time (4). Additionally, it was criticised for having a rigid order of needs which possibly would not apply to everyone, because priorities are likely to vary in different individuals and even for the same individual over time (11). In spite of all these problems, Maslows hierarchy of needs model has been widely utilised in many organisations as a guideline for managers to use to motivate their employees. It provides a valuable insight for managers about the general needs that individual employees have, and what can be used to motivate them (12). In 1972, Clayton Alderfer further developed Maslows Hierarchy of Needs model by grouping the different levels of needs in the hierarchy into three sets in his ERG (Existence, Relatedness and Growth) theory. He placed the lower-order needs, physiological and safety, into existence needs; social and esteem needs into the relatedness needs; and finally, the self-actualisation need into growth needs. In addition, Alderfer put forward a regression theory to accompany the ERG theory, which states that when higher-order needs are not met, the individual will work harder to satisfy the lower-order needs in order to increase their chances of fulfilling these higher needs (21). For instance, an employee who is having difficulties satisfying their sense of full potential would then probably put more effort into increasing their pay through promotion in order to maximize their chances of achieving what they want. (20) However, according to (11) a common problem with both Maslow and Alderfers models of motivation is that they contain having descriptions of needs that are too vague, particularly safety and esteem needs, which would essentially cause difficulties to managers in interpreting them and using them to provide certain opportunities for motivating their employees. In 1961, David McClelland created the Acquired Need Theory which is based on three motivational needs including achievement, affiliation and power. He stated that all of the three needs are normally present in an individual to a certain degree, but only one of them usually dominates. This is mix of motivational needs characterises a persons or managers style and behaviour, both in terms of being motivated, and in the management and motivation others. Another theorist, Elton Mayo, has made significant influences on the concepts of human relations and motivation, through conducting large studies of workers in an electrical company in the United States between 1924 1927. His findings emphasised the importance of teamwork, communication and positive recognition on staff motivation. His studies have also led to the creation of a model called The Hawthorne Effect which shows that the degree of interest shown by the manager has a positive influence on an employees job performance (5). However his model has been criticised for placing too much emphasis and reliance on social contacts within the organization on employees job performance (6). Nevertheless, the impact of Mayos research was huge, as it opened doors for further research into the subject of motivation by other theorists. Frederick Hertzberg (1959) developed a two factor theory based on findings from a study conducted in the U.S. through interviews with employees from different industries, in which they were asked about specific things that pleased or displeased them at their workplace. From this, Herzberg realised that there were two different sets of factors, where one set caused satisfaction and the other one caused dissatisfaction. One set of factors, called hygeine or maintenance factors are concerned with the work environment; they do not result in higher level of motivation, but there absence would result in demotivation. These include extrinsic motivators such as salary, security and work environment. The second set of factors are the motivator or growth factors which are concerned with content of the job itself; they result in increased motivation if present. These include intrinsic motivators such as positive recognition, challenge and a sense of achievement. His research also concluded that some factors overlapped both sets but had a stronger emphasis in one of them. (7) The size of the bars represent the degree of concern that each of the factors has on job motivation or dissatisfaction. The reason why the bars for achievement and pay look different is because they both offer short term satisfaction, as there is a continuous need to search for them to lead to satisfaction. This theory has been frequently criticised by many researchers for its limited application and possibly biased methodology. However, continue from pg 266 on book Furthermore, it has been noted the theory does not allow for individual differences, such as particular personality traits, which would affect individuals unique responses to motivating or hygiene factors.[4] The theories of motivation that were put forward more than half a century ago are still evident and widely utilised in todays banking industry. Based on Maslows Hierarchy of Needs model, banks are constantly attempting to sustain a good level of motivation amongst their staff by understanding and fulfilling employees needs. At the physiological and safety needs levels of the hierarchy, basic needs such as food, shelter, warmth and safety are all provided by working in any bank through paying salaries and having a safe environment to work in. In terms of social and esteem needs, banks meet these by creating opportunities for employees to interact with each other and work in teams; in addition to good recognition of achievements through praising the employee or giving a bonus pay, both of which are only a few methods out of many more used by banks to give the employee a sense of value and appreciation. In terms of self-actualisation, banks meet this need by offering promotion opportuni ties to the employees, and giving them the chance to progress in their careers. The motivators that banks offer also cover the hygeine and motivator factors that were put forward in Hertzbergs motivational model. Expectancy theory is a general theory of motivation that is based on the concept that individuals are influenced by the perceived results of their actions. It argues that there are a number of inter-linking factors which determine the strength of an individuals motivation, such as the efforts expended, the expectation that rewards will be available, and that these rewards will be linked to their performance. In other words, the individuals level of motivation will depend on their perceived expectation that it will lead to the desired outcome. This theory has been approached by several different writers, namely Vroom, Porter and Lawler (HRM book). Vrooms expectancy theory is based on three factors: Valence the perceived gratification from a result. Instrumentality the degree to which a first level (performance-related) outcome, e.g. high productivity, leads to a second level (need-related) outcome, e.g. promotion. Expectancy the connection between a selected course of action and its expected outcome. The combination of valence and expectancy defines the level of an individuals motivation. Vrooms theory has been further modified by Porter and Lawler, to develop which takes account other factors besides motivation that could influence performance. These factors include individual skills, characteristics and role perceptions. These theories help managers to understand the nature of human behaviour and the complexity of motivation in the work setting; in addition to helping them recognise any problems with individual performance. They emphasise that managers should pay particular attention to factors such as an employees effort and performance, and use rewards whenever it is appropriate in order to maintain a good level of motivation amongst the employees; additionally, managers are advised to create methods of evaluating employees performance as a way to ensure that their workforce are constantly motivated. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) offers its employees a package called Total Reward (rbs full). Besides salary, this includes flexible working hours, health and medical benefits, lifestyle benefits such as shopping vouchers, and certain financial products at special rates. It also offers monetary incentives such as bonus payments based on profit-sharing and individual-performance schemes; in addition to non-monetary incentives through recognition of good performance based on personal development plans, where the employee is given the opportunity for promotion. RBS gives the employees the chance to work flexibly through a variety of working practices including job sharing, compressed hours and home-working. In 2004, RBS won an award for its flexible working-hours program in the workplace (find ref). This enabled employees to achieve a work-life balance by choosing working hours that fit around their personal lives, which would have a positive influence on the employees commitment at t he workplace, and in turn results in better overall performance. This was highlighted in Elton Mayos studies on staff motivation in the 1920s that showed that staff tended to be more motivated and productive if they were feeling comfortable and satisfied with their work environment. In 1963, John Adams developed the Equity theory which is concerned with the employees perception of fairness in the workplace, in terms of treatment received compared to co-workers on the basis of inputs and outcomes. He argued that fair treatment is highly valued by individuals, and the feeling of inequity may have a negative influence on their performance. There are a number of factors in the workplace that play an important role towards the feeling of equity including pay, promotion and recognition. Employees would expect equal treatment based on their contributions and performance compared to other co-workers. This would subsequently result in a sense of satisfaction and would strengthen their relationship with the organisation and the team of employees, all of which is important for their motivation. Edwin Locke put forward a Goal theory of motivation in the 1960s, which is based on the idea that individuals goals have a significant influence on their performance. He argued that individuals who have specific and challenging goals set for them, to which they are committed to, would generally perform better, as they provide focus and motivation for the employee on the task given. The performance of the employee is further enhanced if this is coupled with clear and constructive feedback of the results, which provides greater focus and gives the employee a greater sense of satisfaction and motivation for the tasks set. In the 1960s Douglas McGregors developed Theory X and Theory Y, which are theories that define two different approaches towards motivation in the workplace. Theory X implies an authoritarian management style, where the employee is often regarded as relatively unambitious, lacks responsibility, tends to avoid work and change, and is often in need for some kind of direction at work in order to perform and progress. So in order to achieve the organisations goals, managers would adopt a stringent attitude towards the employee, in which they would often rely on threatening techniques of punishment to force the employee to comply with the organisations goals. Based on Maslows Hierarchy of Needs model, McGregor argued that most employees in this environment would only seek to satisfy their lower needs, such as money; however, since they are already satisfied they will not be a sufficient motivating tool for any longer. Therefore, this kind of management style would most definitely produce p oor results in terms of staff motivation, and ultimately meeting the organisations objectives. For this reason, McGregor put forward a Theory Y, which assumes a participative management style, where the employee is considered to be self-motivated, responsible, ambitious, and that they genuinely enjoy working. According to this theory, managers believe that employees are self-directed and motivated to perform well at work. This creates a work environment where managers are able to exercise delegation, collaboration and responsibility in decision making amongst their workforce. In this Theory Y environment, most employees are encouraged and driven to satisfy higher level of needs such as esteem and self-actualisation, which are not fully satisfied and would therefore keep them motivated for higher performance and productivity at the workplace. (8) McGregors model has been criticised for being too rigid and quite unrealistic in the way it depicts management and employees as being one of either two extremes in the workplace. Nevertheless, his theories continue to provide a guide to managers about the fundamentals of management styles, and the importance of maintaining a positive attitude to staff motivation, where employees feel that they are well-treated and valued as part of the of the organisation.

Nisa Critique

While there have been many rich descriptions of the life of the !Kung of south central Africa, the account given by Marjorie Shostak in her analysis of the life of a woman of this clan appears to be a fascinating account at best but not entirely scholarly since it flouts major ethnographic guidelines.Introduction:The !Kung people are a tribe of hunter-gatherers who live as bushmen in the   southwestern part of Africa,   in isolated areas of Botswana (where they make up only 3 percent of the population), Angola, and Namibia, deep in the Kalahari desert. After gaining fluency in the language of the! Kung, Shostak returned to Botswana in 1975 for six months to complete the life histories of several women in the tribe.Marjorie Shostak manages to takes us into the oldest culture on earth by living with a hunter/gatherer tribe in southern Africa and manages to give us the details of there way of life through an interview with them, of course, before their way of life was further damage d by careless government administration policies. She reflexively collects interviews and anecdotes that enable her to explain their morals, architecture, tribal politics, spirituality, games, marriage rituals and subsistence lifestyle, giving us one of the best looks at how human society began all those thousands of years ago. Also read: My Problem With Her Anger SummaryOne of its major flaws especially for those with a strong understanding of anthropology is the fact that she concentrates her analysis from the report of one dominant character named NISA [the name is fictitious]. This results in a narrative of an idiosyncratic life, one that, as the !Kung woman Nisa once told Shostak, †I will break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out into the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away†; seems to imply that each woman’s life is unique and may not reflect the truth about women’s lives in the general community of the !Kung clan, even though it truly attempts to mirror the conventions and culture of the group as well.However, from the book we are able to determine Nisa’s character as a woman who is forthcoming in personality, and unabashed and expressive in her native tongue, although she also comes across as de manding and manipulative in behavior. This presented to Shostak great problems in gaining an objective analysis, a fact that generated early ambivalent feelings towards Nisa which as she reports, did not endear Nisa to her any bit. Although Shostak tried to interview more than a dozen other women of all ages; inviting recall, asking pertinent questions and seeking bio-graphical highlights she seems to finally have settled her choice on Nisa as informant because of her   particularly forceful, colorful language, and generally truthful replies.Secondly, although   the justification of Nisa as informant is reliable, it only serves to foster the concept of authenticity in ethnographic representation. The importance of authenticity in ethnographic representation is still in doubt as portrayed in James Clifford’s   review of Edward Said's Orientalism, Clifford asks, â€Å"Should criticism work to counter sets of culturally produced images like Orientalism with more â€Å"au thentic† or more â€Å"human† representations? Or, if criticism must struggle against the procedures of representation itself, how is it to begin?’The general consensus seems to be that authenticity is itself a representation which can be misused. For example, the purpose of the poet or novelist is creative self-expression. For the creative writer, representation is the vehicle for expression; the creative writer consciously chooses representations as representations. The writer of nonfiction, however, typically focuses on the substance of what she wishes to communicate, and often fails to realize that she uses representations when communicating her ideas hence giving rise to rhetoric. Rhetoric is the characteristic manner by which a text's language and organization convinces its readers of the truth, but is itself not truth.Thirdly is the issue of dialogue versus monologue in ethnographic presentation. It is very apparent that Shostak’s   focus moves aw ay from the central position of the ethnographer (implicit in ethnographic realism and explicit in Dumont’s example of the self-reflexive approach in his book The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalencein the Fieldworking Experience), and brings the importance of native informants to the foreground. â€Å"The other† is given the opportunity, albeit limited, to represent herself in Shostak's text. Shostak's text is also significant because it attempts to incorporate dialogue as a structural feature.Shostak demonstrates the potential usefulness of multiple voices although her ultimate control over the text makes it a monologue. The monological aspect is repeated within the text itself: there is no true discourse between Shostak's and Nisa's portions of the text, only alternating monologues.   However, according to Stephen A. Tyler this presents a problem in ethnographic presentation, one that is solved in a different approach which he suggest when he says, â€Å"A po st-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect.†Tyler's emphasizes the dialogical nature of ethnography [alternating monologues as is the case in Shostak’s work], were the discourse is between reader and writer rather than between the writer and the culture he studies. Tyler maintains that the experience which matters is not the fieldwork but the writing of the ethnography; the ethnographer does not attempt to represent another culture to the reader, but rather to evoke in the reader a recollection of his own culture. Ethnography is a way to make the familiar unfamiliar and then familiar again.Lastly is the authors choice of topics that evolve around the issue f sex and violence maybe justifiable if viewed from the perspective t hat narrative is highly charged with sex because sex is important in !Kung life. From Shostak’s   very provocative findings, such as a much more sexually egalitarian sensibility than our own, we see that in the !Kung culture, marriages are largely monogamous, with some sanction for a second wife; lovers are accepted for both husbands and wives, but discretion is made more important expressly because discovery can lead to mayhem and even murder. However, Shostak seems to get this information largely from Nisa’s own personal account.Personal accounts are   rarely written without particular motivation. Every account has some agenda. Scholars suggest that we need to always consider why the subject feels it is important to share his or her life either privately or with an anonymous public. This is because the narrator’s motivation will account for what parts of a life are discussed and what details are filtered out. What motivated the author of the personal accou nt?Whether written or oral, a personal account is a subjective, selective account of a life recorded for a specific purpose, ranging from personal catharsis to revisionist history. There are many motivations for the creation of personal accounts, including a focus on the self, on others, or on posterity. In this particular account, were Shostak seems to have solicited the story, rather than finding the account, the scholar’s reason for seeking the personal account will probably color the nature of the questions asked.In this case, the personal account will likely reflect the scholar’s interests more than those of the subject. Hence, it can be postulated that Shostak’s interests in giving Nisa’s account was to highlight the issue of women and not entirely for ethnographic purposes. This can be evidenced by the fact that in her time all the way to date, women’s stories in the West have been increasingly considered valid testimonies, along with accoun ts by people of color and those outside the highest strata of socio-political influence. Therefore, although it is impossible to view history from a wholly objective position, it is still helpful to be aware of such biases.In conclusion, I believe that what Shostak should have done was to strive to consider other sources that could offer insight about the !Kung people, such as official documents (marriage, divorce, and birth records, public notices), archived newspapers (human interest stories, political coverage), and glossy magazines (regional and national views reflecting social trends of the time, setting a context). Although her learning of the language is a great achievement enabling her to establish effective communication with the subject, it serves to tell us only a fragment of the whole picture.This fact takes on a deeper gravity when we consider that the question of truth may have many answers. Nisa’s portrayal of her life is indeed accurate in her own mind. Yet we know that, after all, memory is selective: people’s responses to experiences vary and people’s memories of experiences change with time and influence. Events that happen in a person’s life between lived experiences and recording those events can shape their telling, which only confirms that truth may have many answers.Reference:THE PROBLEM OF ETHNOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION http://home.pacbell.net/nicnic/ethnographic.html#14Shostak, Marjorie, Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1981). Nisa Critique Introduction:The Kung people are a tribe of hunter-gatherers who live as bushmen in the   southwestern part of Africa,   in isolated areas of Botswana (where they make up only 3 percent of the population), Angola, and Namibia, deep in the Kalahari desert. After gaining fluency in the language of the! Kung, Shostak returned to Botswana in 1975 for six months to complete the life histories of several women in the tribe.Marjorie Shostak manages to takes us into the oldest culture on earth by living with a hunter/gatherer tribe in southern Africa and manages to give us the details of there way of life through an interview with them, of course, before their way of life was further damaged by careless government administration policies. She reflexively collects interviews and anecdotes that enable her to explain their morals, architecture, tribal politics, spirituality, games, marriage rituals and subsistence lifestyle, giving us one of the best looks at how human society began all tho se thousands of years ago.One of its major flaws especially for those with a strong understanding of anthropology is the fact that she concentrates her analysis from the report of one dominant character named NISA [the name is fictitious]. This results in a narrative of an idiosyncratic life, one that, as the !Kung woman Nisa once told Shostak, †I will break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out into the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away†; seems to imply that each woman’s life is unique and may not reflect the truth about women’s lives in the general community of the !Kung clan, even though it truly attempts to mirror the conventions and culture of the group as well.However, from the book we are able to determine Nisa’s character as a woman who is forthcoming in personality, and unabashed and expressive in her native tongue, although she also comes across as demanding and manip ulative in behavior. This presented to Shostak great problems in gaining an objective analysis, a fact that generated early ambivalent feelings towards Nisa which as she reports, did not endear Nisa to her any bit. Although Shostak tried to interview more than a dozen other women of all ages; inviting recall, asking pertinent questions and seeking bio-graphical highlights she seems to finally have settled her choice on Nisa as informant because of her   particularly forceful, colorful language, and generally truthful replies.Secondly, although   the justification of Nisa as informant is reliable, it only serves to foster the concept of authenticity in ethnographic representation. The importance of authenticity in ethnographic representation is still in doubt as portrayed in James Clifford’s   review of Edward Said's Orientalism, Clifford asks, â€Å"Should criticism work to counter sets of culturally produced images like Orientalism with more â€Å"authentic† or more â€Å"human† representations?Or, if criticism must struggle against the procedures of representation itself, how is it to begin?’ The general consensus seems to be that authenticity is itself a representation which can be misused. For example, the purpose of the poet or novelist is creative self-expression. For the creative writer, representation is the vehicle for expression; the creative writer consciously chooses representations as representations. The writer of nonfiction, however, typically focuses on the substance of what she wishes to communicate, and often fails to realize that she uses representations when communicating her ideas hence giving rise to rhetoric. Rhetoric is the characteristic manner by which a text's language and organization convinces its readers of the truth, but is itself not truth.Thirdly is the issue of dialogue versus monologue in ethnographic presentation. It is very apparent that Shostak’s   focus moves away from the centr al position of the ethnographer (implicit in ethnographic realism and explicit in Dumont’s example of the self-reflexive approach in his book The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalencein the Fieldworking Experience), and brings the importance of native informants to the foreground. â€Å"The other† is given the opportunity, albeit limited, to represent herself in Shostak's text. Shostak's text is also significant because it attempts to incorporate dialogue as a structural feature. Shostak demonstrates the potential usefulness of multiple voices although her ultimate control over the text makes it a monologue.The monological aspect is repeated within the text itself: there is no true discourse between Shostak's and Nisa's portions of the text, only alternating monologues.   However, according to Stephen A. Tyler this presents a problem in ethnographic presentation, one that is solved in a different approach which he suggest when he says, â€Å"A post-modern ethnogr aphy is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect.† Tyler's emphasizes the dialogical nature of ethnography [alternating monologues as is the case in Shostak’s work], were the discourse is between reader and writer rather than between the writer and the culture he studies. Tyler maintains that the experience which matters is not the fieldwork but the writing of the ethnography; the ethnographer does not attempt to represent another culture to the reader, but rather to evoke in the reader a recollection of his own culture. Ethnography is a way to make the familiar unfamiliar and then familiar again.Lastly is the authors choice of topics that evolve around the issue f sex and violence maybe justifiable if viewed from the perspective that narrative is highly charged with sex because sex is important in !Kung life. From Shostak’s   very provocative findings, such as a much more sexually egalitarian sensibility than our own, we see that in the !Kung culture, marriages are largely monogamous, with some sanction for a second wife; lovers are accepted for both husbands and wives, but discretion is made more important expressly because discovery can lead to mayhem and even murder. However, Shostak seems to get this information largely from Nisa’s own personal account. Personal accounts are   rarely written without particular motivation.Every account has some agenda. Scholars suggest that we need to always consider why the subject feels it is important to share his or her life either privately or with an anonymous public. This is because the narrator’s motivation will account for what parts of a life are discussed and what details are filtered out. What motivated the author of the personal account? Whether writ ten or oral, a personal account is a subjective, selective account of a life recorded for a specific purpose, ranging from personal catharsis to revisionist history. There are many motivations for the creation of personal accounts, including a focus on the self, on others, or on posterity.In this particular account, were Shostak seems to have solicited the story, rather than finding the account, the scholar’s reason for seeking the personal account will probably color the nature of the questions asked. In this case, the personal account will likely reflect the scholar’s interests more than those of the subject. Hence, it can be postulated that Shostak’s interests in giving Nisa’s account was to highlight the issue of women and not entirely for ethnographic purposes. This can be evidenced by the fact that in her time all the way to date, women’s stories in the West have been increasingly considered valid testimonies, along with accounts by people of color and those outside the highest strata of socio-political influence. Therefore, although it is impossible to view history from a wholly objective position, it is still helpful to be aware of such biases.In conclusion, I believe that what Shostak should have done was to strive to consider other sources that could offer insight about the !Kung people, such as official documents (marriage, divorce, and birth records, public notices), archived newspapers (human interest stories, political coverage), and glossy magazines (regional and national views reflecting social trends of the time, setting a context). Although her learning of the language is a great achievement enabling her to establish effective communication with the subject, it serves to tell us only a fragment of the whole picture. This fact takes on a deeper gravity when we consider that the question of truth may have many answers. Nisa’s portrayal of her life is indeed accurate in her own mind. Yet we know that, af ter all, memory is selective: people’s responses to experiences vary and people’s memories of experiences change with time and influence. Events that happen in a person’s life between lived experiences and recording those events can shape their telling, which only confirms that truth may have many answers.Reference:THE PROBLEM OF ETHNOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION http://home.pacbell.net/nicnic/ethnographic.html#14Shostak, Marjorie, Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1981).

Mr. Ajinkya Deshmukh

In 1990, Buick advertised extensively that a survey of over 26, 000 new-car buyers had revealed that Buick was the only American car line ranked in the top 10 in initial quality based on owner reported problems during the first 90 days. Buick featured in its ads, a list of the top-10 automobiles in the survey, in which it was ranked fifth: behind Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Infiniti and ahead of Honda, Nissan, Acura, BMW, and Mazda. All nine of these other car lines are Japanese or German. In his nationally syndicated column, â€Å"High Five Is Goodbye Wave, Not the Symbol of Quality,† August 23, 1990, columnist George Will somewhat berated Buick for bragging about only being fifth. He stated that the â€Å"We’re Number One† boasts of wining college football players and their fans may be â€Å"mistaken, and the passion may be disproportionate to the achievement, but at least it is better than chanting ‘We’re Number Five. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Mr. Will noted that such ads imply, â€Å"Don’t expect us to measure up to the big boys – the ones overseas. † He wanted Americans to become â€Å"impatient and censorious about lax standards (We’re Number 5) that are producing pandemic shoddiness in everything rom cars to art to second graders’ homework. † Mr. Will ended his column: â€Å"Americans would feel better, and might be more inclined to buy Buick, if they saw an ad reprinting the list above, but with a text that says: ‘Fifth place is not nearly good enough for Americans to brag about. And until we do better, we apologize! †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Mr. Will may well have been correct that many U. S. firms were not producing products up to the quality standards of many foreign firms. We want to point out, however, that his criticism of Buick’s boast of being number five as indicative of shoddy American quality may not have been quite valid. In fact, it may be great to be â€Å"Number Five†.

Pablo Picasso Guernica vs. Theodore Gericaults Raft of...

For centuries artists have moved audiences through the use of pictures. As time progressed those images became more and more demanding of the viewer until they were meant to invoke a physical response. Perhaps the earliest account of such emotionally exact artwork is the 1818 piece, Raft of the Medusa, by Theodore Gericault. As time progressed people became more politically aware and involved and generations of art portrayed this. Pablo Picassos Guernica, created in 1937, is a great example of how modern times soon saw a peak in the occurrence of allegorical and politically packed artworks. Gericaults The Raft of the Medusa and Picassos Guernica are both horrifying accounts of the nature of men that aimed to alter a viewers political†¦show more content†¦This predominantly two-toned color motif allowed for more focus to be drawn to the most dynamic figures, which are the same humans Gericault wanted viewers to see and sympathize for. While Gericaults, Raft of the Medusa was essentially criticized for its lack of direct criticism of the event and more a display of the human element, it is this feature that made it characteristically romantic. Gericault took the national scandal out of the papers and turned it into a personal event for each of the passengers. Rather than depict the weltering bodies of the crew, he gave them more muscular frames in vigorous poses. Originally setting out to portray the event as nothing more than a visual truth, he shifted his focus to portray a greater truth of suffering. The suffering is reflected in the face of every passenger and it is the main focus of the piece than any other element. The Rafts theme of human suffering evoked empathy and compassion, which helped project the image beyond any hopes the artist could have held for the piece. This predominant focus on the human condition allowed a stereotypical Romantic piece. Another artist famous for highlighting the human condition was Spanish-born, Pablo Picasso. In 1936 the Spanish government commissioned Picasso to paint a feature piece for their international exposition in Paris at the peak of World War II. Picasso was unsure of what to paint until in 1937 when Nazi warplanes bombed the Spanish town of