評論
打印
Workers and labour activists have often attacked strict discipline as coercive, unfair and potentially counterproductive.
工人和勞工活動人士一直以來都在批判紀律苛刻，認為這是強迫性、不公平且可能會適得其反的東西。
Text-book economics suggests, though, that in a competitive labour market any attempt to coerce people into working harder than they want will fail, since workers can simply switch jobs.
雖然教科書式經濟學揭示，在充滿競爭的勞動市場中，任何強迫工人更加努力工作的舉措都將遭到失敗，因為工人會直接跳槽。
Studies of factory work paint a more complicated picture, however.
然而，一些對制造業工作的研究展現出更為復雜情況：
People would like to work hard and earn high wages, this story goes.
人們更愿意努力工作，以賺取高工資。
But they struggle with self-control and do not work as hard as they wish they would.
但他們自制力不高，不能如像想象那般努力。
They consequently choose to work for firms that use disciplinary measures to push them.
因此，他們選擇去實施紀律措施的企業，以此來促使自己努力工作。
During industrialisation, workers “effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder”, says Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, in a seminal paper on the subject.
加利福尼亞大學戴維斯分校經濟史學家格雷戈里克拉克(Gregory Clark)在這一領域有重大影響力的一篇論文中寫道：在工業化期間，工人“有效地受雇于資本家，讓自己工作更努力”。
If that seems an implausibly sunny description of life in 19th-century factories, researchers have found evidence for such behaviour in modern contexts.
如果這看上去是對19世紀工廠生活的生動描述，有點讓人難以置信的話，研究人員在當代制造業也發現了這類行為的證據。
Supreet Kaur, of Columbia University, and Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, of Harvard University, ran a 13-month experiment using data-entry workers,
哥倫比亞大學的蘇普瑞特·考爾以及來自哈佛大學的邁克爾·克雷默和行為經濟學家塞德希爾·穆來納森進行了一項長達13個月的實驗。
who were paid according to the amount of work successfully completed.
該實驗的對象是數據輸入員，其工資取決于他們成功完成的工作量。
Some struggled with self-control, the authors deter-mined, as shown by their tendency to slack off for much of each month but put in more effort as payday approached.
研究人員發現，一些自制力差的人會在每個月的大多數日子里偷懶，然后在領工資日前努力工作。
When workers were offered contracts that penalised them for failing to hit performance targets,
如果提議讓員工簽署合同，規定若未能達到績效指標便實施處罰，
those who struggled to stay on-task disproportionately accepted, and achieved big gains in output and pay as a result.
那些難以保持工作狀態的員工大部分都會接受，最終他們的工作投入和工資會大幅增加。
In many settings, pay is less clearly linked to performance.
在很多情況下，工資并不直接與績效掛鉤。
譯文來源余興宇
