Rivethead -- a Riveting Read Quite Often,

¶ … Rivethead -- a Riveting Read Quite often, management textbooks tend to fall into two categories. The first typical style of a management textbook takes the form of a quantitative text. It deals with employees as sets and reams of numbers, and attempts to analyze and make generalizations about computed processes and statistically tabulated results.

What standard operating procedures produce the greatest quantifiable increases in productivity under different economic circumstances? The second type of management textbook tends to be vague, full of sociological and psychological assertions, steps to follow, principles, and manifestos, all filled with words like 'motivation' and 'goals.' The differences between the appearances of these books, in heft and weight, and design may seem considerable, but there are also many similarities too -- none of the workers in the statistical tables seem to take drugs, none of the workers in the thirteen or fourteen power principles like to curse.

All stress-related disagreements are managed carefully and cleanly between employees, with the aid of members of competent human resources staffs, with a certain percentage of efficacy. Suddenly, into this pristine classroom atmosphere comes a former General Motors Quality Control man named Ben Hamper. One can almost hear Hamper striding into a business classroom, throwing a management textbook into a metal wastebasket, and flinging his book Rivethead onto a nearby student's desk.

Try to stop him from saying what's on his mind and you're likely to be greeted with a "shut the fuck up," an example of the profanity that frequently occurs in the text, but never gratuitously.

(46) Rather the harshness of Harper's language reflects what it is like to dwell in the world of an assembly line plant, to dwell in a work of men and monotony and what Hamper calls car, windshield, car windshield, drudgery piled atop drudgery -- the realities of everyday working life in mass production in meat and potatoes industrial America. Rather than attempting to provide a theory about what works, Rivethead show the reality from the point-of-view of employees on the floor of a GM plant.

It gives the reader the ability to draw conclusions him or herself from the anecdotes portrayed. Unlike a textbook, it gives the unique feeling of what it is like to work in a particular industry, rather than to make generalizations about management and industry in either quantitative or qualitative theory. Why don't you just ask us what's wrong many workers complain, when greeted with mysterious directives from management that they believe to be misguided? Ben Hamper does not ask to be heard, he tells.

However, this is not to give the impression that Hamper disliked his work. His description of the life he lead in the auto industry is also poignant in the love he began to feel for his job GM and the desperate possessiveness he felt for the company. He loved the masculine and blue-collar edge of his work, because it was the source of his self-esteem, despite its routine nature. GM 'was' the town.

The work even seemed to affect the way Hamper saw and functioned in his personal life outside of the factor. Getting ready for work, he already saw an assembly line in his bathroom and in his schedule for the day. "Car, tailpipe. Food, pork chop. Car, brake pad. Rent, Friday. Car, hubcap. Life, toothpaste" (9) Hamper was critical of the way the factory was run, during his work there and afterwards.

He called the factory a crunching dinosaur as testimony to its outmoded structure, but says it was all his -- his bitch, he called it, his dinosaur. Hamper's eventual 'coming over' to the GM mindset and way of live was especially striking, given that Hamper admits when he was in high school he despised all the company stood for, and vowed to never become a GM employee. But after marrying and having a child, he had little choice. Ten years passed.

Those ten years oversaw Hamper's promotion from employee to management. Then, towards the book's climax, when Hamper realized his GM job was going nowhere, that he was going to lose his job and not get it back, he literally went crazy and found himself in a mental institution. The structure of his world had crumbled, and GM did not help him put the pieces back together, just as it had ignored the angst of its workers and the increasingly dinosaur-like nature of its production.

This book is extremely helpful to management personnel who might be tempted to take an 'us vs. them' view of management and lower level employment staff. Arrogantly, some management members might assume that lower level workers do not find routine work boring, because they are not college educated. But Harper shows the humanity of employees, how the monotony of factory life puts the reader to sleep with the boredom of making up games and diversions so that "the.