![]() ![]() Ranganathan and her research assistants spent nearly two years interviewing several dozen workers and managers throughout the factory. Management installed the devices overnight, with no notice to factory workers. Pants work was considered simple and jacket work complex.įactory management had introduced RFID devices to a few garment lines on a trial basis in 2012. The garment factory where Ranganathan conducted her research manufactured men’s pants and jackets. Some interventions will improve productivity, and others won’t.” It’s a more nuanced approach to understanding quantification in different contexts. “Our paper, for the first time, says it’s not all bad or not all good. ![]() “Prior studies focus on quantification either improving things or causing negative effects,” Ranganathan says. Ranganathan describes the work in a paper, coauthored by Alan Benson of the Carlson School of Management, recently published in the American Sociological Review. In contrast, those who perform complex tasks that require higher levels of artisanship believe quantification to be an imperfect measure of their on-the-job performance and are thus demotivated by such real-time scorekeeping. What’s behind this phenomenon? When workers completing simple tasks have their work quantified, they’re more likely to turn the experience into a personal game, a concept known as “auto-gamification.” They compete against themselves to increase efficiency, even when there’s no reward for doing so and no punishment if they don’t. Quantifying complex work, however, has the opposite effect: It drives productivity down. Ultimately, she discovered that when companies quantify simple tasks, productivity goes up. So she spent the next several months embedded in the plant, then analyzed multiple years of the factory’s data to find out. T2 - Quantification of Work, Auto-Gamification, and Worker ProductivityEconomic jitters push pandemic job seekers to big companies, not startups © American Sociological Association 2020.Ībstract = "Technological advances and the big-data revolution have facilitated fine-grained, high-frequency, low-cost measurement of individuals American Sociological Association 2020.", The views expressed here are exclusively those of the authors. We thank Ishwarya Thyagarajan for assistance with fieldwork. We are grateful for the financial support from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tata Center for Technology and Design. Louis, Stanford University, and University of Minnesota. This article contributes to the study of quantification, work games, technology, and organizations, and we explore the policy implications of further quantification of work.įor helpful comments, we thank Ethan Bernstein, Angele Christin, Hengchen Dai, JP Ferguson, Amir Goldberg, Arvind Karunakaran, Kate Kellogg, Barbara Kiviat, Tom Kochan, Adam Seth Litwin, Carrie Oelberger, Wanda Orlikowski, Erin Reid, Ching Ren, Amanda Sharkey, Jesper Sorensen, and Ezra Zuckerman, as well as attendees at the Wharton People & Organizations Conference, Wharton People Analytics Conference, Organization Science Winter Conference, Organizational Ecology Conference, University of Michigan Mitsui Symposium, American Sociological Association meetings, Academy of Management meetings, and seminar participants at McGill University, George Washington University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, University of Southern California, London Business School, Washington University in St. Qualitative evidence uncovers the auto-gamification mechanism and three conditions that enable it a natural experiment tests the consequences of quantification of work for worker productivity. To substantiate our argument, we study implementation of an RFID measurement technology that quantifies individual workers’ output in real time at a garment factory in India. When work is complex, by contrast, quantification reduces productivity because quantified metrics cannot adequately measure the multifaceted work being performed, causing auto-gamification to be demotivating. We further argue that quantification is likely to raise productivity in a context of simple work, where auto-gamification is motivating because quantified metrics adequately measure the work being performed. We argue that quantification affects worker productivity via auto-gamification, or workers’ inadvertent transformation of work into an independent, individual-level game. This article investigates how and when quantification of work affects worker productivity. Yet we understand little about the influences of such quantification of work on workers’ behavior and performance. Technological advances and the big-data revolution have facilitated fine-grained, high-frequency, low-cost measurement of individuals’ work. ![]()
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