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IN THIS ISSUE
When Brenda met Laura
The art of engagement A Frenchman in Argentina
colours
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Good morning,
This is the season of gifting. And
people who gift thoughtfully are a rare breed. So, what is it about gifts and
gifting that makes it nuanced? This is a question Lewis Hyde explores deeply in
the meticulously researched The Gift.
“It is the cardinal difference between
gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two
people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into
a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I
may never see him again. The
disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to
be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop
elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.
“But a gift makes a connection. To take
the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells
of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap
restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table,
and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal
begins, a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his
neighbour’s. And his neighbour will return the
gesture, filling the first man’s empty
glass. In an economic sense nothing has happened. No one has any more wine than
he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The
French customarily tend to ignore people whom they do not know, but in these
little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for
an hour or more. ‘A conflict exists,’ says Levi-Strauss, ‘not very keen to be
sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a state of tension between the
norm of privacy and the fact of community… This is the fleeting but difficult
situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace
which does away with the mutual uncertainty.’ Spatial proximity becomes social
life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions
another exchange—conversation—and a whole series of trivial social ties
unfolds.
“There are many such simple examples,
the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane,
the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus.
These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they
offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions…
“To take just one of the innumerable
examples of marriage gifts, in New Caledonia when boys reach puberty they seek
out girls from the clan complementary to their own and exchange tokens whose
value and nature are set by custom. A boy’s first question to a girl whose
favour he seeks is, ‘Will you take my gifts or not?’ The answer is sometimes ‘I
will take them,’ and sometimes ‘I have taken the gifts of another man. I don’t
want to exchange with you.’ To accept a boy’s gifts initiates a series of
oscillating reciprocations which leads finally to the formal gifts of nuptial
union. Courtship in New Caledonia, it seems, is no different from courtship
throughout the world.”
Have a good day.
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A popular story that dominates
headlines is how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace humans. We have,
however, always argued it will either create a new class of jobs or both will
work together. And this first person account by Laura Preston in The Guardian,
who worked for a year as a backup to a chatbot called Brenda, is one of the
best first person accounts we have read in recent times—it reinforces our
view.
“It was the spring of 2019. My time as
a creative writing student had just come to an end, as had my funding, and the
rent was due; I needed a job. I sent the recruiter my CV. Several phone
interviews later, I was signing up for training slots and watching a 45-minute
PowerPoint presentation on fair-housing law. I did a little maths: an operator
made $25 an hour, and worked between 15 and 30 hours a week, depending on how
lucky they were in the weekly shift lottery…
“(W)e operators, with our advanced
degrees in the humanities, had aptitudes Brenda lacked. We were intuitive,
articulate and sensitive to the finer points of delivery. At $25 an hour we
also cost almost nothing to employ, by corporate standards. Under the
Brenda-operator alliance, everyone came out ahead: the operators got paid
better than they would as adjunct professors, and Brenda became more likeable,
more convincing, more humane. Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were
satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a
customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed
by PhDs in literature.
“Brenda would carry on a
conversation, and when she started to fail an operator would speak in her
place. In reality, I rarely spoke for Brenda. Most of her missteps were errors
of comprehension… But there were moments when a full takeover was necessary.
When Brenda did not understand a message, and knew she did not understand, she
tagged the message with HUMAN_FALLBACK. HUMAN_FALLBACK was Brenda’s white flag
of surrender. With HUMAN_FALLBACK, Brenda ceded the conversation to me, and I
had to assume her voice and manner.”
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Everywhere, there is much talk about ‘quiet
quitting’, where workers do the bare minimum to collect their paychecks,
without deeper engagement, without feeling that the work adds something
meaningful to their lives. In a podcast with Laura Pavin, Leigh Thompson, a
professor at Kellogg, highlights several aspects that one should consider while
trying to engage with such employees. One of them is to turn the gaze
inwards, at yourself.
Pavin says: “Thompson’s actually
studied how the moods of team leaders are really contagious and affect the
behaviour of their teams: the more powerful a person is in the organisation,
she found, the more ‘contagious’ their emotional mindset is. There was this one
simulation she ran where business students were asked to play out the role of a
superior and the role of a subordinate. The superior had to negotiate with the
subordinate over the allocation of scarce resources, and obviously, the
subordinate had a lot less ‘power’ in the scenario. What she learned was that
the emotional state of the powerful superior—positive or negative—affected the
trust between the parties, it affected their performance on a collaborative
task, and it affected how ‘fair’ the outcomes were. If the powerful manager had
a negative disposition, there ended up being lower trust, worse performance,
and unfair allocation of resources. If the powerful manager had a positive
disposition, on the other hand, trust flourished, collaboration was profitable,
and the less-powerful person received more resources.
“Now, keep in mind the environment and
situation was the same. The only difference was what Thompson calls the
‘chronic emotional disposition’ of the leader involved.
“Thompson says that, each
day, we consciously pack up our briefcase and get our meeting notes ready, but
we are often unaware of whom we are bringing to work—our positive self or our
negative self. We are even less aware how our chronic dispositions might be
setting the stage for a negative workplace, she says.”
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A Frenchman in Argentina colours
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