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by Kronopath
3027 days ago
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The part of the article that starts with this paragraph is particularly enlightening: > In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles. People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning, then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also, back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit. This is a great example of how you can't just transplant a culture and expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly. |
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