| I've noticed a trend towards needless bijections in management vocabulary. Like, there will be some common names "foo" and "bar" for things, but then management will start to call them "red" and "blue" -- because that's what Important Guy said at the meeting. And anyone who has to ask what "red" and "blue" mean reveals themselves to be more-distant from Important Person. This little game propagates through the organization, resulting in various forms of confusion and misunderstanding as it goes. Put another way -- without thinking about it, people's instinct to imitate superiors creates a collection of simple substitution ciphers. And these ciphers continually mutate, as those powerful people emit more randomness. It's a lot like "Hail Vectron" from That Mitchell and Webb Look, except it has the structure of a bijection mapping meaningful words to arbitrary ones. For another example, see how Davos people talk about "Blue Hydrogen", and other hues of the colorless gas. I am sure you can think of examples from your own workplace. Anyway, this "Theory X" and "Theory Y" stuff clearly appeals to the same impulse. What are "X" and "Y"? If you don't know, it's your turn to be shamed! Join the mystery cult! I'm being a little too cynical. The other reason these empty signifiers pop up is that good names are hard to coin. Words carry connotations that you may not want. It's sometimes easier to start with an abstract symbol and populate it with meaning over the course of an entire paragraph. But that's never the best thing. You do that only because you couldn't come up with a better name. Some decent words here would be "extrinsic"(=X) and "intrinsic"(=Y), with both adjectives implicitly modifying the noun "reward" or "motivation". |