[Note: Clicking on the linked text will take you to a reference page on our sponsor's site where you can read a more extensive review of the work that I'm referring to. You can also order it or just put it in your shopping cart for another time.]

Don't be alarmed, it's not on my to-do list yet. I have a confession to make: I'm not a successfully self-employed web personality who gets to avoid the tedious hum-drum of going to work in the morning. My name's Zimmie. I'm a wage slave. (Group: "Hi, Zimmie!") There, I've said it. I feel better now.

The rest of this will make just a bit more sense if I provide a bit of background.

Back in the Renaissance, when I was an Experimental Psychology student, I developed a very strong preference for the research of individuals who actually went out and got their hands dirty — i.e., observing behavior in its natural setting. An example would be the work of Leon Festinger , who infiltrated a "cult" which held the belief that on a specific day, the world would be destroyed and aliens would come to rescue them. Or, Muzafer Sherif , who observed the conflict behavior of pre-adolescent summer campers. (The results he obtained should move William G. Golding's "Lord of the Flies" to the non-fiction section.)

On campus, the expedient approach was to select experimental and control groups from the conscripted "subject pool" of intro psych students and set up rigorously controlled parlor games, analyzed by state of the art statistics. Much quicker and easier. Another Ph.D. would roll off the assembly line, and the journals would fill rapidly with information useful and interesting to no one except those who wanted to roll off the assembly line.

I also had an interest in animal behavior. Here again, it was the findings of Konrad Lorenz , Jane Goodall , and others who spent the time to actually observe animals in their natural habitats, which I found fascinating. [ You may want to check out my earlier article, "Bumblebees and Other Flights of Fancy" for a bit of background info.]

The campus version of animal behavior research was a little different: “Let's study the behavior of the Albino Norway Rat, a specially bred, half-blind creature whose natural habitat is the laboratory. (Much more convenient.) While we're at it, let's have him bar press for food pellets.” It really doesn't matter that for eons, real rats have found much more creative and interesting ways to behave (rarely involving bar pressing), This way is more convenient. We can hook up an event recorder and the graphs which will fill up the journals will be generated automatically. Did you know that if an Albino Norway Rat receives a food pellet after pressing a bar, he will be more likely to press the bar again (acquisition)? Conversely, if he does not receive food, he will tend to lose interest (extinction). Also, even if we stop giving him food, he may still try again later (spontaneous recovery). There — now you don't have to bother with the course.

Following my banishment from academia on charges of heresy, and being run out of the quiet college town, I resolved that I would go forth into the "real world" and observe behavior first hand. Only after years of careful observation would I be so presumptuous as to theorize, postulate, or in any way pass myself off as an authority on human behavior. Modeling myself after my hero, Konrad Lorenz, I would emigrate to the barnyard and find my "geese" (figuratively speaking, that is).

I like reading about geese. I don't actually like being with them. The thought of going about with a flock of them constantly hissing at my heels after "imprinting" on me as their parent, is an image I would reserve for my penance in the afterlife. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even partial to barnyards. No, my "barnyard" would be "The Workplace" in the real world, the organization and its intricate social behavior. I would infiltrate and pass myself off as one the ordinary workers and never let on that I was actually a totally detached participant-observer. This was a convenient place to start, as sleeping indoors and other luxuries could be maintained with the weekly salary check which my subjects would give me. Much better than goose eggs.

In our Introductory Psychology text, we learn that "naturalistic observation" is a good thing. Inferences and hypotheses develop which later may be taken into the laboratory and subjected to the rigorous controls needed to produce "objectivity", since what we observe is subject to our "biases", etc. Thinking in terms of biases, one can readily see that I was putting myself in a much more precarious situation than the barnyard. After all, Lorenz was not a goose himself, even though the geese felt he was. And despite her obvious empathy for the creatures, Goodall was not a Chimpanzee. Calling myself a "participant-observer" did not immunize me from subjectivity. On the other hand, to the extent that I actually came to believe that I was an ordinary worker, the possibility existed that my observations would be directed to things which ordinary workers experience and find important. In this regard, I think I've been very successful, on the other hand, as I wistfully peruse the weapons catalog which I've obtained from www.insurrection.com...

Just kidding! I'll have a lot to say about my heuristic construct, "organizational road rage" in subsequent installments. In the mean time, how about sharing some of your own experiences as an objective participant observer in the "salt mines"? Perhaps we can start a cult.

RJS/ Explorations Web Master