The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about manageme

Prompt:

The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter:

“The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs.”

Response:

The author presents the idea that workers today are not generally apathetic about management issues as it was previously thought. The evidence for this is that, in a survey of 1,200 workers, 79% of the respondents expressed a high level of interest in corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs. The conclusion the author arrived at based on a number of assumptions make it weak under scrutiny because it is assumed that the sample gathered is enough to represent the general population’s interest in the matter. Therefore, the argument is flawed as discussed below.

First, the author concludes that workers in general care about management issues by citing a survey of 1,200 workers but we don’t know if this sample is big enough or diverse enough to represent the views of the general population of workers. It can be the case that this is a sample of just over a thousand workers in a population of several millions and the survey was only answered by workers in one particular role. This would make the evidence insufficient to make general conclusions about the total population.

Second, there is no mention of what type of workers were surveyed. It may be possible that a sample 1,200 people is big enough to represent one specific sector of workers that is interested in management issues. But the author uses the term “workers” to refer to all workers. This seems like a leap in that it may be that the 1,200 respondents were all office workers in the finance industry and they are quite interested in management issues but the worker population in general is apathetic about management issues.

Third, the author only mentions the workers’s interest in 2 topics to say that workers are generally interested or at least not apathetic about management issues. It could be possible that workers are only interested in these topics because changes in corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs affect them directly and so they are not interested in any other topics. This could indicate that while there may be an interest in a couple of management issues they are not generally interested in management issues as a whole.

To conclude, the author assumes that a particular survey’s sample is big enough to be representative of a whole population and that it gathered the necessary information to support the conclusion that the worker population is no longer apathetic toward management issues. If we were given more information about the number of workers in the population divided by sector and role as well as details about the sample we would be able to better asses if the author’s argument is standing on solid ground, but the current evidence is not sufficient to make those claims. The author is using a leap in logic to conclude that the information provided is enough without more details and that is why the argument is flawed.