Workplace attitude research serves management, not the workers surveyed

Evidence

The main report also gave other details, such as the fact that in the ironand steel-producing works and processing factories workers who had been there for less than three years, those expelled from the East German provinces, and those aged between twenty and forty, had particularly reserved attitudes towards the company. Information of this sort was useful to management, but there was no way the workers themselves could ever have taken advantage of it, even if they had known about it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 510

Categorization

• XREF: Instantiates the learned claim that industrial research data served management interests, not workers’ — exactly the Mannesmann dispute over who benefits from studying workers.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Whose Data Is It Anyway?’ — how the same survey findings constitute a management intelligence asset and a worker blind spot simultaneously.