Women, Cars & Rationalization

ARTICLE ONE REPLY:
Helene Lawson’s article, Attacking Nicely: Women Selling Cars, illustrates the difference between how males and females experience the world.  Young girls are socialized as to how to act and even think and feel.  Females are taught to place importance on taking the needs of others into consideration, and to maintain honesty in relations.  This societal grooming is not diluted through the following years of maturation, but instead becomes firmly solidified as a part of a woman’s self image.

Lawson’s article presents the idea that in a field historically dominated by males, women have changed the business of selling cars.  As an inherent aspect of the profession, car salespeople are involved in situations laced with dishonesty, distrust, and immoral dealings.  It is understood that salespeople deal with these issues in multiple ways.  They may choose to focus on monetary goals, suppress any reflection of ethicality, claim innocence through feigned unawareness, justify behavior as acting in obedience to superiors, or lastly blame the customer for any negative interaction.

Lawson depicts how females adapt to an incompatible status through the method of role making.   The addition of women into the field of car sales is generally not well received by men. The interactions between co-workers of opposite genders are expected to remain an area of conflict until there is a more gender balanced ratio. More important than co-worker relationships, is the ability to overcome the negative reception female salespeople often receive when dealing with male customers.  In order to overcome this prejudice and make sales Lawson asserts that the saleswomen adapt to the following roles: Innocents, Ladies, Tough Guys, Reformers and Retreaters.  This role adaptation is an aspect of how women have changed the business of selling cars.  Lawson proposes that in these roles, women make use of their personalities and socialized female gender traits to sell cars.  The female socialization experience provides saleswomen a higher level of introspection and different value perspectives than their male counterparts, which has been found to be a positive moderating influence on the interactions between salespersons and customers.

It is in the Reformer role where women contribute possibly the largest positive change in the business of selling cars.  Motivated by interpersonal conflict (due to female socialization) over imposed priorities and the subsequent interactions these priorities engendered, Reformers concentrate on building customer trust.   Saleswomen build trust through using sales tactics comprised of honesty, patience, and understanding, which provide a stability of relationship. Women have positively influenced the business of selling cars by providing an alternate definition of success, which delineates keeping one’s personal values, helping to achieve quality of life both at work and in the home.

ARTICLE TWO REPLY:
In Robin Leidner’s article, Over the Counter at McDonald’s, rationalization is defined as the process of making things efficient through rules designed to reduce unexpected events, while increasing control and predictability. While the article on McDonald’s business methods depicts the epitome of rationalization, society is undergoing rationalization every day in many other aspects. At the forefront of societal rationalization is monetary gain.  Consumer rationalization has been aided greatly by technological advancement.  Technology is defined as a body of knowledge used to create tools, develop skills, and extract or collect materials, or the application of science to meet an objective or solve a problem. The problem technology aids in regard to efficiency is largely related to consumer spending. The use of VISA/debit cards has made the process of spending money much quicker. Instead of wasting valuable spending time at the checkout counter counting out dollars and cents, or writing a check, most people today just zip their VISA/debit card down the slot, press four numbers on the keypad or sign their name, and off they go to the next spending opportunity.  This method increases control and predictability since cashiers don’t have to make change, a source of possible error.

Other examples of consumer rationalization include: the addition of self checkout registers in grocery stores, uniformity of store design and product organization (control and predictability), and analyzing consumer spending data for marketing purposes (control and predictability). Technology has rationalized communication through the use of instant messaging, emails, texts, and social sites such as Facebook.  By eliminating face to face interaction, time usually spent on obligatory social niceties such as small talk can be omitted, and messages can be conveyed without verbal interruption, as often happens in face to face conversation, thus enhancing control and predictability of information transmission. Technology has rationalized travel through online flight check in and self check in kiosks. Additionally, the bus, subway and train systems all have ride cards available for purchase, which are used as debit cards, speeding up the boarding and spending process.

One of the most disturbing examples of rationalization can be found in the methods used by the food industry of the United States. To speed up maturation and provide a better yield, G.M.O. (genetically modified organisms) are used to grow food products, which are then sold unlabeled as such to consumers who purchase without the benefit of this knowledge. http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21744.cfm Chemical additives put into foods to prolong shelf life have also been found unsafe. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20383953

Animals are routinely injected with hormones to ensure growth predictability, in both size and speed. There is great concern that the residual hormones found in animal food products are likely harmful to human health and the environment. http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/hormones. Control and predictability (of profits) has taken precedence to consumer health and safety in the food industry.  Ironically, some aspects of societal “rationalization” don’t seem rational in the least.