Work motivation in Malawi: neither flat earth nor Babel
✍ Scribed by Stuart C. Carr; Malcolm MacLachlan
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 74 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A mush of meaningless gobbledegook' (Blunt and Jones, 1997, p. 913). It has been hard to know how to formulate a response to Blunt and Jones' scholarly rebuke of our paper on The meaning of work in Malawi' (Carr et al., 1997), in which we present data that are neither obvious' nor conventional', nor muddled'. The whole tone of Blunt and Jones' reply to our paper is not acceptable, or productive. In this brief reply, we will demonstrate how it obfuscates, and augments, the lack of substance in their own research. We also delineate their self-contradiction, express concern over their claiming ownership and closure of what could be a vibrant ®eld of study, and explain how they have completely missed the point of questioning the very concept of a Maslowian-style hierarchy. Blunt and Jones' (1997) conclusion, part of which we have quoted above, appears to be an attempt to respond to our explanation for the lack of such a hierarchy, an explanation which we couched in terms of the importance of retaining cultural identity. Their lack of appreciation of how Western psychological models may be nulli®ed by cultural and contextual diversity is both alarming and out-of-kilter with much contemporary thinking in development studies.