SECTION 2

Hello. This afternoon I’m going to begin by outlining some of the main changes that have occurred in the labour market and in working practices over the last 20 years . One of the most significant changes has been the vast move, especially in industrialized countries, from manufacturing to service industries. Although this has freed many people from heavy and repetitivework in factories, many people find their work in service industries equally boring and just as badly paid .

Another important change has been that people no longer expect to spend most of their working lives with the same company or organization . As a result people set themselves objectives which they work towards, and they use the various jobs they do and the different companies they work for as steps towards these objectives. For individual workers I think this has helped them become more independent and given them more control over their lives.

In most companies the management team has become less hierarchical . This is often called downsizing or delayering. In other words, there are fewer managers and fewer levels of management. As a result, there are not so many opportunities for promotion and people often feel frustrated because they find themselves at the same level for many years without the chance to rise in the company.

Competition from new products and from different parts of the world means that nowadays companies have to adapt very fast to changing markets and this requires them to be very flexible . Increasingly this means they don’t employ workers directly, but employ other small specialist companies or individuals to do the job when they need them. This means they don’t have the expense of employing workers when they don’t need them.

I believe that for workers who are subcontracted there are various gains: they’re often better paid for the work they do, they work in smaller, more human organizations and they’re able to organize their working lives in ways which suit them, instead of having to fit into the routines of a large company.

Of course, the biggest areas of change have come with the technological revolution . Workers now have the chance to go job hunting on the World Wide Web, so they have more opportunities to find better or more suitable jobs.

Statistics show that generally people work much harder than in the past with much longer hours. New technologies are largely responsible for this, especially mobile phones and beepers or pagers, These things force employees to stay in contact with their offices even in their free time and at weekends. I think this is a pity as people need to be able to relax and have time for themselves.

Another effect of technological change is that jobs evolve very rapidly , and workers have to be continually going on training courses in order to remain employable. As a university teacher, I can hardly complain about this, but it can place enormous strain on workers if they’re obliged to retrain for jobs well into their late 50s when they’re getting close to retirement , so I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

New technology and global competition have, between them, meant that the life cycle of products isn’t nearly as long as it used to be. This has had a profound effect on companies and on the way we work. In order to cope with sudden changes in the market, companies need much greater flexibility from their staff. As a result, large numbers of tenured or permanent jobs have disappeared. Apart from university lecturers like myself, few people can expect nowadays to have a job for life, and temporary short-term employment has become the norm for many people. However, we have to be positive. One wonderful change which has come out of the technological revolution is the opportunity for the office worker to telecommute , that is, for them to work from home, with their computer and modem. This enables them to organize their working lives around their families and cut out the long journeys to and from work which are the bane of most office workers’ lives.

SECTION 3

Farouk: Hi, Martin. Hi, Maria. How are you getting on with your project ? You’ve got to give the seminar on Friday, haven’t you?
Maria: Hi, Farouk. We’re getting on fine. It’s just so interesting! Do you want to hear about it?
Farouk: Well, I’ve got ten minutes before my next lecture , so why not? Let’s hear it?
Maria: Great. And it’ll help us to sort out who said what, won’t it, Martin?
Martin: That’s right. You know, what we’ve been looking at is research done by a number of psychologists from different parts of the world on intelligence quotients-how they’ve been rising over the last 50 years.
Farouk: Really?
Maria: Yes! Some psychologists have measured increases in intelligence of up to 25 points in one generation.
Farouk: Amazing. What’s causing us all to get cleverer ?
Martin: There’s a political scientist from New Zealand called James Flynn. Well, he’s a pioneer in this field, and he’s found that people perform the visuospatial tasks in intelligence tests much better than they did 50 years ago. Partly he puts this down to people playing with their PCs and watching TV- things like that.
Farouk: What about diet? Does that have anything to do with it?

Maria: Perhaps. Robert Howard, a Sydney psychologist , thinks that it does. Just as eating better has made children taller, their average intelligence has also risen. He also says that parents are having fewer children, so they’re able to pav more attention to their children, which has a positive effect on kids! intelligence.
Farouk: IQ tests have verbal and numerical elements too. Have these also been improving?

Martin: Yes, but only moderately. It’s the visual spatial element which has made the big difference and Flynn also suggests that modern activities like driving may play.a part in this.

Maria: There’s a British researcher, John Rust: who has made the generalpoint that modem life is much more complicated than it was fifty years ago. Our intelligence has had to develop in order to cope with it all.
Martin: Remember also that far more children have the opportunity to go to school nowadays. Howard thinks that must be a leading factor in improved IQ test performance .

Farouk: Well, yes, that would seem fairly obvious.
Maria: To come back to John Rust: he suggests that as science and knowledge develop, ideas become more complex. Well, the people who produce these ideas, the Einsteins and Hawkings are obviously highly intelligent people, but, he says, ordinary people’s intelligence has also had to develop to cope with these sew theories before you hear the rest of the discussion you have some time to look at questions 28 to 30 now listen carefully and answer questions 28 to 30 .
Farouk: Are there any limits to intelligence or will the human race just continue to get cleverer and cleverer?

Martin: Er, actually, research in some Western industrialized countries such as Australia and some European countries suggests that intelligence rose quite steeply for 2 to 3 decades and then levelled off a few years ago. Some pessimists think that quite soon we may see it beginning to dip-in some countries students seem to be less motivated than before. In that sense there may well be a limit to intelligence.
Maria: On the other hand, this rise in intelligence started to happen some years later in East Asian countries -the so-called Asian tigers-and it still hasn’t leveled off.

Farouk: Is higher intelligence what has caused exam results to improve here in Britain, do you think?
Maria: Well, that’s rather a political question, so it depends who you ask, but you must remember that thirty years ago only about 5% of school-leavers here went on to university. But there’s been a vast expansion of the university system, and nowadays about 30 percent of young people get a higher education. So I guess exams must have been getting easier for all those people to get in.

SECTION 4

My lecture today is on motivation at work. If managers are to improve the running of their organization, it’s important for them to understand what motivates the workforce -to know how to satisfy both the high flyers and those who have lower ambitions or ability.

First of all, let’s look at the model of how motivation works. You will see that every member of the workforce has needs or expectations , and these needs and expectations will affect each person’s behaviour- For example, they will work harder if they know that they will be rewarded – that is, if they can achieve their goals of higher pay or promotion. The achievement of these goals will, in turn, lead to job satisfaction . This then feeds back into the worker’s needs or expectations.

Over the years the development of different theories of management and different approaches to organization has affected the way we view motivation. In the 19th century, the writer Frederick Taylor put forward the theory that workers were only interested in making money. In contrast, in the early twentieth century, researchers found that people went to work to satisfya range of different needs, and not simply for financial reward. One need, in particular, was emphasized the social need. An early study done on a coal mining company, for instance, showed that people generally were happier and worked more productively if they were able to work in teams.

One important twentieth-century theoiy of motivation was put forward by Maslow in 1943 . Maslow identified five important needs which he placed in a triangle : at the bottom of the triangle he put what he called “basic needs”: good pay and pleasant working conditions . Then, above the basic needs, he put “security needs”-safe working conditions and job security. His third need he called “social”-the need to have friends at work and get on with the boss. Fourth werft ” status needs”-a job title and social recognition . Finally, at the top of the triangle , Maslow identified the need for advancement -to have a challenging job with opportunities for promotion . His theory isn’t perfect, but it’s a convenient framework for viewing the different needs and expectations of work that people have, and, what’s more, I believe it s still valid today.

During an early twenty-first century survey of full-time employees , when asked what gave them job satisfaction , 72% said having an inspirational leader. 55% of those questioned found satisfaction in the challenging natureof their work, 50% by being paid well, and 40% said flexible working hour. Consequently, we can see that this indicates that today, an employee’s opinion of the quality of the leadership in their workplace is an important factor influencing belief in the company as a good place to work.

Motivation varies over a person’s working life and also according to where they live. Studies show that people have different goals in different countries. For example, a good lifestyle would appear to be more important in Spain than it is in Sweden. Financial security is more important in the US than in the UK. Social contact at work is important to workers in both Germany and Australia, but not of top importance in Britain and Italy. As to high status -this is more important in the USA than to Europeans. These results indicateclear differences between countries, but I don’t think they should be taken too seriously .

There have been many theories which have attempted to explain the nature of motivation. These theories are partially true, and by and large all help to explain the behaviour of certain people at certain times. However, none really provides all the answers. The best a company can do is to provide people with the right environment to be self-motivated . If they are self-motivated, they will perform well