Comment by M_Bakhtiari
9 years ago
In some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema.
Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.
Could you confirm that first statement?
That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
The word for secretary in Swedish is "sekreterare", and a search of the Uppsala University domain find things like https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev... :
> Being the Secretary-General's secretary means helping coordinate, plan and prepare meetings, travel and reception of foreign and domestic guests as well as coordinate, prepare and plan other commitments. For example, involve helping to prepare information, book and plan trips and meetings, and to be responsible for the calendar as well as ex. certain world surveillance.
> You will also be responsible for calls, mailing and agenda appointments, and telephone answering services as well as daily office tasks such as copying, billing, updating of records, ordering office supplies, and providing easier computer support, etc.
There was a secretary for the group, not for any one professor.
If you'd visited in, say, 1925 the professors in the group might've had one secretary each.
That has more to do with those secretaries being replaced by computers than anything else. When everyone can type, and mistakes are easily corrected, you don't need people whose only job is to type anymore.
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Certainly there's a trend away from private secretaries.
But the original statement was specifically about "ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden", and the process you mention is also taking place in the US, which (I believe) is not in that category.
Moreover, the statement added "the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema [in Sweden]." Yet I easily found a job position for a personal secretary.
That's why I would like a confirmation that M_Bakhtiari's observation is based on something stronger than hearsay or an assumption of how Sweden compares to not-as-low-power distance societies like the US.
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> Could you confirm that first statement?
Yes, and as you can see from one of the comments below, the same is largely true of neighbouring Norway.
> That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
Notice that I talked about cultural views on secretaries, not the existence of secretaries within the country's borders. It's a downwards trend, I expect they're even more thinly spread now than 15 years ago.
It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary. And of course theirs will be the last to go, with modern universities favouring administration over faculty, as it's the former that brings the cash, the latter only cost money (with that attitude, why not fire the faculty altogether?).
He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again.
For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.
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The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, email and digital calendars, available on mobile devices, simply removes a significant part of the need for secretaries in the first place - and professors have TAs (who would probably be responsible for a good chunk of the tasks described today). They just don't have general-purpose personal staff.
replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks
And it's more practical since it works even if people in those positions gets sick or are away for holidays.
> The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
Indeed, the opposite error, seen in many ultra-high power distance societies, is arguably worse: when a secretary and a desk not facing a wall becomes an end in itself and nothing of value is produced.
> But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks.
Those things have been around for a long time, but treating it as a replacement rather than a complement to general-purpose secretaries means there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.
> there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.
Staffs still exists. It's not unheard of for a manager in a company to instruct his department to undertake some particular task. Sometimes that's practically all "business development" does. In larger firms, there is often an "office of the CEO" which has a number of people working on particular tasks for the top management, often with a title like "special projects", and often seconded from staff offices with the relevant skills.
The general idea of a secretary does make economic sense. In theory it's good if a professor spends more time researching/teaching and less time typing stuff and managing their appointments. I'm a generalist and would feel rather odd having a secretary but I can understand the general economic argument. It also makes sense to have a maid and someone who mows your lawn etc. etc. (except if you find the work inherently entertaining of course)
In Sweden and in other places, everything, including the universities, is nowadays run by economists. Since university professors don't produce anything that has any immediate monetary value it of course make perfect sense to save money by replacing administrative personel that costs money with the professors time, which is free since the professors pay their own sallaries with external funding.
> run by economists
I am confused. Perhaps you meant to say managers, administrators or bureaucrats ?
Formally they're the ones with the job descriptions, but under New Public Management it's the economists that are the ultimate arbiters of truth.
One amusing aside in that article was that one of the professors who appear to have received the budget to pay an assistant to nothing was Oswald Veblen.
His uncle Thorstein Veblen surely would have had a field day with this idea.