Comment by eesmith
9 years ago
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.
I'm Norwegian, not Swedish, but AIUI the societal trends were similar.
There's been a trend towards typing ability, yes, but hardly decisive. The old secretaries would do the bulk of e.g. organising conferences or the professor's travel, that's needs typing but not only typing.
The trend (in .no/.se etc) towards equality, against certain symbols of prestige, mattered a great deal. A long time ago having a secretary was a symbol of power, appropriate for Professor Dr. Lundman. At some point forgoing one became a symbol of modernity, and private secretaries became much less common, and the universities reorganised to provide specialised services such as ticket purchasers and maybe grant application writers instead of private secretaries.
>When everyone can type
I've spent some time as a troubleshooter of sorts in academia, and I can say that no, not everyone can type. Some are barely literate, especially when they have to use English rather than their native tongue.
Besides, secretaries do more than type. Online booking services have to a large extent replaced travel agents, but they are really just dumb shells on top of the travel agent's consoles, and consumes the user's time and attention.
As long as we don't have general AI computerising all but the most trivial tasks are going to be terrible to work with and waste a lot of time, especially when you have some kind of edge case and have to fight some business rules set up by some out of touch bean counter somewhere.
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.
I suppose it's taking place everywhere where assistant labour is expensive. Faster in the places where having a private secretary is old-fashioned, like Sweden.
> 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.
>He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again.
Culture isn't really very quantifiable, if anecdotal evidence coming from living and working in that particular society is unsatisfactory, feel free to disregard the argument.
>For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.
But that's not what I claimed. I think that's what's happening, but I never claimed to know how strong the cultural component is compared to the technological and economic ones.
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