Argument 34 今天的作业， 求拍！ 谢谢大家了~
The vice president of human resources at Climpson Industries sent the following recommendation to the company's president.
"In an effort to improve our employees' productivity, we should implement electronic monitoring of employees' Internet use from their workstations. Employees who use the Internet from their workstations need to be identified and punished if we are to reduce the number of work hours spent on personal or recreational activities, such as shopping or playing games. By installing software to detect employees' Internet use on company computers, we can prevent employees from wasting time, foster a better work ethic at Climpson, and improve our overall profits."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
1.信息不完整
2.其他不良影响
3.可能增加的成本
The suggestion that we should install monitoring software to prevent the employees from abusing Internet seems at first glance to be helpful. After all, a reduction in employees’ productivity may be caused by shopping or playing games on line during work hours. However, the argument is flawed by a series of unwarranted assumptions, which may result in a wrong measurement for improving employees’ productivity.
Firstly, the vice president assumes unwarrantedly that employees’ productivity badly suffer from the abuse of Internet. Without the information that how many employees are used to spend work hours on personal or recreational activities, we can not claim that the undesirable phenomenon is common at Climpson Industries. What is more, we also do not know the average hours spent on online shopping and games per person. For the absence of this information, we can not make the conclusion that the abuse of Internet is the main factor behind the low productivity.
Secondly, the vice president assumes that we can improve employees’ productivity by installing monitoring software. But that may not be the case because he/she fails to consider many other possible influences. For example, for the employees whose work is collecting market information, Internet is a necessity for work, and for other employees who work with computers, the monitoring software may slow the computer badly. To make things worse, the monitoring software shows employers’ distrust in the stuff, and that may reduce the working enthusiasm of the staff. All the cases mentioned above may result to a decrease in employees’ productivity instead an improvement.
Even if the monitoring software can improve employees’ productivity, it is also too early to claim that the overall profits can be improved. How much does the company have to pay for the software? How much does it cost to maintain and upgrade the software? How many employees are needed to process the information and punish the reported employees? It is possible that the extra costs of the software are much more than the profits improved by it. Thus, we can not predict that the software will improve the overall profits until weighting both the costs and profits.
In sum, the recommendation of the vice president is unconvincing with the assumptions mentioned above. To better the argument, the author have to provide additional evidence in order to make sure that the abuse of Internet is the main factor behind the low productivity. He/she also need to consider all the possible influences caused by the monitoring software especially the negative ones. What is more, only after weighting both the costs and profits can we make a final decision.
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发表于 2012-5-19 18:49:28
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