Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Chapter Eighteen. Societal Implications and Extensions

Many implications of this study have been discussed already. There are three more, however, that are too important not to mention explicitly and that deserve more attention than the space remaining allows. All have the potential to shift the ground under prevailing beliefs about social phenomena.

The first has to do with how the model in this book forces reconsideration of the feasibility of enforcing human behavior in a broad realm of social, not just organizational, situations. Specifically, there is an extent to which long-standing notions of sanction-based social contracts (see Hobbes, 1651, for example) are undermined when individual behavior is as hard to observe and enforce as the ...