Cold Shower Introduction - Psychology in Action

Cold Shower
A Series of 30 Essays
on the
Unexploited Cultural Capital
Of
American Workers

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(Copyright 1996)




This overview of what is to follow is being written in early 2002, or more than six years after any of these essays was first written. But like the French are wont to say, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Technology is constantly exploding and driving an increasingly greater wedge between workers and work, between doing and thinking, while technology is also redefining the content and context of the relationship of workers to each other as well as to what they do. Am I suggesting that technology is master to workers as compliant cogs in the wheel of progress? You decide for yourself upon reading these essays.

Being a writer and disseminator of ideas relating to workers and managers as well as to the changing nature of work and the workplace, I applaud those who broke through the barriers of politeness and suspicion to ask penetrating questions. I have attempted to answer these questions with the directness, honesty and sincerity of the questioners.

They are collected here, not as any great tome but as a reminder that everything begins and ends with the individual as a person, not as a massive nondescript people.

None of these essays has been changed from its original content. They are presented as a measure of the temper of the times.


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., Industrial & Organizational Development Psychologist