In the past, when things were better, decisions could be made carefreely. All that people required were two intellectual fixed points: the current state of the world and an intentionally altered one. The actual and the target output were quite easily exchangeable, provided there were certain personalities who independently and energetically defined the states and left the realization to the enthusiastic subordinates. Both historiography and the myth of founding worked that way. And this still applies to the delegation of power.
However, gradually interfering sounds bothered that harmonious decision-making process. That decisions could turn out to be wrong, had been known before, it is true, but just like in a Greek tragedy all that was left to be done was to shrug one's shoulders and state that the Great Statesman or the patriarch of the company were subjected like anybody else to fate. Failure served as the proof of overpowering autonomous forces at whose mercy the acting mankind invisibly was. So action and decision on the one hand, fate and Providence on the other, were detached. One acted and held one's breath, and when it worked the position in the chronicle or annals of political or company history was secured. When it failed, all that remained to be done was to confide in oblivion.
Some day, when being rational had stiffened into being rationalistic, the idea was given of depriving fate of its independence, too; the more immanent distinction of internal organization and external world replaced the traditional one of action and fate. Furthermore it occurred to actively influence the enigmatic environment instead of keeping the fingers crossed. The concept was simple and clever at the same time. How about not simply deciding something and waiting for the outside world to answer but taking the answer to the decision into account before the decision? Thus an offer could be made that could not be refused. The clock struck meaningfully and rang in the birth of modern public opinion research.
Nobody knows how often the decision-makers have had to experience frustration since then. But it is certain that making decisions is not that funny anymore; for at best the environment is merely reluctant and refuses to meet the brilliant plan which was made inside with keen approval; still, nowadays the pollsters peremptorily stand by, and surveys cannot that easily be dismissed anymore. People have grown too dependent on quotas, per cents and Semantic Differentials (active or lazy), on the reflection on the own appearance in the mirror of public opinion, so to speak.
What is even worse, public opinion polls rarely present definite results; pollsters pore over increasingly thick handbooks, pull out more and more sophisticated coding books, terrified of the vicious sisters called reliability and validity, but are compelled to develop a self-consciousness where it is least needed. The author is talking about the observer's paradoxe, which is a kind of blurredness relation in opinion topics. It teaches us that a question is solved in that way in which it has been posed in the first place. After all, we can never be sure whether we would give an answer without a question. This is no news for common sense, it is true, but who claimed public opinion research worked that way? In relation to that, we notice that the environment is constantly fickle and does not maintain any definite attitudes. Then there is the additional issue of the quality of quantity; maybe 78 % are in favour of a decision an organisation has made, still - is the total of those polled really in keeping with the total of the target groups relevant enough to thwart the plans? And, if so, can we be sure that the true opinion leaders are not entirely allocated to the remaining 22%
Whoever naively endeavours to slip the pollsters' results in his decision, will usually reap worse results the next time. This is because public opinion only perceives their fickleness feeding back to practical ogranization policy. There is no denying that terms like sustainability or farsightedness are booming because they interrupt the short-winded bombarding with polls, thus at least implying there is something beyond the trend which cannot be so easily counted. After all, we should not forget that there is a special kind of irony to that culture of rat race. As mad as we are about figures, as interested we are in numerical change, too; for constancy in numeraical terms means all too often stagnation. What is more, someone who believes something has been found out will suddenly feel compelled by perfectionism and promptly order the next, more detailed survey - provided an enthusiastic financial backer is at hand.
Politics and economy are in the pollsters' stranglehold. Why do they nonetheless stick to the continuation of fortune-telling by other means? Well, for one thing, because the pollsters would otherwise get into a crisis of legitimation. For another, because it works; for it makes no difference in organization proceedings, if their decisions are backed by truth, but it makes a considerable difference to make a decision at all. Therefore pie and bar charts serve as the icons of Enlightenment which has without further ado called belief information.
However, gradually interfering sounds bothered that harmonious decision-making process. That decisions could turn out to be wrong, had been known before, it is true, but just like in a Greek tragedy all that was left to be done was to shrug one's shoulders and state that the Great Statesman or the patriarch of the company were subjected like anybody else to fate. Failure served as the proof of overpowering autonomous forces at whose mercy the acting mankind invisibly was. So action and decision on the one hand, fate and Providence on the other, were detached. One acted and held one's breath, and when it worked the position in the chronicle or annals of political or company history was secured. When it failed, all that remained to be done was to confide in oblivion.
Some day, when being rational had stiffened into being rationalistic, the idea was given of depriving fate of its independence, too; the more immanent distinction of internal organization and external world replaced the traditional one of action and fate. Furthermore it occurred to actively influence the enigmatic environment instead of keeping the fingers crossed. The concept was simple and clever at the same time. How about not simply deciding something and waiting for the outside world to answer but taking the answer to the decision into account before the decision? Thus an offer could be made that could not be refused. The clock struck meaningfully and rang in the birth of modern public opinion research.
Nobody knows how often the decision-makers have had to experience frustration since then. But it is certain that making decisions is not that funny anymore; for at best the environment is merely reluctant and refuses to meet the brilliant plan which was made inside with keen approval; still, nowadays the pollsters peremptorily stand by, and surveys cannot that easily be dismissed anymore. People have grown too dependent on quotas, per cents and Semantic Differentials (active or lazy), on the reflection on the own appearance in the mirror of public opinion, so to speak.
What is even worse, public opinion polls rarely present definite results; pollsters pore over increasingly thick handbooks, pull out more and more sophisticated coding books, terrified of the vicious sisters called reliability and validity, but are compelled to develop a self-consciousness where it is least needed. The author is talking about the observer's paradoxe, which is a kind of blurredness relation in opinion topics. It teaches us that a question is solved in that way in which it has been posed in the first place. After all, we can never be sure whether we would give an answer without a question. This is no news for common sense, it is true, but who claimed public opinion research worked that way? In relation to that, we notice that the environment is constantly fickle and does not maintain any definite attitudes. Then there is the additional issue of the quality of quantity; maybe 78 % are in favour of a decision an organisation has made, still - is the total of those polled really in keeping with the total of the target groups relevant enough to thwart the plans? And, if so, can we be sure that the true opinion leaders are not entirely allocated to the remaining 22%
Whoever naively endeavours to slip the pollsters' results in his decision, will usually reap worse results the next time. This is because public opinion only perceives their fickleness feeding back to practical ogranization policy. There is no denying that terms like sustainability or farsightedness are booming because they interrupt the short-winded bombarding with polls, thus at least implying there is something beyond the trend which cannot be so easily counted. After all, we should not forget that there is a special kind of irony to that culture of rat race. As mad as we are about figures, as interested we are in numerical change, too; for constancy in numeraical terms means all too often stagnation. What is more, someone who believes something has been found out will suddenly feel compelled by perfectionism and promptly order the next, more detailed survey - provided an enthusiastic financial backer is at hand.
Politics and economy are in the pollsters' stranglehold. Why do they nonetheless stick to the continuation of fortune-telling by other means? Well, for one thing, because the pollsters would otherwise get into a crisis of legitimation. For another, because it works; for it makes no difference in organization proceedings, if their decisions are backed by truth, but it makes a considerable difference to make a decision at all. Therefore pie and bar charts serve as the icons of Enlightenment which has without further ado called belief information.
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