假装是聪明的工作方式

Is shirking just a smarter way of working?

假装是聪明的工作方式？

“Fudgelling”, I learned the other day, is an 18th-century word meaning “pretending to work when you’re not really working”, which goes to show it’s an age-old phenomenon. (There’s also the Italian phrase giacca civetta, or “owl jacket”, a modern coinage to describe the jacket slung over a desk chair, late at night, while its owner is enjoying la dolce vita.)

前几天我了解到“Fudgelling”是一个18世纪的单词，它的意思是“假装工作”，这说明这是一个自古便有的现象。（还有意大利短语giacca civetta或者是“猫头鹰夹克”，这是一个现代的词汇，用来描述夹克挂在书桌的椅子上，实指深夜时夹克的主人过着马切罗式的逃避生活）

Today, with work demanding more of us than ever, it’s no surprise to witness the rise of extreme fudgelling. In a recent study, the academic Erin Reid spent time at an unnamed US management consultancy that exp plans to stay late, etc. She discovered that 31% of men and 11% of women found ways tects total devotion from employees: responding to emails at midnight, cancelling birthday plans to stay late,etc.She discovered that 31% of men and 11% percent of women found ways to “pass” as workaholics: they vanished from work without telling anyone, or made covert deals with colleagues so they could spend time with their families.

今天,随着工作的要求越来越多,人们不难看到极端fudgelling的兴起。在最近的一项研究中,美国学术艾琳·里德在一个不知名的管理咨询公司做实验计划待到很晚。她发现31%的男性和11%的女性找到谁是全情投入工作的员工的方法:午夜回复邮件,熬夜取消生日聚会等。她发现31%的男性和11%的女性找到了作为工作狂的“通行证”:他们没有通知任何人便从工作中消失,或者为了能够花时间与他们的家人（在一起）,而与同事秘密做交易。

And here’s the thing: it worked. People who made formal arrangements to reduce their workloads - more often women - got penalised for not pulling their weight. Yet the fake workaholics, predominantly men, were seen as no less devoted to their jobs than the real ones, and were rewarded accordingly. This says something depressing about sexism, but it also shows that what was being rewarded wasn’t relentless work, but the appearance of relentless work.And here’s the thing: it worked.

现在的情况是:它确实有效。通常情况下，女性通过做出正式工作安排减轻压力，却因为不尽责而受到惩罚。因此然而,假的工作狂,主要是指男人,他们并没有和真正的工作狂一样尽心付出，却也得到相应的奖励。这里便提出了性别歧视这样令人沮丧的问题，同时表明，获得奖励并不是因为刻薄无情的努力工作，而是努力工作的表象：这种方式确实有效。

What we are dealing with here is “signalling”- in this case, how we communicate the message that work’s getting done, which doesn’t always mean work’s really getting done.

我们在这里讨论的是“信号”，是指在这种情况下，我们如何传达正在工作这种信息，而这并不总是意味着真正在工作。