Outgroups

Even though I’m not using my college education as a sociologist in my job here at Amazon, I’ve analyzed some interesting patterns of behavior here. In Sociology, there are ingroups and outgroups. Ingroups treat each other respectfully as individuals and help deal with issues on an individual basis. Outgroups are lumped together by ingroups and treated with collective punishment mechanisms to get them to police themselves in their interactions with the ingroups. 

Amazon employees are apparently an outgroup for Amazon management. They are pitted against each other in no-win scenarios so that they can be worked impossibly hard until the point of being pushed out of Amazon when they have nothing left to give. It’s almost like a sociological experiment version of Survivor or Weakest Link where actual job performance is irrelevant in the face of the social structures Amazon has built to work their employees to maximum output, even if the result is a consistently short tenure around 1.5 years.