Personal Reputation

I believe personal reputations play a major role in an individual’s decision-making and behavior. If we think about personal reputation by its dictionary definition, one’s reputation revolves around what other people think about the individual—both positively and negatively. Some may place greater value on how they are perceived while others are relatively indifferent. In the workplace, having a positive outside perception of yourself may be helpful in moving up in the company or organization. To clarify, having a reputation as a trustworthy, punctual and efficient employee may indicate to superiors in the hierarchy of the company that you are worthwhile to the firm.

First, I will discuss how this topic applies in my life and then I want to tie how personal reputations play a role in HBO’s show, Westworld. For the past two summers, I worked at a chemical plant on the south side of Chicago. I worked in the general office, but I was in and out of the plant every day. In terms of intensity, the plant was relatively clean and not as loud or dangerous as a steel mill for example. The work was not that demanding and relatively easy to accomplish. One of my friend’s Dad works at the plant and helped connect me with the right people to get the internship. So I felt an obligation to work well and efficiently so my friend’s Dad looked credible by bringing in a productive worker. Similarly, I wanted to build a good reputation with the individuals at the plant to make my day-to-day experience more enjoyable as well as gaining the trust of my supervisors. In order to build this reputation, I would complete the work given to me in a timely and efficient manner. I wanted to come across as productive and easy to work with so my superiors would trust me to get my work done and not have to check up on how I was progressing. In addition, I normally worked in a group with two other interns on a task. Our director would give us an objective for the day and once we finished, we were free to carry out the rest of the day with relative ease. In short, it was relatively straightforward for the other interns and myself to sell ourselves as productive workers. The full-time employees at the plant also noticed that our group of three worked diligently and were easy to talk to. Subsequently, they were more willing to interact with us and I began to develop positive relationships with several people there. In having the full-time employees trust us to do our work however, some conflict of interest can arise. If our supervisor was not checking on us, we would slack off and not get our work done. Since we were doing mostly busy work, we were not doing the company much harm by not finishing it. The motivation behind this was mostly laziness as we were paid by the hour.

As I mentioned previously, Westworld is based around the concept of creating an entirely new reputation in a syndicate world. The show is a sci-fi drama where modern-day human beings travel to a theme-park set in the 1800s wild west inhabited by artificial robots that look and act exactly as a human being would. I left a link to HBO’s summary of the show here to give a better sense of the plot.

http://www.hbo.com/westworld/about

           Humans experience no physical harm in the park but can inflict as much damage to the hosts (artificial humans) as they wish. Essentially, there are no rules and a decreased sense of consequences for one’s actions. Knowing that they are essentially gods to these robot humans, humans give little regard to their personal reputation. Further, the truest self of the visitors come out. They can be ruthless and cruel but only act in their own self-interest. In fact, this deviant behavior is encouraged as humans can build a reputation for how poor of a human they can really be. With little to no consequences, humans can stray from any reputation they have in the real world and participate in actions that would otherwise result in imprisonment.