The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter.
“The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs.”

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument,
what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.


Author is trying to make a generalization that workers have interest in management issues. To support his statement he presented a survey data which cliams that 79% of the workers have expressed their high interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits program.

While at first glance, author seems very convincing and I find it hard to find a loophole in the statement, but on a second look, it is obvious that author's statements cannot be sound enough if he doesnot make certain assumptions.

The very first thing the author assumes that if workers have shown interest in corporate restructing and redesign, that itself is sufficient and a necessary condition to conclude that workers are interested in management activities. I would say, those two aforementioned activities are a very tiny part in a management activities and in some cases, these activities may not be important as well. Author must show that workers also have active interest in other core management issues like, planning, resources, company finances, work delegation to name a few.

Last, but not the last, lets assume that pure workers, and not people from management group comprises the majority of the surver taker, but question which raises doubt in reader's mind is what was the nature or authenticity of survey, for instance, what kind of questions were asked in the survey ? Was it an multiple-choice or was it an oral questinairre? Based on what criteria they came to the conclusion made by the author. All these question needs explanation and solid reasoning.

Finally, even though the author sounds enthusiastic, his statement will be more convincing if he can backup his argument with relavant data and logic.