Your comments are off the Mark, if I may be cheeky. As it is not helpful to reduce norms to calculations, it is also not helpful to reduce real means-ends calculations to norms.

Sociologically, market norms are valid only in situations where the normative meaning of money is stable. In other words, market norms, e.g. cognitive comparisons of what one’s time ought to be worth, can become “calculations” only when money’s value is symbolic and not real, that is, not really immediately important as a resource. The lawyer’s dignity is offended by a wage cut because she already has enough money in the bank.

Put differently, market norms only operate when one’s consciousness is captured by his class location and not by his real needs (which are, in his class position, already systematically organized) or by another social structure (family the usual example).

From your micro perspective, the perspective of employers, incentive structures should be designed to circumvent market norms entirely, as these norms always admit some kind of compromise on their part (however unfair, some standard of fairness). The best outcome for principles is to know and select among the things that their prospective agents actually need or want, and to then select as an incentive the thing that is least costly. Ariely assumes too much that this thing that people want is dignity, or social recognition, and you are guilty of this as well in your comments about “genuine human desires”. Maybe I have spent too much time around undignified grad students, but most of us are lusting after something which if recognized by those around us could be used to motivate us beyond our own sense of self-potential. Social structures should be evaluated in terms of the psychocultural potential to destabilize them.

This sounds like knowledge managers should use random combinations of cultism, sex and chocolate to motivate their employees. That would create a highly productive workforce, but we have a sense that it might not last long. So we have a catch-22: norms protect us and restrict us in equal measure. Your solution to the problem of motivating employees is to operate within the boundaries of the normative system, to take the social structure for granted, and to decontextualize it from its environment and development. Is this kind of microanalysis really defensible?