The Gain Was Always Shared · Chapter Seven

Promises, Prices and the Operating Room

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Seven of The Gain Was Always Shared: Gainsharing from the Scanlon Mill to the Kitchen Table.

Abstract

The cases in Chapters 5 and 6 are, on the whole, encouraging. A plant that left piecework and saw defects fall. A Scanlon plant watched for up to nine years. A delivery firm whose people began to talk more about the job. They are the right cases to read first, because they show what the idea looks like when it works. This chapter reads two rooms where it is harder. The first is a firm whose Scanlon plan ran into trouble, studied closely by an ethnographer who stayed long enough to see why, and read beside Denis Collins's work on plans that failed. The second is the cardiac catheterisation laboratory, where a set of American hospitals shared savings with the physicians who worked in them, and where the most careful study found that the gain came mostly from somewhere other than where one might expect.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989515

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). Promises, Prices and the Operating Room. In The Gain Was Always Shared. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989515

@incollection{santaanna2026the7,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {Promises, Prices and the Operating Room},
  booktitle = {The Gain Was Always Shared},
  chapter   = {7},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989515},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-gain-was-always-shared/07-promises-prices-and-the-operating-room/}
}

References

  1. Thornicroft, K. W. (1991). Promises kept, promises broken: Reciprocity and the Scanlon Plan. Employee Relations, 13(5), 12–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/01425459110000468
  2. Collins, D. (1996). Case study: 15 lessons learned from the death of a gainsharing plan. Compensation & Benefits Review, 28(2), 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/088636879602800205
  3. Ketcham, J. D., & Furukawa, M. F. (2008). Hospital–physician gainsharing in cardiology. Health Affairs, 27(3), 803–812. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.27.3.803

Every chapter of The Gain Was Always Shared

  1. Chapter OneWho Holds What a Firm Learnsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989505
  2. Chapter TwoThe Mill That Asked Firstdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989508
  3. Chapter ThreeWhere the Gain Goes Missingdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989509
  4. Chapter FourA Firm Has a Circulationdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989510
  5. Chapter FiveTwenty-One Defects in a Thousanddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989511
  6. Chapter SixTalk Is the First Returndoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989514
  7. Chapter SevenPromises, Prices and the Operating Roomdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989515
  8. Chapter EightThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989517
  9. Chapter NineHow to Know It Workeddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989518
  10. Chapter TenThe Hard Conversationsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989519
  11. Chapter ElevenOne Person's Gaindoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989520
  12. Chapter TwelveThe Gain Was Always Shareddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989521
  13. AppendixThe Workbookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989522

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.