Argument :- The following appeared in a
memorandum from the business
department of the Apogee Company: “When
the Apogee Company had all its operations in one location, it was more profitable than it is today. Therefore, the Apogee Company should close down its field offices and conduct all its operations from a single location. Such centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintains better supervision of all employees.” Discuss how logically convincing you find this argument. In your discussion, you should analyze the argument's line of reasoning and use of evidence. It may be appropriate in your critique to call into question certain assumptions underlying the argument and/or to indicate what evidence might weaken or strengthen the argument. It may also be appropriate to discuss how you would alter the argument to make it more convincing and/or discuss what additional evidence, if any, would aid in evaluating the argument. Answer :- The author has claimed that centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintain better supervision of all employees. The close inspection of author’s evidence reveals that It provides little support to authors’ claim .Therefore, Author’s conclusion is incomplete and unconvincing. The author concludes the argument mentioning that the Apogee Company should shut down its field offices and use a centralized location because the company was more profitable when it had a single central location. The argument suffers from serious flaws. First, the author commits the "After This, Therefore, Because of This" fallacy where the author assumes that because a decline in profitability occurred after the field offices were created, the field offices were responsible for the decline. However, there may be other factors that could have caused the decline. Could a industry-wide decline, poor management, or poor marketing have caused the decline? There are many factors that could have caused or contributed to the decline. Without ruling out other factors or presenting stronger evidence, the author cannot conclusively blame the field offices. Second, the author assumes that eliminating the field offices would improve profitability by streamlining the management of employees and cutting costs. There is no evidence to support this assumption. Perhaps the field offices cut travel costs from the central office and allowed better management of sales to far-flung clients. The author could support his assumption with cost cutting and or profit-enhancing strategies. In summary, to strengthen the conclusion that Apogee should close field offices andcentralize, this author must rule out factors other than decentralization that might be affecting current profits negatively and demonstrate how decentralization would cut costs. To strengthen the argument the author should provide statistical evidence showing that centralization is better alternative than the de-centralization of office . It would also be useful to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of alternative courses of action--including various revenue-enhancing as well as cost-cutting measures. The evidence provided by author are weak and provide little support to author’s claim. Therefore, Author’s conclusion is incomplete and unconvincing.