Commitment to Work and Job Satisfaction

Studies of Work Orientations

Bengt Furåker, Kristina Håkansson, Jan Ch Karlsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136485220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

People's work orientations and attitudes to paid work are highly important for the welfare of any country. Still, little is currently known about how such attitudes are distributed among different countries, men and women, classes, occupations, age groups and so on. Even less is known about how work orientations have changed during the dramatic social transformations of economies and labour markets during recent decades. What happened, for example, to work orientations in Iceland when the country went bankrupt? The answer is quite surprising. Or, is it true that work is losing its position in people's lives in Western world? What is the relationship between people's attitudes to work and the way they actually behave on the labour market?

This timely book deals with these questions – and more – presenting fresh knowledge on changes in work orientations in many countries. It is based on genuine theoretical arguments and thorough empirical studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It is a great source of new knowledge on work orientations and changes in attitudes to work.

1 The Relevance of Studying Work Orientations

Bengt Furåker, Kristina Håkansson and Jan Ch. Karlsson

Although the level of living differs enormously across human societies, they are all work societies in the sense that a great amount of labour is needed and carried out to secure the reproduction of the population at some standard of living. The present book does not deal with all kinds of socioeconomic systems but focuses on contemporary developed capitalist societies, in which large numbers of people go to their jobs day after day, week after week, year after year, to take care of various tasks, more or less necessary for sustaining or improving the population’s quality of life. Lots of goods and services are continuously being produced and this production cannot take place without a significant quantity of work. Hence it is not surprising that a majority of the working-age population has gainful employment.

A main idea behind this book is that people’s subjective relationships to work are important. These relationships are connected with the productive capacities in society; insofar as individuals are positively oriented toward contributing their labour power, we can expect a large amount of work to be done and to be done efficiently, carefully and responsibly. The circumstances under which people participate in various activities colour their subjective relationships to them. If people are being forced to do something the outcome will hardly be the same as if they are willing to do it; their performance is affected by whether their contributions are voluntary or not. Consequently work orientations and work attitudes are significant phenomena in society and this book aims at providing a deeper understanding of different aspects of these phenomena.

It can be debated just how voluntary work in the form of wage labour in a modern capitalist economy really is. Without much other property than their labour power individuals have rather little opportunity to escape the economic necessity to work for a living. This holds even in societies with generous welfare state arrangements. The general rule is that also in these systems individuals have to offer their capacity for work in the labour market; they are exempted only under specific circumstances. Another thing is that rules can be violated, in particular if they are ambiguously formulated.

Changes in the labour market may impinge on work orientations. The development of a ‘post-industrial’ labour market involves an expansion of highly qualified jobs and such a transformation is significant because these jobs are often associated with certain attitudinal configurations. At the same time, we need to be aware that work in the so-called new economy is often not that different from what we know about the old economy (Baldry et al. 2007). Yet another aspect is what has happened in terms of flexibility, temporary agency work and job insecurity in the last decades. Researchers have paid a great deal of attention to such changes, but it is rather contested which conclusions are to be drawn (e.g., Blossfeld and Hofmeister 2006; Blossfeld, Mills and Bernardi 2006; Fevre 2007; Furåker, Håkansson and Karlsson 2007; Kalleberg 2000; OECD 1997: ch. 5). Anyhow it is important to study work orientations and work attitudes in the light of changing labour markets.

A crucial question for the book is of course what we mean by work. Our simple answer is that the concept stands for gainful employment, in principle as defined in the developed countries’ labour force statistics. In spite of the long-standing debate over the definition (Karlsson, 2004) and a possible widening of the concept in ILO statistics (Bollé 2009), we adopt this concept of gainful employment, thereby avoiding the whole discussion about unpaid home work, leisure-time activities, etc. Through this approach we can also benefit from the fact that available datasets and statistics from different countries are based on the same or similar definitions. Work is thus here plainly understood as an activity in exchange for income.

It is unquestionably important that high proportions of both the male and the female population work a lot and perform well, as the totality of these efforts is crucial for the level of living in society. We should, however, qualify this argument a bit by adding two comments. First, it matters not only how much people work and how well they perform but also what they do. There is an ecological or environmental dimension to take into account; some of the work done may lead to global warming, increased pollution and other harmful consequences. As a result, the effects on the standard of living are sometimes dubious or directly negative. Second, we should also be aware of the home- or leisure-based production outside the formal economy, including cooking, gardening, hunting, fishing, work in voluntary associations and the like. It is generally difficult, if not impossible, accurately to estimate the scope of it, but there should be no doubt that activities in the informal sector contribute substantially to the wealth of individuals, particularly in certain regions. We must emphasize that our two comments do not falsify—but just modify—the conclusion that the amount of paid work is crucial in contemporary developed capitalism.

This does not mean that every individual has to participate in work activities. Certain exceptions are obvious, but there are also significant cross-national variations regarding those who are under pressure to participate. At least in advanced welfare capitalism, children, sick, handicapped and old people are commonly exempted. A major task for the architects of contemporary welfare states is to define the circumstances under which people should be allowed public financial support and accordingly be able to refrain from taking on employment. It is a task associated with an incessant debate on the principles and norms with respect to benefit entitlements, the size of benefits relative to wage levels, how much resources are to be spent on various programs and how cheating can be prevented.

The subsequent chapters will deal with work orientations and job satisfaction, both a matter of subjective relationships between human beings and work. It may by and large appear that work orientations refer to something that people bring to their jobs, whereas job satisfaction seems to flow in the opposite direction—as something that people get or at least can get from their work. We should, however, be aware of the interaction that is taking place. There is no question that individuals’ work orientations are affected by their job and the experiences it offers, but they usually start out from preconceived notions. At the same time, job satisfaction is partly an effect of expectations, that is, of the work orientations that accompany people to the workplace.

An illustration of the aspects we are interested in can be found in the classical writings of Max Weber (1930: 58–60) on the contrast between ‘traditionalism’ and the ‘spirit of capitalism’. In one of his examples, a farm worker was offered a higher rate per acre for mowing, but instead of working more or doing the same as before (and thus still earning more money) he chose to earn the same by mowing less land. In other words, the worker had not adopted the attitude of striving for as much as possible; he just did what was required to satisfy his customary needs. He may very well have had an instrumental attitude to work—as work was a means to make a living—but within this framework there are at least two different options: to maintain a certain level of living or to increase it. There is a strong tendency in precapitalist societies to follow the first route (Sahlins 2004: ch. 1). For the development of capitalism, it is obvious that the attitude entailing willingness to work more in order to earn more was most appropriate.

Actually, the issue outlined above is still present under developed capitalism. In the economics literature on labour supply this is referred to as the substitution and income effects, and there is the idea of a backward-bending supply curve of labour (e.g., Buchanan 1971; Sloman 2010: 229–230). On the one hand, when wages are raised, work becomes more attractive as every hour spent at work is better remunerated, or, to put it another way, leisure time becomes more expensive. This could hence make us expect an increase of the supply of labour. On the other hand, with higher hourly wages employees can afford to refrain from increasing their supply of labour as their income increases anyway. They can also lower their quantity of work and keep the same level of living.

We should of course keep in mind that people cannot simply choose how much they want to work, as flexibility in this respect is far from unlimited. One thing is how much leisure they can afford and another thing is what employers allow. In many cases nobody will be hired unless he or she accepts full-time commitment, but there are also jobs in which part-time is taken for granted. Anyhow, to some extent, people have a choice between working more, with increased earnings as the result, and working less, thus instead having more leisure. In this connection their attitudes are likely to play a significant role.

The standard of living in a given society is not only linked to the amount of work carried out but also to the quality of it. Good performance requires some degree of engagement or dedication, which is another ground for us to stress the importance of work orientations. Wage labour requires a certain amount of consent on the part of the worker. The reason is that the labour contract cannot always specify the tasks the worker is to perform, how to perform them and at which pace, although the scope of freedom or control varies from one job to another. There is thus a fundamental indeterminacy, to use Baldamus’s (1961) term, involved in the wage labour process, which makes the attitudes of workers of vital importance. Two types can be distinguished: production and mobility indeterminacy (Smith 2006).

Regarding production indeterminacy, we find two subtypes (Furåker 2005: 80–81). First, formal or informal agreements between employee and employer are subject to changing circumstances in, for example, technologies and markets. Thereby the agreement may become obsolete from the perspective of one or both of the parties. Second, the employer’s knowledge of the details of the labour process—what is to be done, how it is to be done and so on—is often incomplete. The employee may be the one having the best understanding of how to perform the work.

Mobility indeterminacy means that the worker can quit his or her present job and go to another employer. This possibility is of course dependent on the state of the economy and of the labour market, but the option is in principle always there. All work contracts are in that sense temporary. From a very different point of departure, Karl Marx (1933: 20) claimed something similar, underlining that workers were subject to ‘the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class’ but that they were free to choose between capitalists; they could offer their labour power to anyone of them. Expressed in another way, in this system necessity and indeterminacy coexist.

The indeterminacy of labour makes organizational commitment, that is, employees’ loyalty to the employing organization, a crucial theme in the book (e.g., Mowday, Porter and Steers 1982; Meyer and Allen 1997; Meyer et al. 2002; Mowday 1998; Gallie et al. 1998: ch. 9). We are interested in examining the determinants behind this kind of loyalty. There are also other forms of commitment—with the profession, with customers, patients, clients, etc.—that can be very important (e.g., Fukami and Larson 1984; Meyer and Allen 1997; Reichers 1985; Wallace 1993). Moreover, job satisfaction is a key aspect to be dealt with in some of the subsequent chapters. It can be expected that employees who are highly committed to their work have a great deal of satisfaction as well.

Some words of warning are in place. We must not shut our eyes to the risks that people work too much, irrespective of the underlying reasons— whether they are forced to do it because of the income or whether they are extraordinarily engaged in their tasks, clients, etc. There are no doubt great health risks with heavy workloads; many individuals become physically injured because they are too tired to handle their own and others’ safety properly, and others get mental health problems because of stress and feelings of inadequacy when facing difficult-to-solve or unsolvable tasks (e.g., Dunham 2001; Karasek and Theorell 1990). Another crucial aspect is the puzzle of combining extensive employment duties with family life, which is evidently also a source of stress (e.g., Bianchi, Casper and Berkowitz King 2005; Frone, Russell and Cooper 1997). We do not want to create the impression that we consider pro-work attitudes something exclusively positive. Such attitudes may be positive for the production of goods and services in society, but they may also hit back by causing problems in other respects.

A main point of departure for the book is that paid work is a key sociological category. We need to emphasize this statement, simply because many authors have tried to detract from it. One of the most well-known attempts of the kind was made by Claus Offe (1985) in an analysis that was first published in German. The author claimed that, for a long time, work had been treated as the key sociological concept, but that, at least by the early 1980s, this position had become obsolete. Two main arguments were presented in favour of the thesis. The first is that work had become much more differentiated because of the increased division of labour and the expansion of services. This was supposed to lead to a situation in which people experience their jobs very differently. Work is ‘no longer the focus of collective meaning and social and political division’ and, therefore, ‘with respect to their objective and subjective contents of experience, many wage-earning activities have hardly more in common than the name “work”’(Offe 1985: 136). We find this way of reasoning untenable; it is like saying that ‘food’ is no longer a relevant concept because there are now so many different dishes.

The second argument refers to an alleged decline in regard to the work ethic (Offe 1985: 140–148). As the argument will be further scrutinized in Chapter 2, this volume, we can leave it out here. It is sufficient to take notice of the principal deduction involved: Offe’s whole analysis implies that work must abdicate from its privileged position in sociological analysis. Our position is very different; in contrast, we assume that work is one major sociological category and that it will remain that way in the foreseeable future. This conclusion is not undermined by the fact that sociological studies rest on several other crucial concepts. The significance of each concept is dependent on the topic under scrutiny. Whether or not work is generally the most important category is a question which it is a waste of time to pay attention to.

The Chapters in the Book

Empirically the analyses in the book are based on different kinds of data. Some of them make use of survey data from various countries to allow international comparisons. These accounts differ from one another as to which countries are involved, but taken together they provide information from Europe, North America and Oceania. To some extent the data entail opportunities of studying changes across time. Furthermore, in two of the chapters personal interviews form the empirical basis for the analyses. The data consist of narratives from workers in low-status occupations and from employees in occupations that have undergone dramatic rationalization measures during the last decades. All these interviews have been carried out in Sweden. Finally, there are some chapters using survey data from a single country, most often Sweden but also Iceland. These chapters deal with different aspects of work and examine how working conditions are related to work orientation and job satisfaction.

All in all, this book contains twelve chapters, written by twelve different authors. In Chapter 2, Bengt Furåker gives an overview of a number of key concepts and theoretical perspectives that will appear here and there in the remainder of the book. To begin with, attention is devoted to the concepts of work orientation, work attitude and job satisfaction. Given the role these notions play in the analyses to come, their respective meaning needs to be spelled out and clarified. Similarly, several related concepts are considered, among others employment commitment—or, rather, non-financial employment commitment—instrumentalism or instrumental work attitudes, organizational commitment, work ethic and work centrality. The task of conceptual clarification is framed by a more general theoretical discussion on the reasons why people work, what factors affect how much effort they put in and how well they perform and what role work plays in their lives.

The subject matter of Chapter 3, written by Frans Hikspoors, Tómas Bjarnason and Kristina Håkansson, is work centrality, defined as individuals’ views about the importance of work in their lives. It is asked whether there have been changes in these attitudes during the last two decades in selected Western European countries. The analysis is based on information derived from the surveys of the European Values Study in 1990, 1999/2000 and 2008, which have been conducted in a large number of nations. Data from eleven countries—Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, (West) Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Spain—are examined. Looking at the whole period from 1990 to 2008, the authors find that the value attributed to work has declined almost everywhere, but this trend is not all that uniform and a few countries show diverging patterns. There is moreover a great deal of continuity in work orientations, as the rank order of different domains in life remains rather stable. Nevertheless work has lost ground to leisure in most countries. Younger individuals tend to put relatively low emphasis on work, and there is evidence of a generational effect in some of the countries, that is, youth keep their outlook as they grow older. With respect to gender, the general pattern is that males value work higher than females do, but by 2008 no significant gender difference could be found among full-time workers. It is suggested that the concept of ‘scarcity’ can be fruitful when we attempt to explain this increased preference for leisure. The idea is that lack of something increases the demand for it. This would mean that being short of employment and being short of leisure affect people’s preferences in different ways.

Departing from Goldthorpe’s concepts of instrumental, solidaristic and bureaucratic orientation, Tomas Berglund analyzes a set of significant work orientations in Chapter 4. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), collected in 2005, he distinguishes four categories: the instrumental, the altruistic, the career and the autonomy orientation. A principal question is whether or to what extent there are cross-national differences—in these respects—related to the institutional settings characteristic of the main types of welfare state, production and employment regimes. Patterns regarding work orientations are compared across six countries representing different societal models: France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US. The analyses also include examining the prevalence of the various orientations by gender, age, occupational categories, sector of employment, etc.

In Chapter 5 Bengt Furåker starts out from the observation that so-called non-financial employment commitment is rather strong in several Nordic countries and often stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon world. Non-financial employment commitment simply stands for willingness to have a paid job even if one does not need the money. However, the level of work mobilization—the proportion of the potential work effort that is actually made use of in a society—is largely higher in the Anglo-Saxon than in the Nordic countries. In order to throw more light on these issues Furåker examines the relationship between various work-related attitudes and certain data on employment and work mobilization. The comparison includes six Anglo-Saxon countries—Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US—and four Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Employment and work mobilization data are derived from the OECD presentation of national labour force surveys, covering the period 2003–2007. The attitudinal data derive from ISSP 2005. Among other things, respondents have been asked whether they want to work more than they presently do, how much they want to work in terms of weekly hours and whether they prefer to work more and earn more or vice versa. It turns out that employment rates are positively associated with non-financial employment commitment, but the latter measure is negatively related to work mobil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. The Relevance of Studying Work Orientations
• 2. Theoretical and Conceptual Considerations on Work Orientations
• 3. Declining Work Centrality in Western Europe: Myth or Reality?
• 4. Work Orientations in Western Europe and the United States
• 5. Work Attitudes, Employment and Work Mobilization: A Comparison between Anglo-Saxon and Nordic Countries
• 6. Work Attitudes in Low-Status Occupations: More than Instrumentalism
• 7. Administrative Service Work, Occupational Identity and Work Orientations: Much-discussed Problems and Underrated Strengths
• 8. The Development of Attitudes to Work in Sweden
• 9. Employee Satisfaction, Exchange Paradigms and Community versus Autonomy in Employment Relations
• 10. Work Attitudes in a Crisis
• 11. Temporary Agency Workers and Organizational Commitment
• 12. Work Travel: Stimulating or Stressful?
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index