Impact of technology on workers and their jobs: A study of the relationship between technology and worker alienation using the 1972 Quality of Employment Survey.

Abstract

Sociologists have long debated whether or not meaningful, humane work can be achieved under the capitalist system of production? This debate has spurred the development of various schools of research aimed at exploring different aspects of the technical, social, and control arrangements of work. These schools of thought and research can be classified into three groups: (1) the human relations school, which has focused upon the social and human arrangements of jobs, (2) the sociotechnical or humanists school which have focused upon the types of social arrangements that best compliment specific technologies of production, and (3) the neo-Marxist school which has focused upon class relations of production systems. This thesis explores how factors stressed within each of these major schools affect workers and their jobs. This thesis examines the impact of individual characteristics, the technology of jobs and the social organization of work upon the nature of work. The data used in this thesis is from the 1972 Quality of Employment Survey which is a representative sample of the U.S. workforce. Using the Dictionary of Occupational Title scores from this data set, I develop and test a comprehensive typology of technology that extends across occupational collars and industrial sectors. The analysis of this new technology measure suggests that it is consistent and reliable. A regression analysis of six specific features of work and overall job satisfaction on technology generally show that the inverse U relationship between technology and alienation observed by Blauner holds across the full range of jobs in the 1972 U.S. workforce. Workers' intrinsic rewards, autonomy, task variety, and satisfaction are highest among jobs with low levels (e.g., skilled craft) and high levels (e.g., continuous processors) of capital intensity or job technology. Equally important, the inclusion in the regression model of factors measuring the social organization of worker's jobs shows that the nature and experience of work depends not only on job technology, but also upon the style of supervision workers receive, the adequacy of their resources, and to a lesser extent, on the degree of co-worker integration they have on their jobs.