workal.html

Worker Alienation and Job Autonomy

By Carey Craddock

In this page I will look back at the roles alienation and autonomy have played in workers' lives and also to compare this with the ways in which alienation affects them now. I intend to be able to examine both the ways in which the idea of alienation has changed throughout history and the ways in which it remains a constant. I will also survey some of the ways people deal with alienation and the outlets they use to overcome feelings of frustration. These include sabotage and brownnosing, in addition to commodity consumption, an outlet from alienating labor which has grown rampant in the 20th century, which Susan Willis brings up in her book A Primer for Daily Life (see Marx/Willis).

In this introductory page, I will give an overview of the issues I have covered in relation to workplace alienation and job autonomy. I have given a very brief summary of each of the topic areas and have highlighted key words in each subject which will lead the reader to further
information on the selected area.



I will begin with a brief overview of what Karl Marx set forth in his book, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx approaches the concept of alienation from his ideas on the way that private property, capitalism and division of labor are all linked and lead to the commodification and devaluation of men.

Switching over to the more modern side of the alienation issue, I also look at the way that gender influences perceptions of job autonomy. I found a study in the August 1993 issue of the Sociological Quarterly by Marina Adler titled "Gender Differences in Job Autonomy: The Consequences of Occupational Segregation and Authority Position." In Adler's words, the study examines "the degree to which gender, authority position, and occupational segregation determine various aspects of job autonomy" (450).

Another very interesting study dealt with the various ways alienated workers took their frustrations out on their companies and I thought it would be relevant to include some of the workers' quotes. This study, entitled "The Active Worker: Compliance and Autonomy in the Workplace" by Randy Hodson appears in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, v. 20, April 1991. It deals with the creative and subversive ways in which workers channel their energy and feeling of alienation when not allowed a healthy level of autonomy on the job.

I also found a recent study on worker alienation and ways of dealing with the feeling of the absence of autonomy and meaning in their work which many workers feel these days. This study examined the ways that workers' perceptions of their supervisors' upward influence in a company reflected on the workers sense of their own job autonomy. To view this article, click on Pelz Effect.