Mike Rose wonders:
" What intrigues me about Phillip's further speculation that the other
factors
I discuss (satisfaction in the display of skill, the rewards of the social
domain, etc.) must carry more weight in NZ is this: He reminds us of the
multiple variables, other than the economic ones, that account for job
satisfaction, even in jobs that a culture defines as low-status. This is
not to buy into the myth of the happy worker, but does suggest that some
(many?) social science depictions of blue-collar and service work may be
more one-dimensional than we think. made this point in his response to
Phillip.)"
Maybe Mike is right, and that different cultures put different weightings on
the various factors or needs that people satisfy through the work they do.
But let me offer an alternative possibility.
Perhaps it is in the nature of people to need to feel that the work they do
provides them with legitimacy as worthwhile human beings, and that the
economic returns they get are merely one of a number of signals that
establishes that. The different kinds of signal are culturally instantaited
and vary in strength and origin in different societies, thus giving the
sense of factors being different weights in different cultures.
Let me develop this idea by, once again, using the example of airline
pilots. These people are among the best paid salary workers there are. They
have also just polled as the 'most trusted professionals' in an American
poll of public attitudes. Despite all that at present in the professional on
line discussion forums of airline pilots there is a lot of anxious fretting
about loss of self-esteem because their managers, and possibly the public,
are coming to regard them as nothing but highly paid monitors of computers
whose job is actually little more complex than that of a bus driver. This
line of worrying is explicitly connected to increasingly automated flight
decks.
When one reads worries such as that being expressed by senior captains with
Delta, United and American - whose annual salaries are nudging or surpassing
USD200,000 a year, then it is clear that it is not just the economic return
that is providing them with job satisfaction, or even a sense of self worth.
Another thought provoking example from our current work concerns farmers -
or at least the farmers in NZ whose working environment is akin to that of
Montana ranchers. It is quite evident that many of these people cannot be
said to be working in order to make money from their farms. Rather they seek
to make money from their farms so that they can keep working on them.
So my suggestion is that the basic needs that people meet through their work
are complex, but pretty similar universally. What varies is the ways in
which different cultures provide different processes and structures for
meeting those needs, each of which tend to privilege some of those needs
over others in the ways that workers can access them.
As I write this it occurs to me that in fact both Mike's suggestion and mine
may be correct. Perhaps they are two sides of a feedback loop. As different
cultural processes for the distribution of wealth and status from work
produce imbalances in the ways that work structures and processes meet the
universal needs of workers, then the workers themselves come to give more
weight to those aspects that are more accessible and/or more visible. This
feeds back into the development of how the culture evolves in the way it
allocates of wealth and status through work.
If this proposition is correct then technological change that alters the
fundamental nature of the work being done (as may be the case with airline
pilots) acts - in Activity Theory terms - as a contradiction-introducing
disturbance (deskilling that potentially threatens status and self esteem)
in this process.
Now in the matter of cross-cultural multinationals and the impact of
globalisation...........
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:17 PDT