LISL KLEIN is a research worker in industrial sociology. 

FABIAN TRACT 349 

This pamphlet is based on a lecture given at a Fabian school. 

R ( P) 

THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 
J 11 Dartmouth Street. S.W.l 


..... 

Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of 
the F AB/AN SOCIETY, represents not the collective 
view of the Society but only the view of the 
individual who prepared it. The responsibility of 
the Society is limited to approving the publications 
which it issues as worthy of consideration within 
the Labour Movement . 

October, 1963. 


I. The Ingredients of Work 
THERE is a wi?espread misconception in middle-class intellectual circles 

that all industrial work is dull. One has only to hear The Critics on 
the B.B.C., on the rare occasions when industrial life or factory work come 
into their discussions, to sample some of the strange beliefs that are held 
about them. They would be very surprised to see factory workers pitying 
social scientists for the dull lives that they must have-yet this is a common 
experience for sociologists and psychologists working in industry. As one 
girl in a factory put it to a research worker: "Don't you get bored, just 
interviewing people all day?" 

The same research worker was one day watching a girl whose job was 
to put the little bits of cork into the tops of toothpaste tubes. In her turn 
she asked the girl, "Don't you get bored, doing that all day?", and the 
girl looked up in complete surprise and said, "Oh, no! They come up different 
every time! " So the first thing is to look at this question without 
preconceptions, and to be careful in the judgments one makes. 

There is a great deal of pleasure to be got out of factory life. This 
shows, presumably, the great capacity of people to adapt themselves and 
get something out of any environment. It might be objected that they should 
not have to, that they are rationalising a situation which would otherwise 
be intolerable. But then, anyone who finds his work interesting or enjoyable 
may be doing that. In any job, much of the beauty or ugliness is in the eye 
of the beholder. For instance, it is usually thought that a lawyer has a 
varied and interesting job, and he certainly has one of the most highly 
esteemed jobs in our society. In fact what he does is to process particular 
cases through a set of known rules and precedents-a routine which, when 
put like that, doesn't sound very exciting and which a computer might well 
be able to do more cheaply. 

It all depends how you look at it. In a large organisation even a 
manager, with a highly responsible administrative and co-ordinating job, and 
big decisions to make, may still be only part of a bigger pattern. A foreman, 
in charge of two hundred people in a very large firm, recognised this when 
he said: "It pays you to be a cog, even if it's a big cog". And this is true. 
Anyone who, if he comes to work on a Monday morning full of a new 
idea, cannot pursue it, either because it must be referred to Head Office, 
or because someone else in the organisation might be upset, or because it 
means creating a difficult precedent is, however senior his position, only a 
bigger cog. So we may all be kidding ourselves. 

In considering the question of the actual content of work I want, first 
of all, to state the obvious and get it out of the way. It goes without saying 
that the first thing that matters about work is to have it. Any discussion 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

about intrinsic work satisfaction has to presuppose that there are no fears 
of large-scale unemployment, and becomes nonsense if there are such fears. 
1'he next thing, still before the intrinsic satisfaction of work matters very 
much, is to be adequately paid for it. To leave wages out of such a discussion 
is to beg another very big question. Nevertheless, I want to discuss the question 
of work as if basic security and basic living standards can be taken 
for granted. It is bard to know whether this is justified. One moment we 
seem to be on the brink of disaster and, with shoulders to wheels and 
noses to grindstones, are exhorted to pant along behind the industrious 
Germans, Japanese, Russians, Americans and Uncle Tom Cobley; the next 
we are apparently affluent to the point of demoralisation. So, leaving the 
economic argument out of account, I am going to give us the benefit of 
the doubt. After all, unions now include shorter hours and longer holidays 
in their claims, which suggests that they are beginning to feel secure about 
the basic necessities and to look ·beyond them. And even when demands are 
for money, more cash often represents something other than purchasing 
power: it may be compensation for boredom, it may be an indication of 
how well one has got on as compared with others, or a measure of one's 
bargaining strength. The new needs, which arise when basic needs are satisfied, 
are complicated and difficult to define. We do not know how to demand 
satisfaction in work, so we continue to demand money. 

There are, then, two possible next steps: one is to do away with 
work as far as possible, to increase leisure and get satisfaction from 
leisure activities. But it does not seem likely that the bulk of work 
can ever be done away with, and this way out is, in a sense, an admission 
of defeat. If the affluent society now gives us some economic 
leeway, it would seem at least as important to take a look at the nature 
of work itself, to see where its satisfactions lie and whether they can 
be inc: eased. 

Certainly, whichever way you look at it, work satisfaction is a very 
slippery topic. Almost everything that can be said about it can also be 
contradicted; for instance, mining is by most standards a terrible job-
dangerous, dirty, unpleasant, unhealthy. But because it has existed for a 
long time, because traditions have grown up round it, because there are 
social compensations for the arduousness and the danger, miners will fight 
hard for the right to do it. Joint consultation is supposed to stimulate a 
sense of participation; on the other hand nobody ever seems to get a sense 
of participation from it, and many people don't want a sense of participation. 
Again, everybody wants more money, but many are prepared to take less 
money for a job which gives them a sense of purpose and self-fulfilment. 

The reason for these, and similar, contradictions is that satisfaction in 
work does not lie along merely one dimension. Many factors go to make 
it up, and I want next to lis't some of them to show bow complex a subject this 
is. They can be div.ided, rather arbitrarily, into three groups: those which 
lie in the nature of the job itself, those which are social, and those which 
lie in the circumstances surrounding the job. The things which contribute 
to satisfaction or dissatisfaction at work apply to any job, and this should 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

be borne in mind when we look at them in more detail, although I shall 
do so mainly jn relation to industrial work. 

The Job Itself 

The first group consists of those experiences which are intrinsic in 
the operation itself. First of aU, ~he physical experiences-the strain, or lack 
of it, degrees of comfort, dirt, noise, colour, ease or difficulty of operation 
experienced jn the course of the job. (Under "strain" one could include the 
effort involved in getting to work, although this is not part of "the job 
itself". Your view of a job can be very much coloured by how far from 
home it is and how easy or difficult to get to.) 

In this connection, it is important whether a job has within it the opportunity, 
or the excuse, to move about occasionally. In a firm where the effects 
of work study were being investigated, the main change which was made 
was that people had loads of work brought to them, instead of having to 
go and fetch them for themselves. Instead of experiencing this as a relief, 
they resented it very much, because fetching their own work had given 
!'hem the opportunity to move around occasionally, have a change of scene 
and an occasional chat. (And, incidentally, some of them had devised ways 
of picking and choosing jobs, of being ready just when a good job was 
coming up, and didn't like having this interfered with.) But there are also 
good physiological reasons for changing position occasionally. The repeated 
use of certain muscles, even in light work such as typing, contributes to a 
feeling of monotony, which is very often really a feeling of fatigue. However, 
the relationship between boredom and fatigue is a complicated one: 
a typist may feel she is bored when she is really mildly fatigued ; but she 
may also become fatigued more quickly when she is bored. 

Then there is the feel of the stuff you're handling; the pleasure of 
handling nice shiny pieces; the pleasure of handling efficient tools, or the 
constant frustration of having to use tools which are inadequate or have 
not been properly maintained. All contribute to your overall feeling about 
the job. 

Another big factor in g1vmg meaning to work is having your own 
machine or set of tools, and being responsible for them. One may find, 
say, a press operator developing a very strong attachment to his own particular 
machine, getting intensely resentful if he is moved somewhere else, 
or if the nightshift leaves his machine in a mess. People set up relationships 
with tools and machines, and even with their own geographical position 
in the shop or office, which can be very important to them. Pin-ups, rows of 
boxes cordoning off somebody's "own" corner, traditions about where to 
put the Christmas decorations, all demonstrate and strengthen this relationship. 


Variations in batches. There is often a difference in materials or components 
which the outsider cannot spot but which can have great meaning to the 
people handling them. When the factory manager yells across the yard for 
three more boxes of four and a halfs this can really mean something to every



THE MEANING OF WORK 

one involved: the people who made them, the people who have handled them 
in the stores, the people who load them on to the lorry. Four and a halfs are 
different, and if you haven't handled them yourself you don't know. Where 
a job is repetitive, people may introduce their own variations, and may 
later defend those variations as being essential and inherent in the job; 
conversely, if there is too much variety, and too many decisions to make, 
they may "switch off". This is where the eye of the beholder is so important 
that it is impossible to generalise: there may be interest and variety in 
different pieces of cork, while all arithmetic classes look alike to the disgruntled 
teacher, and all post-operative cases look alike to the tired nurse. 

Variation in Speed. Variation in speed can make piecework attractive. 
On many piecework jobs it is possible to bash away hard for a 
couple of hours and then take ten minutes off to have a cigarette or a chat, 
without incurring the wrath of the foreman, because in quite a big way one 
is one's own boss. This may even be possible on a conveyor belt. There 
have been experiments in letting groups of people decide the speed of their 
own belt, and they have usually varied it at different times of the day. 

Having one's own particular knacks and ways of doing things; the 
extra twist or pressure which is not laid down in the method but which 
you know makes all the difference; the jig you rigged up yourself; the extra 
carbon copy which saves you looking through the files. This is important 
in all kinds of jobs, clerical and administrative jobs particularly lending 
themselves to people developing their own routines and systems. Sometimes 
these are highly inefficient in terms of the whole organisation, but people 
cling to them possessively, and will find good reasons for retaining them 
because this is what makes a job your job. One of the dangers of work. 
study is that it may determine methods too precisely and take away the 
opportunity to develop small tricks. 

This leads to what is perhaps the most important factor in this group: 
the satisfaction which the job gives is perhaps most closely related to the 
opportunity it provides to develop and use skills. Self-expression, development, 
fulfilment, whatever you want to call it, has much to do with using 
skills and developing skills; for most people, also, with having their skills 
and progress appreciated. Both work which is too easy and work which is 
too difficult are frustrating, so that there are two sides to the equation: 
what talents (official and unofficial ones) the job enables a person to use 
or to develop, and whether he has been selected and trained to be able to 
meet its demands. There is real pleasure to be got from having and beating 
an attainable target, and real misery in having a target which is always 
just out of reach. 

Both sides of this equation can also go wrong at management level, 
and indeed in professional and other non-industrial jobs. There are plenty 
of graduates in industry kicking their heels and feeling that they are not 
being used, who were recruited for reasons related to prestige and not the 
needs of the job; at the same time, many managers suffer from strain and 
pressure, because at middle-management level targets tend to be unlimited 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

or undefined. If managers were allowed to have a sense of achievement 
more often, their subordinates would probably feel the benefit too. 

The coercion there is in a job. This is, of course, why employment can 
never provide all the satisfaction of a bobby-once one has taken on a job 
one is no longer free not to do it. Within this limit, however, there may be 
many degrees of freedom and flexibility. There are probably many jobs 
where flexibility could be greater if one thought about it, where work could 
be taken home or done at unusual hours. Why must all clerical work be 
done in Central London between nine and five, for instance? 

Coercion may also come from sources outside the job. How you feel 
about a job or a career depends a lot on whether you chose it yourself 
or were pushed into it, either through some form of positive pressure, or 
lack of opportunity to train for something else, or simply through not 
knowing what else was available. There is a lot we don't know yet about 
the range of choice which is actually open to people. It can be surprisingly 
limited. There was a man whose firm moved from one side of London to 
the other, so that to get to work he had to go through London every day 
on his motorcycle. He found this very tiring and began to develop various 
symptoms of strain. When he went to his doctor about them, the doctor 
asked whether he could not perhaps change his job-and it simply hadn't 
occurred to him! This kind of thing may be quite widespread and needs to 
be examined. It is not necessarily always good to stay in a job for 50 
years and earn a gold watch. We need more effective vocational guidance, 
and not only for school leavers. Many people don't realise till they are 
quite a bit older that something is wrong with their choice of job. The 
Labour Exchange interview would seem to be the obvious opportunity for 
more positive guidance. 

Social Contacts 

The second big group of factors affecting work satisfaction consists of 
social factors:-whetber the nature of the job itself brings you into contact 
with others, or contact only takes place in spite of the job; whether these 
contacts are only with people at your own level of the organisation, or 
with those at other levels as well; whether geographically you are alone 
or in a group; what opportunity there is to gossip. Gossip can be a big 
source of satisfaction on jobs which are so routine that they require no 
attention, and for this reason women often enjoy routine jobs. On the other 
band, if there is a •lot of noise, or people are too far away from each other 
to talk, the situation is very different. A sewing machine, for instance, or 
a power press, isolates the operator socially and takes just enough constant 
vigilance to prevent him or her attending to anything else-but without 
absorbing the attention. 

Day-dreaming should also be mentioned here. Although too much 
day-dreaming is probably psychologically unhealthy, it does look as if 
some girls and women like routine jobs if they allow them to day-dream. 
If work is not the main concern of one's life anyway, it seems quite sat is



THE MEANING OF WORK 

factory to have a job which allows one to plan the meals or think about 
what to wear for the dance. 

Then there is ganging up with your mates against something or somebody. 
This is a great source of pleasure, and it ranges from huddles in the 
cloakroom, through the solidarity-creating trade union activities, to extreme 
militancy at the other end of the scale. The need for an opportunity to 
oppose is important, and I shall come back to it. Related to this category 
are also such assertions of independence as fiddling the management, beating 
down the time study man, sitting in the canteen for a while after the 
bell has gone. All of them assert one's independence vis-a-vis "them", and 
all of them may give a special satisfaction when done in company. They are 
things which people put into the work situation themselves, bits of freedom 
and pleasure which people find for themselves which are not designed 
into the job. 

There are many other relationships which may combine to give a job 
its unique flavour, either in the direction of pleasure or of misery: how 
you get on with your supervisor; the ritual slap-and-tickle with the girl on 
the tea trolley; the long-standing vendetta with a particular inspector; the 
exchange of insults with the canteen staff; the weekly transactions with the 
chap who runs the football pool or lottery, or with the woman who has a 
supply of cheap cigarettes or nylon parachutes; and many others. 

The Circumstances of the Job 

Into the third group I have put a number of factors which lie in the 
circumstances surrounding the job, some of them in the policies of the 
employer. There is the social esteem of the product: one may be proud of 
driving rivets into the Queen Mary and indifferent about doing it for 
domestic hot water tanks; one may feel ashamed to work an adding machine 
in a tax office and boast about doing it for a film or television company. 
To complicate matters, the social evaluation of occupations changes. Most 
girls 50 years ago would have been proud to be allowed to work as bank 
clerks and ashamed to model clothes; now this merely sounds quaint. 

Then there is the prestige attached to your particular position within 
some hierarchy: since the whole of our culture is competitive, people may 
derive pleasure or misery from quite small differences between their own 
position and someone else's. The attainment of a carpet in the office, or 
the right to a particular parking space, or the key to Top People's lavatories 
may be greatly valued. Wages and salaries are also important here. Above 
certain levels, money is often valued mainly as an indicator of status. 

Whether you accept the aims of the organisation you work for ; know · 
ing where your job fits into the whole; knowing what goes on in the firm; 
feeling ~hat you are making something valuable; feeling that what you do 
matters. In a dirty old factory in Blackfriars during the war a job came 
in one day which consisted of painting a large quantity of metal "Ds"the 
letter D stamped out in metal. These were put on to trays, sprayed with 
paint, and dried, and two women had the job of turning them over so that 


THE MEANING OF WORK 7 

they could be painted on the other side. Hour after hour, and day after 
day they turned these things over and were at screaming point with boredom, 
when by chance the foreman, who was walking through the shop, 
said that these "Ds" were for labelling drinking water for the troops fighting 
on the second front in Normandy. Obviously, this changed the whole 
meaning of the job; they were doing something of national importance and 
began to enjoy it. 

Whether you can feel that what you do is effective: cleaning something, 
for example, can be quite a satisfying experience in itself. What makes 
washing dirty dishes a drudgery is the knowledge that the effect will only 
last a few hours, and the job will have to be done over and over again, 
three times a day for ever. There is a world of difference between spring 
cleaning, say, in the country and spring cleaning in a dirty back street in 
Kings Cross, where the best that you can hope for is that the efie:::t will 
last for a week. 

A knowledge of results. This can come in various ways-it can be obvious 
from the job itself, it can be due to an understanding boss keeping you 
informed about your own progress, as well as the progress of the firm and 
its products, it can take the form of various ways of target-setting against 
which you can measure your own achievements. 

The more progressive managements are aware of the type of factor 
included in this group and some, though not enough, go a long way in 
their attempts to meet it. The bigger the organisation, the more difficult 
this may be. For this reason some of the prestige advertising of the larger ' 
companies is aimed at arousing pride in their employees quite as much as at ) 
their customers. On the same lines joint consultation, various training 
schemes, and particularly induction training where new recruits may be 

1

shown the whole factory, the whole product and the uses to which it is 
put, are all aimed at increasing peoples' knowledge of, and therefore par-I. 
ticipation and satisfaction in, what is going on. The position here is a bit 
tricky. On the one hand it is still necessary to press for more of this kind 
of activity, because many managements are still not even aware of the 
need; on the other hand a high level of this sort of activity tends to lull 
managements (tand unions?) into a false sense of finality, of "now the 
workers ought to be happy". It covers, after all, only one aspect of life 
at work, and a rather debatable one at that. I shall come back to this later. 

These are some of the factors which go to make work satisfying or 
unsatisfying. There arc probably many others which have been left out, 
and their various combinations and permutations are innumerable. Add to 
this the fact that in different situations they have different orders of priority, 
and it becomes clear that the problem is not a simple one. It is just not 
possible to generalise; one has to look at a lot of jobs in very great detail. 
There is no way round this. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

2. Combining the Ingredients 
pROBABLY the most useful way of looking at jobs is under different 
technical conditions, to see how these may influence the possible 
frustrations and satisfactions that have been listed. 

If one looks first of all at 1a craft job, say that of a tailor making suits 
one at a time, there is very little mechanisation, and there is very little subdivision 
of work. This job has built into it a lot of the satisfactions listed. 
The tailor is using skill, he is using a knowledge of materials and techniques 
and he is also developing skill, it is a job on which he can improve. 
He oan easily assess results or the customer makes him very quickly aware 
of results, and he can use this information to improve his performance 
next time. He knows obviously what it is for, and where the different parts 
fit .in. He has to know ·this as part of the job. He has a variety of tasks. 
Within an overall time limit he plans the work himself and co-ordinates 
the different parts of it. He has a choice of methods and he can develop 
his own special knacks. In other words, many of the important satisfactions 
that were listed are built into the demands of the job and do not have to 
be inserted by deliberate policy. 

Mechanisation 

As mechanisation develops, and bigger quantities are produced, work 
gets broken down into component parts. In the production of very !1arge 
batches one man· is likely to see only one component of a product, and to 
perform only one operation on that component, and that one operation 
repeatedly. This could be called a horizontal sub-division of work, but at 
the same time there has also been a vertical sub-division. He is not performing 
the whole work content of his one operation: someone else has 
planned it, has specified the material to be used, the tools, the methods, 
sometimes quite precisely the movements he has to make, and the time he 
has to take; someone else has prepared the work for him, and someone 
else inspects it. In other words, all the control, planning and decision-
making functions have been removed from the job itself and transferred 
either to the machine or to higher management. He does not need to know 
where things fit in, though a progressive management may tell him; he 
does not need to develop skills which he thinks up himself, in fact he will 
be a more satisfactory worker if he doesn't. 

In the production of smallish batches, there is often still a good deal 
of scope for people to compensate for this, to take back for themselves 
little bits of freedom, to acquire little bits of skill, though it may not be 
the kind of skill management wants them to have. The average engineering 
workshop is a marvellous arena for all kinds of small fiddles and manipulations, 
which are all signs, it would seem, of people asserting themselves 
against the system, introducing satisfactions for themselves, many of them 
of the social kind. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

Mass Production 

It is in ~he real mass-production situation that the least opportunity for 
anything of this sort lies. When work is highly machine-paced, or on 
a conveyor belt, so that rhe operator has no control over the flow of work 
or over anything else, the situation arises which Charlie Chaplin depicted 
in "Modern Times"-a robot forever tightening a screw on a moving belt 
-with a minimum of decisions to make, or skill to use, in the course of 
~he work. 

Many people think of this as the typical industrial job. It is not; in this 
country there are not as many of these jobs as one thinks. For one thing, 
the ratio of clerical, administrative and technical workers to manual workers 
has been changing. Between 1900 and 1956 it changed from 1 : 12 to 1 : 4 
in manufacturing industry alone. For another, only a fairly small proportion 
of manufacturing firms are actually engaged on mass production. Thirdly, 
even in a mass production firm, not everyone is on the assembly line. 

But what is life like for those who do have this kind of job? In a study 
of assembly-line production of motor cars, the American sociologists, 
Walker and Guest! found that people were very concerned to try to find 
small ways of varying conditions, and that most of the men disliked intensely 
the pace, the repetitiveness and the lack of opportunity to develop 
skills. The effect of this situation seemed to extend beyond their working 
lives, since the men's wives made comments to the effect that their husbands 
seemed to lose interest in out-of-work activities such as sport, or local 
affairs, or the church, since they began their current jobs. 

I mentioned at the beginning that people are very adaptable. Now, in 
this situation, if a man's ability to grow as a person, make decisions and 
take responsibility shrink to fit the opportunities which are normally available 
to him, so that he becomes what we call apathetic, who is to say that 
this is not a healthy adaptation to his environrrlent? Or if, unable to adapt 
in this way, he becomes militant instead, this too need not be unhealthy for· 
him and should not surprise. The only thing which would be surprising is 
if the technical environment in which a man spends his days did not have 
some influence on him. 

Automation 

So far we have looked at what happens to work under increasing 
mechanisation of production. When mechanisation develops still further, 
there comes the situation of process industry and automation. 

It gives a false picture to lump all automatic processes together, first 
because there are different kinds, and secondly beoause automation is a 
matter of degree, and there are many stages before that of the fully automatic 
factory. The skills required from workers on these processes therefore 

1 C. R. Walker and R. H. Guest-The, Man on the Assembly Line. Harvard 
University Press 1952. 


10 
THE MEANING OF WORK 

vary greatly.2 In general an automatic process may be organised so that 
the operator monitors the process, having a "push-button" type of job, where 
only one course of action is open to him and he behaves in many ways like 
the mass-production operator; or it may be set up so that the OJ:erator 
controls the process, in which case new and important skills may be required 
from him. 

In some cases of automation, therefore, fundamental changes have 
taken place in work content for those people who are still employed on 
the process (I have ignored here the problems of those who are no longer 
employed.) 

In mass production the operator is quite correctly called a machine 
hand. On an ordinary machine tool he puts in the piece, starts the machine, 
the machine cuts, he stops the machine, takes the piece out. On an automatic 
machine tool the machine itself does all that, the machine hand is eliminated 
and what is required is a very highly skilled setter to set the machine 
and control it. Similarly, in process work-chemicals, oil, etc.-what is 
required from the worker is to control the process-to watch for changes, 
spot faults, weigh up their importance and decide on action.

1 

What has happened to the role of the operator? In a craft job we 
saw him doing the whole job: planning it, carrying it out, checking it, and 
modifying what he did next time according to the results he achieved. In 
a mass-production job, he only performs the operating part of this cycle-
all the planning, deciding, inspecting and adapting is done by other people 
or by machine. Now, with a high degree of automa'tion, the operating part 
is done mechanically too, and the operator may once more be doing a 
whole job-but the job, this time, is to control a complicated piece of 
apparatus. 

In many ways his role now resembles that of a craftsman again. For 
instance, he has to have information-it is not a matter of being nice to 
him and telling him what the process is about, he has to know. Because 
the equipment used is so expensive, and the rate of output so high, the 
cost of even short breakdowns on automatic plant is extremely high. It is 
therefore very important that the people working the plant should be able 
to recognise faults or impending faults and know what to do about them. 
This is not always realised. In several cases of breakdown which were 
investigated as part of a study of training needs for automation,3 managers 
acknowledged that a higher degree of training of their operators could 
have saved very large sums. In one case "the manager concerned estimated 
that the financial loss involved amounted to £150,000 over the year [from 
quality variations]. He was convinced that more highly trained operators 
could reduce this figure by possibly as much as £50,000. This would result 

E. R. G. W. Crossman-Automation and Skill. D.S.l.R. Problems of Progress 
in Industry No. 9. 
' 
Oavid King-Vocational Training in View of Technical Change. E.P.A. project 
No. 418. March 1960. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

from sounder on-the-spot decisions based on a more skilful analysis of the 
factors involved." The operator therefore needs to have skills. They are 
usually different skills-instead of dexterity and manipulative skill he now 
has to develop more intellectual abilities, to perceive, think, and make 

decisions. 

In addition, other things seem to happen to his job: he has very often 
become the key point in a communication system. He has direct access to 
people at a very senior level because the information which he has is very 
important. He has direct access to maintenance people because he is in 
charge of very expensive equipment. For economic reasons the machinery in a 
highly mechanised factory usually runs throughout the 24-hour period so that 
there are shifts of operators on continuous duty. The foremen and maintenance 
men, however, are often only on duty during a normal working day 
so that the operator, in addition to his routine controls, forms the chief 
link of communication between the machine and the foreman and maintenance 
staff. This leads to a free exchange of views, and as a result a 
group or team often develops spontaneously and grade barriers tend to 
break down, with the so-called unskilled operator being regarded as a 
responsible person and, apparently, beginning to take up attitudes which 
elsewhere are characteristic of management rather than of labour. { 

The requirements of the task are so obvious to everyone that unusual 
attitudes do seem to develop. For example, in a chemical process plant investigated 
in one particular study,< it was found that the evening shift came on 
regularly half an hour early so as to enable the day-shift to go off in time 
to have a drink before closing time on their way home. It didn't occur to ) 
anyone to leave the plant unattended. Relationships also seem to improve 
when they are dictated by the obvious needs of the situation, which everyone 
understands. 

One more point can be made about automation: it is that at this level 
of mechanisation we are still at the development stage. It is in some cases 
still possible to choose between alternative ways of designing and setting 
up the process, before vast sums are irrevocably invested in equipment. 

To sum up, in a rather over-simplified way: as mechanisation advances 
it first tends to separate out all the processes which a man has been performing, 
does them by machine, and puts in men as adjuncts to the machine. · 
At a later stage it tends to put them together again in a more complex 
machine and may put in men as controllers of the machine. The demands 
on the people are different at each stage and the response is · different at 
each stage. 

4 Joan Woodward--Management and Technology. D.S.I.R. Problems of Progress 
in Industry. No. 3. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

3. Attempted Solutions 
fT is one thing to say that the way people spend the greatest part of their 

waking lives ought, in itself, to be a source of satisfaction and to have 
some meaning beyond earning a living; it is quite another to translate this 
into specifications for particular jobs. For one thing, as we have seen, there 
are very many factors involved. For another, it is one of the slippery 
things about the subject that people get adjusted to and get some kind 
of satisfaction from almost anything. 

Suppose we decide that there are jobs which it is socially undesirable 
for people to do? Then we have two problems: one is that people may, in 
fact, not mind doing them. Imposing one's value judgments on others is 
always a dicey business. But if the people doing those jobs do dislike 
them, and find no way of geting satisfaction out of them, then the second 
problem is that it may be economically intolerable to abolish them. In 
that case, we simply have to accept the social consequences, as well as pay 
high earnings to induce people to do them. It is no good complaining 
about apathy and militance, if those are the only ways of dealing 
with an impossible working situation. This may have something to do with 
the fact that much of our industrial trouble is in the motor industry, and 
that on an assembly line the tea-break assumes great importance. 

Careful selection may help to some extent. We do need jobs for the 
less able and less mature. But this raises the problem of meritocracy. If 
people are so carefully selected that only the dullest do the dull jobs and 
the weakest are at the bottom of the ladder, we may stop producing troublemakers, 
and this could be a dangerous state of affairs. Troublemakers have 
been responsible for many improvements, both in working conditions and in 
the efficient running of firms. Whatever their motivation, and although trouble-
making can obviously get out of hand and be purely destructive, there is 
something to be said for having someone around who keeps management 
on its toes and anxious to forestall the next spot of bother! 

We are certainly not at the stage where a politician can say "Work 
must be designed this way and not that way for maximum satisfaction". 
There are too many factors involved. It is not inconceivable that one day 
we may perhaps be able to do it-one can just barely imagine that there 
might be a Factory Act which perhaps gave point ratings for jobs in terms 
of the value to the person doing them, just as now we have safety specifications, 
and which then says that no one may be employed in jobs which 
rate, say, less than 10 points, and that all such jobs must be abolished 
even if this is not economic. You could then, presumably, go further and 
say that the jobs which people are given must be within, say, 10 points 
of their own capabilities. But in the present state of knowledge this sounds 
ridiculous even as one says it, and doing this kind of thing by legislation 
would almost certainly defeat its own end. 

As in other scientific fields it is difficult to see the role of the poli



THE MEANING OF WORK 

tician in this, since it must be tackled on a technical level. On the other 
hand, there is enough knowledge by now for social scientists to be able to 
give advice in particular work situations, and we do know by now the 
directions in which research can most fruitfully be pushed. 

Ergonomics 

One way in which the problem is being tackled is in the field of 
ergonomics. This is called "human engineering" in the United States, a 
label which is disliked over here, although it does give a better description. 
It is concerned with the idea of "fitting the job to the worker"5 It has in 
recent years taken the attention of psychologists, anatomists, engineers and 
physiologists, who are concerned to study human characteristics and capacities 
in order to relate them to the demands which are made on people by 
particular tasks. It results in the redesigning of work-machines, workplaces, 
sources of information such as instrument panels-to fit in with what is 
becoming known about the physical and psychological capabilities of people. 
On the basis of such knowledge equipment may be designed so as to be 
comfortable and least difficult to use, both at the extremes of human 
capacity where you have to do this or people will simply not be able to 
work the equipment, and at points before the extremes, to increase comfort, 
convenience and efficiency. 

As seems to happen in many fields, this line of research first arose 
out of military needs. During ~he war technical advances produced machines 
such as high-speed aircraft and radar devices, which presented their operators 
with tasks that could be so complex or exacting, or require such rapid 
action, that they were pretty well impossible to perform. It therefore became 
necessary to understand the human limitations of the operators and 
to take them into account. Anatomists, physiologists, and experimental 
psychologists were called upon to work on this. Industrial psychology is therefore 
yet another field of scientific research .in which some of the best work 
has arisen out of military needs-a subject on which the Minister for Science 
himself has expressed strong views. There are probably more psychologists 
to the square inch in the Defence Departments than in any other institution 
where work is done, and it is almost by accident, by some of these 
people trickling out into civilian life, that industrial applications of the 
knowledge began to be worked on. 

The study 10f ergonomics is the right approach to the question of work, 
because it attempts to deal with work at the place where it happens. The 
main thing, after all, is how you spend your working day; the importance 
of some of the satisfactions listed earlier in the second and third groups, 
of some of the extraneous relationships and committee meetings, merely 
lies in the fact that they interrupt it. If one is not prepared to tackle this 
on a technical level, there is not much one can do abo-ut it. If, therefore, I 
make some critical comments it is only because this is so clearly the right 

s A. T. Welford-Fitting the Job to the Worker. in "Time and Motion Study''. 
March 1960. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

way to approach the subject that it should be extended and broadened. 
Two comments can be made on current work in ergonomics, and 
they are probably related to the military origins of the work. One is that 
the range of topics with which it deals has been narrow. Understandably, 
the scientists concerned want to confine themselves to fields where their 
work will be scientifically valid: to human characteristics which can be 
measured and to ideas which can be tested by experiment. But even within 
the narrow range of characteristics that this leaves available for investigation, 
the measurements are not absolutely precise and the experiments not 
absolutely foolproof. Once one accepts that imprecision is a matter of 
degree, one might as well be relatively imprecise about more important 
topics as about less important ones, so that it should be possible to investigate 
the emotional content of work as well as the perceptual and physiological 
content. 
It is important to know how the worker can cope with high or low 
temperatures, noise, various kinds of physical discomfort, complicated 
signals, when the demands which these things make on him are extreme. 
When they are not extreme, it matters less to make a lever just a little 
easier to handle, or the figures on a dial just a shade easier to read. Indeed, 
one can go too far in making things comfortable and convenient, if by doing 
so one eliminates choice and the worker's opportunity to man,oeuvre and 
feel a bit independent. There is something to be said for the feeling expressed 
by one man in an interview: "Bul I'd rather wash my hands in a 
dirty bucket!" 

Job Enlargement 

Emotional needs and abilities in work are more difficult to treat scientifically 
than perceptual and physiological ones, and strictly speaking one is 
partly guessing about them. But they do exist, and the fact that they are 
not easy to pinpoint is no reason to act as if they don't. When it was first 
coined, the phrase "fitting the job to the worker" was given a wider meaning 
than it has now that detailed work is actually going on. This need not 
be a serious problem. For one thing, the ergonomics approach will inevitably 
overlap with the wider aspects of making work satisfactory: if you enquire 
into fatigue, you are bound eventually to enquire into boredom, and so 
on. Also, ergonomics teams could easily include people from other disciplines, 
and research can be done even on the basis of partial guesswork. 
So can experiments in re-designing work: in a small way by varying tasks, 
"job rotation" transferring workers, grouping them differently and so on, but 
in a much more basic way also. There have been some attempts in America 
at what is called "job enlargement", which are very encouraging, and which 
should be followed up in this country. 

One such attempt was made by l.B.M.6 They began in their machine 
shop, which was organised on traditional lines. There were machine setters, 
operators whose job was to put pieces in the machine, start the machine, 

GC. R. Walker-The Problem of the Repetitive Job. Harvard Business Peview. 
May 1950. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

stop the machine and take the pieces out, inspectors who inspected the 
work and specialist departments for sharpening and maintaining tools. In 
a fairly lengthy re-training programme, the operators were trained to set 
their own machines, sharpen their own tools and inspect their own work so 
~hat the job cycle was greatly increased and made to include a variety of skills. 
It is not as simple as it sounds. For instance, it could only be done on a 
rising market because it left the firm with a lot of specialists to find work 
for. But it does open up big and interesting possibilities and far more 
experimenting of this kind could be done. 

The Efficiency Motive 

A second comment one can make about ergonomics is true of all social 
science research in industry. It concerns a kind of conspiracy which has 
surrounded the initiation of new projects or lines or research. One gets the 
impression that ergonomics is only concerned with the efficiency of the 
systems being studied, its task being to eliminate difficulties in the way of 
the operator, not out of consideration for the operator, but out of consideration 
for the process. Ergonomics specialists explain carefully that they 
are not concerned with anything less positive than efficiency or, at best, a 
worker's physical breakdown. It was made clear at a conference on the 
subject that "the main IPOint in ergonomics is to emphasise that anything 
used by man must be designed in relationship to man, otherwise the chances 
are that it will not be so efficient or useful, and that the man using the 
instrument will become more fatigued, and will be less skilful, quite apart 
from the fact that he may also become an invalid more easily".7 

This is not as bad as it sounds. Lip-service has always to be paid to 
the cause of higher productivity, because industry likes to think of itself 
as hard-headed. Research expenditure, therefore, has always to be justified 
in terms of economic returns, even when everybody involved knows that 
there may not be any. Ergonomics apart, broader sociological research in 
industry has always been initiated in the name of efficiency, on the grounds 
that "the happy worker works better". When this turns out to be nonsense, 

1 as of course it is-a worker may be happiest when idling the day away 
in gossip and may produce most output when he is under pressure, unable 
to talk to his friends and afraid of the sack-the research does not therefore 
stop, since the initial excuse was all that was needed. In other fields 
it is now quite respectable simply to wish to extend sociological knowledge 
or to wish to solve a purely social problem. Not so in industry. 
Although, in a sense, this does not matter much, it would be useful 
to have a more realistic approach. Firms as well as governments ought to 
make real decisions about how much money they are prepared to risk on 
activities which they consider to be important for other than economic 
reasons. We could then stop wasting research effort on trying to show that 
there is a simple relationship between satisfaction, morale and efficiency. 
There may be no relationship at all, and if there is, it is not a simple one. 

1 
0. Edholm-Paper given at D.S.I.R. Conference on the Future of Ergonomics 
in Industry. September 1960. 

16 THE MEANING OF WORK 

4. The 'Human Relations' Solution 
£RGONOMICS shows, then, a more fruitful approach than romantically 

wishing that industrialisation had never happened. It also provides a healthy 
counter-weight to the woolly minded "human relations" approach. The 
philosophy of the human relations school has been: "Be nice to people. 
Then they will be happy. Then they will work hard." Muddled thinking 
about this has had two bad effects. Firstly there are, in any case, plenty of 
managers, at all levels, who want to be nice to people, simply because they 
feel that people have a right to be treated reasonably. Such managers have 
been led to believe that this should also lead to harder work, and when 
they find that it does not necessarily do so, they feel disillusioned and 
cheated and find it difficult to go on being nice. 

I 
I 
Secondly, because "being nice to people" and " human relations" training 
has generally· been concerned only with relationships at work, and not 
with work itself, the idea has become generally accepted that the workshop 
is the place for production, and the personnel department is the place for 
human relations, the place where values reside if there are any in the 
organisation. (Sometimes, the mere existence of a personnel department is 
thought to denote the existence of "values"). This has tended to mean that 
people who care about human beings have gone into personnel departments 
and have taken on themselves a specialisation in human relations. It would 
1 be much more useful if people who care about these things took jobs 
where they can really influence them-for instance, if more socialists went 
into industry as managers ami engineers, where they are concerned in a 
. much more direct way with creating the working conditions of others. The 

real essential is combining knowledge of, and sympathy for, human needs 
with technical knowledge. 

There are really two problems involved in "human relations". One is 
that "being nice to people" is not necessarily enough to make them 
"happy", it is only one part of what happens to people at work. I said 
earlier that some of the components of job satisfaction, like knowing results, 
knowing about the product and the firm, are catered for by progressive 
managements with such policies as joint consultation, induction training, 
explaining balance sheets, etc. Obviously, these things are important, and 
they are not yet so widely accepted or so long established that they can be 
taken for granted. (A manager, reminiscing during an interview abou t the 
immediate post-war period, said "Then we had another industrial revolution, 
and we found we'd got to treat these blokes as individuals".) Nevertheless, 
in recent years some of us have come to rely too much on such policies 
as a factor in job satisfaction. 

In an American study called "Motivation to Work"8 the authors made 
a study of the job motivation of 200 American middle-management men. 

s Herzberg, Mausner and Snyderman-The MotivatiOn to Work. New York, 
Wiley. 1959. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

When they reported feeling happy with their jobs, their explanations were 
usually in their actual tasks. When they reported feeling unhappy, the 
explanation was usually in extraneous factors such as supervision, interpersonal 
relations, physical working conditions, salary, company policies 
and administrative practices, benefits and job security. This adds to one's ( 
suspicion t at the value of these things is rathex negativ~They matter when 

ey are absent, but they do not by them~eate "ob atisfaction. The 
authors of this study refer to them-;;-"hygiene" and this is very good 
analogy. Hygiene is an important prerequisite for health, but it does not 
by itself create health. Also, in matters of hygiene, you have to persist, you 
have to keep renewing your efforts. Just washing once, or consulting people 
once is not enough; and indeed one sometimes wonders whether hygiene is 
not perhaps over-emphasised in our culture, and here too the analogy holds. 

The second problem arises from the confusion there has been about 
the aims of these activities. Their function has been twofold: on the one 
hand they can and do increase an understanding of what is going on, and 
feelings of satisfaction about the job. On the other hand, they are, in effect, 
an attempt to manipulate, though not necessarily a cynical one, and sometimes 
not even a deliberate one. It is thought that through understanding 
the firm, its economic position and its products, workers will also come to 
understand that there are not really two sides in industry, that everyone 
is really working for the same goal. 

But how true is this in fact? Isn't it merely a question of perspective? In 
the long term it may be true that, if the company goes bankrupt, both the 
manager and the worker are out of work. But on the whole this is a very 
long-term and theoretical point of view, and the manager, in any case, has 
greater safeguards. In the shorter term, there are not only two sides but 
there are many sides in industry, and their short-term interests are often 
opposed. For one thing there are functional clashes: the operator is up 
against the inspector, the production foreman is up against the sales manager, 
the research engineer is up against the production manager. And then there 
are economic clashes: when it comes to dividing the cake there are still 
different interests to be represented (again, not only two, but many). Further, 
efficiency is a management goal, only in a remote sense is it a worker goal. 
It is much more real in the short term that the boss wants you to work 
hard and you don't feel like working hard; that he wants you to get to 
work at five to eight and you want to get there at ten past. This is a very 
real divergence of interests .• 

Policies such as induction training, good communications and joint 
consultation could be regarded as devices for fixing the workers' attention 
on the wider objectives, and by nature people don't do this for very long. In 
the case of the metal "Ds" quoted earlier the wider objective was the obvious 
national interest and the device was very effective; but I don't think it 
would have lasted. If the women had gone on for months doing the same 
job of turning over metal "Ds", the effect would have worn off and something 
else would have bad to be injected into the situation. 


18 THE MEANING OF WORK 

In Communist countries, it seems, the national interest also plays a 
large part in harnessing people's motivation. Pictures of national leaders 
hanging up in every workshop and office, slogans, exhortations about your 
part in the five-year plan and so on, all have this aim. One cannot tell how 
far it works. I would guess that with a rising standard of living it would 
become less effective and certainly the British worker, with a fairly high 
standard of living, doesn't seem very amenable to this kind of thing. Whether 
this shows a sturdy independence and refusal to be manipulated, or an 
unhealthy apathy and dissociation, is a matter for argument. 

Joint Consultation 

Whatever the cause, many people give the impression that they do not 
want to be consulted. They prefer to remain in opposition, or at least 
detached. As many a personnel manager will testify, it is sometimes extremely 
difficult to get people to stand for the representative positions on 
joint consultation committees, and sometimes one finds that those who 
do stand for these positions are the neurotics, the misfits, or the village 
idiot who has been put up by his mates for a lark. So we say that joint 
consultation hasn't been done properly, that the motives were wrong. 

Partly, it is true, a readiness to take full and responsible part in joint 
consultation is hampered by the limits which are put to the topics that can 
be discussed by joint consultative committees, and the decisions that can 
be taken. Much has been written about this. If you are not allowed to discuss 
anything except the welfare services, then no one should be surprised if 
flurries continually blow up about the colour of the tea. 

But this is not the whole answer. There have been some genuine and 
far-reaching attempts at consultation, and the point I am trying to make is 
that even in such firms the work-force may remain basically "in opposition" • 
on many issues, and may have real grounds for doing so. 

In considering joint consultation, the history of a country's industrial 
relations always has to be taken into account. Hugh Clegg, in his evaluation 
of the experience which different countries now have of industrial 
democracy,9 shows that on the whole, in the context of traditional Western 
political democracies, it has taken the form of collective bargaining to 
protect rights and interests, i.e. pressure group democracy, rather than joint 
decision making. Indeed, it is through collective bargaining that the industrial 
worker in these countries has traditionally expected to participate. 

Confiicts of Interest 

Somewhere along the line between the immediate experience of the job 
and a global view of the firm, the national interest and world interest, 
everyone ceases to "show understanding" when this goes against his own 
interest. The narrower the job, the nearer home this limit is likely to be put. 

Hugh Clegg-A New Approach to Industrial Democracy. Blackwell 1960. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 19 

What the worker experiences from his immediate environment to be his 
own interest is not the same as management's. To be semantic about it, this 
is so even by definition. Lord Halsbury defines management as an act 
which occurs in opposition to some form of resistance, and says that therefore 
"to treat it as a mere problem in communications is quite inadequate".10 
By this he means that if the production process or the transport service 
just happened spontaneously there would be no need to manage. The need 
for opposition is.built into the very technology itself, for basically we have 
organised work so that there are two camps-those who take decisions 
and those who have decisions taken for them. A wider view therefore has 
to be plugged at people continually, by what I have called artificial devices. 
It does not arise immediately from their daily experience at work, and the 
bigger the organisation in which they are, the less likely is it to do so. 

There is a tendency lately to say that joint consultation has failed, 
but this is because expectations about it have been muddled. It certainly 
does not lead to a permanent state of exaltation among workers, which 

~ some idealists may have expected. Indeed, there is a sense in which it can 
v never be completely successful. There is much that can be achieved by 
\Dhonest and far-reaching consultatior and other techniques for improving 
F"human relations" and "communications". But it is foolish to expect such\1 

_Q techniques to eliminate copJlicts of interest. J 
This is what makes management so difficult for anyone with socialist 

S\leanings. I said earlier that it was important for socialists to go in for 
1-)management or for technical jobs in industry. I believe that this is probably 
.; the main reason why they don't. It is extremely difficult to accept the oppo) 
sition and perhaps even the hatred of subordinates, if one is the kind of 
~ person who temperamentally or by conviction tends to identify himself with 
'h ~under-dog or with the working class. Someone who is born or educated 
3 to the conviction that be is a leader or ruler does not have this problem 

and he is usually more successful, and, ironically, more popular as a manager 
because he does not step outside the role which the workers assign to him. 
Within this role he can be kind, benevolent and have all kinds of good 
qualities which will be appreciated. The manager who is really despised is 
the one who tries too hard to be one of the boys, who goes out and gets 
drunk with them, and so on. This can be a pathetic spectacle. 

One of the main functions of joint consultation in this country has, I 
believe, been to make it easier for managers to live with this situation. In 
companies where the intention has been genuine, I am sure that consultation 
has done at least as much to make a difficult situation more bearable for 
the management side, as to make the workers' side feel that they have a 
share in running things. 

Nevertheless, although we have probably over-estimated the results 
to be achieved by joint consultation, it should not be under-estimated. 

10 Lord Halsbury-Management. Group Conflict and the Sciences. in "The lmpactof Science on Society'' Vol. S. 1957. No. 3. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

either. The awful paradox is that you have to keep trying. The really good 
manager is the one who behaves as if it can work but who accepts, in his 
heart of hearts and for his own peace of mind, that it cannot do so 
completely. 

Deliberate "Inefficiency" 

Finally, a little kite-flying: one day some enterprising employer is 
going to do away with his sports ground, his welfare facilities, his flowerbeds 
and his fringe benefits, and use the money in deliberately ignoring 
some of the accepted precepts of efficiency-perhaps running his assembly 
line at a lower speed or allowing the girls in the typing pool to chat. The 
results might be surprising. In National Productivity Year it is difficult to 
advocate deliberate inefficiency, but there is plenty of inefficiency now, 
only it is accidental and haphazard. In terms of work satisfaction, inefficiency 
may have good results ,and bad ones-hold-ups, delays, breakdowns, 
bad organisation can be maddening to work under. 

We need, in any case, to examine this overriding aim of efficiency. 
Efficiency means using those methods which are most likely to achieve 
one's goal or goals. Therefore one cannot begin to be efficient until one 
has decided what the goals are and assigned priorities to them. Industrial 
organisations generally have a number of goals, and some of them are 
incompatible. In that case, the behaviour of the firm, if not its explicit 
policy, will show what the oriorities are. One may be having a comfortable 
time in the home market but be willing to risk venturing into the 
export market for patriotic reasons; one may make a less economic high-
quality product for prestige rtasons. Even purely economic goals are not 
simple, since short-term profitability often conflicts with long-term profitability. 
All the time different goals have to be evaluated and assigned their 
measure of priority, and being a good employer is often one of them. 
Sometimes this is because there is competition for labour, sometimes it is 
simply because this is now part of the climate of opinion. There are firms 
which are quite explicit in the way in which they integrate social goals, 
for instance guaranteed employment, with their economic goals, sometimes 
to the detriment of the latter. 

Mostly, however, the social objectives are not made explicit. The 
Harvard Business Review once made an interesting analysis of the surprising 
way; in which large firms in fact do not maximise profits 
but pursue other goals.11 Even allowing for the fact that only an 
economically efficient firm can afford to do this at all, and that there will 
be some element of hoping for a long-term pay off in terms of worker 
loyalty, there is no doubt that there exists a genuine paternalistic wish, 
however motivated, to do something which will benefit employees, to do 
the "right thing". 

Robert N. Anthony-The Troub'e with Profit Maxirnisation. Harvard Business 
Review. Nov./Dec. 1960. Vol. 38. No. 6. 


THE MEANING OF WORK 

Deliberate inefficiency would mean deliberately abandoning a technique 
of management practice or of production engineering, because one does 
not like its effects. It is a new and strange idea in technology, and one 
which could not have been feasible until technology was so far advanced 
that there were alternative ways of achieving the same effects. But in the 
field of warfare we are beginning to get used to the idea of refraining from 
using the most efficient techniques for social reasons, so why not in the 
field of production engineering? 

Technically there is probably very little which could not be done in 
the way of reorganising work so as to abolish those aspects of work which 
it might be demonstrated are harmful to the people doing them, though 
this would require more research and clearer knowledge. The question is 
whether anyone is prepared to afford it-either to slow down the rate of 
production so as to introduce more freedom and flexibility, or to invest in 
automatic machinery where the market may not warrant the investment. 
(This blithely assumes, of course, that the optimum economic decisions 
on these things are always made now-which is by no means the case.) 
It is argued that people doing dull work also want the high standard of living 
that dull work produces. Of course they do-but is it essential for the 
standard of living to rise at the fastest technically possible rates? Ask the 
question at a time of slump, and people will throw tomatoes. Ask it during 
a time of boom, and many will agree that it is worth asking. Therefore, it 
is difficult to ask until the economy shows more signs of being under control. 

Nevertheless, the fact remains: the working environment is a large 
part of most people's lives. People have great powers of adaptation, and 
most of them can make some sort of adaptation to most kinds of work 
situation. What sort of adaptation they make will depend partly on their 
personality structure and partly on the work situation. We now know qui~e a~ 
lot about responses to the work situation; what we have not fully recogmsed 
is the amount of choice we have in the sort of work situations we create for ' 
each other. 


Recent Fabian Publications 


RESEARCH PAMPHLETS 

228 EDUCATION FOR COMMONWEALTII SnJoENTS IN BRITAIN. 
Patrick La ncaster 2/6 

229 NEw 
ToWNs FOR OLD : the Problem of Urban Renewal 

J. B. Cullingworth 
4/230 
COMMONWEALTII AND COMMON MARKET : the Economic 
Implications. Tom Soper 3 I


231 THE 
INGLEBY REPORT : THREE CRITICAL ESSAYS 
David Donnison, Peggy Jay, Mary Stewart 2/6 

232 Too 
MANY PEOPLE? 

A . Carter 
3I· 
233 WORKERS' CONTROL IN YUGOSLAVIA 
Frederick Singleton and Anthony Topham 31


234 TAXES FOR A PROSPEROUS SOCIETY 
Bruce Millan 3 I


235 
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS : SWEDEN SHOWS THE WAY 
Jack Cooper 3 I


TRACTS 

339 THE 
FuTuRE OF THE UNIONS 
William McCarthy 3/6 

340 R EDUNDANCY IN THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY 
Geoffrey Goodman 3/6 

341 THE 
COMMON MARKET DEBATE 
Douglas Jay, Roy Jenkins 1/6 

342 EDUCATION IN A CLAss SociETY 
John Vaizey 21· 

343 OUT 
oF STAGNATION: A PoLICY FOR GRowrn 

J . R . Sargent 
4/6 
344 THE FUTURE OF PuBLIC OWNERSHIP 
A Fabian G roup 31


345 THE 
COMING STRUGGLE FOR SOUTH AFRICA 
Sandor 3/6 

346 PLANNING FOR PROGRESS 
Thomas Balogh 4/6 

347 
NATIONS AND NUCLEAR W EAPONS 
Elizabeth Young 216 
348 PENSION RIGHTS AND WRONGS 
Tony Lynes 31


Printed in Great BriJain by Devonport Press Ltd. T.U. London, W./2