Research on Work Values in a Changing Economic and Social Context
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0002716219826038 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Conceptual Clarifications on Work Attitudes |
The Annals of The American AcademyWork Values in a Changing Economic and Social Context
research-article2019
This article examines the agenda of research on work
values that has been developing since the late 1960s. It
distinguishes four phases, which successively broad-
ened the scope of research on work values. The first
phase focused on the likely impact of economic devel-
opment and rising incomes on work values. The second
interrogated the role of work values for those experi-
encing unemployment. The third extended the focus to
gendered work values related to women’s increasing
Research on participation in the labor market. Finally, there has
been increased interest in the strength of role attach-
Work Values in ment to a job and organization. In each area of
research, the growth over time of cross-national com-
parative studies has revealed variations in work values
a Changing across countries that point to the importance of under-
standing differences in institutional structures and cul-
Economic and tural values.
Social Context Keywords: work values; orientations to work; post-
materialism; unemployment; gender
attitudes; knowledge economy; high
performance management
Work values have been central to debates
By
over the last 50 years about the implica-
DuNCAN GALLIE
tions of the changing nature of work for per-
sonal well-being. There have been strongly
contrasting views, however, about their nature,
the factors that influence them, and their sta-
bility or change over time. These arguments
have been shaped by the changing economic
and social context across the globe, which has
influenced particular value structures and their
determinants.
A developing research literature has revealed
the importance of accounting for the multi-
dimensionality of work values. At the most
Duncan Gallie is an emeritus fellow of Nuffield College,
Oxford. His research has focused on the quality of work
and on unemployment. He has advised the French gov-
ernment on psychosocial risks at work and the OECD
on guidelines to national governments for monitoring
the quality of work.
Correspondence: duncan.gallie@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
DOI: 10.1177/0002716219826038
26
ANNALS, AAPSS, 682, March 2019
WORk VALuES IN A ChANGING ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONTExT
27
general level, they can be conceived as relatively enduring ideals that provide
personal goals, motivate behavior, and give standards for judging the desirability
of situations and actions (hitlin and Piliavin 2004).
They can refer, however, to quite different facets of people’s relationship to
work (Mercure and Vultur 2010). They may relate to the importance or centrality
that people attach to work as part of their overall life preoccupations (Dubin
1956). This may be the absolute level of importance of work to people’s lives
(often referred to as employment commitment) or its relative importance in rela-
tion to other life values. Work values also can refer to the rewards that people
want from work—for instance whether they are primarily attached to intrinsic
values such as autonomy, self-realization through the use of their skills, and per-
sonal development, or whether they are primarily concerned with extrinsic val-
ues, such as pay and hours—that help them to achieve goals outside work. Last,
work values may concern the value that people attach to their roles as members
of a specific organization or as practitioners of a particular type of job.
The relative importance of these dimensions in discussions of work values has
varied over time. underlying such shifts of emphasis has been change in the
principal concerns of academics and policy-makers about the broader social
implications of work values. This has reflected both the structural transforma-
tions and the cyclical phases of advanced capitalist societies over the period.
The aim of this article is to chart the main contours of this evolving research
agenda, and to highlight the very different types of work values that need to be
taken into account and some of the key lessons that have been learned about the
factors that determine them. Very broadly, it is possible to distinguish four phases
in the literature, characterized by progressive extension of the scope of research
themes. The first, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focused on the likely
impact on work values of economic development—providing strongly contrasting
scenarios of increasing instrumentalism and rising post-materialist values. The
second, stimulated by the economic crisis of the early 1980s, was concerned with
the role of work values in accounting for unemployment. The third, increasingly
important from the late 1980s on, extended the focus to the implications for
changing work values of women’s increasing participation in the labor market.
Finally, in the last two decades, in a context of theoretical interest in the growth
of a knowledge economy and its presumed affinity with high performance
systems of management, there has been increased interest in the intensity of role
attachment to a job and organization.
Economic Development, Instrumentalism
and Post-Materialist Values
The emergence of sociological debates about work values, in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, developed in reaction to an earlier intellectual environment in which
work values were commonly viewed as an expression of relatively constant human
needs. The most direct challenge to the assumptions of these earlier traditions
28
ThE ANNALS OF ThE AMERICAN ACADEMY
was raised by the Affluent Worker study (Goldthorpe et al. 1968). The authors’
point of departure was that “wants and expectations are culturally determined
variables, not psychological constants” (p. 178). More specifically, they argued
that work values were in the process of transformation, with structural changes
leading to a more privatized social life and a growing importance of conjugal fam-
ily life. This was associated with an increased concern with consumption and,
hence, with a definition of work as largely instrumental, a means to ends, which
were extrinsic to the work situation. The shift involved then both a change in the
centrality of work to people’s lives and in the values that they attached to work.
Goldthorpe et al. (1968, 1969) argued that these new orientations to work were
likely to be prototypical and would develop more widely in the future among
both manual workers in manufacturing and lower white collar workers involved
in routine administrative work.
The study initiated a debate that informed research over many years. Some
critics suggested that withdrawal of interest from work might reflect the lack of
opportunities for self-realization in work (Daniel 1969). The conditions of work
in the automobile assembly lines that Goldthorpe and his colleagues had studied
could be seen as the quintessence of the type of alienating work environment that
Marx had thought likely to lead to a harmful suppression of the inner human
need for self-realization through work. Other critical contributions questioned
whether there was a need to distinguish instrumental from economic orientations
(Ingham 1970), whether orientations were in fact relatively stable over time
(Blackburn and Mann 1979), and whether diverse and complex empirical pat-
terns of work values can be captured adequately by relatively simple typologies
(Bennett 1974, 1978; Mercure and Vultur 2010).
In the early 1970s, however, a strongly contrasting prediction emerged about
the consequences of economic and social change for work values. Inglehart
(1971, 1977) argued that unprecedented prosperity and the absence of total war-
fare had provided people with a level of security that was conducive to an upward
shift in aspirations away from “materialist” toward “post-materialist” values,
which gave primacy to values of self-actualization. Such value shifts, he argued,
occur through generational change, since values are acquired primarily in early
socialization and remain relatively stable through adult life. Although this line of
research was initially concerned with the implication of value shifts for people’s
political priorities, the growth of post-materialist values became relevant for vari-
ous institutional spheres, including work (Inglehart 1977).
Empirical research in the following decades led to a considerably more com-
plex picture of the pattern of change in work values than suggested by either of
these conflicting scenarios. A cross-national study in the mid-1980s of the relative
importance of work and other life domains concluded that work, followed closely
by the home and family, remained the most central life domain for adults (Super
and Šverko 1995). The same study showed that, in terms of specific reward val-
ues, personal development, ability utilization, and achievement were ranked
highest in all countries. The measure most frequently used by research into
employment commitment focused on nonfinancial (or intrinsic) employment
commitment—whether people would wish to continue to work, even if they had
WORk VALuES IN A ChANGING ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONTExT
29
enough money to live as comfortably as they would like for the rest of their lives.
Studies in the united States show that employment commitment was very high
in the 1970s—approximately 72 percent wanted to continue to work, even with-
out the need for money (Quinn...
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