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Happiness theory and worker cooperatives: A critique of the alignment thesis
Abstract
Work may provide subsistence, but for most people it is a necessary evil. For communities, businesses lie at the heart of our economic system, but often come with negative externalities. This article considers whether worker cooperatives will tend to have more positive impacts on the happiness of their workers and of the community than do traditional businesses. Worker cooperatives are businesses, but they are rooted in the community. Based on the work of 19th‐century political economist William Thompson, I examine what I call the alignment thesis, which suggests that the democratic and ownership structure of cooperatives will align the interests of the enterprise with that of the workers and the community beyond. I explore this question both analytically and by reviewing the existing empirical literature. I find that the impact on workers is generally positive, mostly because of the establishment of democratic control, better working conditions and job security, but it is limited where social inequalities that disadvantage women and people of color are replicated in the cooperative. The larger community impacts, however, are less certain, because worker cooperatives do not necessarily alter the logic of capitalist production for exchange. I conclude with thoughts for further research.
... Cooperative labor models are also known to require less oversight and fewer incentives due to the intrinsic motivation that ostensibly comes from being a co-owner. 34 Further unpacking the implications of organized cooperative labor structures here is not possible given the constraints of this piece. Yet, as a provocation for further investigation, I'd like to suggest that a promising way to follow Grant's prescriptions and to build a more ethical platform economy is to lend support to worker ownership and democratic workplaces. ...
Il libro sviluppa una teoria della rivoluzione come atto di emancipazione delle classi subalterne e una visione della storia come un lungo processo di espansione della libertà. Dopo aver ricostruito nei primi due capitoli alcuni fatti riguardanti i regimi d’oppressione e i movimenti di liberazione verificatisi nella storia, nei successivi due vengono elaborati i concetti di libertà e autonomia, che definiscono le motivazioni dei rivoluzionari. Altri due capitoli affrontano i problemi dell’azione collettiva, separando il comportamento ordinario, che si risolve nell’adattamento all’ordine costituito, dal comportamento sovversivo, che genera i movimenti di contestazione. I due capitoli finali descrivono alcune istituzioni di un sistema politico ed economico post-capitalistico in cui si realizza la “vera democrazia” nella sfera politica e il “lavoro libero e associato” nella sfera economica. È un modello di società tutt’altro che utopistico, poiché quelle istituzioni possono essere realizzate qui e ora, date le conoscenze tecnologiche esistenti.
Purpose: This study was conducted to explore research trends on hospital nurses’ happiness. Methods: Studies published from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2020 were searched. At the first search, 1,898 articles were extracted from academic databases. Twenty-eight articles were used in the systematic review, and 20 included meta-analysis. Results: There were 38 variables explored in relation to nurses’ happiness. The variables with the highest meta-analysis value were resilience, positive psychological capabilities, quality of nursing work life, and perceived stress on nursing performance measurement. Among the areas classified based on the nurses’ happiness theoretical framework, personal factors (r=.60) and work environment factors (r=.51) showed high meta-correlation values. Conclusion: The relationship between the hospital nurses’ happiness and work-related factor in various dimensions has been confirmed. Considering variables related to hospital nurses’ happiness in the future, various programs at the individual level and organizational level should be developed.
Drawing on qualitative research and longitudinal data on two Mondragon multinational cooperatives, the authors examine the multinational expansion of these co-ops and the diffusion of the cooperative model’s employment practices to their subsidiaries in Brazil, China, Slovakia, France, and Poland. The results show that international expansion can radically transform the organizational architecture of co-ops and exacerbate dilemmas about how to put their hallmark values into practice. Moreover, the findings reveal a fragmented and inconsistent introduction of the cooperative model overseas. Work organization practices are homogeneous across the various sites, whereas job security, training, and pay equity practices are not. Core cooperative practices (i.e., employee participation in ownership, profit sharing, and general management) have not been implemented in any foreign operation. The study illustrates how market influences, institutions, and macro- and micro-politics shape the transfer of employment practices.
This article presents a case study of the rise and fall of the Mondragon cooperative Fagor Electrodomésticos (1959-2013). Fagor, after playing a key role in the creation of the Mondragon cooperative experience, had been transformed into a multinational corporation competing in the global home appliance market. Given Fagor’s role as a leading cooperative, the general question of the viability of workers’ cooperatives is also at stake in its failure.
Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that distinct “diversity regimes” have emerged at these establishments, substantially affecting the configurations of inequality that evolved. We distinguish two types of diversity regimes—“utilitarian” and “communitarian”—which operate either to obscure the workings of inequality or to foster attention to their presence. Our results suggest that how sociodemographic differences are managed has material consequences for the development of egalitarian structures at work.
PurposeTo examine how different types of ownership, including investor-owned, employee-owned, and mixed models, affect the dynamics of participatory practices in the workplace, and the broader social effects of these differences.
Design/methodology/approachBrings together literature from democratic theory and empirical research in workplace participation and employee ownership. The first step is to articulate the range of democratic practices from nondemocratic to strongly democratic. The essay then discusses the different forms that participation can take and the threshold for what can be considered democratic participation. It then considers different models of ownership and the impact of ownership type on participatory practices.
FindingsIt is found that investor-owned firms cannot be considered strongly democratic and that worker cooperatives are more likely to be strongly democratic and cannot fall below the threshold of weak democracy. However, strong democracy is not necessarily a feature of worker cooperatives.
Originality/valueLittle work has been done to consider the way the type of ownership affects the kind or degree of democratic practices that may be present in an enterprise.
Competitiveness today requires being able to operate at a global scale. The financial crisis invigorated this requirement, posing new challenges to the economic viability of conventional companies and demanding alternative organizational forms of production. Although a wealth of research has focused on capitalist companies, little attention has been paid to the way these challenges affected worker cooperatives. Drawing from a qualitative case study of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, this article discusses the obstacles to internationalization faced by worker cooperatives, as well as the specific conditions and implications involved. In particular, the article analyzes Mondragon's contradiction between being forced to expand and trying to keep cooperative values during this expansion. Two main actions aimed at responding to this contradiction are analyzed: the creation of mixed cooperatives and the extension of the corporate management model. The analysis of this process will shed light on actions for the global expansion of worker cooperatives.
We investigate the effects of works councils on employees’ wages and job satisfaction in general and for subgroups with respect to sex and occupational status. Making use of a German representative sample of employees, we find that employees, who move to a firm with a works council, report increases in job satisfaction, but do not receive particular wage increases. Especially the job satisfaction of female employees is affected by a change in works council status. However, we do not find support for the hypothesis that the introduction of a works council itself increases wages or job satisfaction for the employees staying at the firm.
In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe, and Japan. What is going on? Now fully revised and updated to include developments since first publication, Layard answers his critics in what is still the key book in 'happiness studies'.
This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem to give increasing importance to the more social aspects of jobs: useful and helpful jobs. The central finding of the paper is that, following a substantial fall between 1989 and 1997, subjective measures of job quality have mostly bounced back between 1997 and 2005. Overall job satisfaction is higher in 2005 than it was in 1989. Last, the rate of self-employment has been falling gently in ISSP data; even so three to four times as many people say they would prefer to be self-employed than are actually self-employed. As the self-employed are more satisfied than are employees, one consistent interpretation of the above is that the barriers to self-employment have grown in recent years.
Economic measures of income have ignored large areas of human well-being and are poor measures of well-being in the areas to which they attend. Despite increased recognition of those distortions, 'GNP per capita continues to be regarded as the quintessential indicator of a country's living standard' (Partha Dasgupta). Well-being seems to have intuitive plausibility as a concept, but in practice we encounter a bewilderingly diverse family of concepts and approaches, partly reflecting different contexts, purposes, and foci of attention. Is there a unifying framework that yet respects the complexity and diversity of well-being? This paper presents an imperfect comparative and integrative framework that builds on the contributions by Sen and others. We move toward the framework gradually, since well-being concepts are in fact complex entitities which reflect pictures of personhood and of science. Insight grows through surveying a wide range of relevant experience and views, before risking blinkering one's vision in a framework. The paper then uses the framework to examine conceptualizations of human well-being, by Dasgupta, Sen, Nussbaum, Doyal and Gough, and Alkire.
Human dignity, the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to enjoy the respect of others, is necessary for a fully realized life. Working with dignity is a fundamental part of achieving a life well-lived, yet the workplace often poses challenging obstacles because of mismanagement or managerial abuse. Defending dignity and realizing self-respect through work are key to workers' well-being; insuring the dignity of employees is equally important for organizations as they attempt to make effective use of their human capital. In this book Randy Hodson, a sociologist of work and organizational behavior, applies ethnographic and statistical approaches to this topic, offering both a richly detailed, inside look at real examples of dignity in action, and a broader analysis of the pivotal role of dignity at work.
Organizational theory scholars typically see organizations as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have largely neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race. The theory developed in this article bridges these subfields, arguing that organizations are racial structures—cognitive schemas connecting organizational rules to social and material resources. I begin with the proposition that race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Next, I develop four tenets: (1) racialized organizations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized. I argue that racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through—and changed by—organizations. Seeing race as constitutive of organizations helps us better understand the formation and everyday functioning of organizations. Incorporating organizations into a structural theory of racial inequality can help us better understand stability, change, and the institutionalization of racial inequality. I conclude with an overview of internal and external sources of organizational change and a discussion of how the theory of racialized organizations may set the agenda for future research.
Combining aspects of Marxist theory, the Frankfurt School, French social theory, and American social science, Marcuse outlines a theory of advanced industrial society in which changes in production, consumption, and culture combine to create a technological society in which thought and labor is restructured in such a way that perpetuates domination and dehumanization. Marcuse argues that this leads to an oversimiplified culture that he refers to as a "one-dimensional society." Reason is used as a method of control in this society. Marcuse outlines simultaneous tensions in society: 1) advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change and 2) forces exist which can break this containment and explode the society.
Prefaces - Introduction - PART I RELATIVISM AND THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN NEED - Who Needs Human Needs? - The Inevitability of Human Needs - The Grammar of Human Needs - PART 2 A THEORY OF HUMAN NEED - The Basic Needs of Persons - Societal Preconditions for Need Satisfaction - Human Liberation and the Right to Optimal Need Satisfaction - Optimising Need Satisfaction in Theory - PART 3 HUMAN NEEDS IN PRACTICE - Measuring Need Satisfaction - Health and Autonomy - Intermediate Needs - Societal Preconditions for Optimising Need Satisfaction - Charting Human Welfare - PART 4 THE POLITICS OF HUMAN NEED - Towards a Political Economy of Need Satisfaction - The Dual Strategy
Unfettered free market capitalism has adversely affected the socio-economic well-being of labor for over thirty years, leading to unprecedented income disparities in society. An alternative economic model that promotes worker ownership and economic democracy—the worker cooperative—is the focus of this study. Three exemplary case studies suggest that worker cooperatives are not only viable forms of businesses - competitive and productive—but they are also democratic workplaces with participatory democracy guaranteeing individual and collective freedom, worker satisfaction, prosperity, and dignity. The essay concludes that self-determination in the workplace that empowers labor is a transformative alternative strategy to successfully fight income inequality.
'Whether you're looking for economic realities expressed through mathematical formulae, classical history, Immanuel Kant's ethics, or sustainable development, there's something here for you. . . I suggest that you read it.' © Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta 2007. All rights reserved.
This is the first comprehensive book on the return of happiness in economics. It still sounds comparatively unusual to put happiness and economics together. At the same time, the association appears increasingly exciting and fruitful, and quite a number of studies have been produced following Richard Easterlin's and Tibor Scitovsky's pioneering works through the 1970s. The essays collected in this book provide an authoritative and comprehensive assessment - theoretical, applied, and partly experimental - of the entire field moving from the so-called paradoxes of happiness in economics. The book breaks new ground on the recent directions of research on happiness, well-being, interpersonal relations, and reciprocity. The meaning of happiness is thoroughly explored, and the tension between a hedonic-subjective idea of happiness and a eudaimonic-objective one is discussed.
Existing research on businesses that are both owned and managed by their workers suggests that these firms have one of two kinds of effects for their participants. They either learn to be better citizens of democratic society through daily democratic practice, or they become better capitalists through the daily practice of business ownership. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews and participant observation, I argue that cooperative participants learn both things. Furthermore, participants in cooperatives develop a spirit of Cooperative Entrepreneurialism that allows them to engage in free enterprise, while also adhering to the cooperative values of equality and democracy.
Communities in rural America are a complex mixture of peoples and cultures, ranging from miners who have been laid off in West Virginia, to Laotian immigrants relocating in Kansas to work at a beef processing plant, to entrepreneurs drawing up plans for a world-class ski resort in California’s Sierra Nevada. Rural Communities: Legacy and Change uses its unique Community Capitals framework to examine how America’s diverse rural communities use their various capitals (natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built) to address the modern challenges that face them. Each chapter opens with a case study of a community facing a particular challenge, and is followed by a comprehensive discussion of sociological concepts to be applied to understanding the case. This narrative, topical approach makes the book accessible and engaging for undergraduate students, while its integrative approach provides them with a framework for understanding rural society based on the concepts and explanations of social science. This fifth edition is updated throughout with 2013 census data and features new and expanded coverage of health and health care, food systems and alternatives, the effects of neoliberalism and globalization on rural communities, as well as an expanded resource and activity section at the end of each chapter.
PurposeThis paper examines job satisfaction and participation in decision making in three home health aide facilities with different organizational structures (worker-owned for-profit, for-profit with no participation or ownership by workers, and nonprofit).
Design/methodology/approachMore than 600 surveys were completed by home health aides across the three facilities. The author also engaged in participant observation during training sessions and other meetings and conducted a small number of interviews with caregivers and agency management.
FindingsHome health aides at the worker-owned, participative decision making organization were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those at the other agencies. Results for the other agencies were not significantly distinguishable from one another.
Research limitations/implicationsThis study involved respondents from one of each type of business. A study across several of each type of organization would allow more focus on the effects of the structural characteristics of the organizations.
Practical implicationsIn the United States, the work that home health aides perform provides a valuable service to society. On behalf of caregivers and those for whom they provide care, conditions of the work need improvement. If participative democratic workplaces provide better outcomes, they should receive more attention from lawmakers, the business community, and researchers.
Social implicationsThis research highlights the working conditions of the people (primarily women) who perform this work. The poor compensation received is a reminder of inequality in opportunity for some workers and of the value placed on this type of caring labor.
Originality/valueThis research is unique in its focus on work environment and outcomes in home health care across nonprofit, for-profit, and worker-owned for-profit organizations. The findings of different job satisfaction outcomes from the others in the worker-owned organization and similar outcomes in the nonprofit and conventional for-profit organizations are also unique.
Happiness is political. The way we think about happiness affects what we do, how we relate to other people and the world around us, our moral principles, and even our ideas about how society should be organized. Utilitarianism, a political theory based on hedonistic and individualistic ideas of happiness, has been dominated for more than two-hundred years by its founder, Jeremy Bentham. In Happiness, Democracy, and the Cooperative Movement, Mark J. Kaswan examines the work of William Thompson, a friend of Bentham’s who nonetheless offers a very different utilitarian philosophy and political theory based on a different conception of happiness, but whose work has been largely overlooked. Kaswan reveals the importance of our ideas about happiness for our understanding of the basic principles and nature of democracy, its role in society and its character as a social institution. In what is the closest examination of Thompson’s political theory to date, Kaswan moves from philosophy to theory to practice, starting with conceptions of happiness before moving to theories of utility, then to democratic theory, and finally to practice in the first detailed account of how Thompson’s ideas laid the foundations for the cooperative movement, which is now the world’s largest democratic social movement.
“This is an original and impressive piece of scholarship that calls attention to an important but neglected figure (Thompson) and provides an innovative and timely reading of his work. In the author’s hands, applied theory is given new life and new purpose.” — Stephen Engelmann, editor of Selected Writings: Jeremy Bentham
“In this remarkable book, Mark Kaswan rescues and rehabilitates the reputation of a long-forgotten and unjustly neglected thinker—the radical Irishman, feminist, non-Benthamite Utilitarian, and a writer of remarkable range and power—William Thompson. In Kaswan, Thompson has finally found the expositor he so richly deserves. And we might in turn find in Thompson a vision of democratic possibilities that we so sorely need.” — Terence Ball, author of Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought
Decades of feminist scholarship documents the persistence of gender inequality in work organizations. Yet few studies explicitly examine gender inequality in collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives. This article draws on the “theory of gendered organizations” to consider how gender operates in a worker-recovered cooperative in contemporary Argentina. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Hotel B.A.U.E.N., this article finds that although gender remains a salient feature of the workplace, the cooperative has also adopted policies that take steps toward addressing gender inequality. It concludes by offering an updated theoretical framework for the future study of “gendered organizations.”
The quality of place in the American suburbs often inhibits peoples ability to have a sense of ownership and connection to the places they live. This is partly because the physical design of many suburban environments have repellent and disengaging characteristics. These characteristics have evolved alongside a basic structural transformation of American cities in the last century. In the end, the physical environment of the suburbs makes people feel like outsiders in their own homes because places can push people away through their confused organization and ugliness. In order to unlock the potential for suburban strip centers to be places that help us orient ourselves and connect to our world, I have developed a set of prototypes for the infill of existing strip malls in suburban strip commercial centers. These prototypes act as a systematic tool for the possible widespread densification and diversification of uses within these centers. The coherence and engaging vitality that will result from the application of this tool will improve the quality of place and enhance our sense belonging to our communities.
Gender scholars have developed a significant body of scholarship on the reproduction of gender inequality in work organizations. However, the vast majority of that research has been conducted in non-profit organizations or in employer-owned businesses. In this article, we review the existing literature on gender in worker-owned businesses. We begin by defining three distinctly different types of worker-owned businesses: companies with employee stock ownership plans, worker cooperatives, and communes. Next we review the limited research on gender inequality in each of these organizational forms. The current literature finds that women benefit from working in these alternative organizations, but gender disparities nevertheless persist due to occupational segregation and the devaluation of domestic work. Exceptions are those organizations with strong ties to feminism and those with formal power-sharing policies. Granted the scarcity of research on this topic, however, these conclusions are tentative. We conclude with a discussion of areas for further research.
This article reviews the literature that evaluates WalMart’s impacts on local economies. The authors first describe the methods used to account for potential reverse causality of WalMart’s store location decisions, and then they discuss the literature assessing the company’s effect on three aspects of community life: (a) retail (and nonretail) businesses, across large- and small-sized stores and in different business environments; (b) retail workers, wages, and types of jobs; and (c) producer and consumer welfare through the company’s price-decreasing effect and other potential indirect effects. Last, articles focusing on a broad spectrum of local conditions that could be affected by the company, including poverty rates, social capital, food insecurity, policy effectiveness, and obesity are reviewed. For each dimension, evidence is found of both positive and negative effects, suggesting that we are still far from truly understanding the net effect of WalMart on local economies, let alone the overall consequences in the long run.
Employee involvement is an evolving process replete with uncertainties even given the best of preconditions–worker ownership. This case study of the largest Indian worker cooperative focuses on the processes of employee involvement over a decade. The authors argue that employee involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that the employees consider critical is shared with them. While for the management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, for the employees it is a matter of trust. The authors propose that as the management expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, the worker expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional, trust-based loop. This mismatch in expectations around information critically influences employee involvement.
In light of the recent proliferation of several types of cooperatives in the US and Western Europe, this paper argues that the worker-owners, or cooperators, in these organizations occupy an emergent class position which is structurally different from that of conventional workers or of the petty bourgeoisie, their two nearest class equivalents. We argue that this new class position has implications for the job satisfaction, expectations, alienation and stress associated with work. We bring together empirical findings from our own studies and from other researchers' studies of cooperatives in order to develop some original hypotheses and to provide suggestive evidence concerning the effects of worker-ownership and control on the individual worker-owners. In the end, we argue that although workplace democracy may bring more meaning and sense of community to work, certain structural features of cooperatives also give rise to high levels of personal stress.
By drawing on new interview evidence gathered during several field trips and new financial and economic data from both external and internal sources, we document and assess the changing economic importance and performance of the Mondragon group of cooperatives as well as the two largest sectors within the group. Compared to conventional firms in the Basque Country and Spain, and producer co-ops (PCs) and employee owned firms elsewhere, in general we find evidence of growing group importance and strong performance and a similarly strong record for the industrial and retail divisions. These stylized facts do not support hypotheses concerning PCs such as predictions that PCs will restrict employment and become progressively comparatively under-capitalized. In accounting for this record, we highlight key and, at times, not uncontroversial institutional developments in the group during the last 20 years or so that indicate the existence of a continuing capacity for institutional adaptation in Mondragon - an ongoing ability to innovate and make institutional adjustments to deal with emerging challenges. In addition, we provide more detailed information than before on some key distinguishing institutional mechanisms of the Mondragon group, including the extent of worker-member transfers during economic crises, the patterns of profit pooling and the type and volume of training. The aggressive and extensive use of these and related mechanisms, themselves formulated and refined only after a deliberative democratic process, may help to account for some of the outstanding features of the Mondragon group record. Overall these findings represent suggestive evidence that groups of employee-owned firms are feasible and sustainable organizational forms; in a world of declining labor power and tepid employment recovery by private firms, the institutional arrangements at Mondragon are worthy of deeper study by many including policymakers, other co-ops and other employee-owned firms.
The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,1 but Civil, or Social Liberty: the na¬ture and limits of the power which can be legitimately ex¬ercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself rec¬ognized as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and re¬quires a different and more fundamental treatment.
A model of job satisfaction integrating economic and work environment variables was developed and used for testing interactions between rewards and work environment hazards. Data came from a representative panel of Danish employees. Results showed that psychosocial work environment factors, like information about decisions concerning the work place, social support, and influence, have significant impacts on the level of job satisfaction. Maximizing rewards did not compensate public employees to an extent that ameliorated the negative effects on job satisfaction of experiencing low levels of any of these factors whereas influence did not impact job satisfaction of private employees.
Most large firms are controlled by shareholders, who choose the board of directors and can replace the firm’s management. In rare instances, however, control over the firm rests with the workforce. Many explanations for the rarity of workers’ control have been offered, but there have been few attempts to assess these hypotheses in a systematic way. This book draws upon economic theory, statistical evidence, and case studies to frame an explanation. The fundamental idea is that labor is inalienable, while capital can be freely transferred from one person to another. This implies that worker-controlled firms typically face financing problems, encounter collective choice dilemmas, and have difficulty creating markets for control positions within the firm. Together these factors can account for much of what is known about the incidence, behavior, and design of worker-controlled firms. A policy proposal to encourage employee buyouts is developed in the concluding chapter.
Human dignity, the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to enjoy the respect of others, is necessary for a fully realized life. Working with dignity is a fundamental part of achieving a life well-lived, yet the workplace often poses challenging obstacles because of mismanagement or managerial abuse. Defending dignity and realizing self-respect through work are key to workers’ well-being; insuring the dignity of employees is equally important for organizations as they attempt to make effective use of their human capital. In this book Randy Hodson, a sociologist of work and organizational behavior, applies ethnographic and statistical approaches to this topic, offering both a richly detailed, inside look at real examples of dignity in action, and a broader analysis of the pivotal role of dignity at work.