| For decades, sociologists have sought to explain how firms achieve control over workers' activities alterations in the labor process. While revealing a great deal about origins and processes associated with innovations in control techniques, benchmark theories have been less successful in generating concepts equally applicable across time and place---impairing theoretical synthesis and growth. Moreover, they provide limited guidance in developing expectations regarding the implications of control for worker well-being.;Subsequent studies, many of which are based on qualitative research, are helpful in this regard, and have drawn attention to the combined influence that worker control techniques exert on worker outcomes. Data limitations have obstructed the quantitative, comparative research necessary for understanding these relationships. However, a limited body of research provides evidence of systematic variation between the dominant mode of control and worker outcomes associated with alienation, resistance and consent. Unfortunately, existing research lacks explicit attention to the combined influence of the full range of control techniques present in a given workplace, and their collective influence on worker outcomes.;This study seeks to fill this gap by offering a model incorporating general and combinable concepts and using it to evaluate the implications of control for the worker outcomes. I highlight six key forms of control: direct supervision, automation, task segmentation, rules, career ladders and worker input. Then, I evaluate their separate and combined influence on six outcomes associated with psychological and behavioral responses to work. These include two indicators of alienation (powerlessness and worthlessness), a measure of consent, and three forms of resistance to management (organized opposition, work avoidance, and loathing of management).;I use data culled from the population of English-language, book-length workplace ethnographies to analyze these relationships. These data include 141 work groups in a broad range of occupations, industries, and firm sizes. My analytic approach proceeds in three stages. First, I use logistic regression to measure the effect of each form of control, net of the others, on the odds of each worker outcome. Second, I use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify packages, or typologies, of control apparent in these work settings, and I examine their implications for dependent variables. Third, I use similar techniques to identify packages of control in settings with work groups of varying class, gender and race composition, and determine their implications for worker well-being. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
