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Work Life and Political Attitudes: A Study of Manual Workers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Lewis Lipsitz
Lewis Lipsitz
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

For centuries men have speculated about the human consequences of work. Slowly, a considerable body of information has begun to accumulate concerning the relationships between people's jobs and other aspects of their lives. Investigators have pointed out the connections between certain types of jobs and certain personality disorders, job satisfaction, productivity, attitudes toward union and management, social relations on the job, leisure activities, and other things. Extending such findings, this study concludes that a particular job situation can have important effects on a man's political outlook.

Political studies have long classified individuals according to occupation, yet there have been extremely few efforts to penetrate within specific occupational categories to discover the causal triggers of occupational attitude differences.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1964 , pp. 951 - 962
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1964

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References

1 See in particular Friedmann, Georges, Industrial Society: The Emergence of the Human Problems of Automation, trans. Sheppard, Harold L. (Glencoe, 1955), p. 276Google Scholar; Blauner, Robert, “Work Satisfaction and Industrial Trends in Modern Society,” Labor and Trade Unionism: an Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Galenson, Walter and Lipset, Seymour Martin (New York, 1960), pp. 339–360Google Scholar; Trist, E. L. and Bamforth, K. W., “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-getting,” Human Relations, Vol. 4 (1951), pp. 3–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Charles R. and Guest, Robert, The Man on the Assembly Line (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jasinski, Frank J., “Technological Delimitation of Reciprocal Relationships: A Study of Interaction Patterns in Industry,” Human Organization, Vol. 15 (1956), pp. 24–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armstrong, David, “Meaning in Work,” New Left Review, No. 10 (July–August, 1961), pp. 16–23Google Scholar; and Friedmann, Georges, The Anatomy of Work—Labor, Leisure and the Implications of Automation, trans. Rawson, Wyatt (New York, 1961), p. 107Google Scholar.

2 Lipset, , “The Psychology of Voting,” Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Lindzey, Gardner (Cambridge, Addison-Wesley, 1954), II, 1139Google Scholar; Kornhauser, , The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, 1959), p. 154Google Scholar.

3 Political Man (Garden City, N. Y., 1960), p. 237Google Scholar.

4 Blauner, loc. cit.

5 Ibid., p. 343. The extent of satisfaction expressed is clearly in part a function of the particular question asked. For example, a group of American unskilled workers asked “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your present job?” showed 72% indicating they were satisfied. Exactly what satisfaction means in such a case is not at all clear. See Inkeles, Alex, “Industrial Man: The Relation of Status to Experience, Perception and Value,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66 (July, 1960), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Walker and Guest, loc. cit., p. 19.

7 Blauner, loc. cit., pp. 346–347.

8 Turner, Arthur N., “Impersonality and Group Membership: A Case Study of an Automobile Assembly Line” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1958), pp. 13–16Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 26.

10 Sayles, Leonard, Behavior of Industrial Work Groups: Prediction and Control (New York, 1958)Google Scholar.

11 Walker and Guest, loc. cit.

12 See, for example, the classifications employed by Reiss, Albert J. Jr., in “Change in the Occupational Structure of the United States, 1910–1950.” Cities and Society, The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. Hatt, Paul K. and Reiss, Albert J. (New York, 1957), pp. 424–431Google Scholar.

13 See Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, 1958)Google Scholar; and Riesman, David, Glazer, Nathan, and Denny, Reuel, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

14 Generally speaking, these findings confirm previous ideas about working class political attitudes in the United States. For a discussion of the pessimism of working class attitudes on international affairs, see Almond, Gabriel A., The American People and Foreign Policy (New York, 1950), pp. 123–130Google Scholar.

15 The Liberalism-Conservatism Scale is taken from Richard Centers' book The Psychology of Social Classes (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1949)Google Scholar. The scale was part of the questionnaire administered with each interview. One man in the repair category never completed this questionnaire and so only 13, instead of 14 men are scored above. The Centers scale basically compares 19th century liberalism (conservative) with 20th century liberalism (radical—welfare state). The questions explore management versus labor identification; belief in the possibilities of economic opportunity; attitude toward government ownership and social insurance.

16 Lipset points out that the unemployed, feeling resentful and alienated, are less tolerant of minority groups than are employed workers, a finding that seems related to the conclusions here about the assembly-line group. See Lipset, S. M., Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, 1960), p. 114Google Scholar. For a discussion of the importance of attitudes toward out-groups, see Adorno, T. W. and associates, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), chs. 2–4Google Scholar.

17 See Christiansen, Bjorn, Attitudes Towards Foreign Affairs as a Function of Personality (Oslo, Norway, Oslo University Press, 1959), p. 59Google Scholar.

18 Thus, most of these men are not “cabalists” as that term is used by Robert E. Lane. Describing the cabalist frame of mind Lane notes: (1) There is some unofficial, quasi-conspiratorial group behind the scenes to manipulate and control public affairs; (2) each cabal group is responsible to no one but itself, and (3) the cabalist argument is protean; for the same person it will focus now upon the international banker and now upon the Communists….

Lane argues that such a pattern of thought is rooted both in personality weaknesses and the social processes of modern society. He finds this frame of mind among men with anti-democratic tendencies. See his Political Ideology, ch. 7.

19 Kornhauser, Arthur, “The Mental Health of the Industrial Worker—A Detroit Study” (preliminary draft, August, 1962)Google Scholar; “Mental Health of Factory Workers: A Detroit Study,” Human Organization, Vol. 21 (1962), pp. 43–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The following table, ibid., p. 45), will indicate his findings:

These relationships held when the author controlled for education.

20 Though I have spoken of a causal relationship between jobs and attitudes, I have not really “proven” such a relationship exists. The crucial problem is one of pre-selection. Perhaps men on assembly-line jobs differ from other semi-skilled workers because they were different before they ever took these jobs, rather than because they have been changed by their employment. Perhaps it is only men with a low sense of self-esteem and strong withdrawal tendencies who stay on the assembly-line. Kornhauser tries to handle this problem by exploring the life of his interviewees before they took their present jobs. He concludes that there is demonstrable evidence that jobs change attitudes, regardless of what those attitudes were before the job was taken. If so, then personality differences that exist before taking the job do not explain occupational group differences in mental health. See “Mental Health of Factory Workers,” loc. cit., p. 46.

21 Demands for justice and self-esteem can take many forms. For a discussion see Butt, Denis, “Workers' Control,” New Left Review, No. 10 (July–August 1961), pp. 24–33Google Scholar.

22 Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, op. cit.

23 There is an extreme divergence of views concerning the composition of the manual workforce. For example, compare the emphasis in the appendix to Friedmann's, Anatomy of Work—Labor, Leisure and the Implications of Automation, trans. Rawson, Wyatt (New York, 1961)Google Scholar, with the notes to Blauner, loc. cit.

24 “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” this Review, Vol. 53 (March 1959), pp. 69–105Google Scholar; see also his Political Man, op. cit., ch. 2.

25 Political Ideology, ch. 15.

26 Mills' point of view is set out in White Collar, The American Middle Classes (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1951)Google Scholar; The Power Elite (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1959)Google Scholar, and The Causes of World War III (New York, 1960)Google Scholar. Fromm's views can be found, in part, in The Sane Society (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

27 Political Man, p. 48.

28 For ft comparison of “alienation” in several quite different industrial settings, see Blauner, Robert, Alienation and Freedom (Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar.

29 Allen Schick provides a perceptive discussion of the need to deal realistically with the presence of ambivalent political attitudes in his paper, “Alienation and Politics,” delivered at the 1964 American Political Science Association convention.