world of work and what new directions might be taken to deal with rapidly burgeoning problems that seem to be anchored in current work experience.

That was the purpose of a conference convened in Williamsburg, Virginia, by the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in late March 1971. To it came more than 40 invited participants from management, unions, the federal government, universities, and the press. The purposes of the three-day meeting were to:

- Get as clear and comprehensive a view as possible of current problems in the world of work that have come to the attention of all of the groups represented by the participants.

Consider how such problems affect all participants as individuals and as organizational representatives.

Study and evaluate a variety of new approaches that are being tried by industry, unions, government, and others to deal with workcentered problems.

Identify and recommend how these approaches or others might be improved or more widely used and by whom.

As the account of the conference that follows makes clear, the Williamsburg meeting was only partially successful in achieving these ambitious objectives. The sessions did bring to light many problems in current work experience, and a beginning was made in identifying the reasons for them. After much exposition of various ways that are being tried to deal with these problems, there was some discussion. And a variety of further policy and action steps in both the public and the private sectors was proposed and commented upon.

But no consensus was reached on any one of the conference themes. There seemed to be two main reasons for this (apart from the difficulty of coming to agreement about anything in only three days with such a varied group and on such a complex subject). The first was that the kinds of work problems emerging today seem to challenge fundamental management and union practices, as well as government policies - policies that were developed in an earlier era to meet a different set of conditions than now obtains. (This is an example of the "lag" phenomenon mentioned earlier.) A second reason, never clearly stated at the conference and therefore more difficult to deal with, was the fact that problems in worklife look very different when seen from the perspective of each of the various interests represented at the conference table. Little wonder, then, that no clear agreement emerged on what next steps need to be taken, or by whom. But it seemed evident that improving the quality of life at work is long overdue as an area requiring attention and action.

These were some of the themes that highlighted the conference: worklife problems and their interrelations, experience to date with new solutions, and recommendations for further action. At many points in this report attention is drawn to issues that remained largely below the surface in the Williamsburg meeting but that cannot be avoided as the search for new directions in the world of work continues.

Background for Williamsburg

Harold L. Sheppard of the Upjohn Institute, who organized and chaired the Williamsburg meeting, pointed out that a number of reasons combined to make such a gathering seem practical and urgent.

Recent research by himself and others has shown that the workers holding jobs that they themselves regard as most monotonous and least fulfilling are also the workers who are most alienated from both the company and the union, and most likely to seek extreme political solutions as voters and citizens (or to "cop out" entirely from the political process — a dangerous trend for a representative democracy).

Management and union experience in many plants tends to support this conclusion, but in different ways. Despite high unemployment and a tightened job market, many companies are still experiencing high rates of turnover, lowered productivity, increases in work disputes and grievances, and here and there even sabotage of property or products. Meanwhile, leaders in many unions have found that they are out of touch with much of their membership; the credibility and confidence gap sometimes shows up dramatically in union election battles, nonratification of contracts, but more often in apathy towards and lack of participation in union affairs. Manpower development and training policies in government to a limited extent have begun to be related more closely to some of these new conditions. But some of the newest thinking has not yet been widely reported or is "between the lines" in pending legislation. Meanwhile, new major problems, such as the absorption of three million school graduates each year in a period of high unemployment and the retraining of the often highly skilled workers displaced by aerospace and defense cutbacks, are naturally drawing attention from on-the-job problems. But the conference might indicate how government policies and programs could be more responsive to emerging work problems highlighted in the research and in recent management and union experience.

-Finally, in a number of places and with a variety of approaches, various efforts so far incompletely documented — are beginning

to be made to cope with the consequences of an industrial system in which management and organization principles geared to efficiency through work simplification (task fragmentation) and highly routinized production systems seem to be less and less effective. -Some of these new initiatives have been taken by unions. (The general impression conveyed by the conference was that more have come from the management side.) Certain employers focus upon the enrichment, enlargement, and redesign of individual jobs. In other instances, emphasis is upon groups of jobs, even the design or redesign of whole department or plant work systems in ways intended to make work effort more productive by making it more meaningful and satisfying. Still other approaches bridge from the organization to the community, such as the hiring and training of many persons previously considered unemployable, or programs of training and counseling leading to new careers.

Basil Whiting from The Ford Foundation, which underwrote much of the Upjohn Institute conference, gave additional reasons for paying more attention than heretofore to the "Suddenly Remembered American," or the "mainstream worker" and his problem.1

One reason is the quality-of-life issue: "People ought to have a satisfying life, and the job is a big part of that life."

There is an obvious economic argument: Industry faces cost, profit, and product-quality problems stemming from increasing absenteeism and work disruptions, not infrequent sabotage, and lower motivation and productivity; some of these problems might be addressed in part by making work experience more satisfying through job enrichment or other methods.

There is also a social policy reason: It is a good thing for a society to make the most flexible and productive use of its human resources.

There is the political aspect: When significant proportions of mainstream people began to put on "hardhats" and/or support George Wallace and others advocating extreme and possibly repressive solutions to the nation's problems, the specter of extreme alienation and threats to the democratic process was raised.

Signs of Cultural Shift

Michael Maccoby, of Harvard University, who has been studying relationships between technology and social character (the basic personality

'The Williamsburg, Conference, however, took up in some detail the work problems of people outside the "mainstream," as presented in this paper.

types most common to a culture) led off the meeting by describing what he has seen of the changing meanings of work and work problems under the current conditions of fast culture change. He commented first on the term "alienation," pointing out that it has (at least) two meanings and that both need to be considered in understanding what is now going on.

First, alienation may describe the distance between a person and his society. About 10 years ago, when much social commentary had to do with the problem of conformity, it could be said that some alienation in this sense would be a good thing since those with an independent view would be the hope for progress and constructive change. Another meaning of alienation concerns the relationship of the individual to himself. A person is alienated from himself when there is a split between his thoughts and his feelings. The converse would be a self-directed, self-aware person who can fully mature and fully develop his potential. If this distinction can be maintained, it becomes easier to see a variety of forces at work in society today that are leading to more autonomy and individualism but also threatening the individual's concept of his own worth and his life prospects.

We are going through some profound cultural changes, Mr. Maccoby maintained, and it is not surprising that evidence of this should show up in the world of work as elsewhere.

Younger people, in particular, are much less willing to accept authoritarian influences at work or in the community. The demand to participate in events and to have a say in what happens is very widespread, not just shown by the demonstrations that grab the headlines but in attitudes and behavior at work and in the family. In some ways this may look like a return to an earlier, more participative America with face-to-face relationships and town meetings. In the period between, when there were waves of migration from European cultures which stressed strong control in the family, the same kind of paternal direction could be accepted in the workplace. The children and more especially the grandchildren of these immigrants have few ties with this paterfamilias type of upbringing and its associated values. But even in Europe the script, the plot, and the actors are changing today.

Another important change has been in the much wider spread of educational opportunity, according to Mr. Maccoby. With some form of publicly supported higher education at bearable cost increasingly available to almost everyone, "there may be less opportunity to be a J. P. Morgan, but for the average middle-class person the opportunity to do rather well is increased." However, Mr. Maccoby pointed out that this is not an unmixed blessing:

With the greater availability of opportunity, there is no longer the

excuse of having "a certain station in life" to excuse failure. If everyone can make the team, when you don't make it, whose fault is it? You can either feel it's your fault, which is very hard for most of us to do; or you have to say there's something wrong with the guys who are running it; or those pointy-headed intellectuals are the ones who are at fault; or there's something funny going on there in Washington. These are the feelings, of deep resentment of being a loser in a society in which only the winners are appreciated. And to be a loser is to be nobody.

This, Mr. Maccoby contended, is a definite change in American society, and one that has made many people angry and increasingly alienated in the first definition of the term. This is shown in the research by Mr. Sheppard and others.2 Those workers who see the greatest gap between their life situation and their original hopes are the most alienated (in the sense defined by Mr. Sheppard), and apparently the most willing to seek extreme and repressive political "solutions" for what they perceive as what's wrong with the country and their lives.

And, Mr. Maccoby maintained, such feelings are not confined to "hardhats" or the blue-collar world in general; his recent studies in hightechnology industry and companies developing large systems indicate that dissatisfaction with lack of fulfillment on the job (and what that implies about achievement of life hopes) may be as high as 80 percent among managerial and technical people. The critical point is that such feelings are part of a new ethos, and not of the life style of one particular class (or race).

Study of work in terms of its relationship to social character shows that some kinds of work can lead to great satisfaction for a particular personality or character type but not for others. (There are some signs of this in the Sheppard study.) Therefore, said Mr. Maccoby, one measure of the depth of a culture is how much it allows people with different character types to develop themselves. The question for the future, he added, will be: Will the worklife experiences available be on the side of creating more alienation or on the side of allowing the possibility of individuals to develop themselves to the fullest?

Worker Attitudes: How Much Has Changed?

Mr. Maccoby was talking in general terms, basing his claim about basic shifts occurring in the culture partly on the Upjohn Institute studies by Mr. Sheppard but also on data from his own research, from Neal Her

2Harold L. Sheppard and Neal Q. Herrick, Where Have All the Robots Gone? to be published by The Free Press in 1972.