Expectations Frustrated by Changes in Work

Abstract

The relationship to work and the meaning attached to work are shaped by individuals’ experience of the labour market and of employment: the way in which they have found or failed to find employment, their sense of job security, their position at work, the style of management, ways of working and modes of evaluation, the type and degree of knowledge and skill required, the scope for negotiation and so on. The nature of the experience is intimately related not only to individual characteristics, notably gender and socio-economic status, but also to age in that this can entail considerable differences in the encounter with the realities of work and employment. The meanings individuals attach to work and to their participation in it are intrinsically linked to their own experience of a world of work that has undergone profound transformations over the last three decades. Very few of the key features that characterised the Fordist firm of the post-War period remain in place. Ways of organising production, conceptions of the individual at work, the power relationship between workers and employers: all have changed radically.