Prestige,Work Satisfaction,and Alienation

Abstract

Work dissatisfaction and general alienation of incumbents in seven nonfactory and nonoffice occupations ranging across the prestige hierarchy are examined and compared. Our findings challenge some rather commonly accepted (if seldom tested) social science generalizations. Neither status nor self-direction at the workplace were important predictors of the dependent variables, and the spillover model linking work dissatisfaction to general alienation received little support from our data. Contrary to most predictions from the literature, there were no significant differences between the lowest status garbage collectors and the highest status professors on work satisfaction or alienation measures. Two occupations in the middle range of the prestige hierarchy (mail carriers and high school teachers), however, reported unexpectedly high scores on both dependent variables. These and other unpredicted findings are discussed, bringing in some of the workers' own comments to help explain the quantitative results, and two hypotheses for further investigation are suggested.