The article investigates mechanisms of class reproduction by looking at school-to-work transitions of young blue-collar workers from Austria. The study adopts a Bourdieusian explanatory framework to show how working-class kids are guided towards picking up apprenticeship training instead of pursuing further education. Two classed dispositions are…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to measure the response of blue-collar workers to new technology in manufacturing and to establish the relationship between learning culture and that response. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected with a survey questionnaire from 12 manufacturing sites that were implementing…

The authors examined job satisfaction and workers' perceptions of a nonprofessional occupation using the Position Classification Inventory (PCI; G. D. Gottfredson & J. L. Holland, 1991). Results revealed high job satisfaction scores and suggest that the PCI shows promise as a method of classifying working-class occupations according to J. L.…

A study of 2,489 men and 1,070 women who work in Midwestern factories suggests that women's reactions to work are formed in ways that contradict traditional gender role interpretations of the relationship of women to paid work. There are gender differences in the formation of work attitudes that are consistent with the feminist strand of the…

A work involvement scale was given to a sample of high school students from an area of high unemployment. Their overall mean score was not significantly different from the score for blue collar workers, indicating that young people's work attitudes are not fixed but change with work experience. (SK)

Workload, role conflict, and use of skills are related to strain among white collar supervisors. For blue collar supervisors, strain is related to workload and job security. White collar supervisors tend to be more satisfied when their time is used well. (JAC)

Industrial workers who perceive work as their central life interest (CLI) also describe themselves as having a higher level of decisiveness, initiative, and supervisory ability than workers with other CLI orientations. This is one result found in this study which investigates the relationship between personality and CLI. (Author/HMV)

A 74-item attitude questionnaire was administered in six companies to 101 black and 87 white male blue-collar employees holding similar jobs in the same company. Differences between the two ethnic groups were not marked, both in terms of job satisfaction and in other respects. (Author)

To help minority group Americans become integrated into our industrial system, organizations need information on differences in job attitudes of white and black male employees, particularly how they perceive and react to supervisors. A pilot study demonstrated the feasibility of the questionnaire method for the target sample and illuminated the…

The work values of 3,637 factory workers are examined. Results indicate that (1) the value placed on types of rewards is affected by general values and perceptions of needs; (2) workers tend to value what is most available from work; and (3) factory workers are not necessarily instrumentally oriented to work. (Author/CH)

Excerpts from a speech made by the author at the conference of the American Compensation Association, October 21, 1970. Economic factors, job satisfactions, and problems of living experienced by blue collar workers are included. (DM)

Respondents among a sample of 86 women in nontraditional occupations indicated that the challenge of succeeding in such occupations was a primary source of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the first year. Later, they became more concerned with traditional sources of satisfaction and the inherent dissatisfactions of blue-collar jobs. (Author/SK)

Concerned with the treatment of leisure as "an empty, valueless, superficial phenomenon in American culture," the authors conducted a study relating work, leisure, and politics among blue collar workers. Underlying the study was their fundamental hypothesis that "when play is encouraged on the job, the job-holder becomes more committed to his job,…

Relationships between age and employee satisfaction with intrinsic and extrinsic outcomes were investigated in samples of female (n=177) and male (n=96) blue-collar operatives. Results indicated a linear approximation of the age-satisfaction relationships is adequate, and satisfaction with intrinsic outcomes is related to age. (Author)

Data from in-depth interviews with more than one hundred women over a three-year period suggest that the experience of women in skilled and semiskilled jobs contradicts the conventional wisdom about the values and motives of these women and challenge many sociological findings regarding the alienating character of much blue collar work. The women…