A first step toward thinking about job design issues involves consideration of three questions. They are (1) what kinds of changes occur when electronic tools are adopted in the workplace?, (2) whose jobs change and how?, and (3) who plays a role in job design? Answers can be drawn from data and observations from two Rand Corporation studies…

The Oklahoma State Board of Education prepared this handbook to serve as a guide for local board presidents, clerks, and secretaries in recording the minutes of school board meetings. The information that is compiled and presented was gleaned from reference books listed in the bibliography. Chapters of the guide describe board of education…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine historical changes in aptitude scores. Recent literature suggesting a decline in the quality of the U.S. workforce is reviewed, and an expectation that score distributions on aptitude tests have shifted in a negative direction is presented. Archival analyses of normative data for the Short…

This study examined the concept that extent of agreement between clerical employees and their respective supervisors on competency importance would relate to satisfactoriness and job satisfaction. Data for competency agreement, satisfactoriness, and job satisfaction were analyzed and interpreted for fifty-five clerical employees who responded to a…

A study was undertaken to determine the operational reading levels and skills of beginning office employees and to compare the readability of classroom and on-the-job materials. Clerks and secretaries who had been employed for two years or less were observed and interviewed to collect the data. Statistical analysis revealed that secretaries read…

Working-class high school girls choose courses for a variety of reasons, both consciously and subconsciously, and use conventional attitudes to justify their choices to themselves and others, according to working-class girls who volunteered to be interviewed during their free periods in Vancouver (British Columbia) high schools. The girls cited…

The paper describes a data-based vocational curriculum for multiple handicapped adolescents and young adults with cerebral palsy. Three care studies illustrate the different types of curricula that may lead to employment in the areas of micrographics filming, computer skill, and clerical work. The approach incorporates a task analysis orientation…

The partnership of IBM, located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Meredith College, a small women's college, resulted in the Secretarial Transition Training Program. Hiring constraints had created critical shortages in the secretarial skill field. Additional impetus for the development of a transition training program was provided by…

Implicit in the human capital approach of 20th-century educational rhetoric in Australia was the belief that schools imparted vocationally useful cognitive skills beyond basic literacy and numeracy. These skills were believed to be transferable to the workplace and to increase the productivity of the individual to the benefit of society. For…

A study sought to determine how features of the office of the future are related to career paths of office workers. Personal interviews were used to obtain data from 178 administrative, supervisory, and clerical persons employed by sixteen insurance companies located in the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan area. Employees responded to questions…

An analysis of secretarial employment advertisements in major metropolitan newspapers across the United States was made in order to determine required job skills. The study was designed to provide information regarding the modification of the secretarial training curriculum in order to reflect the current trends and developments in the business…

Research was conducted using an ethnographic method within a cultural reproduction framework to examine what it means to young women to be office education students in a comprehensive urban high school, and how those meanings are reproduced. The analysis is based on a year-long field study of a cooperative office education program in a midwestern…

In the post-World War II period, women have been employed in jobs that have been degraded, deskilled, and cheapened. Their employment has increasingly been in the service sector. Data supports the argument that women are treated as secondary workers in the labor market and are not paid as equals to men. Along with the degradation of women's jobs…

This paper summarizes a comparative study of the impact of market and technological changes on human resources in banks and insurance companies in five countries: France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. The research was organized around case studies of changes in 12 firms--9 banks and 3 insurance carriers. The paper discusses the…

A study was conducted to determine the (theoretical) relative influence of family status and occupational and attitudinal variables on women's commitment to work. Twelve hundred working women were asked. "If you were to get enough money to live as comfortably as you'd like for the rest of your life, would you continue to work? Yes or…