Social psychology is generally concerned with the study of the relationship between the individual and the social world (Watson, 1996), yet the different approaches it comprises coming from either the psychological or the sociological tradition, place their emphasis, respectively, either on the individual (humanistic and experimental perspectives) or on how the social context helps to construct the person (social constructionist perspective) (Stevens, 1996).
For example, an individualistic perspective on working people would rather consider how a person fits to a job, or a job fits to a person, whereas a social constructionist would consider how individuals are both shaping (through their personal understandings and actions) and being shaped by their job (Watson, 1996). The latter relates to the issue of interdependence between individual agency and social structure, which this essay will attempt to explore with regard to work and employment.
Work can be conceptualized as a type of activity that comes in many forms and is defined by the conventions of the prevailing social structure.
The social structure determines the duties and rights associated with the different roles and statuses found within it, which instigate and also constrain the individual action of people holding these roles and statuses (Bruner, 1996). It involves institutions, in the sense of established types of social activity or practice, validated by corresponding norms (Aber-crombie et al., 1994 in Watson, 1996). In the case of work, current institutional patterns are: capitalism, entailing the incentive for profit and competition; employment, implying the vending of employees’ work to employers for money; bureaucracy, indicating a hierarchical structure of offices staffed by similarly specialized people; and the work ethic i.e. the values and ideas suggesting that commitment to work is a major feature of an individual’s self-worth (Watson, 1996).
Institutions such as those concerning work, exemplify the interdependence between individual agency and social structure, as they are constructed via people’s initiative, and simultaneously operate as structures that may constrain personal agency (Watson, 1996).
This interaction is also illustrated by research into how people enter employment. While this line of investigation has been dominated by a focus on either individual choice or on the structural constraints – which reflects the broader issue concerning the emphasis on either the individual or the society, and the relative importance of human agency and social structure – recent theorizing such as Giddens’s (1984) ‘structuration theory’ proposes a mutual relationship between the two elements, where both have equal value.
Working on Giddens’s ideas, Layder et al.’s (1991) study on the mutual implication of individual and structural factors in specifying young people’s transition into job market, suggested that structural factors (e.g. social class, gender and opportunities) are more important, and individual factors (e.g. attitudes and educational attainment) are much less important, for those who get in lower level jobs compared to those getting in upper level jobs.
According to Layder et al. (1991), at the upper levels, the entry level in the job market is primarily determined by those factors associated with personal effort and attainment, and individuals are more competent in controlling their employment through intentional manipulation (e.g. job search) and behaviour based on personal attitudes, values and social representations.
While this study illustrates the implication of the social context in the extent of the social structure’s influence on a person’s transition to employment, as well as the role of individual agency in determining job allocation, the interplay between agency and structure is further elucidated by research into the choice of occupation, based on discourse analysis – a key tool of the social constructionist approach aiming to explore how people employ language as an activity in shaping their social world.
For example, in contrast to the traditional ‘personality-matching’ and ‘developmental’ approaches which explored the psychological processes underlying occupational choice (the suitability of an individual’s personality for a particular job and their degree of vocational maturity, respectively), Moir (1993) employed discourse analysis to undergraduate interviewees’ accounts of occupational choice, to explore their ‘linguistic repertoires’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) in accounting for their choice. Focusing on the interactive function of these accounts suggested that some respondents’ emphasis on holding the typical features required by their chosen profession, reflected the use of ‘standard membership category repertoire’ (e.g. for engineering: ‘I enjoyed the physics and maths side’; for nursing: ‘a well worth job’) in explaining their choice, so as to demonstrate that they were suitable candidates. These accounts were more persuasive to the interviewer of the candidates’ appropriateness for their career choice compared to those of other respondents who employed the ‘family influence repertoire’ in explaining their choice (e.g. ‘My mum had been a nurse’) at the expense of associated interests and attributes.
These findings indicate the determining function of discourse and linguistic repertoires that people use to interpret the processes underlying entry to work, in the interaction between individual choice and institutional constraints. Besides, as people’s accounts of their career choice involve retrospective explanations of their decisions and actions (Garfinkel, 1967 in Watson, 1996), they can be seen as narratives about oneself, which link personal agency and action with the social structure, and help to construct and project the person’s identity into the social medium.
By way of example, in a study of full-time trade union officers (Watson, 1988), some interviewees’ accounts concerning their occupational choice – taken from their wider life narratives – were constructed on the basis of personal choice and agency: they had chosen this job in order to fight against the exploitation and injustice on working people, while all interviewees’ accounts indicated the acknowledgment of structural constraints e.g. limited opportunities, boredom, need to escape from former displeasing job. In interpreting historical events which are presented in such accounts, discourse analysis emphasizes the need to consider the interpretative process in which individuals engage when generating personal accounts of events, and also the wider narrative of their life history.
Turning to the individual’s working environment, we may also see the interplay between personal agency and social structure, through the ideas of orientation to work and psychological contract.
Orientation to work refers to the meanings and expectations people carry about their work, which influence their thoughts and actions in relation to it, while the psychological contract concerns the implicit agreement between employer and employee regarding the employee’s effort and rewards, which involves a two-way bargaining. Both notions can be seen as dynamic constructions, amenable to change as a result of changing conditions within our outside the person’s working environment. For example, a married woman may be content with a routine clerical job which meets her domestic needs, but her orientation to work and her relationship with it might change upon, say, a divorce, when she might see her work as a way of changing her life and the kind of person she is, and be induced to pursue a more fulfilling position, maybe a promotion. The psychological contract is also modified as a result of the employees’ individual or collective pursuit to decrease working effort and raise rewards, and the employers’ pressure to raise profit and production.
Interaction is also involved in the case of newly developed technological and organizational control structures attempted to be imposed on employees, who may actively dispute them and, in turn, develop their own, collective or individual, practices of coping with and controlling their working conditions. According to Collinson (1992), one of these practices is collective humour, which serves to gain a positive meaning and enjoyment at work, a feeling of power and identity validation.
Coping practices at work have also been illustrated by psychodynamic studies, and particularly that of Menzies Lyth (1988 in Morgan and Thomas, 1996) which explored how the unconscious anxieties of the nursing staff in a general hospital, arising from the nature of their work (caring for patients), induced the emergence of collective defence mechanisms which turned to institutional practices meant to help the staff cope with stress (e.g. splitting of the relationship between nurse and patient, depersonalization of the patient, detachment and denial of feelings, task standardization to minimize decision making, etc.). This study shows how individuals use their work organization to develop social structures for reducing anxiety, which become part of the organization’s structure and practices that will thereafter be faced by new members.
Another area of agency-structure interaction at work, concerns the management of people, and particularly the process of motivation, which involves finding out the personnel needs and fulfilling them in a way that they will repay by complying to the managers’ requirements of them.
The various theories on work motivation that have been proposed over time, suggest different models of the person and the organization, and of the mutual influence between them.
Thus, Myers (1920) focused on the workers’ needs, in particular the ‘psychological factor’ and the elements that hinder work efficiency, like mental tiredness, boredom, mistrust, enmity etc. The underlying model, supported by the views of the ‘human relations’ tradition that were demonstrated in the Hawthorne experiments (Mayo, 1933, 1949; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939), sees employees as social beings whose social needs (e.g. the need to belong) have to be met by the organization, in order to induce their compliance to the management’s requirements. This view necessitated a sensible distribution of people in work groups, showing interest for the workers as persons and providing them with a sense of belonging to the organization.
Later, Maslow’s (1943) proposal that, as soon as individuals have covered their physical, social and self-esteem needs (‘lower level needs’) they move on to meet ‘higher level needs’ which contribute to self-actualization, suggested a model whereby effective motivation involves giving the employees the maximum possible responsibility or discretion in performing their jobs.
These ideas brought about the reformation of jobs with regard to enrichment (Herzberg, 1966 in Watson, 1996), and some of the modern institutional practices at work organizations concerning employees’ empowerment, teamwork and exertion of their initiative, which suggest a view of the person as having a central role in shaping institutional patterns through their need to gain self-fulfillment.
Moving beyond work motivation theories which have a partial acknowledgement of the social influence on motivation, through the notion of fulfilling the individual’s social needs, but still focus on the individual, recent theories on management are concerned with the culture of the work organization and the associated institutional requirements. Peters and Waterman (1982) argued that excellent companies are identified by a ‘strong culture’ comprising a shared value system which induces the organization members – not under managerial direction and supervision but because they wish to do so – to concentrate on satisfying customers in a manner that is beneficial to the enterprise as a whole. They suggest that these companies rest on the fulfillment of people’s need for both self-determination and security, and on management processes which turn the work organization into an institution, so that the organization acquires its own identity and value system – its own culture – and thus may gain a more central role in the employees’ lives.
The concept of organizational culture links the individual level – people’s need to search for meaning – with the social level – the role of institutions in assisting people to find meaning and in moulding their behaviours. According to Ott (1989), it resembles a social culture which is inconspicuously constructed behind the overt organization activities. It comprises values, ideas, assumptions, views, norms and patterns of behaviour, and mobilizes, directs, gives meaning and informally controls the behaviour of organization members.
The role of the organizational culture can be illustrated through managerial attempts to change it, which may bring about positive as well as negative effects for the organization as a whole and its individual members. For example, the account of a senior manager of ‘Dowty Aerospace propellers’ about the process of creating a new culture in this company (Arkin, 1994 in Watson, 1996), suggested significant innovations, such as integration of ‘works’ and ‘staff’ into a single-status workforce, employees’ empowerment, a flatter structure, open-plan working areas, elimination of departmental barriers, briefings and conferences with interactive communication between employees and managers, training workshops about customer care, and training customized to the needs of particular groups or individuals. In this manager’s view, this new culture was very beneficial for the company’s commercial success.
However, the new culture may be presented adversely from the point of view of employees suffering the changes. For example, the account of a Barclays employee on the changing culture of this bank (Pilkington, 1995 in Watson, 1996), indicated decentralization, loss of the former pleasant family atmosphere, accumulation of company targets entailing harder work, staff reduction, depersonalization of customers, job insecurity, lowered morale and unsatisfactory remuneration. This account also illustrates the interaction between individual agency and structural variables, whereby the person needs to cope with the changes in the company’s expectations of them and their own expectations of the company. Besides, from a discursive perspective, the narrator’s employment of the notion of culture (“the culture of the company has changed”), reflects – in T. Watson’s (1996) terms – the discursive resources utilized in shaping and formulating one’s ideas. And the point “I’m no militant” that he makes to indicate that his anger is not unreasonable, reflects a discourse which links ‘militancy’ to unreasonableness, thus demonstrating how the cultural aspect of life can be brought together with individuals’ attempts to manage their sense of identity, through the concept of discourse.
Approaching the end of this essay, we may argue that our discussion of the processes underlying work and employment – concerning occupational entry, career choice, work orientation, psychological contract, work motivation and organizational culture – illustrated by relevant examples from research studies and real-life accounts, demonstrated the ways in which individual agency and social structure are mutually dependent. It was suggested that the interaction between individuals and work institutions involves a process of mutual construction, whereby human agency induces the creation of social institutions, which act back on individuals, as structures that may constrain personal action. The role of discourse as a mediator in this two-way construction was also emphasized.
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Article Author: Panagiota Kypraiou MSc Health Psychology, MBPsS - Body & Gestalt Psychotherapist (ECP) - Body Psychotherapy Supervisor - Parents' Education Groups Coordinator https://www.psychotherapeia.net.gr
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