Work & people. An Economic Evaluation of Job-Enrichment

Job enrichment has been the domain of individual industrial sociologists and psychologists who have worked hard to improve the design of industrial jobs. It has been assumed that the happy worker is a productive worker and that the new participation and enrichment schemes would continue to bring about increased productivity. In this book the author addresses job enrichment as an economist, though he is a strong advocate of a multi-disciplinary approach. He provides a historical summary of the problems involved in job design and then analyses three areas of experiment in order to develop a methodology for measuring the economic costs of changes in the work structure. To effect such changes it is essential to prove that improvement of social performance in companies and organizations is compatible with growth in economic performance and this requires a new form of accounting. First the author analyses factories when are attempting to soften the consequences of job fragmentation and production line work. Then he investigates the impact of computerization on banks and the growth of an over-qualified white-collar workforce. Finally he discusses the case of a company which is attempting to involve its workers in determining their own working conditions. Students and teachers of industrial economics, sociology and psychology, as well as managers, will find this book full of useful insight