Polanyi Michael, Tompa Emile
Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Work. 2004;23(1):3-18.
Technology change, rising international trade and investment, and increased competition are changing the organization, distribution and nature of work in industrialized countries. To enhance productivity, employers are striving to increase innovation while minimizing costs. This is leading to an intensification of work demands on core employees and the outsourcing or casualization of more marginal tasks, often to contingent workers. The two prevailing models of work and health - demand-control and effort-reward imbalance - may not capture the full range of experiences of workers in today's increasingly flexible and competitive economies. To explore this proposition, we conducted a secondary qualitative analysis of interviews with 120 American workers [6]. Our analysis identifies aspects of work affecting the quality of workers' experiences that are largely overlooked by popular work-health models: the nature of social interactions with customers and clients; workers' belief in, and perception of, the importance of the product of their work. We suggest that the quality of work experiences is partly determined by the objective characteristics of the work environment, but also by the fit of the work environment with the worker's needs, interests, desires and personality, something not adequately captured in current models.
技术变革、国际贸易与投资的增加以及竞争的加剧正在改变工业化国家的工作组织、分配和性质。为提高生产率，雇主们在努力增加创新的同时将成本降至最低。这导致对核心员工的工作要求不断强化，而将更多边缘性任务外包或临时化，这些任务通常交给临时工。两种流行的工作与健康模式——需求控制和努力回报失衡——可能无法涵盖当今日益灵活和竞争激烈的经济体中工人的全部经历。为探究这一观点，我们对120名美国工人的访谈进行了二次定性分析[6]。我们的分析确定了影响工人体验质量的工作方面，而这些方面在流行的工作-健康模式中很大程度上被忽视了：与客户的社会互动的性质；工人对其工作产品重要性的信念和认知。我们认为，工作体验的质量部分取决于工作环境的客观特征，也取决于工作环境与工人的需求、兴趣、欲望和个性的契合度，而这一点在当前模型中并未得到充分体现。
