Attitude Research of White Collar workers in Industry

Abstract

As the importance of “white-collar” workers is gaining recognition, increasingly greater number of studies are made on this subject. However, it appears that most of those studies have been done exclusively from the highly macroscopic standpoint with specific approach. According to this approach, white-collar workers are put directly within the mass society and bureaucracy, and are regarded as alienated from the modern society. In contrast to this approach, it seems necessary to pay attention to the behavior of white-collar workers in their offices and to specify more microscopic social-psychological factors which determine their behavior in their daily life. We have been suggested a great deal by “The American Soldier” by A. S. Stouffer et al. and by the theoretical analysis of it made by R. K. Merton.
Theoretically, those factors could be formulated from the theory of attitude, the accompanying theory of reference group and the prospect of promotion. Concretely, we measured white-collar workers' attitude in their offices with the satisfaction-scale and the conformism-scale, and their attitude toward the whole society with the politico-economic scale and the class identification. Then we examined the correlation among those factors and interrelated them to the prospect of promotion and also to their identification with their superiors. Those scales are constructed on the basis of the method of scalogram analysis, each respondent's score having been calculated. We have taken the cases of two companies-one on a large scale, another on a small scale.
To sum up, the findings are as follows.
(1) The higher the level of education and the longer the length of service, the higher is the degree of satisfaction. On the other hand, the prospect of promotion is the variable which is most closely connected with the level of education and the length of service. Therefore the degree of satisfaction can be regarded as related to the prospect of promotion.
(2) The degree of satisfaction has a definite relation with the degree of conformity. Most of the factors which influence the degree of satisfaction are also related to the degree of conformity.
(3) Reference group is related to the prospect of promotion, and those people whose prospect of promotion is bright tend to identify themselves with their superiors. Therefore reference group also has an indirect relation with the other factors.
(4) At the same time, the factors in the offices have a correlation to the class identification and the orientation toward the whole society. Especially, in combination with the prospect of promotion, the degree of satisfaction strongly influences the politico-economic attitude and the class identification.