M. Kohn and his colleague have been analyzing complicated relationships between work and personality for more than twenty years. He insists that "the essence of higher class position is that one's decisions and actions can be consequential; the essence of lower class position is that one is at the mercy of forces and people beyond one's control, often beyond one's understanding." Higher class position means relatively higher occupational self-direction and promotes self-directedness of personality; on the other hand, the lower class position's occupational conditions force people to conform to external authority.
In this paper, I re-examine part of the studies, "Work and Personality", using Japanese men's data which was collected in 1979. I focus on three different components of self-directed personality, 1 ) authoritarian conservatism, 2 ) idea-conformity and 3 ) self-esteem. Then I re-confirm significant relationships between social stratificaion and these three attitudes. In order to examine direct causalities of related social factors, I introduce social background variables, which have been ignored or treated as control variables in almost all previous studies; father's occupational prestige and education, urbanness of respondent's hometown, age and education of respondent. Then the coefficient between social stratification and attitudes is divided into direct or indirect causes as follows;
1 ) Respondent's education and aging have effects on their ideational flexibility. By these effects, high education reduces authoritarian conservatism, while aged people tend to be more authoritarian.
2 ) Urbanness of one's hometown directly influences idea-conformity, but social stratification does not have a significant direct effect on idea-conformity.
3 ) Occupational prestige of present job and aging have positive direct effects on self-esteem.
These findings match S. Lipset's discussion about blue-collar workers' authoritarianism. And they also suggest important hypotheses about the relationships between personality and social structural factors in Japan.
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