Dignity at Work - Book Review

Everyone loves a good story. What better, then, than a book based on 84 good stories? Randy Hodson has taken 84 book-length ethnographies of organizational life and attempted to distill the insights into a grand model of dignity at work. The advantages of this approach are compelling. Ethnographies enable readers to become immersed in rich settings peopled with intriguing characters who are propelled by both stranger-than-fiction events and grinding ordinariness. On display are ambivalence, passion, generosity, capriciousness, affection, spite, and so on through the gamut of human emotions and behaviors. In short, ethnographies provide a slice of life. The problem, of course, is that ethnographies are highly idiosyncratic, creating doubts about how generalizable the resulting insights are to other organizational settings and individuals. Hodson's brainstorm was to have his cake--his slice of life--and eat it, too: by analyzing multiple ethnographies, he could abstract a one-size-fits-all model. The result is a book laced with wonderful quotes, provocative findings, and bracing insights and speculations. The book is clearly intended for scholars in organizational studies, although it's accessible to anyone interested in workplace dignity as a lived experience.

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Hodson defines dignity as "the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others" (p. 3). Hodson's basic thesis, summarized in chapter 1, is simply stated. He argues that there are four workplace "denials of dignity" (p. 19): mismanagement and abuse, overwork, constraints on autonomy, and contradictions of employee involvement (e.g., pressuring employees under the guise of participation). In response, employees have developed four means of safeguarding dignity: resistance, organizational citizenship, pursuing meaning at work, and social relations at work. This model, and the empirical indicators of each concept, were developed a priori and then refined during the coding of the first eight ethnographies by Hodson and three graduate students. Although the use of an a priori model greatly simplified the analysis of the 84 books, the model necessarily functions like a horse's blinders, constraining what is sought and therefore found. The upshot is that the study seeks to confirm a model rather than discover one.

Chapter 2 expands on the basic model, nesting it in the classic works of The Three Sages: Karl Marx (capitalism alienates workers from their labors, necessitating resistance), Emile Durkheim (the division of labor induces anomie, necessitating that workers band together to forge a moral order), and Max Weber (bureaucratic rationalization depersonalizes the individual, necessitating that charismatic leaders transcend the impersonal). Hodson continues his historical tour of the struggle for workplace dignity with interesting visits to Frederick Taylor, Chester Barnard, and William Ouchi, among others, along the way.

Chapter 3, coupled with Appendix A, outlines the rationale and method for the study. This was a study so prodigious that it might have given Hercules pause. Hodson and his research assistants started with an initial pool of 365 book-length ethnographies and winnowed these down to the final pool of 84: a book had to be based on observations of a single organization over at least six months, with a focus on at least one specific group of workers. Given the author's claim to have captured the population--not merely a sample--of suitable ethnographies, and given that many readers may wonder along with me why their personal favorites were excluded, a list of the excluded books and the criteria by which each fell afoul would have been very helpful. Even more helpful would have been a table documenting how the final pool of books scored on the various measures used in the study. I often found myself wondering how well a book-length description of a living, breathing organization over time could be distilled into, say, a 3-point scale of pride in work. A scorecard would at least let the reader compare his or her recollection of a particular ethnography with the scores assigned by the research team. In the absence of such a scorecard, the reader has to take on faith that the measures are valid. (The author does describe some sensible checks and balances that were used to reduce coder bias and enhance reliability.)

Also, as Hodson notes, because ethnographers do not choose their targets at random, the "population" is by no means representative of all organizations and workgroups. The 84 ethnographies seem skewed toward so-called blue-collar occupations, particularly in factories (41 of the 108 groups in the ethnographies do assembly work), and toward times that are receding faster than my hairline (40 of the 84 ethnographies were published before 1980, and none after 1992). The unfortunate effect is a lopsided emphasis on increasingly dated settings and technologies.