Quality of Working Life Movement Part I: History
| Pages | 2-6 |
| Date | 01 January 1981 |
| Published date | 01 January 1981 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb054960 |
| Author | Don Ronchi |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Quality of Working Life
Movement
Part I: History
by Don Ronchi
Professor, Ohio State University
Occasionally, a new idea will burst upon the world of
work with such a force that it commands the attention of
researchers and practitioners alike. It generates
excitement, perhaps even a certain vogue, as active minds
attempt to exploit it. Of course, the courtship eventually
ends and a general consensus emerges as to just how
seminal the idea was to begin with. Most likely it will come
to occupy a niche in the prevailing scheme of industrial and
organisational thought. Some—very few—pass into that
select company of honoured concepts which have
established new schemes for research and practice.
An idea that is truly pathbreaking allows one to
substitute a more complex image of reality for one that is
less so. The celebrated Hawthorne studies and the human-
relations movement to which it gave birth did not "prove"
the scientific management school to be in error. It merely
relocated the quest for engineered elegance in person-
machine systems within the larger context of person-
person systems. And it did so in a way that was congenial
to capitalistic ideology, for unlike the Marxists before
them, the advocates of the human-relations approach
found a way of speaking about social relations without
recourse to such concepts as praxis and class.
What is QWL?
In this and the two articles to follow, I shall successively
describe, compare with related concepts, and analyse an
idea which some would claim represents a new revolution
in workplace organisation [1]. Although the name
"quality of working life" (QWL) means different things to
different people and has been applied to various Canadian
and European programmes, here its use will be restricted
to an idea that was conceived and gestated in the ethos of
American industrial relations in the 1970s. In the next
article I shall deal with the differences between QWL and
European programmes which may appear similar.
A Common Rhetoric
The document that has most influenced the development
of the US, if not most western nations, was written in
1776—but not by Thomas Jefferson. More than anything
else,
the growth of western capitalism rests on the
principals first put forth in that year by a Scottish
professor in a book entitled An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. One of these
principals is that the wealth of a society is not to be simply
located in its material possessions. Rather, a society's
wealth lies in the capacity of its citizens to produce
material things. The western obsession with nurturing and
advancing this capacity has generated enormous affluence.
Although the name "quality of working
life"
(QWL) means different things to
different people, here its use will be
restricted to an idea that was conceived
and gestated in the ethos of
American industrial relations in the 1970s
But at what price? By the early 1970s there was a visable
and articulate case being made for the position that
America's penchant for productivity may itself be counter-
productive. The visibility came from the publicity given to
such events as the bitter strike over "management rights"
in one of the country's newest and most efficient
automobile assembly plants located at Lordstown, Ohio.
The US Senate held hearings on worker alienation and a
bill was introduced to fund research on ways to reduce it.
A popular journalist and author began his widely-read
account of conversations with working people by saying
that:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature,
about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is
about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting
matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns
as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or
beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the
day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among
the great many of us [2].
The message was clear; all is not well in the American
workplace.
This same message was given more scientific expression
in the US Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare's report, Work in America and in Sheppard and
Herrick's Where Have All the Robots Gone? [3]. In the
national agreement negotiated in 1973 between the United
Auto Workers and General Motors there was an explicit
reference to developing mechanisms for dealing with
quality of working life issues. During this period the Ford
Foundation sponsored an international conference on
quality of working life. Then, in 1975, the National Centre
for Productivity and Quality of Working Life was
established by act of Congress.
2 | Employee Relations 3,1 1981
To continue reading
Request your trial