An Understructured Conception of Dignity at Work

Abstract

Randy Hodson's Dignity at Work is a creative, clever, and thoughtful treatment of some of the most important aspects of workers' experience, particularly their efforts to maintain their dignity in the workplace, even in the face of direct, or indirect, assaults from management. What makes this book so creative, and what emerges as one of its major strengths, is Hodson's solution to a research problem that bedevils many of us who study workplace relations. Specifically, workplace scholars are often caught between the demands for the generalizability, reliability, and validity that large scale data sets provide and the in-depth understanding and explanation that qualitative research generates. Few of us, however, have come up with such an original and compelling solution to this dilemma as has Hodson. While most of us choose one or the