Industrial Technology and Worker Integration in the Organization

Abstract

This paper is based on a sample of 1491 Canadian manual workers from three different industries-printing, automobile, and oil. These industries were selected to represent three basic types of sociotechnical systems that have been identifid in recent literature-craft, mass and continuous process production systems. The main hypothesis is that worker integration in the organization differs by type of sociotechnical system-being highest in the continuous process system, represented by the oil industry and lowest in the mass production system, represented by the automobile industry. Integration is investigated in five areas: (1) relationship with fellow workers, (2) relationship with first line supervisors, (3) labor-management relations, (4) status structure of the organization, and (5) evaluation of the company. The outstanding finding is that the oil worker is much more integrated regarding the above five areas of the organizational system than are auto workers. Printers fall in between, being closer to oil workers than to auto workers. The implications of worker integration in the organization for receptivity toward industrial change and alienation from the job are discussed.