Alienation

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Many have studied the notion of alienation at work. According to Karl Marx, work becomes alienating when a worker is engaged in a series of tasks over which he or she has no control, and the worker is imbedded in a system of domination, constraint, and under the orders and authority of another person. Erik Erikson associated alienation with a lack of identity in the worker as a consequence of the conflicts between the individual and the social structure. Robert Merton refers to the notion of occupational psychosis as a consequence of the hierarchical inflexibility of organizations, producing an incapacity or incompetence in the worker. In the bureaucratic organization of Max Weber, the bureaucracy produces a climate of alienating work in which the worker should comply with the routines, strict obedience to the hierarchy, and compliance with the norm. Frederick Taylor utilized economic incentives to achieve the maximum productivity of work. The consequence of this was a type of work that was repetitive and in which the needs and motivations of the worker were considered irrelevant. This has been considered alienating.

The study of alienation at work has been undertaken more extensively to understand modern and industrialized societies through a focus on the labor, economic, political, religious, and social systems. The different notions of alienation discussed in the literature have focused more prominently on the condition of the laborer.

Studies of alienation at work have been carried out in many organizations, including industries, government, the health sector, and the education sector; in different occupations and professions such as health workers, teachers, employees, and professionals and nonprofessionals such as manual and nonmanual employees; through different perspectives, including sociological, economic, psychological, and in the social sciences. The notion of alienation has been associated with other constructs; for instance, job dissatisfaction, pressure, exploitation, syndrome of burnout, and mechanization. Alienation at work has its origin, chiefly, in the organization and produces direct and negatives effects in the worker.

Based on the social-psychological literature, Melvin Seeman proposes six meanings of the notion of alienation: powerlessness (feeling of impotence and incapacity to influence in the work system), meaninglessness (feeling of absurdity, lack of sense, and absence of meaning), normlessness (feeling of anomie, and absence of norms), cultural [Page 17]estrangement (rejecting the values shared by the society), self-estrangement (auto-alienation and lack of interest in the work), and social isolation (feeling of isolation). Seeman stresses that some meanings of alienation are not clear (e.g., self-estrangement), and he notes that there are difficulties in clearly defining and assessing such meanings.

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