Occupational Welfare as an Aspect of Quality of Working Life

Abstract

The Quality of Working Life movement (QWL) has been associated in the social sciences with two main streams of thought and practice. In the U.S. the main line has been ‘Job Enrichment’ or ‘Job Redesign’, with its emphasis on the job content and its motivational potential. In Western Europe the mainstream has followed socio-technical principles, which combined similar job content considerations with consideration of the social organization of the production unit. Both approaches have demonstrated their validity and utility in certain cases, but accumulating evidence has also shown some of their limitations. Perhaps the greatest limitations stem from the fact that in many production and service organizations the technological and economic considerations simply do not enable the levels of autonomy, variety, meaningfulness and significance of operative level jobs to be significantly increased.