Research on Work Values in a Changing Economic and Social Context

Economic Development, Instrumentalism and Post-Materialist Values

The emergence of sociological debates about work values, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed in reaction to an earlier intellectual environment in which work values were commonly viewed as an expression of relatively constant human needs. The most direct challenge to the assumptions of these earlier traditions was raised by the Affluent Worker study (Goldthorpe et al. 1968). The authors’ point of departure was that “wants and expectations are culturally determined variables, not psychological constants” (p. 178). More specifically, they argued that work values were in the process of transformation, with structural changes leading to a more privatized social life and a growing importance of conjugal family life. This was associated with an increased concern with consumption and, hence, with a definition of work as largely instrumental, a means to ends, which were extrinsic to the work situation. The shift involved then both a change in the centrality of work to people’s lives and in the values that they attached to work. Goldthorpe et al. (1968, 1969) argued that these new orientations to work were likely to be prototypical and would develop more widely in the future among both manual workers in manufacturing and lower white collar workers involved in routine administrative work.

The study initiated a debate that informed research over many years. Some critics suggested that withdrawal of interest from work might reflect the lack of opportunities for self-realization in work (Daniel 1969). The conditions of work in the automobile assembly lines that Goldthorpe and his colleagues had studied could be seen as the quintessence of the type of alienating work environment that Marx had thought likely to lead to a harmful suppression of the inner human need for self-realization through work. Other critical contributions questioned whether there was a need to distinguish instrumental from economic orientations (Ingham 1970), whether orientations were in fact relatively stable over time (Blackburn and Mann 1979), and whether diverse and complex empirical patterns of work values can be captured adequately by relatively simple typologies (Bennett 1974, 1978; Mercure and Vultur 2010).

In the early 1970s, however, a strongly contrasting prediction emerged about the consequences of economic and social change for work values. Inglehart (1971, 1977) argued that unprecedented prosperity and the absence of total warfare had provided people with a level of security that was conducive to an upward shift in aspirations away from “materialist” toward “post-materialist” values, which gave primacy to values of self-actualization. Such value shifts, he argued, occur through generational change, since values are acquired primarily in early socialization and remain relatively stable through adult life. Although this line of research was initially concerned with the implication of value shifts for people’s political priorities, the growth of post-materialist values became relevant for various institutional spheres, including work (Inglehart 1977).

Empirical research in the following decades led to a considerably more complex picture of the pattern of change in work values than suggested by either of these conflicting scenarios. A cross-national study in the mid-1980s of the relative importance of work and other life domains concluded that work, followed closely by the home and family, remained the most central life domain for adults (Super and Šverko 1995). The same study showed that, in terms of specific reward values, personal development, ability utilization, and achievement were ranked highest in all countries. The measure most frequently used by research into employment commitment focused on nonfinancial (or intrinsic) employment commitment—whether people would wish to continue to work, even if they had enough money to live as comfortably as they would like for the rest of their lives. Studies in the United States show that employment commitment was very high in the 1970s—approximately 72 percent wanted to continue to work, even without the need for money (Quinn and Staines 1979). However, there was a downward trend in employment commitment in the United States from the mid-1970s through to approximately 1993, which then leveled off between 1994 and 2006, at which time 68 percent wanted to continue in work irrespective of financial need (Highhouse et al. 2010). A British study in 1981, using the same measure, found that 69 percent of all employed men and 65 percent of women would want to continue to work even without financial necessity (Warr 1982). Subsequent research suggested that employment commitment in Britain remained very stable over the period 1981 to 1992 (Gallie et al. 1998).

A comparison of work values in European countries between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s (Hajdu and Sik 2015) concluded that, while work had become less central relative to other life spheres for people in the EU (especially in the postsocialist countries), there was only a very marginal decline in employment commitment. Moreover, there was no evidence that this reflected differences in specific birth cohorts, contrary to the view that there had been changes in the importance attached to work due to changes in patterns of early socialization.

With respect to work reward values, Esser and Lindh (2018), in a study of nineteen OECD countries, found, in general, a picture of relative stability in extrinsic and intrinsic job preferences, with, in some countries, a tendency toward an increase in the importance of intrinsic values. A picture of intergenerational stability in intrinsic work values emerges from studies in the United States (Twenge 2010). The influence of family background on work values is one factor that can help to explain this continuity (Lindsay and Knox 1984). Further, since in many cross-national studies, education has been found to be strongly related to levels of employment commitment and to expressive and self-development values, the general rise in education levels may partially explain the continuing (and possibly increasing) importance of intrinsic values (MOW 1987; Harding, Phillips, and Forgarty 1986; Hult and Svallfors 2002).

The principal conclusion, however, that emerged from comparative studies was that there was substantial variation among countries in work centrality, employment commitment, and work reward values. This was shown for work centrality in the 1980s by a cross-national study involving eight countries (MOW 1987). Others studies have found considerable differences in employment commitment. Hult and Svallfors (2002) noted the higher level of employment commitment in Norway and Sweden than in liberal countries—such as Britain, New Zealand, and the United States—with their much weaker forms of employment and labor market regulation. They saw this as evidence of a “production regime” effect, whereby a stronger emphasis on skill-oriented work in coordinated market economies led to work practices that were more conducive to high commitment than those in more rule-oriented systems. Taking a broader range of countries, Esser (2005) concluded that both strong welfare systems and skills-focused production systems favored higher employment commitment. Steiber (2013) found employment commitment highest in the continental and Scandinavian countries, and lowest in the southern and in the transition (or formerly state socialist) European countries. She accounted for this in terms of variations in both the level of economic development and in the quality of jobs.

There were also important country variations with respect to the importance of reward values. Gallie (2007) found that intrinsic values were significantly stronger in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden than in either Germany or Britain, and attributed this in particular to the higher education level of employees and the better quality of working conditions in the former countries. In their study of OECD countries, Esser and Lindh (2018) concluded that extrinsic and “collective” intrinsic values (such as work useful for society or that helps others) differ mainly across countries rather than period, although valuations of job autonomy were more similar.

In short, the comparative studies point to three broad conclusions. There is no necessary logic of economic development that leads to a decline in commitment to employment and to higher instrumentalism; rather, the evidence points to a high stability of work values over time. Second, institutional factors make a substantial difference to employment commitment even among more economically developed countries. Finally, while early socialization and education were generally important determinants of employment commitment and intrinsic reward values, differences in job quality also help to account for country differences.

Unemployment and Employment Commitment

The sharp rise in unemployment, and particularly long-term unemployment, in almost all OECD countries in the early 1980s led to the emergence of a new agenda, focusing on the role of work values in accounting for the behavior of the unemployed. For neo-liberal economists, the growth of long-term unemployment was accentuated by a low level of work motivation among those who had lost their jobs, partly resulting from the financial safety net provided by the welfare state. In this perspective, relatively high levels of benefit relative to potential wages led people to prefer to remain unemployed rather than actively seek work. It is a view informed by the assumption that work is a “disutility” for people, so that there will be a general preference for leisure over work, as long as it is possible to afford what is required to meet basic needs. This may be reinforced by a tendency of people to adapt to their situation over time by finding other activities that fill their time and give a sense to their everyday lives.

The main approach for testing these assumptions was to examine the relationship between the replacement rate (the ratio of unemployment benefit to earnings from employment) and the duration of unemployment. The empirical results, however, did not provide impressive evidence in support of the theory. In a review of over a decade of research, Spiezia (2000) concluded that even those studies that had detected an effect of benefits on unemployment duration found that it was rather small. On average, the estimates implied that a 10 percent increase in the replacement rate would be associated with an increase of only one to one and a half weeks in unemployment duration.

The view that the unemployed are work shy and that unemployment durations are an indicator of low commitment to employment came under sustained criticism from both psychologists and sociologists. An influential paper by Peter Warr (1982), drawing on a national survey in Britain, showed that a majority of unemployed men (62 percent) wanted employment even if there was no financial necessity for it, although the figure was notably lower for women. A British study, carried out in 1986 when unemployment reached its highest level in that decade, found that the commitment of the unemployed was even higher than that of the employed—77 percent compared with 66 percent (Gallie and Vogler 1994). The difference in employment commitment between unemployed men and women had virtually disappeared. The same study showed that the unemployed were also not characterized by any high level of inflexibility with respect to the pay they were hoping to receive or their openness to retraining, although only a minority (40 percent) were willing to move from the area they lived in to find a job.

In the 1990s, with the increased availability of cross-national data, research on the unemployed expanded into the comparison of European countries. The results proved very consistent across countries in the EU-15: ¹ a study in 1996 found that in all countries the unemployed had higher employment commitment than the employed (Gallie and Alm 2000). The extent of difference varied, however, between countries. It was greatest in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Greece, and France and lowest in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Steiber (2013), drawing on data for nineteen European countries in 2010, also found that the unemployed were more committed than those in paid work. Although the commitment scores for the unemployed were higher than for the employed in each region (other the Scandinavian countries where they were the same), the difference was only statistically significant in the southern and transition (or Eastern European) countries. The relatively higher employment commitment of the unemployed in those two regions did not reflect greater commitment of the unemployed themselves in those regions, but the markedly lower commitment of those in work.

Even if there is little evidence that the unemployed overall have lower commitment to employment, it could be that there are particular subgroups—such as the long-term unemployed or the young—that are likely to develop cultures antithetical to the work ethic. However, the empirical evidence suggested that the employment commitment of those with longer experiences of unemployment (12 months or more) was very similar to that of those who had shorter-term experiences of job loss (Gallie and Alm 2000). Steiber (2013), examining data a decade later, also found little impact of duration of unemployment on employment commitment. Similarly, there was no evidence that the young unemployed had a weaker attachment to work. Indeed, the evidence showed higher levels of commitment among younger British unemployed people (16–24) than those in all other age groups (Warr 1982), while, in a wider set of European countries, Steiber (2013) found that the unemployed in their twenties had significantly higher levels of employment commitment than their equivalents in work.

The issue of whether unemployment benefits undermined employment motivation had implications for views about the welfare state. Those who thought that replacement rates were demotivating favored a minimalist welfare state that emphasized cutting benefits to increase financial pressure on the unemployed. Esser (2005) addressed this issue by comparing the employment commitment of those who were in countries with relatively generous welfare regimes and those who were in countries that had low benefit (primarily means tested) provision. Focussing on twelve countries—Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—she brought together attitudinal data with detailed comparative information on the level of a variety of welfare benefits. This showed that higher benefit provision was related to higher, not lower, employment commitment both for those in work, and also, even more strongly, for the unemployed. This positive effect was reinforced by institutional systems in which production was organized in a way that led to high quality jobs.

The overall picture then is that the unemployed are at least as committed to employment as those in work, and that generous welfare provision encourages higher motivation. The principal measures used, however, capture general attitudes toward employment rather than views about particular types of jobs. As Warr (1982) has shown, a commitment to work, even among the employed, does not necessarily imply that people would want their current job. It seems reasonable to assume that people respond using the reference point of a desirable or decent job. A recent British study found that, despite the consistent evidence of a positive attitude toward employment, the unemployed may not necessarily think that taking “any job” would be an improvement on the state of unemployment (Dunn, Grasso, and Saunders 2014). Indeed, perhaps reflecting greater familiarity with the characteristics of poor jobs, they were more likely to disagree that this would be the case. The quality of proposed job offers may then be an important factor moderating the implications of employment commitment for labor market behavior. This would again point to the higher capacity for the integration of the unemployed in countries that foster the conditions for better job quality.

Gender Differences in Work Values

In the early phase of the expansion of women’s employment participation, the prevailing view was that women were entering the labor market largely as secondary workers, with rather different work attitudes than men—particularly with respect to lower work centrality, weaker commitment to employment, and lower attachment to the intrinsic rewards of work. The subsequent sharp rise in female employment rates placed a new central issue on the research agenda: whether women have continued to have distinctive patterns of work attitudes despite their growing participation in the labor force or whether there has been a convergence in work values between men and women.

Studies in the 1980s generally confirmed that women were less likely to regard paid employment as a central life interest. The Meaning of Work (MOW 1987) comparative study of eight countries, examining data from 1980 to 1982, found that work centrality was significantly higher for men than for women. Comparing the United States, West Germany, and Israel, Agassi (1982) concluded that women were notably less likely to have a self-image as a basic earner, although there was much less difference with respect to employment commitment. For Britain, Dex (1988) showed that, as late as the 1980s, there was a strong norm among women of working age that women with pre-school-age children should stay at home. The evidence was more mixed for work reward values. De Vaus and McAllister (1991), in a study of nine European countries from the early 1980s, concluded that women were less attached to intrinsic values than men. However, both Agassi (1982) and Dex (1988) found that women’s work reward values had much in common with those of men, although women attached more importance to social relationships at work and less importance to career advancement. Both authors considered that the distinctiveness of women’s attitudes reflected primarily the structural constraints they faced, with respect to the poor quality of their jobs (Agassi 1982) or the availability of suitable childcare (Dex 1988), rather than any essential differences between men and women. They reached a similar conclusion that there was likely to be growing convergence in the work values of men and women.

Hakim (1991, 1996, 2000) was highly sceptical about the likelihood of convergence. She emphasized the role of choice in women’s selection of jobs, and interpreted their diverse labor market outcomes as arising from relatively stable differences in work values. These differences underlie both the choice between full-time or part-time work, and the decision to participate in the labor market. A substantial proportion of women in western industrial societies have markedly lower work commitment than men, and this helps to account for their higher job satisfaction, despite having poorer jobs (Hakim 1991). The argument that women’s preferences are based on “genuine choice,” are “qualitatively different” to those of men, and reflect “conflicting interests” (Hakim 2000) suggests that differences in work values are relatively stable across time and rooted in life-style choices that form part of self-identity, making rapid convergence unlikely.

The empirical evidence from Britain, which, together with the United States, had provided the principal evidence for Hakim’s thesis, was not altogether supportive of this. The period between 1981 and 1992 witnessed the disappearance of the earlier sharp differentials in employment commitment not only between male and female employees overall, but, most crucially, between female full-time and part-time employees (Hakim 1996). Moreover, from at least the early 1990s, there was no evidence that British men and women overall differed in their attachment to intrinsic work values (Gallie, Felstead, and Green 2012), although female part-time workers placed a lower importance on intrinsic values than full-timers of either sex (Zou 2015). Research also showed a very substantial decline over the 1990s, both in the general population and among mothers of pre-school children, in the belief that maternal employment was damaging for young children, a development attributable both to personal experiences in the labor market and to the observed behavior of other mothers (Himmelweit and Sigal 2004).

The cross-national evidence of a decline of traditional views about sex roles in the 1980s and early 1990s also appeared to give support to the view that there was a general trend toward convergence in men’s and women’s views about work values. Scott, Alwin, and Braun (1996) found that more of the shift toward liberal values occurred within cohorts than through the process of cohort succession. This suggested that the experience of labor market participation was an important factor in changing values. Longitudinal studies confirmed that, although both play a role, the responsiveness of women’s work values to the experience of employment was more common than an effect of values on mother’s employment decisions (Himmelweit and Sigal 2004; Steiber and Haas 2012).

Moreover, by the end of the 2000s, there was no evidence that women in European countries had lower levels of employment commitment or intrinsic reward values than men. Steiber (2013) found that women reported significantly higher commitment than men in nine countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, and the UK), the same level of commitment in eight other countries, and lower commitment only in Greece and Portugal. In their study of nineteen OECD countries, Esser and Lindh (2018) found that women, on average, expressed stronger intrinsic preferences and were more concerned with job autonomy than men.

A number of researchers noted that the pace of change in women’s sex-role attitudes declined markedly in the 1990s, raising the possibility that the gender revolution had stalled (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2011). But more recent analyses conclude that egalitarian change has continued, although in a more diverse way than foreseen in scenarios of convergence. Traditional role norms have continued to change, but are being replaced, not just by liberal egalitarian values, favoring similar roles for men and women, but also by other types of egalitarianism in which both work and family are central life priorities (Charles and Grusky 2004; Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2011; Knight and Brinton 2017; Wall 2007). In this view, there is (possibly growing) heterogeneity in women’s work values, but within the context of a general transition away from traditionalism.

It is clear from the evidence that the centrality of work for women varies substantially across countries in which macro-social factors are important determinants of work values. Alwin, Braun, and Scott (1992) noted the marked differences between the egalitarian values of women in the United States and the strong traditionalism of German women, particularly with respect to the appropriateness of working when there were pre-school children in the household. British women were intermediate, with a greater favorability toward part-time work as a way of reconciling the conflicted priorities of work and family values. In an eight country comparative study, drawing on data from 1988, Haller and Hoellinger (1994) found that British, American, and Dutch women were the most likely to support egalitarian views about gender roles; the Germans, Irish, and Italians were intermediate; and the Austrians and, most particularly, the Hungarians were the most traditional. Knight and Brinton (2017) concluded that Eastern European countries were distinctive in the relatively high prevalence of “egalitarian familism,” which gives high value to both work and family, while the Northern European countries were closer to the United States in the prevalence of liberal egalitarian values. They rejected the view that there is any long-term process convergence in sex role values between countries; while traditional values have been declining in most countries, there has been country divergence in the types of egalitarian values that are replacing them.

Scholars have differed in their views about the factors that account for country differences. Some have emphasized the importance of institutional differences, while others have stressed primarily the role of differences in gender and family cultures (Pfau-Effinger 2012). Institutional explanations focus primarily on national differences in the availability of public childcare and parental leave provision (Steiber and Haas 2009, 2012) or the opportunities for part-time work (Alwin, Braun, and Scott 1992). Cultural explanations have included the influence of the religious heritages of different countries—in particular the role of the Catholic Church in upholding traditional conceptions of the family in Austria, Italy, and Ireland or of the persistence of a paternalistic authority culture in Germany (Haller and Hoellinger 1994). Knight and Brinton (2017) note the distinctiveness of the current values of women living in countries that were previously state socialist regimes. The relative importance of institutional and cultural determinants, however, is inherently difficult to resolve given their likely reciprocal effects over time (Pfau-Effinger 2005) and the empirical difficulties of disentangling the influence of different macro-structural factors with a small number of country cases (Steiber and Haas 2012).

Overall, while there seems to have been a general trend away from traditional role values among women, there still appear to be significant differences in the centrality of work in the life priorities of men and women, reflecting greater heterogeneity in women’s values. A more polycentric structure of central life goals, however, proves to be compatible with a commitment to employment and to intrinsic reward values similar to men’s.

New Forms of Management and Work Role Values in a Post-Fordist Era

The most recent scholarly discussion about the nature of work values was stimulated by analyses of the changing nature of the production processes in advanced societies. Already in the 1980s, Walton (1985) and Lawler (1986) had argued that traditional forms of work organization, which had relied on a highly developed division of labor, close supervision, and top-down directive forms of management, were no longer adequate to meet the demands of emerging technologies and market conditions. In the conditions of a more competitive international economy, firms would need to compete in terms of quality as well as cost and this would require being able to draw on the skills and ideas of the workforce. New forms of “high involvement or high commitment” management would involve a shift from “control” to “commitment,” by enhancing the discretion that employees could exercise over their work tasks and their participation in organizational decisions. In the 1990s, this line of thinking was reinforced by a growing literature on high performance management systems (Appelbaum et al. 2000) and, in the 2000s, by theories of “discretionary/learning” organizations. While the former emphasized the benefits of higher involvement for productivity, the latter underlined its importance for meeting increasing rates of change and demand for innovation in an economy driven by information technology (Lundvall and Nielsen 2007; Valeyre et al. 2009; Lundvall and Lorenz 2011). These analyses revealed the importance of long-term commitment of workers to their firm and of the high levels of work engagement that are needed among workers to ensure that they take initiative and are creative at work. In contrast to the issues of work centrality and the relative importance of work reward values, this perspective placed the focus on the values people attach to their roles in their specific organizations and jobs.

There have been two influential bodies of empirical research relating to such values: research on organizational commitment and research on work engagement. Organizational commitment has a long history in scholarly research (Mowday et al. 1982), but it came to have a more central place in research on work values in the 1990s, particularly through the work of Meyer and Alan (1991, 1997; Meyer, Allen, and Gellatly 1990). Meyer and Alan drew a distinction between affective commitment (emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization); continuance commitment (based on an evaluation of the costs of leaving the organization); and normative commitment (sense of obligation to continue in employment with the current employer). Research has focused predominantly on affective commitment.

The evidence available suggests that levels of organizational commitment in the workforce are relatively modest. A British national study of employees in 1998 (Cully et al. 1999) found that only 8 percent of employees strongly agreed that they shared many of their organization’s values, only 15 percent felt loyal to their organization, and 16 percent felt proud to tell people where they worked. On the basis of a summary scale derived from the three items, only 11 percent of employees could be classified as highly committed. A study based on the British Skills and Employment surveys (Zhou 2009) found somewhat higher figures for 2001: 12 percent for similar values; 19 percent for pride in the organization; and 32 percent for loyalty. But, in both studies, the most common response indicated moderate commitment, with less than a quarter of employees selecting responses indicating a lack of commitment. There may be some evidence that commitment has been growing more recently. While Zhou (2009) found no change in overall organizational commitment between 1992 and 2001, van Wanrooy et al. (2013) found an increase in commitment between 2004 and 2011.

Work engagement research, which focuses particularly on the work tasks involved in the job, can also trace its roots back to earlier decades (under the term “job involvement”), but it gained a new dynamic in the 2000s with the emergence of researchers arguing for an increased emphasis on the strength of workers’ expressive attachment to their work role. Work engagement is indicated by a psychological state involving a “positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind,” manifested by high levels of energy (vigor) and identification with/dedication to work (Shaufeli, Bakker, and Salanova 2006). In earlier versions, the concept also included a third dimension, absorption in the job, but it remains controversial whether this is best understood as an outcome of energy and identification or as an independent dimension of work engagement (Bakker et al. 2008; Bakker, Albrecht, and Leiter 2011; Schaufeli and Salanova 2011).

Given its relative recentness in the research field, representative statistics on work engagement are scarce; research involving the full set of indicators has been carried out primarily on samples of employees in particular occupations or workplaces. However, a British study (van Wanrooy et al. 2013), that used a proxy measure of whether people use their own initiative to carry out tasks that were not required as part of their work, found employees’ level of job “engagement” was a little higher than their level of “organizational commitment” as expressed through similarity of values or pride in the organization.

Research points to the importance of work experience as a primary determinant of values about one’s role at work—both with respect to the organization and to the job. Both Lincoln and Kalleberg (1990) and Zhou (2009) emphasize the significance of diverse mechanisms of participation in decision-making for organizational commitment. In a review of 155 published and unpublished studies, Meyer et al. (2002) found that the strongest correlations with affective organizational commitment were those relating to work experience factors, with organizational or personal characteristics having weaker effects. More recently, Boyd et al. (2011), in an Australian longitudinal study, showed that job autonomy and procedural fairness predicted workers’ future organizational commitment.

Similarly, the work environment plays a central role in work engagement. Bakker, Albrecht, and Leiter (2011) underline two key drivers of engagement: job and personal resources. Job resources include factors such as skill variety, decision latitude (autonomy), opportunities to learn, and social support. Personal resources relate to factors such as self-efficacy and resilience. A meta-analysis by Halbesleben (2010) found a relationship between job resources and work engagement with respect both to measures of overall job resources and of specific resources, in particular job control. There is also some support for this from longitudinal research. A study by Shaufeli, Bakker, and Van Rhenen (2009) showed that higher job resources predicted higher work engagement in the subsequent year, while a Finnish longitudinal study (Mauno, Kinnunen, and Ruokolainen 2007) showed that job control was the most robust predictor of future work engagement.

Good comparative data are still relatively rare and are restricted to organizational commitment. A large-scale study carried out in manufacturing industries in Indiana in the United States and in the Atsugi region in Japan in the 1980s (Near 1989; Lincoln and Kalleberg 1990) showed that, contrary to expectation, organizational commitment was higher in the United States than in Japan. A study drawing on International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data for 1997 similarly found that the United States stood out as highest in organizational commitment compared with countries as diverse as Britain, Norway, Sweden, West Germany, and New Zealand (Hult and Svallfors 2002). This contrasted sharply with the pattern for employment commitment, for which the Scandinavian countries had the highest levels of commitment. Given that evidence points very consistently to the significance of work experiences in affecting organizational commitment, it is unexpected that the Nordic countries, which are often found to have the best working conditions, do not also have the highest levels of organizational commitment. Hult and Svallfors (2002) suggest that a factor that may help to account for this is the high level of union organization in these countries. Where unions are influential, they may actively counter too strong an identification with management objectives and views, thereby undercutting organizational commitment. It is notable that Sweden, where organizational commitment was lowest, also had the largest class differences in organizational commitment.

Conclusion

The four substantive areas of research on work values that I have discussed here differ in their core debates, but highlight a number of issues that are of general importance for the study of work values. The first is the need to distinguish between different value dimensions, in particular, work centrality, employment commitment, work reward values, and work role values. Researchers sometimes assume that one can infer the nature of other types of work values—for instance employment commitment or the importance of intrinsic reward values—from evidence about work centrality—for instance, employment commitment or the importance of intrinsic reward values. But this is not the case. The different dimensions can be combined in diverse ways, leading to varied patterns of overall work values. Further, there are grounds for thinking that different types of factors help to best account for the diverse value dimensions. For instance, early socialization and education were clearly major influences on work centrality and employment commitment, while the nature of the work environment is the primary factor with respect to work role values.

At the start of the period that we reviewed—late 1960s and early 1970s—the literature was characterized by bold predictions about the direction of change in work values. These varied however between scenarios of the declining importance of work for people’s self-identity and life priorities, to arguments of the growing centrality of work as a source of self-expression. Research has revealed, however, that the trends are considerably more complex. The centrality of work may have declined partly because male workers attach more importance than in the past to their family and leisure lives and partly because female workers, with more diverse life priorities, have become an increasingly important component of the workforce. But this does not imply that workers are any less committed to having a job or that they attach less importance to the intrinsic rewards that work can provide. Rather, the overall importance of both employment commitment and intrinsic job reward values has been remarkably stable over time and there is no evidence of generational change. Moreover, research on the unemployed has clearly shown the persisting importance attached to having a job, irrespective of the financial pressures to do so, even in a situation where intrinsic rewards may be hard to come by.

Further, in each area of research, the growth over time of cross-national comparative studies has revealed national variations in work values that point to the inadequacy of earlier explanations of work values in terms of levels of economic growth or change in industrial structures. The workforces of different countries differ significantly in their overall levels of employment commitment, the strength of commitment to work of the unemployed, the relative value that women attach to work and the family, and the extent to which people feel committed to their organizations. This underlines the importance of understanding national differences in institutional structures—in particular the system of employment regulation, the strength of trade union organization, and the level of support for employment offered by the welfare state—and in cultural values, in particular the values attached to equality and the role of the family.

The themes covered in this article will doubtless be supplemented soon by yet another major issue—the future of work values in an age of digital transformation. Some predictions of the effects of technological change on job loss in the next decades suggest that it will be so precipitous, particularly for those in lower skilled positions, that significant sectors of those of working age will be faced with indefinite exclusion from the labor market. Such predictions of the effects of a technological revolution are not entirely new. There was a similar discussion in the early 1960s with the introduction of continuous-process technologies, and in the 1980s when the introduction of computers began to change the nature of work. Moreover, it is notable that, in the longer term, previous technological revolutions did not have catastrophic effects on the overall employment rate. But the past is not a certain guide to the future, and it will be surely important to extend the research agenda to monitor how values about work are affected by what will probably be a period of unusually rapid and widespread technical and social change.