Work and Social Character: Old and New Contours

This article attempts to delineate new contours of work-consciousness presently appearing among blue-collar workers. The text contests postulates advanced by the current discussion on the value change which proclaim that workers are increasingly dissociating themselves from work in their social consciousness and behaviour and which have thus resurrected the 'instrumentalism debate' of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on their own theoretical concept of work-consciousness the theorem of a 'dual relationship to work' and on new research data regarding changing working conditions, the authors show that today's blue-collar workers may have greater opportunities and legitimization for dissociating themselves from work but that the growing attractive quality of work's new contents counteracts the urge to seize these opportunities.