Orientations and Job Experience

Abstract

We turn now to a consideration of the relevance of orientations in the general experience and action of the workers, looking at their influence and the forces that influence them. This involves examining the relationships between orientations in terms of our measures of preferences and salience, and of other variables relevant to work and outside lives. The first step is to analyse the relations with job characteristics to see if workers with certain orientations are actually in jobs congruent with those orientations. We must also ask if the orientations really are substantially independent of the work situation, or solely a response to it and so not truly “orientations” at all. This question is then pursued further in the next chapter in an analysis of relations with background characteristics, which serves to shed light on the origins of orientations and generally set them in a full social context.