Alienation, Work Structure, and the Quality of Life: Can Cooperatives Make a Difference?

Description and explanation of life quality have been hindered by the failure to link the aspirations and experience of individuals with the structure of the social settings they occupy. This is an ethnographic study of the structural grounding of social well-being, using the concept of alienation t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 1981-06, Vol.28 (5), p.548-562
Main Author: Wells, Miriam J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture, Cooperative
Alienation
Alienation/Alienated
America/American/Americans
Collective farms
Cooperative/Cooperatives
Crop harvesting
Crops
Family farms
Farm workers
Farmer/Farmers
Industrial production
Labor
Mexican Americans
Mexico/Mexican/Mexicans
Organization among California Farm Workers
Quality of life
Wellbeing
Work/Works/Working
Workplaces
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Summary:Description and explanation of life quality have been hindered by the failure to link the aspirations and experience of individuals with the structure of the social settings they occupy. This is an ethnographic study of the structural grounding of social well-being, using the concept of alienation to examine the impact of the objective working environments of Mexican American cooperative farmers on their subjective life quality assessments. The findings indicate the inadequacy of the dominant focus on income as a measure of life quality. They also suggest the importance of a) identifying possible variations among working populations in the ways that group values may affect concern with workplace control, and b) exploring workers' actual perceptions of the differences between ideal goals and reasonable expectations.
ISSN:0037-7791
1533-8533
DOI:10.1525/sp.1981.28.5.03a00130