Kick-off Meeting of the Advisory Group for the OECD Guidelines for Measuring the Quality of Working Environment, OECD HQ, Paris, 8-9 December 2015

1. Intrinsic Job Quality:
Theory and Concepts
Duncan Gallie
Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Presentation to Advisory Group for the Guidelines for
Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment,
OECD 8th-9th December, 2015

2. Central Themes
• How should we assess what is important for the quality of
work?
• What are the main sociological theories of trends in the
quality of work?
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3. Intrinsic Job Quality
Intrinsic job quality = the quality of the work task and
of the working environment in contrast to extrinsic job
quality (earnings and labour market security).
Prime focus : autonomy/task discretion; task variety;
skill utilisation; opportunities for skill development;
work intensity; health and safety; social support and
workplace participation.
Importance re employee well-being : a) self-
development and b) psychological & physical health 3

4. Subjective vs Objective Concepts of Job Quality
• Subjective : the ‘utility’ a worker derives from
a job - usually measured through ‘job
satisfaction’.
• Objective : job quality encompasses job
features that can be shown empirically to
enhance workers’ psychological and/or
physical well-being.
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5. Subjective Approaches
Key criterion: each individual’s subjective
evaluation of a job : high quality jobs are those
that lead to high personal job satisfaction.
- The problem of reference groups
- The problem of downward adaptation
- The problem of lack of knowledge
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6. Objective Approach
Key Criteria : Inter-Subjective Validity
High quality jobs are those that correspond to:
• Widely shared values ie for self-determination, development
(consistency with values essential for positive psychological
well-being).
• Conditions necessary for maintaining good psychological
health (work intensity, job control, job security)
• Requirements for long-term physical health
(physical dangers, but also stress)
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7. Part 2
Theories of Job Quality
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8. Two Contrasting Types of Theory
• Universalistic theories predict growing
convergence between countries
• Institutional theories predict persisting
distinctiveness of different countries or types
of country (regimes)
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9. Universalistic Theories
Optimistic Universalistic
• Industrialism (Clark Kerr; Blauner; Piore and Sabel)
• Post-industrialism/ Informational Society (Daniel Bell;
Castells)
• Knowledge-Economy (OECD; EU)
Pessimistic Universalistic
• Marxian/ labour process theory (Friedmann;
Braverman)
• Flexibility Theories (Atkinson; Capelli; Kalleberg)
• Skill Polarization Theories (Autor; Goos & Manning) 9

10. Theory of Industrialism
Core Theses
• Technology the principal driver of change
• Increased division of labour leads to skill specialization
and skill upgrading
• Growing scale of organisations leads to rule-based co-
ordination rather than arbitrary managerial power
• Need to retain commitment of more skilled workforce
requires greater involvement of employees in decision
making through negotiations between social partners
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11. Theory of post-industrialism
• Knowledge and informational technology increasingly the
major sources of productive growth, implying growing
centrality of education (including universities) to production
and meritocratic allocation of jobs.
• Transition from manufacturing to services, involving growth of
managerial, professional and technical (especially scientific,
informational and communication) occupations
• Automation progressively eliminates routine and semi-skilled
work.
• Trend to upward shift in overall job quality, but low skilled
become progressively more disadvantaged 11

12. Knowledge-Based Economy
Political version of post-industrialism argument, developed by
the OECD (eg. OCDE/GD(96)102) and incorporated by EU in its
Lisbon mission statement of 2000. But less deterministic:
- Rapidly changing and rising skills require lifelong education,
particularly of the low skilled
- Continuous technological innovation requires new forms of
work organisation giving greater autonomy and opportunities
for learning
- Adequate earnings, security, work conditions, health and
safety and work life balance pre-requisites for productivity
(DG Employment : Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2014 Chapter 3)
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13. Pessimistic Universalistic
Neo-Marxian
Neo-Marxian post-war labour process theories of
capitalist development, predicted intensifying
competition between employers, leading to declining
quality of work for lower and intermediate classes with:
• Deskilling
• Tighter managerial control over work performance
• Work intensification
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14. Pessimistic Universalistic
Flexibility Theories
• Increased international competition leads to new employer
strategies to heighten flexibility in deployment in labour –
particularly through use of non-standard contracts (temporary
contracts).
• Increased division between core and expanding peripheral
workforce, involving cumulative disadvantage for periphery
(intrinsic and extrinsic)
• Structural trend to greater insecurity at work.
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15. Pessimistic Universalistic
Skill Polarization
• Automation displaces most rapidly skills that involve
explicit routines (‘routine skills’) and hence can be
easily programmed.
• Such skills are primarily in the intermediate strata of
the workforce – clerical and skilled manual work
• Therefore trend towards polarization with expanding
high and low skilled classes, but declining middle
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16. Theories of Institutional Variation
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17. Institutional Theories
• Varieties of Capitalism/ Production Regime Theory
(Soskice, Hall, Estevez-Abe)
• Power Resource /Employment Regime Theory (Korpi,
Esping-Anderson, Gallie)
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18. Production Regime Theory
• David Soskice, ‘Divergent Production Regimes:
Coordinated and Uncoordinated Market
Economies in the 1980s and 1990s’
in Continuity and Change in Contemporary
Capitalism, ed. H. Kitschelt, P. Lange, G. Marks,
JD Stephens, CUP 1999
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19. The Basic Argument
• Different employment dynamics between capitalist
societies depending on the way they try to solve
their coordination problems re industrial relations,
vocational training, corporate governance, inter-firm
relations and employee cooperation.
• Key distinction is between: Liberal market economies
(hierarchies and competitive market arrangements)
and Coordinated Market Economies (primarily non-
market)
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20. Key Determinants
Employers as the key actors (in contrast to some strands of
welfare state theory that had posited importance of organised
labour and social democratic control of government)
Decisions about institutional systems of skill formation are
central proximate determinant of work quality
Particularly their relative emphasis on Specific Skills vs General
Skills
Note specific primarily in non-Beckerian sense of initial
vocational training
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21. Examplars
• Coordinated : Germany, the Scandinavian
countries
• Liberal : Britain, US and ? Ireland
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22. Production Regimes and Skill
• Coordinated : Diversified quality production (Streeck)
requires skilled and experienced employees. So
strong initial vocational training, specialised skills
across broad spectrum of the workforce.
• Liberal : Innovative design combined with mass
production. Polarised skill structure, with highly
educated elite and large semi and nonskilled
workforce. Relies on general rather than specific
skills.
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23. Job Control
• Coordinated: Complex products and skilled work
difficult for management to monitor or direct
through rules. So devolution of decision-making
responsibility to employees and new forms of team-
based work organization.
• Liberal: Lower skilled employees will be subject to
tight supervisory or technical forms of control.
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24. Industrial Relations
• Coordinated: Where employees are high skilled and
work organization is team-based, consensus-based
management more effective for ensuring
cooperation. Therefore stronger role for workplace
representatives (works councils) and unions.
• Liberal : Stronger emphasis on numerical flexibility in
mass production low-skilled systems encourages
unilateral management and marginalization of
unions.
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25. Job Security
• Coordinated : System based on skill specificity and
high training levels places emphasis on labour
retention so as not to lose training investment.
Conducive to greater job security. Also associated
with strong welfare safety net to encourage training
investment, therefore greater employment security.
• Liberal: Low skilled mass production systems may
require rapid adjustment of numbers employed. So
tendency for low employment security.
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26. Some Issues with Production Regime
Theory
• Basically takes a version of earlier ‘optimistic
theories’ as model for coordinated market
economies and of ‘pessimistic theories’ as model of
liberal market economies.
• Employers are depicted as autonomous actors with
little constraint from state or organised labour. How
accurate is this?
• Many (indeed most) countries are not located within
the schema. 26

27. Power Resource/ Employment Regime
Theory
• Originates from research into welfare state regimes
(Korpi; Esping Andersen) and developed in Gallie
(2007; 2013)
• Argues that employer strategies will be
constrained/conditioned by the broader balance of
power reflecting the nature of government policies
and the strength of trade unions
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28. Types of Employment Regimes
• Where organized labour strong, and/or left wing
governments in power for substantial periods,
government policies may lead to major differences in
employment systems through : high employment
policies, greater salience of quality of working life
reform and strong union workplace controls
• Distinguishes 1) inclusive systems (Nordic) 2)
dualistic (Continental) and 3) Liberal (UK, Ireland)
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29. Similarities and Contrasts
• Depiction of liberal regime very similar in the
different institutional theories
• Production Regime Theory emphasizes skill
formation as key driver; Employment Regime Theory
politics and strength of organised labour.
• Leads to differences in country predictions, for
instance re Nordic and Continental countries. In PRT
similar; in ERT Nordic should be notably better.
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30. Some Implications of Institutional Variation
• Systems of workplace control are likely to vary with
differences in the balance of power between social partners
at national level (relevant to demand-control theory of work
stress)
• Systems based on social dialogue and negotiation are likely to
be perceived as procedurally fairer than systems based on
directive employer decision-making as they reflect better
citizenship norms (relevant to organisational justice theory of
work stress)
• They are also more likely to lead to acceptable compromises
with respect to appropriate levels of reward and protection of
employees (relevant to effort-reward theory of work stress)
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31. Conclusions
Towards Empirical Evaluation
• Theoretical scenarios often based on limited
evidence: data for specific countries (most frequently
the US) and for limited time periods.
• High degree of variability of key indicators between
studies makes cumulative analysis very difficult.
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32. 32

33. Also
• Peter Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional
Foundations of Comparative Advantage , OUP, 2001
• Estevez-Abe, M., Iversen, T. and Soskice, D. ‘Social Protection and the
Formation of Skills : A Reinterpretation of the Welfare State’ (in Hall and
Soskice)
• Estevez-Abe, M. Gender Bias in Skills and Policies: the varieties of
capitalism perspective on sex segregation, Social Politics, 12 (2) 2005
• Iversen, T. and Soskice, D. An asset theory of social policy preferences.
American Political Science Review 95 (4), 2001
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