Irony in "The New American Workplace"

I wanted to add, as an afterthought, one point I neglected to mention in yesterday's critique of The New American Workplace. It is a point of irony that arises in the Foreword written by Susan R. Meisinger. I cited this Foreword yesterday to provide the context for the project under which this book was written, but the irony arises in what appears to be a difference of opinion between Meisinger and authors James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III. Towards the end of the Foreword, Meisinger offers her opinion of the major take-away from the text of the book:

Even though American workplaces have evolved in ways unforeseen at the time of the Work in America study, readers of The New American Workplace will draw at least one conclusion that remains unchanged from the earlier study: Satisfying work is a basic human need that establishes individual identity and self-respect and lends order to life.

The irony resides in how this conclusion actually aligns with the results that O'Toole and Lawler present. Yes, the authors observe that many of the jobs that are no longer available in the United States were not very satisfying and were probably alienating (to draw upon the observations of Robert Blauner, whom, as I observed yesterday, was not recognized as a source). It is also true that many of the new "knowledge work" jobs can, indeed, be highly satisfying, particularly when they address intellectual challenges of innovation. What is more important is that has been left unsaid. I see at least two key points here:

1. For whatever virtues they attribute to it, the sort of knowledge work that O'Toole and Lawler have in mind is a relatively elite profession. Those who work in the "trenches of innovation" are the product of a rigorous filtering process that has probably begun before one enters college as an undergraduate and continues all the way through current hiring practices. When I suggested yesterday that O'Toole and Lawler were ignoring people in favor of abstractions, the people I had in mind were the many unemployed who have either lost their jobs and found no replacement or are looking for work after having successfully graduated college. For me, these are the people of the "real world," rather than the "stars of high technology," whom O'Toole and Lawler seem to be celebrating. I suggest that it would not be too far-fetched to claim that the odds of an average twenty-something breaking into such a profession of knowledge work are about the same as those of making a career in professional sports. or show business.
2. Even in those elite circles where the work itself is satisfying, the progressive erosion of both job security and benefits (both of which O'Toole and Lawler acknowledge) lead to a quality of life that detracts significantly from any personal sense of satisfaction. Put another way, knowledge work now takes place in high-risk settings, where the risks may be just as high as they are in sports and show business. Where O'Toole and Lawler try to see this positively as an incentive for working harder and "smarter," I see it as a recipe for burn-out, again very much as we can observe in sports and show business. For a CEO, of course, this creates a "churn" in which "fresh blood" keeps flowing in to replace those who have burned out their "knowledge productivity;" but what happens when such burn-out occurs long before the worker is thinking about retirement?

I really have to wonder if Meisinger actually saw the disconnect between this small bit of text she was using to introduce the book and what the book was actually saying. Perhaps it does not matter very much. After all, she was writing as the sponsor of the project and was therefore obliged to put a positive spin on the results, even if that spin could only be obtained through a gesture of rather shallow lip service. The rest of us can just add "satisfying work" to the list of concepts that have succumbed to that loss of meaning that so occupied the studies of Max Weber.