Do Technological Changes and Organizational Context Affect Job Autonomy?

Abstract

This paper examines when jobs are autonomous in the labor process and under what kinds of circumstances workers achieve more control of their work process. The degree of skill, technology, and bureaucratization are addressed in previous literatures and are analyzed in this paper as sources of variation in work autonomy. The data employed for this study is the 2002 Australian National Organizations Survey, and the research target is core jobs, defined as jobs directly related to the primary product or service of the organizations. Ordinal Logistic regression is employed for this study and result shows that information based technology increase job autonomy for jobs that require higher education. Also, formalized jobs are likely to have less job autonomy. More generally, findings suggest that job autonomy is contingent on relative power in the labor process and that formalization is primarily a control device at least relative to the labor process.