David A. Williamson - Job Satisfaction in Social Services

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Before coming to sociology as a discipline and a profession I pondered the questions that this book addresses as I worked in a number of human service organizations. Their missions ranged from caring for emotionally abused children near Los Angeles to delivering emergency food relief during the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. Of course, the questions were at that time only unarticulated curiosities.

Personal experience and my untrained observation of others from dozens of nationalities and ethnic groups who also were engaged in human service work led me to a number of assumptions: 1) those who are engaged in people-helping fuld the greatest rewards in the intangibles that go along with making a difference in someones life; 2) their frustration with bureaucratic interference, whether from the seemingly inane and arbitrary laws of despotic Third World leaders or state child protection laws, is frequently high and often aggravated because of the extraordinary value they place on the lives of those they are seeking to help; and 3) although they work hard in exchange for relatively low monetary rewards, the thought of doing anything other than people-helping leaves them uninspired, regardless of the prospect of substantially increased pay and benefits.

Their work often is a vocation, a mission, and a ministry. There are many exceptions and not all social service workers are saints (although Ive met a few who should qualify). In fact, their uniqueness seems to have less to do with saintliness than it does with a qualitative difference in what they view as meaningful workor that they need to find meaning in work at all.

It was from these observations, latent though they may have been, that I drew my fust questions as I became more familiar with the research into job satisfaction and commitment. Intuitively, existing models just did not seem adequate to explain the experience of work for those I had known in human service occupations. Moving beyond intuition, the research represented here is a fledgling step toward expanding our limited understanding of the dynamics of how work affects workers.

Those who are aware of the existing research into job satisfaction in social services may think that I am coming late to the game. This books main point, however, is not that job satisfaction research has been ignored in this area, but that those in the mainstream of job satisfaction research in sociology have been engaged for years in the construction of models of satisfaction built almost entirely on data from business and industry. More specifically, although values of work and rewards have been analyzed in a number of ways as predictors of job satisfaction, the argument presented here is that there are fundamental differences in the way we approach work (or are oriented toward work) that define for each of us its essence, meaning, and experience. Those fundamental differences suggest the need to modify predictive models of job satisfaction that reflect the unique processes and mechanisms that contribute to positive job affect for people with a variety of orientations toward work.