Editor’s note

Citation

(2013), "Editor’s note", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 34 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2013.28834caa.001

Editor’s note

Article Type: Editor’s note From: Journal of Business Strategy, Volume 34, Issue 3

Several papers in this issue of JBS discuss human resources, or talent, or personnel, or people, or employees. The name of the function has changed over the past few decades and now most firms refer to the old personnel department as human resources (in contrast to inhuman resources) or talent management (assuming that all employees are talented). There is something distant and severe about these terminologies, although the intention is probably the opposite. But managing employees now seems to take as much time as producing actual goods or services. Experts methodically deconstruct best practices and recommend new systems and programs to extract the most from people while ensuring their satisfaction and loyalty.

We now have evidence that people care somewhat less about wages and raises than we thought. But of course Studs Terkel always knew that people cared almost as much about meaning in work and feeling valued as about the paycheck. His 1972 book, Working, records interviews with Americans at work, many of whom like what they do. Cashiers can be as satisfied as film directors with their jobs. Without exception, though, all the people Terkel interviewed had thoughts about their work and what they liked or despised about their jobs. No one was indifferent, from the receptionist to the photographer to the miner. They had all given time and consideration to what work meant to them. It seems that people have an almost innate need, perhaps unarticulated, to extract meaning from their work. Most of us would rather, given the choice, make a difference in the world than not.

Finding meaning in work, whatever it consists of, may be a survival mechanism. After all, most people have to work (or live with someone who works) and, as long as we are spending our waking hours in paid positions, we need to believe we are doing something worthwhile.

The overwhelming majority of articles on human resources management, whether in academic journals or in other media, take the top down viewpoint. Very seldom does a researcher or reporter write from the employee’s perspective (not counting surveys and questionnaires), and we therefore have little qualitative information on what workers, especially non-managers, want and need. Online surveys of targeted groups simply do not tell us what open-ended interviews would. The Studs Terkel approach to discovering what average people think about their work may be impractical on a large scale, but it is fascinating and revealing.

There is a huge gap, which is only increasing, between the average worker, who is little affected by “talent management”, and management. For a start, the wage differential between workers and executives has multiplied exponentially in the past few decades and worker scepticism about certain kinds of information coming from their managers has made true communication in the workplace more difficult.

Studs Terkel’s Working should be required reading in business schools, and current managers and executives might also gain insights from this seminal work. In fact, we need an updated version by a twenty-first century researcher to see whether perspectives on work and its meaning have changed since the 1972 publication of the original study.

We invite reader comments on the meaning of work and how it has changed over the past half century.