Workers' attitudes to technical change: an integrated survey of research

The purpose of this book is to introduce the main discoveries which have been made concerning workers' reaction to technical changes. Successive chapters deal with the worker as an operative, as a member of an organisation and of a system of social relations, as a wage earner or, in other words, as a person subject to someone else's powers of economic decision, and finally as a member of communities outside his work such as the family, the ethnic group, the town or the neighbourhood.

This book does not claim to cite and analyse all the existing works; it is not a systematic bibliography. Nor have we limited ourselves to defining the main current trends of sociological research in the sphere under review. We have sought rather to put forward the widest possible overall view of this field of study. This work is primarily addressed to all industrial sociologists in universities, business and in the public service, but we hope it will also be useful to businessmen, personnel experts and trade unionists, all of whom have to guide the attitude of workers towards change.