We've now looked at work from a lot of different perspectives. People work for pay. Other people might work for self esteem, a sense of belonging. Or even a deeper source of understanding of who you are. What I called identity. Now notice that these are all primarily individual goals. Looking to support myself or my immediate family. Looking for my own sense of belonging. My own understanding of who I am. And we've also been assuming that these are largely individual choices. Now yes, they're shaped by markets, and they're shaped by HR strategies, as we've looked at in earlier modules. But within those confines, we're assuming that individuals can choose whether they want to work for pay, and for how much. Individuals can choose how much belonging is important to them. However, work also occurs in a rich social context. Work is influenced by what sociologists call social institutions. This includes social norms, conventions, rules, and procedures. It also includes socially constructed power relations. Now sociologists emphasize that all of this shapes what is acceptable and what is possible. Therefore, also what is unacceptable and what's not possible. And so these are additional constraints on individual worker behavior that we need to appreciate. Now, we've already discussed the second of these two, power relations in other places. For example, at the end of the previous module when we looked at radical and pluralist critiques of the neo-liberal market ideology. So, in this video I'm gonna focus on this first dimension, social institutions. And in particular focus on social norms. Sociologists believe that social norms fundamentally shape human behavior via social sanctions. There's group acceptance for those who abide by social norms, conform to social norms. And there's exclusion for those who violate them. So a sense of belonging through acceptance and avoiding exclusions can be see as important drivers of behavior not only in the workplace but outside of the workplace as well. Now these norms can operate at many different levels. For example, there's work group norms. Remember my distant cousin, Frederick Winslow Taylor. He famously critiqued what he saw as a widespread practice of soldiering. This is when workers purposefully work slower than their full capacity. And they're for full capability. Now, what happens to those who try to deviate from this? How are these norms enforced? Well, those who fail to conform are given derogatory nicknames, they're harassed, and they're ostracized. Now norms can also take place at an organizational level. You probably know this as corporate culture, a set of norms that govern work in a particular organization. There's many examples of this. Some organizations have a culture of work hard, play hard. This causes employees to embrace long hours to further the success of their organization, and also their own personal success within that culture. A culture of teamwork shapes employee behavior by equating team success with personal success and by creating peer pressure to work hard and not let the team down. An ideology of market business competition can reduce worker resistance to wage and benefit concessions and other forms of organizational change in the name of business survival. So now to manage workers, you have various tools at your disposal. And we've looked at a number of them up to this point in this course. There's formal HR policies, like performance appraisals. There's job design so that you can design jobs to match the skills of your workforce and to provide intrinsic motivation and intrinsic rewards. You can use financial incentives to manage workers. Here's now another thing to add to your tool kit, work group and organizational norms. Set up norms within your work group to facilitate the behaviors that you want your workers to pursue. Not only need to pursue this through intrinsic motivation or for other types of workers financial incentives. But you can also think about how norms in your work group, norms in your organization can facilitate the work behaviors that you want your employees to be fulfilling. At a third level, there's also national and ethnic culture, for example in many societies, there's strong norms around appropriate and inappropriate gender roles. As a second example, in modern Japan and Korea, it's socially unacceptable to leave work before your boss. This results in very long work hours that take such a physical and psychological toll that there are specific words for death from overwork. However, given that these are Japanese and Korean words, I'm not going to try to pronounce them for you. There are also norms around working to be seen as contributing, independent members of society. You wanna be seen as having the ability to support yourself and not be dependent on others. To not be seen as lazy. This too can be an important reason why some people work. And consideration of a social environment and social pressures as we've been talking about also serves as a reminder that work isn't just an economic exchange, it's a social exchange. Social exchanges are characterized by open ended ongoing relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Now they have imperfectly specified obligations and perhaps many objectives. Maybe money is involved in a social exchange. But a social exchange isn't limited solely to money. There's also other goals like status and respect, and a sense of belonging. Now seeing work as a social exchange is useful because it helps us understand behaviors that are more difficult to understand through other lenses. For example, if work is something that individuals do solely to earn income, then we would expect them to only do the job duties that they're narrowly assigned to do. However, there's a large research literature which documents the existence of what behavioral scholars called organizational citizenship behaviors. OCBs. These are discretionary actions in which workers are helping co-workers or the employer, but they're not part of their formal job duties. You might just think of this more casually as lending a helping hand. Lastly, work doesn't get done as a set of individuals. It gets done through a set of social networks. So therefore, how work gets done, and how individual's experience work, can depend on the characteristics of their social network. What's also called social capital. A particularly strong form of social capital is the chinese idea of guanxi. So pay attention to the nature of different employees' social networks. Recognize that some might be at a disadvantage, and help them overcome these disadvantages. For example, members of minority groups, disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, might suffer from low levels of social capital if their networks do not extend to individuals that have a high level of resources. At the same time, network social relations are also a source of social norms that can punish individuals who significantly deviate from accepted norms. This discussion of social norms brings us right back to the beginning of this video, so, it's time to end.
