Psychiatry Interpersonal and Biological Processes
ISSN: 0033-2747 (Print) 1943-281X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upsy20
Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Style Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden & Sylvia Woodaman To cite this article: Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden & Sylvia Woodaman (1967) Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Style, Psychiatry, 30:4, 392-404, DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1967.11023525 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1967.11023525
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Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Stylet Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden, and Sylvia Woodaman*
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ORKING CHILDREN are not a thing of the past. Many boys work extensively before they are fourteen but almost nothing is known about them. Study of why and how they work offers important opportunities for the enrichment of theories of child development and vocational behavior. But why certain children turn to work at an early age is currently of more than theoretical interest, since programs designed to provide work training have become major instruments of social change. We have accordingly conducted an extensive statistical and an intensive clinical study of working boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. 1 The purpose of this paper is to present a portrait of one working boy, and to explicate certain concepts used in the analysis of clinical materials pertaining to boys' discussions of their work experience-concepts which we believe hold promise for the exploration of man's orientation to work. Previous contributions to the psychology of work have produced few theoretical or conceptual tools appropriate to the study of working children. Investigations conducted within the framework of industrial psychology and sociology have focused primarily on issues of worker productivity and satisfaction. Psychologists and sociologists interested in adult vocational behavior have typically investigated specific occupational groups and their relation to the larger social structure, or relations between personality characteristics and occupational group membership.2 The occupational-group ap-
proach seems inappropriate to the study of working children because it "adultomorphizes" the data. The range of job types open to children is severely constrained and determined by social factors. Moreover, the occupationalgroup memberships of children below the age of fourteen lack stability. The kind of work a child does is certainly of interest, but occupational category is relatively less useful as a basis for discriminating different varieties of working children than it is in the study of working adults. Investigators interested in the vocational behavior of children have studied
• Peter L. Berger, "Some General Observations on the Problem of Work," in The Human Shape of Work: Studies in the Sociology of Occup(Uo tions, edited by Peter L. Berger; New York, Macmillan, 1964; Chapter 6. John L. Holland,
"Major Programs of Research on Vocational BehaVior," in Man in a World at Work, edited by Henry Borow; Boston, Houghton Mifllin, 1964; Chapter 12.
• Dr. !i1ngel (Ph.D. Peabo?y College 56) is Associate Professor, l?epa!tment ?f .Psychology, and ASSOCIate Research ScientIst, Mental Health Research Institute, UnIVerSIty of MIChIgan. Dr. Marsden (Ed.D. Harvard 67) Is Instructor, Department of Psychiatl'y. and Lecturer, Departillellt of Psychology, University of Michigan. Miss Woodaman (M.A. Tufts College 66) is Head Teacher, Somerville Guidance Center, Somerville, Massachusetts. t This research has been supported by the Milton Fund and the Center for Research in Careers, Harvard University, and by NIMH Grant No.1 Rll MH02146-01. We wish to express our gratitude to Dr. Anne Roe and Dr. David Tiedeman, directors of the Center for Research in Careers, whose support made possible the work reported in this paper. 1 The statistical study was based on a stratified random sample of 35 public school classrooms, grades four through eight, in Boston and seven of the communities contiguous with it. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire administered to the 965 chlldren in these classrooms. Some results of this study appear in our paper "Orientation to Work in Children," Amer. J. Orthopsychiatry, in press. Details of the clinical study appear below.
[ 392
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preemployment variables, such as occupational preference, aspiration, and expectation, and have begun to examine developmental aspects of the occupational-choice process.3 A developmental approach has also characterized the more useful and exciting efforts to study the psychology of work by way of psychoanalytic theory.4 General agreement appears to exist among investigators pursuing a developmental approach that the latency period has importance as a time when the child normally shifts the locus of his attempts at solution of pressing psychological issues: He moves from a strategy of attack via fantasy within the framework of the nuclear family, to one of attack via realistic achievement and mastery in the larger world beyond the family.5 But at present these studies are primarily of heuristic value, suggesting only fragments of what might someday become a reasonably comprehensive developmental theory of work. None of these investigators has examined the role of work experience in the psychological development of children between the ages of eight and fourteen.6
Because of the paucity of studies on the psychological implications of early work experience and of concepts tailored to the requirements of this problem, our clinical study was exploratory by design. To insure that subjects did in fact work, we attempted to recruit any boys under fourteen whom we found working at jobs such as newspaper peddling, shoeshining, and stock clerking. We also obtained names from employers who we knew hired boys below the age of fourteen.7 Fifty-two such boys were included in the study, ranging in age from eight to fourteen, with a modal age of twelve. They varied in socioeconomic status from Class II to V,s with 83 percent coming from Classes IV and V. All subjects were Caucasian; we chose not to introduce the complex variable of race. After verifying ages and obtaining parental permission, we arranged for the participation of interested boys in the project by employing them for a temporary parttime job, for which they were paid the minimum hourly wage. These jobs involved them as subjects for extensive psychological testing and interviewing.9 The semistructured interviews were
• See Holland in footnote 2. Henry Borow, "Development of Occupational Motives and Roles," pp. 373-422 in Review of Ohild Development Research, Vol. 2, edited by Lois W. Hoffman and M. L. Hoffman; New York, Russell Sage Foundation. 1966. '-Erik H. Erikson, Ohildhood and Society (2nd ed'); New York, Norton, 1963. Barbara Lantos, "Work and the Instincts," Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. (1943) 24:114-119; and "Metapsychological Considerations on the Concept of Work," Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. (1952) 33 :439443. Anna Freud, Normality and Patholoqy in Ohildhood; New York, Internat. Univ. Press, 1965; Chapter 3. Therese Benedek, "On the Psychic Economy of Developmental Processes," paper read at the Conference on New Directions in Research on Normal Behavior, Michael Reesc Hospital and Medical Center, Chicago, September, 1966. Some of these and other relevant psychoanalytic contributions to thc study of work have recently been reviewed by Waiter S. Neff in "Psychoanalytic Conceptions of the Meaning of Work," PSYCHIATRY (1965) 28 :324-333. • In this connection it is worth nothing that in the statistical study we found that 73 percent of the boys had earned money by working for persons outside their family at one time or another, and that the modal age at which they began this work was ten. See article cited in footnote 1. Among the working boys of the clinical study, who had been more carefully selected, the modal age for beginning work was also ten. Of these boys, 62 percent began their work experience between the ages of nine and eleven. • We use the term "work" In the narrow sense
of earning money from persons outside the family. Work in a broader sense, which would include school activities, is relevant to the development of a work orientation but is beyond the scope of our studies. There is an extensive literature on working children in the field of child labor reform, some of which might be called psychological, but its rclevance to the problems we are concerned with is negligible. These materials have been briefiy reviewed in the paper cited in footnote I, and at length in Gerald Marsden. "A Psychological Study of Working Boys," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1967. • More conventional methods of subject selection based on random sampling were not possible when we began our clinical study. Census data on such children do not exist. Most work illegally, which means that subjects obtained through the agencies in 'each community which provide work permits for children would constitute a biased sample. S Socioeconomic status was assessed by means of the Hollingshead Two-factor Index of Social Position, which is based on the educational attainment and occupational status of the head of the household. The Index identifies five groups, Class I corresponding roughly to "upper class" and Class V to "lower-lower class." • Subjects were told that we were interested in learning about ways in which children grow up, that we would like them to teach us as much as they could about how things were for them, and that we were particularly interested in thcir work.
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conducted as informally as possible. They occupied three to four hours in up to three sessions, and covered work history, work attitudes and circumstances, school, family life, leisure-time activities, and future plans. The central focus was, of course, the boys' work life, and the resulting documents frequently provide a rich and complex view of aspects of childhood largely unknown to middle-class professionals. Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 15:34 17 August 2017
A PORTRAIT OF RALPH Ralph started shoeshining when he was ten, and this is how he says it happened:
boy to become a five-dollars-a-day shoeshine boy, Ralph suggests that most importantly the novice would have to know his trade, "I'd show him how to shine and I'd show him how to snap the rag like me, and the guy [customer] thinks he is getting a real fast shine. And make sure you always brush it off first 'cause the guy is gonna yell at you, you have to clean them before you put the polish on." There are some additional suggestions, because Ralph has clear opinions about materials of his trade. He prefers two particular brands of polish because both of these pastes have an enhanced effect if kept warm and soft to the finger. But to a high-earning shoeshine boy it is not enough to know the technology. It is important to know the psychology of tipping.
Well, really, the first time I went, I went down there and, you know, and I, and I just sat there for five minutes and then, you know, I didn't do nothin' about it, you know, I just knew that you were supposed to shine a guy's shoes. I didn't know nothin' about it, you know, and there was no one If the guy talks just keep talkin' to him, on the corner that night. I think it was a mmm-hm, you know, just agree with everyWednesday and that's the rotten est day you thing that he says and you get a big tip. can go. It's before pay day, so I went up Yeah! Then you get him, keep him onto there and this guy came along and he says, another thing, something like that, you "I'll take a shine." So I shined his shoes know, then later on he is thinkin', "How did and he gave me a quarter. And I go, "I I get onto that subject?" made a quarter." And then I was just Showing interest in the customer's gettin' ready to go home and I was only there for about fifteen minutes and another person is not the only avenue to large guy come up and says he wanted a shine, so tips. It is also important to arouse pity I shined his shoes and he gave me another quarter. So then I goes, "Ooooh, I made toward oneself: half a dollar!" And then I ran over the bus They [customers] say, "You make a lot and went home. I had forty cents after I of money shinin'?" Like you say, "Ah, you paid my carfare. Then when I got home, don't make too much money." And then you know, I was braggin' about it to the while you are shinin' he says, ah, "How kids that I made forty cents and he goes, much money did you make today?" And "Oh, that's rotten for shinin'." I goes, "Not you tell him some real, real low price, you for me it ain't." So then, you know, I found say, "Oh, you are my first shine," or someout that you were supposed to stay, you thin' like that. I used always to do that know, even if it took longer waitin' for the every single time, yeah, and I'd get half a guys. You were supposed to ask them. I dollar and quarters, and the guy will say, didn't know. So then he says, "You can go "Here, sorry for ya," or somethin' like that. shinin' with me Friday...." He showed me A silent customer, one who does not everything about it, gave me little tips and stuff. engage him, is encouraged to interact
Now, as we interview Ralph, we learn that at age thirteen and a half, after more than three years of shining, Ralph considers himself very experienced; he raised his prices in accordance with his evaluation of his skill and has definite ideas on how a boy can make the most of shoeshining. When we ask him how he would train another
in the following way: You just start talkin' to him and you say, "Pretty good shoes you have here I" somethin' like that, you know. He says, "Yeah, I bought them," you know. You ask him, "Where did you buy them?" and everything like that, you know, as if you were interested, ha, ha! So then you start gettin' him to talkin'.
The art of shoeshining holds few
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mysteries for Ralph. He throws himself him out of palpable sums of money he, into it with gusto, ambition, and ruse. unlike several other boys, did not quit. Of all our shoeshining boys he is the After all, he had made a commitment liveliest, the most observant, and his to his mother to give her a certain openness to the interview situation, his amount of money each evening; he responsiveness to the interviewer make wasn't free to just walk off the job. him an excellent informant on his sub- Instead he devised an ingenious way to culture. cheat back, one that resulted in even We work with Ralph for long hours; higher earnings for himself. By not turnmore than a hundred pages of ing over all his money to Hy, but by typescript bring to light numerous counting out the exact amount, he kept things we did not know about boys who his tips to himself, and when Hy began live in low-cost housing projects, boys to do arithmetic in his head Ralph whose fathers have deserted, boys made confusing comments so that the whose mothers are now on welfare. At old man actually claimed several dollars age twelve and a half Ralph found less than was his due. In this manner himself stepping into the vacant place Ralph's earnings went up from one left when his father deserted the fami- dollar one night to seven dollars the ly. Recalling the time when his role in next, and he reported proudly how his relation to his mother changed from mother exclaimed with delight when he boy to man, he muses about his father, handed her the money. a former alcoholic with only a sixthHy apparently understood that he grade education who had always had had met his match because Ralph retrouble finding work. As we approach ports, "He never messed me up anythe end of our work with Ralph he more, usually I messed him up." He reports that his father is being sought bothers with some measure of selfby the police. No reference to his father justification, "You know, I don't like to contains any pain or even anger. We rook him, but I didn't want to get infer that he handled the desertion rooked myself." Ralph makes no bones through active coping with the most about the fact that after four months, burning survival problem-money. We when his mother was beginning to get find that before a woman begins to welfare checks, he was glad to quit Hy. receive welfare checks there is a wait- But Hy still remains a possibility ing period during which she cries and should things take a turn for the worse. hopes and does not act on her own In Ralph's words, "I would work for behalf. We catch glimpses of the chil- him only on bad conditions." Having returned to his previous ocdren's sense of helplessness and of their unquestioning acceptance of the neces- cupation of shining shoes, Ralph has drawn an important conclusion. He presity of helping the mother. And so it was that after a period of fers working independently, being actime had elapsed and his father had not countable only to himself. Unlike selling returned, Ralph gave up shoeshining- papers, where " ... every minute you are it was in the middle of the winter workin' for someone and there's no othanyhow-and went to work selling er kids to mess around with," shoeshinnewspapers in barrooms and in traffic ing affords endless opportunities for for IIy, "an old Jew," who ha~ ~ulU freeuom. A shoe::;hine hoy i~ his own newspapers on a busy intersection for master and his own clock: "When you over twenty years. Hy has at one time are workin' for yourself you can do or another employed a number of our whatever you want!" One may work subjects. Boys don't like to work for Hy for oneself in several ways. Ralph's because he is cross and crotchety, and style is clearly entrepreneurial. He is besides, they all agree, he cheats. When fiercely competitive, yet he has set limRalph discovered that Hy was ~heating its even on, this, for a boy can be tOQ
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greedy and get himself into trouble. He considers the advantages of getting a bootblack license. A license would help if one had difficulties with the police. But Ralph has observed unfairness by police with regard to boys and he is careful to stay out of their way. He concludes that even though he has been entitled to a license since the age of twelve, he will forego it: "It would just be a waste of money 'cause you can shine just as good and anyway I usually go home early." In the same realistic manner he refused on one occasion to join a "shoeshine boys' union" even though "the guy" offered him a steady income in exchange for joining. Consequently he does not understand the workings of this "union" and can only tantalize us with bits of information about the rules of membership. The naivete that had characterized Ralph's attitudes about his work at age ten has now, at age thirteen and a half, evolved into a high level of sophistication which, coupled with his ruthless competitiveness, results in his averaging five dollars a day, making him the highest earning shoeshine boy in our group. He knows that in addition to technical skill and understanding the psychology of tipping the matter of location is also of great financial significance. He is large enough not to be afraid of big boys and he throws himself fully into obtaining and maintaining the best corners. Like a young hunter who knows his victim is easier prey on a full stomach, Ralph scorns the untutored assumptions of some of his colleagues who think that bigger crowds are most productive. These colleagues settle themselves in front of a large ice cream parlor near a bus station, not unuerl:ltaIluing that one does much better at a nearby, less busy corner where those who pass have gotten off the bus earlier and have already had their ice cream I People who congregate in front of bus stops and ice cream parlors he labels as "cheap," a label he also readily attaches to anyone
who doesn't want to have his shoes shined-or who wears sneakers. Ralph also teaches us that location choices involve not only corners but also positions along a block. Other boys think that if three boys go shining the one in the middle makes the least money. Ralph knows better. When his friends argue over who will squat in the middle he willingly agrees to give up the ends. So I get in the middle, I don't argue with them. Come the end of the night I make the most money. 'Cause see, I think in a way, you know, they miss one guy and he keeps walkin' by and I ask him and he says, "Yeah, I think I need one." Sometimes [the boy at the other end] says "shine" and he [potential customer] thinks, "Nah, I don't need one," and then he looks at his shoes and he goes, "Oh, I think I need one," and he walks over to my box. Ha, ha! One day Ralph announces sourly, "The cops made a new rule, only two kids to a corner." As the interviewer expresses sympathy that he should have to cope with this new inconvenience and suggests that he might try getting there first, Ralph brushes the suggestion aside and assures her that he is in the process of "making up a new corner." This sounds like moving one's place of business to outwit competition and indeed it turns out to be a forward-looking move, but again it is wrapped in the guise of passivity. When another boy told him the rule, Ralph said, "All right," picked up his shoeshine box and walked around the corner. He announces triumphantly, "I'm cutting his business off I" Apparently his competitor also thought so, because he followed Ralph and accused him of unfair business practices, to which Halph replied with legalistic precision, "No, I'm not. This is another corner. You said the cop said you could have only two guys to a corner. So I'll stay on this corner and you stay on that." Naturally our research team cannot help but develop an interest in Ralph's intellectual abilities. His IQ of 102 (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) is comfortably average, and sug-
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gests that Ralph is not among our brighter subjects. But the disparities in his intellectual functioning10 indicate that this view is too simple, and help explain how, in the seventh grade, he is able to perform at grade level 9.9 in Word Knowledge, 9.4 in Spelling, and 8.1 in Arithmetic-parts of the Metropolitan Achievement Test. One would think that Ralph's sophistication about working would also express itself in purposeful planning for the future. He certainly knows a good deal more about the world of work and the need for money than most boys his age. How does he construe his career? Surprisingly, his information about what a boy has to do to become what he wants to be is rather inaccurate. He states that he is thinking of being a construction man. This, he thinks, requires him to go to a junior college. Consider his approach to his occupational future in the following exampIes: You know, they go for two years. And then, then I can just be, you know, won't take very long for me to get a lot of money. Workin' in that kind of job. 'Cause I was doin', I was shinin' a man's shoes yesterday and, you know, he is a construction man, and I was telIin' him about it, what I was gonna be. And he said that was a good thing. And I asked him how much money he made and he told me $4.55 an hour!
Ralph also soaked up information from his teacher about becoming a teacher himself: Mr. B said they only make about four doJlars, 'cause he was namin' off all the jobs that you get a lot of money. Well, teachin', no, not teachin', ah, that's where you get the lowest money. That's what he told us. And then. ah, let me see, like runnin' IBM 10 Ralph's scaled scores on the WISC subtests range from 5 on Coding and 6 on Information, to 13 on Comprehension and 15 on Digit Span and Picture Completion. This de~ree and patterning of scatter is quite unusual; one would expect scores more tightly clustered around a scaled score of 10. His scaled scores of 13 and 15 reflect very superior intellectual functioning in the areas tapped by those subtests. His low score on Information may well be attributable to the effect of his lower-class background, while the poor relative performance on Coding and to a lesser degree on some other subtests appears to be a function of Ralph's difficulty in working under time pressure.
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machines and bein' secretary, you make pretty good money on that. And he said some other things, r don't even know what they are, jobs like construction and everything like that. Oh yeah, he said if you are in politics you make a lot of money too, and law, like detective.
Although Ralph's judgment that he has to go to junior college to become a construction man is erroneous, this aspiration is clearly stated and carries the same charge of ambition, verve, and pleasure-in-functioning that he expresses in other areas: R: You know, like I want to work for a big company and then I'll be the manager of one little, you know, group of men. Then we build all kinds of stuff. INTERVIEWER: Why is this a good idea? R: 'Cause you make more money than the regular guys, you have to tell 'em all the stuff to do. r: But you'll still have a boss. R: So, I want to have a boss. I wouldn't like to run it all by myself. You know, maybe after I was in between, then I would. If I knew how to do it real good, then I might. You can start out from just nothin', and then you work up. It takes longer that way.
How stable is this fantasy of becoming a construction man? How committed is he to making money as a primary goal? We see him again six months after the conclusion of our interviews, and find that life has indeed changed for him, and along with the changes has come a different outlook or perhaps a different emphasis on what is important. This time he is thoughtful. He has about decided to quit shoeshining. He is intensely involved in getting ahead in school and has made friends with a freshman from MIT who is tutoring him at a neighborhood settlement house, and who sometimes even goes to Ralph's house to work with him on his science projects. It is evident that the tutor and Ralph are getting along very well in spite of the fact that Ralph occasionally forgets his appointments. He esteems the MIT freshman not only because of his obvious intellectual superiority, but also because the tutor is "a regular guy," not distant, not demanding. Sometimes they just
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play ball, and the tutor once collected hundreds of Coke bottle caps in his dormitory for Ralph so he could turn them in for a new football. Importantly, the tutor challenged Ralph's plan to become a construction man. He told him it was very hard work .md that with Ralph's ability and overall good grades he ought to try to get a scholarship to enter one of the finest private schools in the area. Now, at fourteen, shoeshining interferes with Ralph's fierce studying for an entrance examination to the private school. He has a competitor, Bob, whom he assesses as being way below him in English but superior to him in mathematics. Ralph is absorbed in calculating the number of points he would need to defeat him. It is a close and exciting battle but Ralph does not doubt the outcome: "I think I am going to private schooL"
constituted their work lives, and how incompletely these activities captured the vitality of the children we were seeing. We never doubted that these "content" aspects of the interviews were important, but we saw that they were no more important than the manner or style of the behavior described . For the content of behavior and its style of execution are two interdependent aspects of a unity; both are essential to comprehensive understanding. In comparing Ralph with other boys, were we to consider only what he said or did, we would find fundamental similarities, and we would miss much of the uniqueness of his ways, much of the quality of his experience at work. Thus we sought a means of ordering our data that captured the unique, idiosyncratic, stylistic variations in how boys work, variations which override the demands of the job and which express the person in relation to the task. We evolved the CONCEPT OF WORK STYLE concept of work style. Ralph's interviews leave one with an We defined five dimensions of work impression familiar to those who have style that seemed to capture important worked with interview material: They differences among our subjects. These are rich, multifaceted, real. But their were: work-mindedness, activity-passivvery richness is paralyzing. A kind of ity in work, occupational orientation, tension exists between the immediacy concept of life span, and work relationof clinical data and the abstractness of ships with adults.ll We shall consider the questions one attempts to answer each of these dimensions in detail. with them. This tension is resolved only Work mindedness refers to the exwhen intervening conceptual categotent and nature of the boys' commitries, introduced to help order the data ment to work. Of course all children in terms of the research questions, have relevance to both data and questions. 11 Each dimension was cast in the form of 11 That is, if the conceptual categories too five-point rating scale. Interview material percompletely reflect the research ques- taining to work was rated for each subject by tions and inadequately encompass the judges otherwise not associated with the project. interjudge reliability of these ratings for richness and SUbtlety of the interview The each dimension was satisfactory. Details concerning procedures and reliability can be found materials, the researcher senses to his in the dissertation cited in footnote 6. Interdismay that the real meaning of his correlations between the work-style dimensions from .16 to .61 and six of the ten reaehf!d materials has somehow eluded his ranged statistical significance, implying sufficient congrasp. And conceptual categories in- sistency in our subjects across dimensions to justify viewing the dimensions as elements of a sufficiently in touch with the research work-style concept. At the same time, each of questions-a more unusual situation- the five dimensions contributes enough unique meaning to warrant their use as separate dimenare equally disastrous. sions. Analysis of the statistical relationships We came to our study with no ready- among dimensions of work style and between dimensions and various family and cognimade concepts. As we worked with the these tive variables in our subjects will be considered boys we began to realize how similar in a subsequent publication. These five dimensions do not, of course, exhaust the possible were the activities and events which stylistic aspects of the ways in which boys work.
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who work, according to our definition, Ralph is such a subject. His sense of do so to earn money, but from the craft, his intensely competitive enterreactions of some we infer that there prising, clearly convey the central posiare additional, psychological reasons tion of work in his young life. Yet his for their effort. Some take little or no rating on work-mindedness is an inpleasure in their work. It fails to cap- termediate three, perhaps because the ture their interest. They differentiate rater took into account his playful atsharply between work and play, and tachment to work, which lacks the when they work they invest themselves adultlike seriousness characteristic of minimally. Work for them is an activity boys given higher ratings. Ralph clearly like dressing or brushing teeth; it is likes his work but he does not appear to part of life but not a matter of commit- value it for its own sake. Particularly ment or identity. For these boys there noteworthy, given our voluminous inappears to be little inducement to work terview material on his work experibeyond the money they earn. They dis- ence, is the absence of any generalizacuss their work matter-of-factly, with- tion about the usefulness of work to a out enthusiasm, and they have little to boy, something many other subjects dissay about it. When asked what was cussed in one way or another. good about having a paper route, one Activity-passivity in work refers to boy said he didn't know. He added that the extent that the boy wishes to, or if he could have his pick of jobs he'd tries to fashion the conditions of his like to be a supervisor. The interviewer work. In the case of children regularly asked how that would be better than employed, activity is expressed by his present job. He replied, "One thing, pressing for alterations of pay, time, you don't do a route. You make more and work conditions. In the case of money and you don't have to go out in shoeshine boys it is expressed through the morning and in the night. I guess the styls of negotiation with customers about pay and with police about corthat's all." But some boys value work for other ners. The most active subjects are overtreasons than immediate gain. Work is ly revisionist and control-seeking to a so much a part of their present exist- degree that has been a continuous ence that for them it means living out source of surprise to us. For example, a sense of identity. There is an adultlike one of our subjects, age twelve, orgaquality in the way they talk about nized a newsboys' strike which effecwork, and often they have given some tively paralyzed a neighborhood news thought to the value of work experience dealer with a good many subscribers. at an early age. Some of these boys He did this out of anger at the fact value work because it keeps them busy that the younger boys were allowed while at the same time providing them only to distribute, never to collect, and with spending money, thus serving in were thus barred from the kind of complementary ways to keep them out contact with customers that results in of trouble. Others respond to the ques- tips. He would be considered high on tion of why they are working as fol- activity. A boy who had the same paper lows: "Well, because if I don't work route for three years with never a rewhen I'm young I won't learn nothin' qUARt for either more PfI,Y or additional about workin' when I'm older." Often customers would be rated relatively this quality of high work-mindedness passive. Ralph was rated high (four) on the does not appear condensed in such eminently quotable statements, but rather activity-passivity dimension. His fruspervades the discussion more diffusely. tration of Hy's attempts to cheat him, These conversations have a quality of his acute attention to the importance of zest and excitement accompanied by an location in maximizing his shoeshining business, and his crafty one-upmanship element of seriousness and purpose.
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when competitors invoked the new rule limiting a corner to two shoeshiners all attest to Ralph's unwillingness to accept the world as it presents itself. But it is also important to note, as our rating system does not, that his active style was often achieved by passive means: He gained the upper hand through a strategy of apparent resignation and subtle countermove. Occupational orientation involves assessment of the degree to which subjects articulate an interest in future vocational activities and, more importantly, a disposition to conceptualize their lives in terms of continuity between the present and the imagined or planned-for future. Many working boys appear never to have considered how their work might have implications for their future vocational activities. Some attempt to do so, but their reasoning is replete with gross inaccuracies or it lacks conviction, suggesting that they have not previously considered the issue and are simply responding to an unexpected line of questioning. Others point to some general or quite specific skill they are developing in their current work, which they believe will have relevance to their future life, or they say that their present earnings are being carefully saved against the costs of preparation for future work life. Several boys mentioned the importance of learning how to work during childhood. One quotation cited under workmindedness is also applicable here: " ... if I don't work when I'm young I won't learn nothin' about workin' when I'm 0Ider."12 Another boy, asked what was good about working as a boy, replied, "Well, you get money and, ah, you, you start gettin' ready for bigger jobs if you work." "You have to learn how to obey your boss." Ralph received a low rating (one) on the occupational-orientation dimension. 12 This raises the question of the degree to which these dimensions overlap. Their productmoment correlation was .37, significant beyond the .01 level, but accounting for less than 14 percent of the variance.
His thinking about his occupational future displayed the same enthusiasm we saw in his discussion of his present work life, but it contained an inaccurate, fantasy-based view of adulthood. Nor did he relate his present work to future occupational planning, even implicitly. During our interviews he was beginning to gather information, but he appeared to be overly swayed by the person he had talked to most recently. When we saw him six months after the conclusion of our interviews,13 Ralph had partially relinquished the plan to be a construction man together with the fantasy of comfortable wealth easily attained. He was then intent on a future more immediately at hand-the acquisition of an education. He was less concerned and less willing to speculate about what would follow. To what extent this new emphasis will become internalized, become truly a part of Ralph, and how much it reflects a passing identification with the MIT tutor is, of course, unknown. Concept of life span complements the occupational orientation dimension in that it focuses on the span of time covered in the boy's consideration of his future rather than on the continuity between present and future. Some boys have never thought of their future. They seem to live for the moment and questions pertaining to planning their lives make little sense to them. Others appear to have given some thought to growing up and have planned around various markers in time. These markers are usually furnished ready-made by society, such as the legal school-leaving age, enlistment or draft age, and so on. Still others think of their lives in terms of a rather complete life span concept, including the kind of life they hope to live as adults. Some discuss prospects for retirement, and these children are frequently security oriented. A boy's view of his life span may focus on his vocational life or it may be phrased more generally in terms of life style. 18 Materials derived from this late contact were not rated by judges.
CHILDREN WHO WORK AND THE CONCEPT OF WORK STYLE
For the most part, when these boys think about future they do so in terms of vocational activities. One subject explained:
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When I was about four I got this feeling the first time my mother took me to Mass, I got this feeling .that I felt like ~eing a priest, and ever SInce then I have still been thinking about it. Already my mother hopes that I will. She wants the first one in the family to go into the priesthood or something, so, but that is what I have been thinking of lately.
He explained that after high school he could either go into the service and then later go to college and seminary, or he could do that first and then go into the army as a chaplain. The interviewer noted that it would probably make his mother happy if he became a priest and asked if that was largely why he wanted to do it. To this the boy replied: "Yeahhh, plus I want to do it for myself." Another boy wanted to be a dentist. He understood the extent of the required education and had tentative plans for obtaining it. He had also discussed possibilities in the field of dentistry with his family dentist. The time span involved in Ralph's view of his future extended to at least early or middle adulthood (rated four). He looked beyond the completion of a junior college course to a time when he "" uuld be a construction man in charge of a work crew, and even to a time when he might shoulder greater responsibility: ..• you make more money than the regular guys, you have to tell 'em all the stuff to do .... I want to have a boss. I wouldn't like to run it all by myself. You know, maybe after I was in between, then I would. If I knew how to do it real good, then I might..•.
In contrast to these relatively extended life-span concepts some boys have only vague notions about their future lives: I: Have you any idea what you'll do when you get out of school? S: No, not really. I: Are you going to go to high school? S: Yes, I'm going to college. I: Do you have any idea what college is like? S: No.
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I: What would you study in college? S: I don't know. I don't know what they have. I: Then when you get out of college what would you do? S: I don't know, get a job. I: What kind of job? S: I don't know.
Work relationships with adults deals with the degree of the boy's investment in relationships which would not exist but for his work. Our primary interest lay in the quality of the boy's relationship with his employer. But some working boys do not have employers, though they do have significant relationships with adults in the work context. Shoeshine boys are an example. Among our subjects there are striking differences in the importance of these work relationships. In some cases they are imper_ sonal and matter-of-fact, and discussions of adults are anemic: They lack luster interest, or affect. Some boys tolerate the ultimate in anonymity, neither knowing their boss's name nor being known other than as "kid." For others, relationships with employers . or other relevant adults are more Important, but there is also balanced awareness of other aspects of the work situation. The work life of these boys could be adequately understood without describing their relationships with people at work. In marked contrast are boys whose work lives are dominated by relationships that originated in the work context, but have come to transcend the requirements of the work situation. Some of the~e boys have b~ come attached to theIr employers In quasi parent-child relationships in which they are cared for by, and give a good deal of love to a man to who:n they are initially not related by any tIe other than work. These relationships are moving in their spontaneity; losses are sad and palpable. For example, one thirteen-year-old simply quit his job with a news agency because his boss was transferred. Of course, for some boys the relationship with the employer is a hostile symbiosis in which mutual accusations of dishonesty and acts of bad faith predominate. Relationships at
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mental research; our present data do not illuminate the issue beyond informing us that the two relevant dimensions -work-mindedness and occupational orientation-bear an intermediate, positive correlation. While the five dimensions have been thus far grouped together as elements of work style, we believe there are important psychological differences among them. Underlying the hypothesis suggested in the preceding paragraph is the belief that the dimensions constitute developmental variables-that a group of boys rerated after a sufficiently long span of time would receive higher ratings as a group. Looking at boys from the vantage point of these dimensions, we believe that they do not develop at an even rate. Also, it appears that aspects of development to which our dimensions refer become critical at different periods of life. Thus it is likely that various aspects of work style do not stabilize at the same time, but that once .a boy does achieve stability of style in one or more respects only significant alterations of personality orgaDISCUSSION nization can lead to a change in work Applied to Ralph, these five work- style. Let us consider the dimensions from style dimensions highlight a certain unevenness. This boy who assertively this point of view. Occupational orienand eagerly confronts his present work tation and life span are, we suggest, and who takes a relatively long view of the last of the five dimensions to stabihis life in vocational terms, does not lize. Indeed, it seems likely that both bring these two threads together in a may be in flux during the age range plan for his occupational future which spanned by our subjects. Recall the mareflects either a reality orientation or a jor shift Ralph made in his career sense of continuity between present plans within six months following his work and that future. There are un- last official contact with us, and that doubtedly many determinants of this this shift was largely determined, at circumstance, but it can be partially least superficially, by his experience understood in terms of Ralph's in- with the MIT tutor. Recent research on termediate rating for workminded- the occupational planning and aspiraness, which we speculated had to tions of boys Ralph's age indicates that do with his playful, if intense, orien- this is a period of considerable fertation to his work. Indeed, one nIight ment, though by no means chaos, in the hypothesize that a quality of adultlike career planning process. 14 It seems seriousness about childhood work ex- likely that during periods of change in perience is one prerequisite for formu- career objective and in plans for its lating life plans in which that work ,. Warren D. Gribbons and Paul R. Lohnes, plays a part. This is, of course, a ques- Oareer Development, U.S. Office of Education, Cooperative Research Project No. 5-0088; Westion to be answered through develop- ton, Mass., Regis College, 1966. John C. Flanthis pole of the work-relationships continuum clearly meet important needs for human contact; the work situation simply provides an arena for their expression. Ralph's relationships with adults in his various work settings are of the sort described by the more balanced middle position (three) on this dimension. He utilized his personality and his cunning to extract tips from customers under the guise of friendly conversation, but he also used adults as sources of information and as partial identification figures. His relationship with Hy had all the ingredients of the hostilesymbiotic form mentioned above, and indeed Hy was involved in such relationships with other subjects of our study. But Ralph did not allow his relationship with Hy to sour in this fashion. He saw Hy for what he was and met him on his own ground. And during moments of reflection he expressed regret about this hostile, exploitative situation: " ... I don't like to rook him, but I didn't want to get rooked myself."
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realization one might find changes in the degree of relationship boys see between their present work and their planned-for future occupation, and also in their conceptualization of the period of their lives embraced by these plans. Moreover, these two dimensions differ from the others in that they involve relatively abstract consideration of the future. Piaget has shown that the mental structures required for thinking about matters of future, of potential, as opposed to the immediate, concrete present, typically do not develop until after age eleven. In contrast, we think that our subjects have already achieved fairly stable styles on the activity-passivity and work-relationships dimensions. And we think the work-mindedness dimension falls somewhere between these two sets of dimensions-that most of our subjects have already established their style on work-mindedness, but that some of the youngest may still be in the process of doing so. Evidence for these impressions is highly SUbjective. We note that when we speculate about what a given subject will be like as an adult we consistently use our estimate of his position on activity-passivity, work relationships, and, somewhat less frequently, work-mindedness as a basis for prediction. In these predictive efforts we rarely find ourselves making reference to either life span or occupational orientation. We return repeatedly to the conviction that there is simply something more final, more settled about these first three dimensions. But this analysis can be pushed a step further by considering the dimensions in terms of certain developmental issues of childhood. The activitypassivity dimension was defined in terms of revisionism and controlseeking in the work context. These characteristics seem to us highly dependent on the way the child has agan and others, Project TALENT: One-year FoZlow-up Studie8; Pittsburgh, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1966.
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resolved the prelatency developmental issues of autonomy and initiative referred to in psychoanalytic psychosexual theory and, more explicity, 1n Erikson's psychosocial elaboration of that theory.15 Similarly, the workrelationships dimension must reflect early learning and conflict resolution concerning relationships with significant authority figures. Workmindedness, with its twin emphases on capacity for self-investment and valuing, seems more directly related to the developmental issues of the latency period, to the issues Erikson conceptualized as "industry versus inferiority." The occupational orientation and life span dimensions, in addition to requiring modes of thinking typical of adolescence, also appear to have much to do with the adolescent issues of identity establishment. The concept of work style seems to us to have several potential research applications beyond the uses to which we have put it. Our discussion has raised obvious questions for longitudinal personality research, but it also suggests questions concerning the generality of style across behavioral domains. School, for example, has been called the work of the child, yet little is known about stylistic aspects of children's school behavior. Much could be learned about the nature of the multiple experiential realities of late childhood by comparing work-style ratings from both job and school situations. The concept of work style should also be useful in vocational behavior research. Typically, the work life of adults has been investigated in terms of occupational-group comparisons. The introduction of the concept of work style promises amplification and expansion of this approach, leading to greater illumination of the relations between personality and work. It should also 16 See Erikson in footnote 4. Of course a less restrictive definition of activity-passivity would imply a developmental course affected by constitutional predisposition (drive endowment> and many other vicissitudes of prelatency development.
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contribute to our understanding of the developmental processes of vocational behavior in childhood. Little is known about the basis of occupational preferences in early adolescence, and career plans formulated in the eighth or ninth grade are currently only moderately useful in predicting career plans or occupational activities a year or two after high school. How they will fare in predictions over longer time periods awaits the conclusion of longitudinal research presently in progress. 16 We believe the work-style concept will prove useful in explaining some of the variance not accounted for at present. Thus divergent or even apparently contradictory occupational choices might make more sense if we examine the possibility that they represent, in part, an attempt to give expression to stylistic personality dispositions, that job labels mask the potential for expressive behavior available within an occupational group. For example, a boy who expresses the wish to become either a construction boss or a ship's captain .. See footnote 14.
may be expressing in these apparently divergent choices his wish to stand in a position of authority to others-a wish which might be predictable from his style of relating to adults in his childhood work setting. Moreover, inclusion of work style in research on the developmental process of choosing an occupation seems advantageous because the concept of style is well adapted to the problem of continuity, ·which is of increasing interest in such research, and because occupational choice is so overdetermined by life circumstances, luck, opportunity, and unpredictable setbacks. Consider Ralph. Almost anything may happen. One can imagine him as a construction worker, career soldier, or businessman. The alternatives will depend on what life brings his way. But one can be reasonably certain that whatever he does, he will continue to engage in life zestfully, actively, and with a keen sense of the immediate. DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 48104
ISSN: 0033-2747 (Print) 1943-281X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upsy20
Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Style Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden & Sylvia Woodaman To cite this article: Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden & Sylvia Woodaman (1967) Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Style, Psychiatry, 30:4, 392-404, DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1967.11023525 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1967.11023525
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Children Who Work and the Concept of Work Stylet Mary Engel, Gerald Marsden, and Sylvia Woodaman*
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W
ORKING CHILDREN are not a thing of the past. Many boys work extensively before they are fourteen but almost nothing is known about them. Study of why and how they work offers important opportunities for the enrichment of theories of child development and vocational behavior. But why certain children turn to work at an early age is currently of more than theoretical interest, since programs designed to provide work training have become major instruments of social change. We have accordingly conducted an extensive statistical and an intensive clinical study of working boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. 1 The purpose of this paper is to present a portrait of one working boy, and to explicate certain concepts used in the analysis of clinical materials pertaining to boys' discussions of their work experience-concepts which we believe hold promise for the exploration of man's orientation to work. Previous contributions to the psychology of work have produced few theoretical or conceptual tools appropriate to the study of working children. Investigations conducted within the framework of industrial psychology and sociology have focused primarily on issues of worker productivity and satisfaction. Psychologists and sociologists interested in adult vocational behavior have typically investigated specific occupational groups and their relation to the larger social structure, or relations between personality characteristics and occupational group membership.2 The occupational-group ap-
proach seems inappropriate to the study of working children because it "adultomorphizes" the data. The range of job types open to children is severely constrained and determined by social factors. Moreover, the occupationalgroup memberships of children below the age of fourteen lack stability. The kind of work a child does is certainly of interest, but occupational category is relatively less useful as a basis for discriminating different varieties of working children than it is in the study of working adults. Investigators interested in the vocational behavior of children have studied
• Peter L. Berger, "Some General Observations on the Problem of Work," in The Human Shape of Work: Studies in the Sociology of Occup(Uo tions, edited by Peter L. Berger; New York, Macmillan, 1964; Chapter 6. John L. Holland,
"Major Programs of Research on Vocational BehaVior," in Man in a World at Work, edited by Henry Borow; Boston, Houghton Mifllin, 1964; Chapter 12.
• Dr. !i1ngel (Ph.D. Peabo?y College 56) is Associate Professor, l?epa!tment ?f .Psychology, and ASSOCIate Research ScientIst, Mental Health Research Institute, UnIVerSIty of MIChIgan. Dr. Marsden (Ed.D. Harvard 67) Is Instructor, Department of Psychiatl'y. and Lecturer, Departillellt of Psychology, University of Michigan. Miss Woodaman (M.A. Tufts College 66) is Head Teacher, Somerville Guidance Center, Somerville, Massachusetts. t This research has been supported by the Milton Fund and the Center for Research in Careers, Harvard University, and by NIMH Grant No.1 Rll MH02146-01. We wish to express our gratitude to Dr. Anne Roe and Dr. David Tiedeman, directors of the Center for Research in Careers, whose support made possible the work reported in this paper. 1 The statistical study was based on a stratified random sample of 35 public school classrooms, grades four through eight, in Boston and seven of the communities contiguous with it. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire administered to the 965 chlldren in these classrooms. Some results of this study appear in our paper "Orientation to Work in Children," Amer. J. Orthopsychiatry, in press. Details of the clinical study appear below.
[ 392
J
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preemployment variables, such as occupational preference, aspiration, and expectation, and have begun to examine developmental aspects of the occupational-choice process.3 A developmental approach has also characterized the more useful and exciting efforts to study the psychology of work by way of psychoanalytic theory.4 General agreement appears to exist among investigators pursuing a developmental approach that the latency period has importance as a time when the child normally shifts the locus of his attempts at solution of pressing psychological issues: He moves from a strategy of attack via fantasy within the framework of the nuclear family, to one of attack via realistic achievement and mastery in the larger world beyond the family.5 But at present these studies are primarily of heuristic value, suggesting only fragments of what might someday become a reasonably comprehensive developmental theory of work. None of these investigators has examined the role of work experience in the psychological development of children between the ages of eight and fourteen.6
Because of the paucity of studies on the psychological implications of early work experience and of concepts tailored to the requirements of this problem, our clinical study was exploratory by design. To insure that subjects did in fact work, we attempted to recruit any boys under fourteen whom we found working at jobs such as newspaper peddling, shoeshining, and stock clerking. We also obtained names from employers who we knew hired boys below the age of fourteen.7 Fifty-two such boys were included in the study, ranging in age from eight to fourteen, with a modal age of twelve. They varied in socioeconomic status from Class II to V,s with 83 percent coming from Classes IV and V. All subjects were Caucasian; we chose not to introduce the complex variable of race. After verifying ages and obtaining parental permission, we arranged for the participation of interested boys in the project by employing them for a temporary parttime job, for which they were paid the minimum hourly wage. These jobs involved them as subjects for extensive psychological testing and interviewing.9 The semistructured interviews were
• See Holland in footnote 2. Henry Borow, "Development of Occupational Motives and Roles," pp. 373-422 in Review of Ohild Development Research, Vol. 2, edited by Lois W. Hoffman and M. L. Hoffman; New York, Russell Sage Foundation. 1966. '-Erik H. Erikson, Ohildhood and Society (2nd ed'); New York, Norton, 1963. Barbara Lantos, "Work and the Instincts," Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. (1943) 24:114-119; and "Metapsychological Considerations on the Concept of Work," Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. (1952) 33 :439443. Anna Freud, Normality and Patholoqy in Ohildhood; New York, Internat. Univ. Press, 1965; Chapter 3. Therese Benedek, "On the Psychic Economy of Developmental Processes," paper read at the Conference on New Directions in Research on Normal Behavior, Michael Reesc Hospital and Medical Center, Chicago, September, 1966. Some of these and other relevant psychoanalytic contributions to thc study of work have recently been reviewed by Waiter S. Neff in "Psychoanalytic Conceptions of the Meaning of Work," PSYCHIATRY (1965) 28 :324-333. • In this connection it is worth nothing that in the statistical study we found that 73 percent of the boys had earned money by working for persons outside their family at one time or another, and that the modal age at which they began this work was ten. See article cited in footnote 1. Among the working boys of the clinical study, who had been more carefully selected, the modal age for beginning work was also ten. Of these boys, 62 percent began their work experience between the ages of nine and eleven. • We use the term "work" In the narrow sense
of earning money from persons outside the family. Work in a broader sense, which would include school activities, is relevant to the development of a work orientation but is beyond the scope of our studies. There is an extensive literature on working children in the field of child labor reform, some of which might be called psychological, but its rclevance to the problems we are concerned with is negligible. These materials have been briefiy reviewed in the paper cited in footnote I, and at length in Gerald Marsden. "A Psychological Study of Working Boys," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1967. • More conventional methods of subject selection based on random sampling were not possible when we began our clinical study. Census data on such children do not exist. Most work illegally, which means that subjects obtained through the agencies in 'each community which provide work permits for children would constitute a biased sample. S Socioeconomic status was assessed by means of the Hollingshead Two-factor Index of Social Position, which is based on the educational attainment and occupational status of the head of the household. The Index identifies five groups, Class I corresponding roughly to "upper class" and Class V to "lower-lower class." • Subjects were told that we were interested in learning about ways in which children grow up, that we would like them to teach us as much as they could about how things were for them, and that we were particularly interested in thcir work.
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conducted as informally as possible. They occupied three to four hours in up to three sessions, and covered work history, work attitudes and circumstances, school, family life, leisure-time activities, and future plans. The central focus was, of course, the boys' work life, and the resulting documents frequently provide a rich and complex view of aspects of childhood largely unknown to middle-class professionals. Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 15:34 17 August 2017
A PORTRAIT OF RALPH Ralph started shoeshining when he was ten, and this is how he says it happened:
boy to become a five-dollars-a-day shoeshine boy, Ralph suggests that most importantly the novice would have to know his trade, "I'd show him how to shine and I'd show him how to snap the rag like me, and the guy [customer] thinks he is getting a real fast shine. And make sure you always brush it off first 'cause the guy is gonna yell at you, you have to clean them before you put the polish on." There are some additional suggestions, because Ralph has clear opinions about materials of his trade. He prefers two particular brands of polish because both of these pastes have an enhanced effect if kept warm and soft to the finger. But to a high-earning shoeshine boy it is not enough to know the technology. It is important to know the psychology of tipping.
Well, really, the first time I went, I went down there and, you know, and I, and I just sat there for five minutes and then, you know, I didn't do nothin' about it, you know, I just knew that you were supposed to shine a guy's shoes. I didn't know nothin' about it, you know, and there was no one If the guy talks just keep talkin' to him, on the corner that night. I think it was a mmm-hm, you know, just agree with everyWednesday and that's the rotten est day you thing that he says and you get a big tip. can go. It's before pay day, so I went up Yeah! Then you get him, keep him onto there and this guy came along and he says, another thing, something like that, you "I'll take a shine." So I shined his shoes know, then later on he is thinkin', "How did and he gave me a quarter. And I go, "I I get onto that subject?" made a quarter." And then I was just Showing interest in the customer's gettin' ready to go home and I was only there for about fifteen minutes and another person is not the only avenue to large guy come up and says he wanted a shine, so tips. It is also important to arouse pity I shined his shoes and he gave me another quarter. So then I goes, "Ooooh, I made toward oneself: half a dollar!" And then I ran over the bus They [customers] say, "You make a lot and went home. I had forty cents after I of money shinin'?" Like you say, "Ah, you paid my carfare. Then when I got home, don't make too much money." And then you know, I was braggin' about it to the while you are shinin' he says, ah, "How kids that I made forty cents and he goes, much money did you make today?" And "Oh, that's rotten for shinin'." I goes, "Not you tell him some real, real low price, you for me it ain't." So then, you know, I found say, "Oh, you are my first shine," or someout that you were supposed to stay, you thin' like that. I used always to do that know, even if it took longer waitin' for the every single time, yeah, and I'd get half a guys. You were supposed to ask them. I dollar and quarters, and the guy will say, didn't know. So then he says, "You can go "Here, sorry for ya," or somethin' like that. shinin' with me Friday...." He showed me A silent customer, one who does not everything about it, gave me little tips and stuff. engage him, is encouraged to interact
Now, as we interview Ralph, we learn that at age thirteen and a half, after more than three years of shining, Ralph considers himself very experienced; he raised his prices in accordance with his evaluation of his skill and has definite ideas on how a boy can make the most of shoeshining. When we ask him how he would train another
in the following way: You just start talkin' to him and you say, "Pretty good shoes you have here I" somethin' like that, you know. He says, "Yeah, I bought them," you know. You ask him, "Where did you buy them?" and everything like that, you know, as if you were interested, ha, ha! So then you start gettin' him to talkin'.
The art of shoeshining holds few
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mysteries for Ralph. He throws himself him out of palpable sums of money he, into it with gusto, ambition, and ruse. unlike several other boys, did not quit. Of all our shoeshining boys he is the After all, he had made a commitment liveliest, the most observant, and his to his mother to give her a certain openness to the interview situation, his amount of money each evening; he responsiveness to the interviewer make wasn't free to just walk off the job. him an excellent informant on his sub- Instead he devised an ingenious way to culture. cheat back, one that resulted in even We work with Ralph for long hours; higher earnings for himself. By not turnmore than a hundred pages of ing over all his money to Hy, but by typescript bring to light numerous counting out the exact amount, he kept things we did not know about boys who his tips to himself, and when Hy began live in low-cost housing projects, boys to do arithmetic in his head Ralph whose fathers have deserted, boys made confusing comments so that the whose mothers are now on welfare. At old man actually claimed several dollars age twelve and a half Ralph found less than was his due. In this manner himself stepping into the vacant place Ralph's earnings went up from one left when his father deserted the fami- dollar one night to seven dollars the ly. Recalling the time when his role in next, and he reported proudly how his relation to his mother changed from mother exclaimed with delight when he boy to man, he muses about his father, handed her the money. a former alcoholic with only a sixthHy apparently understood that he grade education who had always had had met his match because Ralph retrouble finding work. As we approach ports, "He never messed me up anythe end of our work with Ralph he more, usually I messed him up." He reports that his father is being sought bothers with some measure of selfby the police. No reference to his father justification, "You know, I don't like to contains any pain or even anger. We rook him, but I didn't want to get infer that he handled the desertion rooked myself." Ralph makes no bones through active coping with the most about the fact that after four months, burning survival problem-money. We when his mother was beginning to get find that before a woman begins to welfare checks, he was glad to quit Hy. receive welfare checks there is a wait- But Hy still remains a possibility ing period during which she cries and should things take a turn for the worse. hopes and does not act on her own In Ralph's words, "I would work for behalf. We catch glimpses of the chil- him only on bad conditions." Having returned to his previous ocdren's sense of helplessness and of their unquestioning acceptance of the neces- cupation of shining shoes, Ralph has drawn an important conclusion. He presity of helping the mother. And so it was that after a period of fers working independently, being actime had elapsed and his father had not countable only to himself. Unlike selling returned, Ralph gave up shoeshining- papers, where " ... every minute you are it was in the middle of the winter workin' for someone and there's no othanyhow-and went to work selling er kids to mess around with," shoeshinnewspapers in barrooms and in traffic ing affords endless opportunities for for IIy, "an old Jew," who ha~ ~ulU freeuom. A shoe::;hine hoy i~ his own newspapers on a busy intersection for master and his own clock: "When you over twenty years. Hy has at one time are workin' for yourself you can do or another employed a number of our whatever you want!" One may work subjects. Boys don't like to work for Hy for oneself in several ways. Ralph's because he is cross and crotchety, and style is clearly entrepreneurial. He is besides, they all agree, he cheats. When fiercely competitive, yet he has set limRalph discovered that Hy was ~heating its even on, this, for a boy can be tOQ
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greedy and get himself into trouble. He considers the advantages of getting a bootblack license. A license would help if one had difficulties with the police. But Ralph has observed unfairness by police with regard to boys and he is careful to stay out of their way. He concludes that even though he has been entitled to a license since the age of twelve, he will forego it: "It would just be a waste of money 'cause you can shine just as good and anyway I usually go home early." In the same realistic manner he refused on one occasion to join a "shoeshine boys' union" even though "the guy" offered him a steady income in exchange for joining. Consequently he does not understand the workings of this "union" and can only tantalize us with bits of information about the rules of membership. The naivete that had characterized Ralph's attitudes about his work at age ten has now, at age thirteen and a half, evolved into a high level of sophistication which, coupled with his ruthless competitiveness, results in his averaging five dollars a day, making him the highest earning shoeshine boy in our group. He knows that in addition to technical skill and understanding the psychology of tipping the matter of location is also of great financial significance. He is large enough not to be afraid of big boys and he throws himself fully into obtaining and maintaining the best corners. Like a young hunter who knows his victim is easier prey on a full stomach, Ralph scorns the untutored assumptions of some of his colleagues who think that bigger crowds are most productive. These colleagues settle themselves in front of a large ice cream parlor near a bus station, not unuerl:ltaIluing that one does much better at a nearby, less busy corner where those who pass have gotten off the bus earlier and have already had their ice cream I People who congregate in front of bus stops and ice cream parlors he labels as "cheap," a label he also readily attaches to anyone
who doesn't want to have his shoes shined-or who wears sneakers. Ralph also teaches us that location choices involve not only corners but also positions along a block. Other boys think that if three boys go shining the one in the middle makes the least money. Ralph knows better. When his friends argue over who will squat in the middle he willingly agrees to give up the ends. So I get in the middle, I don't argue with them. Come the end of the night I make the most money. 'Cause see, I think in a way, you know, they miss one guy and he keeps walkin' by and I ask him and he says, "Yeah, I think I need one." Sometimes [the boy at the other end] says "shine" and he [potential customer] thinks, "Nah, I don't need one," and then he looks at his shoes and he goes, "Oh, I think I need one," and he walks over to my box. Ha, ha! One day Ralph announces sourly, "The cops made a new rule, only two kids to a corner." As the interviewer expresses sympathy that he should have to cope with this new inconvenience and suggests that he might try getting there first, Ralph brushes the suggestion aside and assures her that he is in the process of "making up a new corner." This sounds like moving one's place of business to outwit competition and indeed it turns out to be a forward-looking move, but again it is wrapped in the guise of passivity. When another boy told him the rule, Ralph said, "All right," picked up his shoeshine box and walked around the corner. He announces triumphantly, "I'm cutting his business off I" Apparently his competitor also thought so, because he followed Ralph and accused him of unfair business practices, to which Halph replied with legalistic precision, "No, I'm not. This is another corner. You said the cop said you could have only two guys to a corner. So I'll stay on this corner and you stay on that." Naturally our research team cannot help but develop an interest in Ralph's intellectual abilities. His IQ of 102 (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) is comfortably average, and sug-
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gests that Ralph is not among our brighter subjects. But the disparities in his intellectual functioning10 indicate that this view is too simple, and help explain how, in the seventh grade, he is able to perform at grade level 9.9 in Word Knowledge, 9.4 in Spelling, and 8.1 in Arithmetic-parts of the Metropolitan Achievement Test. One would think that Ralph's sophistication about working would also express itself in purposeful planning for the future. He certainly knows a good deal more about the world of work and the need for money than most boys his age. How does he construe his career? Surprisingly, his information about what a boy has to do to become what he wants to be is rather inaccurate. He states that he is thinking of being a construction man. This, he thinks, requires him to go to a junior college. Consider his approach to his occupational future in the following exampIes: You know, they go for two years. And then, then I can just be, you know, won't take very long for me to get a lot of money. Workin' in that kind of job. 'Cause I was doin', I was shinin' a man's shoes yesterday and, you know, he is a construction man, and I was telIin' him about it, what I was gonna be. And he said that was a good thing. And I asked him how much money he made and he told me $4.55 an hour!
Ralph also soaked up information from his teacher about becoming a teacher himself: Mr. B said they only make about four doJlars, 'cause he was namin' off all the jobs that you get a lot of money. Well, teachin', no, not teachin', ah, that's where you get the lowest money. That's what he told us. And then. ah, let me see, like runnin' IBM 10 Ralph's scaled scores on the WISC subtests range from 5 on Coding and 6 on Information, to 13 on Comprehension and 15 on Digit Span and Picture Completion. This de~ree and patterning of scatter is quite unusual; one would expect scores more tightly clustered around a scaled score of 10. His scaled scores of 13 and 15 reflect very superior intellectual functioning in the areas tapped by those subtests. His low score on Information may well be attributable to the effect of his lower-class background, while the poor relative performance on Coding and to a lesser degree on some other subtests appears to be a function of Ralph's difficulty in working under time pressure.
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machines and bein' secretary, you make pretty good money on that. And he said some other things, r don't even know what they are, jobs like construction and everything like that. Oh yeah, he said if you are in politics you make a lot of money too, and law, like detective.
Although Ralph's judgment that he has to go to junior college to become a construction man is erroneous, this aspiration is clearly stated and carries the same charge of ambition, verve, and pleasure-in-functioning that he expresses in other areas: R: You know, like I want to work for a big company and then I'll be the manager of one little, you know, group of men. Then we build all kinds of stuff. INTERVIEWER: Why is this a good idea? R: 'Cause you make more money than the regular guys, you have to tell 'em all the stuff to do. r: But you'll still have a boss. R: So, I want to have a boss. I wouldn't like to run it all by myself. You know, maybe after I was in between, then I would. If I knew how to do it real good, then I might. You can start out from just nothin', and then you work up. It takes longer that way.
How stable is this fantasy of becoming a construction man? How committed is he to making money as a primary goal? We see him again six months after the conclusion of our interviews, and find that life has indeed changed for him, and along with the changes has come a different outlook or perhaps a different emphasis on what is important. This time he is thoughtful. He has about decided to quit shoeshining. He is intensely involved in getting ahead in school and has made friends with a freshman from MIT who is tutoring him at a neighborhood settlement house, and who sometimes even goes to Ralph's house to work with him on his science projects. It is evident that the tutor and Ralph are getting along very well in spite of the fact that Ralph occasionally forgets his appointments. He esteems the MIT freshman not only because of his obvious intellectual superiority, but also because the tutor is "a regular guy," not distant, not demanding. Sometimes they just
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play ball, and the tutor once collected hundreds of Coke bottle caps in his dormitory for Ralph so he could turn them in for a new football. Importantly, the tutor challenged Ralph's plan to become a construction man. He told him it was very hard work .md that with Ralph's ability and overall good grades he ought to try to get a scholarship to enter one of the finest private schools in the area. Now, at fourteen, shoeshining interferes with Ralph's fierce studying for an entrance examination to the private school. He has a competitor, Bob, whom he assesses as being way below him in English but superior to him in mathematics. Ralph is absorbed in calculating the number of points he would need to defeat him. It is a close and exciting battle but Ralph does not doubt the outcome: "I think I am going to private schooL"
constituted their work lives, and how incompletely these activities captured the vitality of the children we were seeing. We never doubted that these "content" aspects of the interviews were important, but we saw that they were no more important than the manner or style of the behavior described . For the content of behavior and its style of execution are two interdependent aspects of a unity; both are essential to comprehensive understanding. In comparing Ralph with other boys, were we to consider only what he said or did, we would find fundamental similarities, and we would miss much of the uniqueness of his ways, much of the quality of his experience at work. Thus we sought a means of ordering our data that captured the unique, idiosyncratic, stylistic variations in how boys work, variations which override the demands of the job and which express the person in relation to the task. We evolved the CONCEPT OF WORK STYLE concept of work style. Ralph's interviews leave one with an We defined five dimensions of work impression familiar to those who have style that seemed to capture important worked with interview material: They differences among our subjects. These are rich, multifaceted, real. But their were: work-mindedness, activity-passivvery richness is paralyzing. A kind of ity in work, occupational orientation, tension exists between the immediacy concept of life span, and work relationof clinical data and the abstractness of ships with adults.ll We shall consider the questions one attempts to answer each of these dimensions in detail. with them. This tension is resolved only Work mindedness refers to the exwhen intervening conceptual categotent and nature of the boys' commitries, introduced to help order the data ment to work. Of course all children in terms of the research questions, have relevance to both data and questions. 11 Each dimension was cast in the form of 11 That is, if the conceptual categories too five-point rating scale. Interview material percompletely reflect the research ques- taining to work was rated for each subject by tions and inadequately encompass the judges otherwise not associated with the project. interjudge reliability of these ratings for richness and SUbtlety of the interview The each dimension was satisfactory. Details concerning procedures and reliability can be found materials, the researcher senses to his in the dissertation cited in footnote 6. Interdismay that the real meaning of his correlations between the work-style dimensions from .16 to .61 and six of the ten reaehf!d materials has somehow eluded his ranged statistical significance, implying sufficient congrasp. And conceptual categories in- sistency in our subjects across dimensions to justify viewing the dimensions as elements of a sufficiently in touch with the research work-style concept. At the same time, each of questions-a more unusual situation- the five dimensions contributes enough unique meaning to warrant their use as separate dimenare equally disastrous. sions. Analysis of the statistical relationships We came to our study with no ready- among dimensions of work style and between dimensions and various family and cognimade concepts. As we worked with the these tive variables in our subjects will be considered boys we began to realize how similar in a subsequent publication. These five dimensions do not, of course, exhaust the possible were the activities and events which stylistic aspects of the ways in which boys work.
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who work, according to our definition, Ralph is such a subject. His sense of do so to earn money, but from the craft, his intensely competitive enterreactions of some we infer that there prising, clearly convey the central posiare additional, psychological reasons tion of work in his young life. Yet his for their effort. Some take little or no rating on work-mindedness is an inpleasure in their work. It fails to cap- termediate three, perhaps because the ture their interest. They differentiate rater took into account his playful atsharply between work and play, and tachment to work, which lacks the when they work they invest themselves adultlike seriousness characteristic of minimally. Work for them is an activity boys given higher ratings. Ralph clearly like dressing or brushing teeth; it is likes his work but he does not appear to part of life but not a matter of commit- value it for its own sake. Particularly ment or identity. For these boys there noteworthy, given our voluminous inappears to be little inducement to work terview material on his work experibeyond the money they earn. They dis- ence, is the absence of any generalizacuss their work matter-of-factly, with- tion about the usefulness of work to a out enthusiasm, and they have little to boy, something many other subjects dissay about it. When asked what was cussed in one way or another. good about having a paper route, one Activity-passivity in work refers to boy said he didn't know. He added that the extent that the boy wishes to, or if he could have his pick of jobs he'd tries to fashion the conditions of his like to be a supervisor. The interviewer work. In the case of children regularly asked how that would be better than employed, activity is expressed by his present job. He replied, "One thing, pressing for alterations of pay, time, you don't do a route. You make more and work conditions. In the case of money and you don't have to go out in shoeshine boys it is expressed through the morning and in the night. I guess the styls of negotiation with customers about pay and with police about corthat's all." But some boys value work for other ners. The most active subjects are overtreasons than immediate gain. Work is ly revisionist and control-seeking to a so much a part of their present exist- degree that has been a continuous ence that for them it means living out source of surprise to us. For example, a sense of identity. There is an adultlike one of our subjects, age twelve, orgaquality in the way they talk about nized a newsboys' strike which effecwork, and often they have given some tively paralyzed a neighborhood news thought to the value of work experience dealer with a good many subscribers. at an early age. Some of these boys He did this out of anger at the fact value work because it keeps them busy that the younger boys were allowed while at the same time providing them only to distribute, never to collect, and with spending money, thus serving in were thus barred from the kind of complementary ways to keep them out contact with customers that results in of trouble. Others respond to the ques- tips. He would be considered high on tion of why they are working as fol- activity. A boy who had the same paper lows: "Well, because if I don't work route for three years with never a rewhen I'm young I won't learn nothin' qUARt for either more PfI,Y or additional about workin' when I'm older." Often customers would be rated relatively this quality of high work-mindedness passive. Ralph was rated high (four) on the does not appear condensed in such eminently quotable statements, but rather activity-passivity dimension. His fruspervades the discussion more diffusely. tration of Hy's attempts to cheat him, These conversations have a quality of his acute attention to the importance of zest and excitement accompanied by an location in maximizing his shoeshining business, and his crafty one-upmanship element of seriousness and purpose.
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when competitors invoked the new rule limiting a corner to two shoeshiners all attest to Ralph's unwillingness to accept the world as it presents itself. But it is also important to note, as our rating system does not, that his active style was often achieved by passive means: He gained the upper hand through a strategy of apparent resignation and subtle countermove. Occupational orientation involves assessment of the degree to which subjects articulate an interest in future vocational activities and, more importantly, a disposition to conceptualize their lives in terms of continuity between the present and the imagined or planned-for future. Many working boys appear never to have considered how their work might have implications for their future vocational activities. Some attempt to do so, but their reasoning is replete with gross inaccuracies or it lacks conviction, suggesting that they have not previously considered the issue and are simply responding to an unexpected line of questioning. Others point to some general or quite specific skill they are developing in their current work, which they believe will have relevance to their future life, or they say that their present earnings are being carefully saved against the costs of preparation for future work life. Several boys mentioned the importance of learning how to work during childhood. One quotation cited under workmindedness is also applicable here: " ... if I don't work when I'm young I won't learn nothin' about workin' when I'm 0Ider."12 Another boy, asked what was good about working as a boy, replied, "Well, you get money and, ah, you, you start gettin' ready for bigger jobs if you work." "You have to learn how to obey your boss." Ralph received a low rating (one) on the occupational-orientation dimension. 12 This raises the question of the degree to which these dimensions overlap. Their productmoment correlation was .37, significant beyond the .01 level, but accounting for less than 14 percent of the variance.
His thinking about his occupational future displayed the same enthusiasm we saw in his discussion of his present work life, but it contained an inaccurate, fantasy-based view of adulthood. Nor did he relate his present work to future occupational planning, even implicitly. During our interviews he was beginning to gather information, but he appeared to be overly swayed by the person he had talked to most recently. When we saw him six months after the conclusion of our interviews,13 Ralph had partially relinquished the plan to be a construction man together with the fantasy of comfortable wealth easily attained. He was then intent on a future more immediately at hand-the acquisition of an education. He was less concerned and less willing to speculate about what would follow. To what extent this new emphasis will become internalized, become truly a part of Ralph, and how much it reflects a passing identification with the MIT tutor is, of course, unknown. Concept of life span complements the occupational orientation dimension in that it focuses on the span of time covered in the boy's consideration of his future rather than on the continuity between present and future. Some boys have never thought of their future. They seem to live for the moment and questions pertaining to planning their lives make little sense to them. Others appear to have given some thought to growing up and have planned around various markers in time. These markers are usually furnished ready-made by society, such as the legal school-leaving age, enlistment or draft age, and so on. Still others think of their lives in terms of a rather complete life span concept, including the kind of life they hope to live as adults. Some discuss prospects for retirement, and these children are frequently security oriented. A boy's view of his life span may focus on his vocational life or it may be phrased more generally in terms of life style. 18 Materials derived from this late contact were not rated by judges.
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For the most part, when these boys think about future they do so in terms of vocational activities. One subject explained:
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When I was about four I got this feeling the first time my mother took me to Mass, I got this feeling .that I felt like ~eing a priest, and ever SInce then I have still been thinking about it. Already my mother hopes that I will. She wants the first one in the family to go into the priesthood or something, so, but that is what I have been thinking of lately.
He explained that after high school he could either go into the service and then later go to college and seminary, or he could do that first and then go into the army as a chaplain. The interviewer noted that it would probably make his mother happy if he became a priest and asked if that was largely why he wanted to do it. To this the boy replied: "Yeahhh, plus I want to do it for myself." Another boy wanted to be a dentist. He understood the extent of the required education and had tentative plans for obtaining it. He had also discussed possibilities in the field of dentistry with his family dentist. The time span involved in Ralph's view of his future extended to at least early or middle adulthood (rated four). He looked beyond the completion of a junior college course to a time when he "" uuld be a construction man in charge of a work crew, and even to a time when he might shoulder greater responsibility: ..• you make more money than the regular guys, you have to tell 'em all the stuff to do .... I want to have a boss. I wouldn't like to run it all by myself. You know, maybe after I was in between, then I would. If I knew how to do it real good, then I might..•.
In contrast to these relatively extended life-span concepts some boys have only vague notions about their future lives: I: Have you any idea what you'll do when you get out of school? S: No, not really. I: Are you going to go to high school? S: Yes, I'm going to college. I: Do you have any idea what college is like? S: No.
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I: What would you study in college? S: I don't know. I don't know what they have. I: Then when you get out of college what would you do? S: I don't know, get a job. I: What kind of job? S: I don't know.
Work relationships with adults deals with the degree of the boy's investment in relationships which would not exist but for his work. Our primary interest lay in the quality of the boy's relationship with his employer. But some working boys do not have employers, though they do have significant relationships with adults in the work context. Shoeshine boys are an example. Among our subjects there are striking differences in the importance of these work relationships. In some cases they are imper_ sonal and matter-of-fact, and discussions of adults are anemic: They lack luster interest, or affect. Some boys tolerate the ultimate in anonymity, neither knowing their boss's name nor being known other than as "kid." For others, relationships with employers . or other relevant adults are more Important, but there is also balanced awareness of other aspects of the work situation. The work life of these boys could be adequately understood without describing their relationships with people at work. In marked contrast are boys whose work lives are dominated by relationships that originated in the work context, but have come to transcend the requirements of the work situation. Some of the~e boys have b~ come attached to theIr employers In quasi parent-child relationships in which they are cared for by, and give a good deal of love to a man to who:n they are initially not related by any tIe other than work. These relationships are moving in their spontaneity; losses are sad and palpable. For example, one thirteen-year-old simply quit his job with a news agency because his boss was transferred. Of course, for some boys the relationship with the employer is a hostile symbiosis in which mutual accusations of dishonesty and acts of bad faith predominate. Relationships at
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mental research; our present data do not illuminate the issue beyond informing us that the two relevant dimensions -work-mindedness and occupational orientation-bear an intermediate, positive correlation. While the five dimensions have been thus far grouped together as elements of work style, we believe there are important psychological differences among them. Underlying the hypothesis suggested in the preceding paragraph is the belief that the dimensions constitute developmental variables-that a group of boys rerated after a sufficiently long span of time would receive higher ratings as a group. Looking at boys from the vantage point of these dimensions, we believe that they do not develop at an even rate. Also, it appears that aspects of development to which our dimensions refer become critical at different periods of life. Thus it is likely that various aspects of work style do not stabilize at the same time, but that once .a boy does achieve stability of style in one or more respects only significant alterations of personality orgaDISCUSSION nization can lead to a change in work Applied to Ralph, these five work- style. Let us consider the dimensions from style dimensions highlight a certain unevenness. This boy who assertively this point of view. Occupational orienand eagerly confronts his present work tation and life span are, we suggest, and who takes a relatively long view of the last of the five dimensions to stabihis life in vocational terms, does not lize. Indeed, it seems likely that both bring these two threads together in a may be in flux during the age range plan for his occupational future which spanned by our subjects. Recall the mareflects either a reality orientation or a jor shift Ralph made in his career sense of continuity between present plans within six months following his work and that future. There are un- last official contact with us, and that doubtedly many determinants of this this shift was largely determined, at circumstance, but it can be partially least superficially, by his experience understood in terms of Ralph's in- with the MIT tutor. Recent research on termediate rating for workminded- the occupational planning and aspiraness, which we speculated had to tions of boys Ralph's age indicates that do with his playful, if intense, orien- this is a period of considerable fertation to his work. Indeed, one nIight ment, though by no means chaos, in the hypothesize that a quality of adultlike career planning process. 14 It seems seriousness about childhood work ex- likely that during periods of change in perience is one prerequisite for formu- career objective and in plans for its lating life plans in which that work ,. Warren D. Gribbons and Paul R. Lohnes, plays a part. This is, of course, a ques- Oareer Development, U.S. Office of Education, Cooperative Research Project No. 5-0088; Westion to be answered through develop- ton, Mass., Regis College, 1966. John C. Flanthis pole of the work-relationships continuum clearly meet important needs for human contact; the work situation simply provides an arena for their expression. Ralph's relationships with adults in his various work settings are of the sort described by the more balanced middle position (three) on this dimension. He utilized his personality and his cunning to extract tips from customers under the guise of friendly conversation, but he also used adults as sources of information and as partial identification figures. His relationship with Hy had all the ingredients of the hostilesymbiotic form mentioned above, and indeed Hy was involved in such relationships with other subjects of our study. But Ralph did not allow his relationship with Hy to sour in this fashion. He saw Hy for what he was and met him on his own ground. And during moments of reflection he expressed regret about this hostile, exploitative situation: " ... I don't like to rook him, but I didn't want to get rooked myself."
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realization one might find changes in the degree of relationship boys see between their present work and their planned-for future occupation, and also in their conceptualization of the period of their lives embraced by these plans. Moreover, these two dimensions differ from the others in that they involve relatively abstract consideration of the future. Piaget has shown that the mental structures required for thinking about matters of future, of potential, as opposed to the immediate, concrete present, typically do not develop until after age eleven. In contrast, we think that our subjects have already achieved fairly stable styles on the activity-passivity and work-relationships dimensions. And we think the work-mindedness dimension falls somewhere between these two sets of dimensions-that most of our subjects have already established their style on work-mindedness, but that some of the youngest may still be in the process of doing so. Evidence for these impressions is highly SUbjective. We note that when we speculate about what a given subject will be like as an adult we consistently use our estimate of his position on activity-passivity, work relationships, and, somewhat less frequently, work-mindedness as a basis for prediction. In these predictive efforts we rarely find ourselves making reference to either life span or occupational orientation. We return repeatedly to the conviction that there is simply something more final, more settled about these first three dimensions. But this analysis can be pushed a step further by considering the dimensions in terms of certain developmental issues of childhood. The activitypassivity dimension was defined in terms of revisionism and controlseeking in the work context. These characteristics seem to us highly dependent on the way the child has agan and others, Project TALENT: One-year FoZlow-up Studie8; Pittsburgh, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1966.
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resolved the prelatency developmental issues of autonomy and initiative referred to in psychoanalytic psychosexual theory and, more explicity, 1n Erikson's psychosocial elaboration of that theory.15 Similarly, the workrelationships dimension must reflect early learning and conflict resolution concerning relationships with significant authority figures. Workmindedness, with its twin emphases on capacity for self-investment and valuing, seems more directly related to the developmental issues of the latency period, to the issues Erikson conceptualized as "industry versus inferiority." The occupational orientation and life span dimensions, in addition to requiring modes of thinking typical of adolescence, also appear to have much to do with the adolescent issues of identity establishment. The concept of work style seems to us to have several potential research applications beyond the uses to which we have put it. Our discussion has raised obvious questions for longitudinal personality research, but it also suggests questions concerning the generality of style across behavioral domains. School, for example, has been called the work of the child, yet little is known about stylistic aspects of children's school behavior. Much could be learned about the nature of the multiple experiential realities of late childhood by comparing work-style ratings from both job and school situations. The concept of work style should also be useful in vocational behavior research. Typically, the work life of adults has been investigated in terms of occupational-group comparisons. The introduction of the concept of work style promises amplification and expansion of this approach, leading to greater illumination of the relations between personality and work. It should also 16 See Erikson in footnote 4. Of course a less restrictive definition of activity-passivity would imply a developmental course affected by constitutional predisposition (drive endowment> and many other vicissitudes of prelatency development.
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contribute to our understanding of the developmental processes of vocational behavior in childhood. Little is known about the basis of occupational preferences in early adolescence, and career plans formulated in the eighth or ninth grade are currently only moderately useful in predicting career plans or occupational activities a year or two after high school. How they will fare in predictions over longer time periods awaits the conclusion of longitudinal research presently in progress. 16 We believe the work-style concept will prove useful in explaining some of the variance not accounted for at present. Thus divergent or even apparently contradictory occupational choices might make more sense if we examine the possibility that they represent, in part, an attempt to give expression to stylistic personality dispositions, that job labels mask the potential for expressive behavior available within an occupational group. For example, a boy who expresses the wish to become either a construction boss or a ship's captain .. See footnote 14.
may be expressing in these apparently divergent choices his wish to stand in a position of authority to others-a wish which might be predictable from his style of relating to adults in his childhood work setting. Moreover, inclusion of work style in research on the developmental process of choosing an occupation seems advantageous because the concept of style is well adapted to the problem of continuity, ·which is of increasing interest in such research, and because occupational choice is so overdetermined by life circumstances, luck, opportunity, and unpredictable setbacks. Consider Ralph. Almost anything may happen. One can imagine him as a construction worker, career soldier, or businessman. The alternatives will depend on what life brings his way. But one can be reasonably certain that whatever he does, he will continue to engage in life zestfully, actively, and with a keen sense of the immediate. DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 48104
