(p.122) For Marx, there is a crucial distinction that must be made between the concept of alienation and the related (but not identical) concepts of domination and oppression. Although all forms of alienation involve oppression or domination, it is not the case that all forms of domination or oppression involve alienation. One can be dominated and oppressed without being alienated. But if one is alienated, one is certainly dominated and oppressed. Thus, to say that the family, housework, and child care can be free of alienation is not to say that there cannot at the same time be domination or oppression...

(p.127) Difficult as they may be, cleaning and washing can still be satisfying. Sewing, quilting, cooking, decorating, and building can be not only satisfying but also creative and can develop one’s powers and capacities. Child care can also be emotionally rewarding. The point is that difficulty, repetition, and even drudgery by themselves do not produce alienation; they do not even produce oppression. Something else is required to produce alienation or oppression. The most unalienated work, the most satisfying work, can involve certain aspects that are simply dull, repetitious drudgery. Even artistic work, the production of films, or scholarship can all involve...

(p.111) Despite its ambiguity of meaning, alienation is an appealing concept, standing as it does at the intersection of social-structural conditions and psychological orientation. Certainly it has been the subject of a vast litera- ture (see Geyer 1972). On the structural side, there is the fundamental Marxian analysis, focusing on the meaning for the worker of loss of con- trol over his primary work role. On the psychological side, there is the extensive recent literature on all the ways in which estrangement from self and others can be expressed. But rarely are the social-structural and psychological aspects of alienation juxtaposed, and...

(p.112) Work that is "external" to the worker, in which he cannot "fulfill him- self," comes close to being the opposite pole of what Schooler and I have called "self-directed" work-that is, work involving initiative, thought, and independent judgment (Kohn 1969, pp. 139-40; Kohn and Schooler 1973).

(p.113) The intent of this analysis, then, is to appraise two related hypotheses suggested by Marx's analysis of the occupational sources of alienation. One hypothesis, emphasizing loss of control over the products of one's labor, posits that ownership and hierarchical position are of crucial im- portance with respect to alienation (and also ascribes an important, if secondary, role to division of labor). The other hypothesis, emphasizing loss of control over the process of labor, suggests that (at least within an industrialized, capitalist society) such determinants of occupational self- direction as closeness of supervision, routinization, and substantive com- plexity overshadow ownership, hierarchical...

(p.114) Before assessing the occupational sources of alienation, one must face the fact that in social-psychological usage, "alienation" is an extraordinarily vague and imprecise term. It refers to people's conceptions of the external world and of self, in other words, to their orientations. Most definitions agree that alienation involves estrangement from (or disillusionment with, or lack of faith in) the larger social world or oneself. But there is little agreement on how large a segment of the orientational domain "aliena- tion" should encompass. Lacking an adequate general definition, I follow Seeman's (1959) example, in his classic analysis of the historical uses...

(p.120) This pattern of relationships between occupational conditions and feelings of powerlessness is essentially repeated for self-estrangement and normlessness: Ownership per se is of minor importance at most, position in the supervisory hierarchy is of greater importance, division of labor (as inferred from bureaucratization) is negatively related to alienation, and the three conditions that impede the exercise of occupational self- direction are consistently related to feelings of alienation. In each instance, the conditions determinative of occupational self-direction are more strongly related to alienation than are ownership and hierarchical position. (Similar analyses, limited to the profit-making sector of the economy, yield identical...