Social Control and Alcohol in the Workplace
Principal Investigator: Genevieve M. Ames, Ph.D.
Project Director: Roland S. Moore, Ph.D.

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The goal of this project was to explain how systems of social control in the workplace formulate, sustain, and enforce work-related drinking norms and practices. The project represented an opportune extension of an earlier study that described elements of social control supporting permissive drinking norms among workers in a large assembly plant with an organizational culture that is traditional to United States industries. We then compared that factory with a similar heavy machinery plant with an organizational culture modeled after Japanese industries, and with comparatively few alcohol problems at work. In these studies, social control in the workplace consisted of four interacting elements: (1) company and union ideology, (2) organizational structure of workers, (3) alcohol-related policies and procedures, and (4) key roles responsible for handling alcohol problems.

Our team used both survey and ethnographic methods to determine if and how social control predicted work-related drinking patterns of 10,000 employees in the same U.S industry, but in two separate work environments. One work environment reflected traditional U.S. organizational culture; the other was based on a Japanese model.

Survey data were obtained from in-home interviews with a random sample of 984 workers in one setting and 739 in the other. Respondents were asked about general and on-the-job drinking, perceptions of drinking norms, and perceptions of strengths or weaknesses of alcohol-related policies, procedures for policy enforcement, and availability of alcohol in the workplace. Ethnographic data were obtained from on-site, semi-structured interviews with 110 union and management personnel and over 200 hours of direct observations in relevant work operations.

Our findings are worth discussing.

Our analyses of the survey data revealed that alcohol policies, the extent to which policies are actually enforced, and alcohol availability all predicted drinking norms, which in turn, predicted work-related drinking, and accounted for differences in alcohol consumption between the two worksites.

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The traditional (i.e., U.S. model) was associated with more permissive norms regarding drinking before or during work shifts, including breaks, and higher workplace drinking rates than the transplant (i.e., Japanese model).

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Although overall consumption rates in both populations were similar, significant differences existed between the two samples regarding work-related drinking.

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Our analyses of ethnographic data provided descriptive understandings of aspects of the two organizational cultures that enabled mechanisms for social control of drinking in one setting and disabled those mechanisms in the other.

These understandings of how social control predicts workplace drinking practices provide guidelines for alcohol problem prevention in a specific kind of workplace. However, our identification of aspects of social control that successfully regulate workplace drinking is applicable to other kinds of occupational settings as well.


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