This book represents years’ worth of accumulation of academic research by the Working Conditions Research Group. On the basis of the data of China Working Conditions Survey, the book touches on a range of aspects from a review of working conditions research in Europe, an outline of theoretical frameworks of working conditions in China, a focus on different topics of high interest in literature of China’s working conditions, to an in-depth analysis of the comprehensive results of this research.

    Through a summary of the context of the European job quality policy emerging in the 1990s, Chapter 1 titled New Progress in European Job Quality Research: Development and Challenges attempts to comb through the practices and disagreements of scholars in concept construction and indicator measurement, followed by a review of theoretical progress in the field of European job quality. This chapter argues that despite a lack of conceptual and methodological consensus in the job quality research revitalized in recent years, the advancement in cross-national statistical surveys and the employment of comparative analytical perspective have enabled the continuation of relevant research, as well as relevant achievements in the process of theorization. To some extent, reviewing the progress and problems of European job quality research helps provide a useful reference for working conditions and job quality research in China. In the meantime, Chapter 9 titled Objective and Subjective Job Quality Analysis in Chinese Organizations traces the origin of job quality research and its development in recent years. Using annual data of China Statistical Yearbook and part of nationwide sampling surveys, the objective and subjective job quality of Chinese urban employees and its influencing factors are analyzed. In addition, from temporal and cross-national perspectives, changes in job quality of Chinese urban employees over time are examined and compared with those of developed countries like the U.K. and U.S.

On that basis, this book explores working conditions in China from an assessment point of view. In Chapter 2, titled From Individual Sentiment to Collective Sentiment: Research on Work Satisfaction, a working conditions satisfaction scale encompassing three dimensions, namely, objective working conditions, organizational working conditions and subjective psychological conditions, is developed to explore working conditions of urban residents in China. Further, this chapter also examines working conditions satisfaction of urban residents and their subjective perceptions to different aspects of quality of life from a macroscopic society level. An analysis of their associations reveals that urban residents’ working conditions satisfaction is significantly correlated, at varying degrees, to their social satisfaction, life satisfaction, social participation and social stratification. Chapter 3 titled Working Conditions, Meaningfulness of Work and Job Satisfaction further explores how working conditions affect employees’ work satisfaction, finding that meaningfulness of work plays a regulatory role between the two factors. That is, the higher the meaningfulness of work, the smaller the effect of working conditions on employees’ job satisfaction. Additionally, this book also expands the theoretical horizon of working conditions research into areas of organizational trust, working autonomy, work engagement and work-family relationship. Chapter 7, titled Trust in Organizational Working Conditions and Its Functions, puts organizational trust in the context of the deep transformation of the Chinese society to explore trust in organizational working conditions and its functions. The question of whether, and how, the two dimensions and three aspects of trust play a mediating or moderating role between working conditions and individual behaviors. In the meantime, Luhmann's definition of trust in combination with the specific organizational institutional arrangements in China is used to regard organizational trust as a certain of state of consistent behaviors between an organization and its members, and divide the extension of organizational trust into two dimensions, namely, institutional trust and interpersonal trust. From a sociological perspective, the relationship between organizational and interpersonal trust is discussed. An empirical analysis reveals that apart from the conditions of organizational service facilities in the category of hardware environment, an organization's welfare institutional conditions, hazardous physical conditions, ritual and cultural atmosphere, communication network atmosphere and management and control atmosphere all have a statistically significant effect on the level of organizational trust. Similarly, working autonomy and work engagement as an important dimension in job quality research is also theoretically reviewed and empirically explored in the following chapters. For example, Chapter 6, titled Work Engagement and Self-esteem: A Literature Review, presents a review of literature on job burnout, work engagement and self-esteem; against this backdrop, Chapter 10, titled Working Autonomy of Workers, analyzes the construction of objective institutions and subjective evaluation of working autonomy; Chapter 12, titled The Cost of Freedom: The Effect of Working Autonomy on Slacking, argues that while bringing employees freedom, working autonomy also creates more opportunities for “slacking off” and thus may increase such behaviors. Although working autonomy generally increases slack-off behavior, the intensity of such an effect changes with variations in factors like organizational input, individual input, internal incentive and organizational supervision. Chapter 16, titled The Influencing Route of Working Time on Employees: Theory and Validation, proposes the basic model for how working time quality affects employees. Finally, Chapter 11, titled Work-family Relationship, Gender and Job Burnout, expands the perspective of this research to work-family relationship and explores the positive effect of work-family relationship on eliminating job burnout. Subsequently, the concept of “career lifecycle” is introduced in the analysis of the effect of working autonomy on job burnout. Using age as a criterion, we further divide working groups to examine job burnout in a more refined way and attempt to explore the societal factors behind gender-wise difference of job burnout.

Finally, this book presents an in-depth analysis of topics of high interest related to working conditions in China by focusing on working groups from a few special industries. Chapter 4, titled An Analysis of Working Conditions of Public Servants and Their Working Status, focuses on the group of public servants in an attempt to outline their general working conditions from dimensions of working relations, organizational climate, work behavior, remuneration, work identity and overall evaluation. Chapter 5, titled Research of Working Conditions of Doctors of Public Hospitals in China: An Analysis of Case Data, strives to comprehensively portray the basic working conditions of doctors from public hospitals and examine the relationship between working conditions and changes in their behavioral attitude. Chapter 13, titled Why Flexible Working Hours System Failed?: A Study of Theories and Practices of Work Stress Mechanism in Internet Companies, presents an analysis of work stress of a leading Internet giant, finding that it is through three aspects, namely, corporate culture, management system and labor process, that corporate organizations incorporate effort-reward imbalance and job demand-control (resources) models into daily practices. In this process, the flexible working hours system is implemented as an exemplar freedom factor on corporate culture dimension, but it eventually becomes unworthy of its name because of the performance evaluation, quantification of personal development, differentiation and competition in management institutions, as well as the adoption of the agile method and “little dark room” initiative in the labor process. Indeed, despite its failure to alleviate stress factors, the flexible working hours system still contains other resources helping relieving stress, such as the effect of native social and interpersonal relations in the performance evaluation and promotion processes. With a similar focus on Internet companies, Chapter 15, titled The 996 Overtime Work Policy: A Study of the Evolution of Management and Control in Internet Companies, presents a comparison of cases of organizational management and control in elite and mobile Internet companies to illustrate that changes in corporate culture are more significant in mobile Internet companies. On the one hand, it is reflected by the change in the connotation of corporate culture, that is, the dominance of technical culture shifts into the one of market competition, in which the subjectivity of laborers in production weakens and their identification with corporate culture thus loses its foundation. On the other hand, the role of cultural coefficient in the quantitative performance evaluation approach forces laborers to accept and learn the new culture of market competition, thereby increasing the passivity of laborers in organization. Essentially, it is a cultural foundation formed by a top-down, direct management and control strategy. Chapter 14, titled A Study of Influencing Factors of Job Satisfaction among Employees of Private Companies, discusses job satisfaction among employees of private companies in the emerging market of China and the effects of person-job fit, employee participation and organizational belongingness on such satisfaction.