Not all that it might seem: why job satisfaction is worth studying despite it being a poor summary measure of job quality

By Andrew Brown, Andy Charlwood, David A Spencer. 2012

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7933400025f54286e5d75ae1b781926a4cc2179

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. D. Wheatley
2. F. Cnossen
3. H. Stier
4. S. Hurrell
5. C. Bickerton
6. J. Rubery
7. Min Zou
8. Milena Nikolova

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. H. Stier
2. S. Hurrell
3. C. Bickerton
4. J. Rubery
5. F. Cnossen
6. Min Zou
7. Milena Nikolova
8. D. Wheatley

In Social Psychology

1. H. Stier
2. C. Bickerton
3. F. Cnossen
4. Min Zou
5. Milena Nikolova
6. D. Wheatley

Citations in the corpus

• Subjective well-being and engagement in arts, culture and sport (2017, methodology): “Some studies measure well-being as happiness (e.g. Blanchflower and Oswald 2008), while others measure well-being using satisfaction measures including life satisfaction (e.g. Gardner and Oswald 2006) and/or job satisfaction (e.g. Brown et al. 2012).”
• Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well‐being and work‐life balance (2017, unknown): “This is because job satisfaction represents an amalgam of the varied norms and expectations of job holders and the objective features of the job (Brown et al. , 2012).”
• Occupational segregation and gender inequality in job quality: a multi-level approach (2014, background): “…flexibility, skill utilization, physical and emotional conditions, as well as job security and the more general notion of job satisfaction (Brown et al., 2012; Clark, 2005; Esser and Olsen, 2011; Gallie, 2007a, 2007b; Gallie et al., 2012; Green, 2006; Munoz de Bustillo et al., 2011;…”
• Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction (2015, background): “…the ‘making the best of a bad job’ theses from Hakim and Walters can also be linked to Clark’s ‘relative income’ hypothesis in a sense that women’s subjective interpretation of job quality can be influenced by norms and expectations arising from family life and work experience (Brown et al., 2012).”
• Rethinking job satisfaction in care work: looking beyond the care debates (2015, background): “Brown et al. (2012) go further and call for a new research agenda that draws on cultural analyses of class to theorize ‘the social and individual processes that influence workers’ norms and expectations, including their work orientations’ (2012: 1015), an approach which they believe ‘offers the pros”
• Rethinking the soft skills deficit blame game: Employers, skills withdrawal and the reporting of soft skills gaps (2016, background): “The data thus support Brown et al. (2012) that workers may report high levels of job satisfaction alongside objectively poor conditions.”
• What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it (2020, background): “Clark (2011) proposes that job satisfaction is a comprehensive summative measure reflecting objective and subjective job quality, though this view has not remained unchallenged (Brown et al., 2012).”