Vocational education, self-employment and burnout among Australian workers

Australian Journal of Social Issues, Autumn, 2009 by Joanna Sikora, Lawrence J. Saha

Introduction

It is generally accepted that formal education improves productivity at work. Human capital theorists argue that education bestows expectations and attitudes which bring about greater efficiency and satisfaction (Wan, 2007). Furthermore, formal education provides the human capital which reduces the likelihood of becoming alienated or disaffected with one's work, or what social scientists call burnout. Burnout can manifest itself in a number of negative workplace behaviours, including absenteeism, high accident rates, poor work output and poor interpersonal relationships in the workplace (Australian Government, NOHSC, 2004). The existing literature on burnout is mostly informed by the psychology of particular occupations, and occasionally only task-related training or events in specific work locations are considered as mediating factors (Goddard, Creed, and Patton 2001). In contrast, the sociological approach to burnout focuses on broader structural contexts, i.e. differences across groups of occupations, employment situations and a range of educational credentials considered simultaneously. Our goal is to complement the existing, primarily psychological, studies with a sociological analysis of burnout among the Australian self-employed and employees, who work across the private and the public sector on either a full-time or part-time basis. To the best of our knowledge, our study is unique in comparing the propensity to burnout of workers with more academic versus vocational credentials. In particular we are interested to know whether vocational education may serve as a buffer against disaffection with one's work, and how this may vary between the self-employed and employees.

What is burnout?

Burnout or 'role alienation', with its psychological manifestations such as job frustration and the feeling of powerlessness, has been at the centre of sociological analyses of work since Marx's exposition of alienation first became influential. As a structurally reinforced predisposition to apathy and feelings of ineffectiveness and failure, occupational burnout was researched in bureaucratic settings and the service sector, including healthcare and education (Dworkin 1987). In the Marxist tradition, alienation is inherently linked to job content and, in particular, workers' autonomy. However, research on teachers suggests that burnout is best understood as the outcome of a 'basic contradiction' between the training and the work experience of employees (Dworkin 1987: 68-69). This approach underscores as correlates of the propensity to feel exhaustion at work not only the importance of job conditions, but also to the process of preparatory education itself.

Psychologists, such as Maslach, Cherniss and Pines, regard burnout as the result of the failure of an individual to cope with stress. They see its symptoms in feelings of fatigue, hopelessness, depression and low morale. However, sociologists such as Dworkin, LeCompte and Townsend focus on alienation which is embedded in social organisations and social structures. They see burnout reflected in negative attitudes such as meaninglessness and isolation, and in the negative relationships towards one's work or colleagues. (See Dworkin, 1997, for a review of these approaches.)

In this study we follow the more sociological definition of burnout developed in research on American teachers (Dworkin 1987). Dworkin combined the psychological and sociological traditions, and described burnout as:

'... an extreme form of role-specific alienation characterized by a sense that one's work is meaningless and that one is powerless to effect changes which could make the work more meaningful. Further, this sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness is heightened by a belief that the norms associated with the role and the setting are absent, conflicting, or inoperative, and that one is alone and isolated among one's colleagues and clients.' (Dworkin 1987: 28).

This definition conceptualises burnout as a form of alienation which is not explained solely by individual traits, but also includes structural factors within the work environment. This partly reflects the original Marxist tradition of regarding alienation as an inextricable characteristic of capitalist employment. While Marx saw alienation in purely structural terms, Marxists, such as Blauner and Seeman, adopted a more socio-psychological perspective (Blauner 1973; Seeman 1959). Central to their approach was the belief that alienation from one's work could be reduced or eliminated with appropriate adjustments in work organisation and management. Seeman, on whose work Dworkin based his own definition, described five ways of understanding alienation (1959): 1) powerlessness, which is the worker's inability to control the work process, including the tools and products of labour; 2) meaninglessness, which refers to the uncertainty about what ought to be believed and the inability to predict behaviour based on shared beliefs; 3) normlessness, which refers to obsolete rules or the absence of rules which leads to distrust; 4) social isolation, which Seeman saw as 'assigning low reward value to goals or beliefs that are typically highly valued in the given society' (1959: 789); and 5) alienation which is defined as self-estrangement, that is, the state in which an individual does not reach her or his full human potential, and instead becomes 'insecure, given to appearances [and] conformist' (Seeman 1959: 790).