Abstract:
Alienation, one of the most meaningful and debating topics among social critics, was revisited and became the main theme of this study. It is considered to be an important aspects of life among Thai factory employees. Within Karl Marxs Framework of thought, alienation was empirically investigated under three distinct but closely related hypotheses : 1. The greater the degree of control over the major process of work if perceived, the more likely the individual employee will be free from alienation. 2. The greater the opportunity to do a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome (indentifiable piece of work), the less likely the individual employee will suffer from alienation. 3. The more the individual employee is assured of his influence over the allocation of rewards, the less likely he will suffer from alienation. Four kinds of factory were purposively selected on the basis of the investigators knowledge about the identifiable nature of factory work. They were arranged into a continuum from low to high degrees of identifiability, and 285 employees were randomly selected from these factories. A self-administered questionnaire and set of attitude scales were used to collect necessary information and measure the state of mind under study. The main findings of the present study produce too little empirical support to all of the three above-mentioned hypotheses. No statistically significant associations were found between perceived control over work process and the allocation of rewards and alienation the first and third hypotheses. But insofar as the ability to identify the finished product of ones own work is concerned, the nature and degree of its association with alienation cannot be unequivocally explained the values of Gamma and Chi-square contradict each other. Two main reasons can be given to explain why most, if not all, hypotheses are not confirmed: on the one hand, items in the scale are so few in number that the various dimensions of alienation were not adequately measured. On the other hand, all but one of the hypothesized causal variables are neutralized by the Thai ways of life As the present study reveals, the nature of social relations in the place of work, anxiety about life and social conditions outside the factory, and emotional instability do have moderately strong relationship with alienated felling. Moreover, the alienated employees were found to differ from their non-alienated counterparts in terms of such bio-data factors as educational level, shifts of work, and kinds of payment.