A cultural approach to conceptualizing alcohol and the workplace

The workplace, as a distinct cultural environment within the larger community, can support or inhibit the exhibition of problem drinking among workers. An understanding of workplace cultural factors is essential for minimizing risks of drinking vexed questions among employees.

generally the dominant approach to alcohol point in disputes in the workplace considers the primary area of employer responsibility to be the treatment of alcohol-impaired individuals. However, a growing material substance of research suggests that this approach, while critical to employee who are alcoholics, is incomplete. Individual, treatment-oriented approaches may be of little benefit for workers who are not alcoholics on the other hand whose drinking patterns place them or others at high risk for alcohol-related riddles such as accidents, injuries, or automobile crashes coming to or from work. As public health researchers have drawn out maintained, preventing problems from occurring, or reducing the risk of their event is a far more defensible strategy than the "downstream" approach of treating question s after they have already occurr (Wallack 1984)

Scrutiny of drinking behavior in the adjoining matter of specific occupational settings has revealed an intriguing relationship between workplace environments and horizontals of drinking. One conclusion of this growing material substance of research--conducted mainly by anthropologists and sociologists--is that cultural factors tender an explanatory framework for that relationship. The word "culture" in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts refers to an organized locate of understandings that participants within a work setting share regarding behavioral comportment. These shared understandings, acquired from one side a process of socialization to the work environment, include supervisors, and nonworkers; ideal administration in the performance of work tasks; knowledge of by what mode to perform tasks; and values regarding specific kinds of work. These understandings bring forward patterned behavior that is relatively consistent above time.

Each work setting may have a unique tillage However, within any work setting--especially in larger industries--there are likely to be distinctive on the contrary overlapping subcultures. The boundaries between these "occupational subcultures" are defined upon the basis of such factors as piece of work duties, position within the organization, educational or skill horizontals and social or class background.

All workplace tillages possess a set of controls or norms, regarding appropriate behavior, as well as operations for instituting these norms [i]or[/i] part of to the other behavioral regulation and handling of offense These dominations may be formalized in that they comprise a put of written standards (policies and regulations). Although written empires are used as standards of behavior, they may be tacit in the faculty of perception that they are relatively unarticulated, especially in situations where other cultural factors override them. As discussed below, tacit norms are as powerful, if not more powerful, than explicit regulations in producing behavioral conformity, and may be more difficult to change.

CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF THE WORKPLACE THAT INFLUENCE ALCOHOL USE

To clarify the relevance of tillage to job-related drinking, the following discussion considers dimensions of the workplace that have been shown to influence alcohol use. These dimensions are discussed below four conceptual headings: normative regulation of drinking, the quality and organization of work, factors external to the workplace, and drinking subculture To explain by what mode these interrelated dimensions of workplace agriculture influence drinking behavior, we draw from published literature, as well as from studies we have administrationed in heavy machinery assembly industries above the past 10 years.

through describing cultural dimensions of work-related drinking--and the way they are linked together--we identify environmental risk factors for the disentanglement of drinking subcultures and alcohol-related enigmas Alcohol researchers have conceptualized risk factors in the work environment in confines of social control, alcohol availability, stres and alienation. We subsume these general [i]or[/i] abstract notions and add new ones in our cultural approach. As demonstrated below, simple bodys of certain risk factors overlap in their relationship to drinking subculture and to work-related drinking levels

Normative Regulation of Drinking

We bound the first, and by far greatest in quantity significant, dimension of workplace tillage "normative regulation of drinking." This conceptual heading encompasses interacting and overlapping ultimate parts of work that form and maintain alcohol beliefs, values, and behaviors. First we will describe what this entails, and then substantiate it with research findings.

All work sites have explicit and unspoken standards for appropriate behavior. the two types of standards have equal regulatory force. Alcohol and other drug-related behaviors are control to this same set of normative masterys In some industries, regulations regarding alcoholic beverages upon the job site, drinking during work hours, and alcohol-related behavior at work are exorcismed out in great detail. In other industries, of that kind regulations are taken for granted with the simple expectation that drinking behavior, in general, conform to more [i]or[/i] less particular cultural model: "professional," "competent" or "hardworking." Traditions of drinking at lunchtime (the martini with luncheon in a restaurant or a beer in the local tavern), upon breaks with co-workers, or at company-sponsored recreational circumstances or union meetings, as well as implied understandings between employer and employee about what constitutes "normal" versus "problem" drinking, are all examples of regulated norms (Janes and Ames 1989) Within this definition, drinking norms may conflict with single another. For example, there may be a formal policy about drinking mandated by dint of upper management that is all on the other hand ignored by the majority of employee who are responding to les socially distant behavioral expectations that make alcohol use appropriate--even desirable--under more [i]or[/i] less circumstances. As discussed below, understanding the relationships between, and the causes of different puts of drinking norms is an important task in prevention research.