By Emily Brown

Megan is a 23 year old, white female who works at a locally, well-known law firm, ACME, LLP. Megan is a secretary for the attorneys at this law firm and has been there one year. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Megan majored in English. Megan wishes to return to school to pursue a career as a lawyer. Presently, she is not satisfied with her job. The purpose of this paper is to show how the elements of a control system at ACME, LLP affect the four dimensions of work as they relate to Megan’s job. The four dimensions of work which are studied in detail in this paper are autonomy and control, meaning, social integration, and self-involvement.

ACME, LLP is located just outside of Chapel Hill in Durham on 15-501. When I entered the office, the front desk receptionist greeted me. As she juggled answering the phone and getting Megan to front, I waited in the lobby. The lobby was decorated with old maps of downtown Durham, framed on the walls. Additionally, there were framed pictures of UNC-CH buildings and their conference rooms. There was a very small sofa with a coffee table and a side table. The coffee table was cluttered with magazines and various recent newspapers. The side table contained a couple of dead plants. The office was lit with florescent lighting and the temperature in the office was very cold.

As Megan took me back to her office, she showed me a small library and a break room. Her office was very small, containing a desk and a computer. There were a couple of plants on her windowsill and a clock on the wall, but that was the extent of her personal touch to her office. In Megan’s office, it was very loud. Her office is located right next to one of the attorneys office. He was constantly dictating to himself about a case or talking on the phone.

The employees in the law firm arrive at 8:30 a.m. and leave at 5:00 p.m., with one hour for lunch. All nine of the attorneys in the office are male and all of the support staff are female. The office does not sexually discriminate against the support staff. Rather, it is just that men do not want these jobs because of the way they are socialized.

ACME has no part-time workers, only full time employees. All of the attorneys are dressed in courtroom attire, while all of the support staff was dressed casually. The firm handles litigation, real estate, and insurance cases. Megan began working for the law firm through a temporary agency a couple of months after her graduation from college. She is single and has no children. Her income is used merely to support herself, although she considers her salary to be extremely low for having a college education.

Megan was raised in Durham and has never left the area for an extended period of time. When I asked Megan if she considers her job a dead-end job, she replied, "Yes. Without a law degree or some formal training to become an administrative paralegal, it is a dead-end job." I asked Megan about the turnover rate in the office and she said that it is extremely high. "Of all the support staff, the majority just began working for the firm. The three of us who have been here for over a year are planning on leaving as soon as something better comes up."

Megan’s job entails typical clerical work. She has to do filing, coping, and typing up forms within the office. Additionally, she has to do summaries of cases. This entails an attorney giving Megan a case with the background information. She then has to take the file and summarize everything in the file for the attorney. The last detail of Megan’s job is taking items to the courthouse. An attorney gives her an assignment, which might entail copying a court file or dropping off paper work to a judge.

Megan has some degree of autonomy and control in her job. Job autonomy is the extent to which the worker controls his or her own work and relations with others at work, including both co-workers and supervisors (Hodson and Sullivan 97). Megan does not have immediate control over her work. Megan must complete her tasks by the time the attorney has requested it to be completed. Therefore, she must work at the pace that is set by the attorneys and the tasks to be completed. As a result, she does not have freedom from pressure.

With the tasks to be completed in the allotted time, the attorney Megan works for and personnel manager are always checking up on her. Megan complains that it really does annoy her. Megan feels that she is powerless; powerlessness is the expectation that one cannot control the events in one’s life (Hodson and Sullivan 95). Moreover, Megan feels that the job is an insult to her intelligence. She knows she can complete the task and can not understand why they persist on hanging over her shoulder. Megan said that she wished they would give her more responsibility and more decision-making ability.

We see illustrated here the concept of execution versus conception. Megan’s part of the job is the execution of the assignments the attorneys give to her. Megan would like the attorneys to give her more conception, where she would be able to put more thought into her work. The outcome of this is Megan is isolated from her job. Isolation arises from a disparity between the goals, values, and expectations of an individual and those of the rest of society (Hodson and Sullivan 95). Her goals and expectations are much different from those of the attorneys at her office.

Although Megan does not have control over her immediate work process, she does have some freedom in her job. Megan is free to use the restroom, get a drink, or use the phone when she pleases. However, she must limit her time on the telephone. All of the employees have a number correlating to them in regards to who is using it. This number tells everyone in every office who is on the phone and how long he or she has been on the line.

In addition, Megan gets an hour for lunch break, but this is the only break she gets during the workday. Lastly, Megan is supervised by the front desk receptionist, who keeps track of her location at all times. She must sign-out in a logbook as to where she is and the time she left the office. Even though Megan has freedom of physical movement, the rest of her job is closely supervised and controlled by the attorneys, resulting in a low degree of autonomy and control.

Megan’s job has relatively little meaning to her. Meaning has to do with the scope and the span of the product worked on and if the product is unique. Megan feels that she does understand her job, and yet she is not attached to it. The service that ACME provides is not unique. Megan said that their clients could go to just about any law firm and receive close to the same results. The work Megan does is meaningless to her because she does not see the entire span of the process. She normally only sees the middle part, where she might have to type work for an attorney or research items regarding the case. Megan has never seen a case completed in the courtroom.

As a result of Megan’s job having little meaning to her, she has no loyalty or commitment to this firm. Commitment develops when workers perceive that their own needs will be met through continued employment in the job and when they perceive that the goals and values of the occupation or the employer are compatible with their own goals and values (Hodson and Sullivan 107). Megan’s own goals and values are not met by this firm. The outcome of this lack of commitment is that Megan feels she could easily be replaced by someone else, yet not just anyone could walk off the street and be competent enough to be successful at this job.

As the Bureau of Labor Statistics would classify it, this job is semiskilled. Her job took more than a couple of days to learn, but less that two weeks (Hodson and Sullivan, 26). Megan told me that she simply does her job to make a living. When I asked her if she wanted another job, she sharply replied, "Yes!" Unlike her present job, she would like a job where her input made a difference and the company treated her well. Furthermore, Megan said that although her job has variation and is not repetitive, she has no long-term goals because she hopes she will not be with the firm much longer. Because of job standardization and the small bits of the product Megan works on, Megan’s job has very little meaning to her.

There is a degree of social integration within Megan’s law firm, although Megan isolates herself from it. Because the attorneys work on cases together occasionally, a cohesive group of them exists. Employees occasionally have lunch together, yet Megan prefers to have lunch alone at her home. Additionally, management tries to socially unite workers through office functions, such as attending a baseball or football game, having birthday parties, and going away parties.

Although Megan’s job requires human contact, Megan says that she does not have direct contact with her manager or co-workers on a personal level. If Megan had a problem relating to her job, she would go to the personnel manager. Together, they would solve the problem. In contrast, she said that she would not discuss any personal problem she had with the personnel manager, even if it was affecting her work.

An example of a problem Megan had where she had to approach the personnel manager involved tension between here and one of the attorneys. He was not doing his part of the job. He sent her to the courthouse with an incomplete assignment, such as an order lacking his signature. Therefore, Megan could not do her part of the job. It is times like this Megan explains she had to control her temper or use emotion management. When this did occur, Megan had to go into the personnel manager’s office, smile, and politely explain that he had not signed off on an order. Hence, she is using emotion management by consciously manipulating and controlling her expression (Hodson and Sullivan 277).

Megan is not self-involved in her job. Megan claims that even though her work is not monotonous, she is bored everyday. She constantly is watching the clock and counting down the hours until the end of her day. She helps time pass by playing on her computer or just by starring out of her window and daydreaming. Additionally if Megan really wants to speed up her day, she simply leaves. This behavioral response to her boredom is sabotage. She purposely withdrawals efficiency from the work process. Another response Megan used is absenteeism. She told me that there are just some days where she cannot bear to go into her office, so just calls in sick. Additionally, the air filtration system in the office is very bad, and therefore everyone does get legitimately sick. The behavioral response and the bad filtration system cause Megan to be absent from work often.

Megan’s job does not come automatically to her because there are times when thought is involved in her work, although she does not feel she is her true self at work and the skills she could offer to the firm are not utilized. Therefore, her work and life are not connected. Her job gives her no personal satisfaction. She would prefer a job that would intellectually challenge her. Hence, Megan does not receive self-actualization from doing her job; it does not contribute to her broader human needs. If the job was self-actualizing it would not only provide for material needs, but if one’s material needs were already met in some other way, one would want to continue the work anyway, for it’s own rewards (Hodson and Sullivan 94).

Another element of self-involvement that is present in Megan's job is much like the Japanese system "Kaizen". The firm meets every Friday to discuss what each individual has been doing that week, discuss and solve problems. In contrast to the Japanese system, Megan gives input in these meetings, but her input is most often disregarded. The consequence of Megan’s boredom and merely seeing her job as a means to an end is low self-involvement in her work.

The three elements of a control system used by the employers are present in the law firm of ACME, LLP. First, there is a direction of work tasks. The orders flow from the top down and from Megan’s experience it appears to be very personal. Next, there is an evaluation of how the work is done. The person who tells Megan if her work was done right or wrong is the attorney she directly works for at the firm. Lastly, there is a system of rewards and punishment. I think that rewards are emphasized more than punishment. I feel the attorneys reward their workers by arranging to take the employees to a baseball or football game. Along with the elements of the control system, there is a specific form of control used in the law firm.

The type of control most prevalent within this organization is bureaucratic. From our classroom discussion, bureaucratic control is where direction and evaluation are in the rules. The six dimensions are apparent in the law firm. First, there is a division of labor. The lawyers have the expertise to do their job, paralegals have the skills to do their jobs, and the secretaries have their expertise to do their job. Therefore, each of the positions within the firm is specialized and the work is subdivided. Second, there is a hierarchy of authority. In the law firm, the senior partner is in charge of the office. Below him are the other partners within the firm, then the other lawyers, then the paralegals, then the secretaries. Next, office holders are employees. When Mr. Johnson, the senior partner, retires, the partner with the most competence and years in the firm will then be appointed as the senior partner.

Next, office holding is a career. First, you could come in as a paralegal or a law clerk. Upon receiving you degree in law, you can become a lawyer in the firm. Once you have put in enough time and are successful in the law firm, you can become a partner in the law firm. After that, you can become the senior partner in the firm. The next characteristic of bureaucracy present is that competence governs hiring and firing. All of the people hired within the firm have at least a high school diploma. The majority of them have at least some college education. People are originally hired on a temporary trial period to ensure that the employees have the competence needed to add to the success of the office.

Lastly, impersonality regulates organizational acts. The employees know the rules. Although there are no written rules saying when they can go to the restroom, when to talk, and how to sign out, there is a understanding of these rules and they are to be followed by the employees. Controls over the workers at the top is not bureaucratized. In this firm, that would be the senior partner. He sets the goals and establishes the bureaucratic form of control so therefore he can control the actions of the employees below him.

In conclusion, Megan’s job gives her no personal satisfaction. Megan’s job seems to be low on the four dimensions of the work experience. The clerical position Megan holds lacks autonomy and control because the attorneys set the pace at which Megan works. As a result, Megan does not have freedom from pressure. The job has very little meaning to Megan. Megan's goals are not met by the firm. Additionally, Megan is not involved in entire span of the service. This decreases the meaning Megan finds in her job. Although the firm tries to create social integration for their employees, Megan isolates herself from it. I think that this is a direct result of her being unsatisfied with her job and the lack of self-involvement she has within it. Megan considers her work to be very boring, with little thought that goes into her work. Additionally, the lack of input and judgment she can put into her work increases these unsatisfactory job conditions for Megan.

Megan receives very few intrinsic rewards from doing her job. Her knowledge and skills are not utilized. She feels there is no need for a college degree in this type of position, although she is happy that she has one. At least she knows she can go back to school to find a better job. Lastly, the pay she receives for having a college education frustrates her. She says that if she was to have a large expense, i.e. car trouble, she does not know how she would pay for it without a credit card. As a result, I think that Megan’s experience at the law firm has encouraged her to pursue a career in law. Megan said, "It’s me who has a dead-end job, not the attorneys." I feel that it is this job that will get Megan moving on her career goal, which is to become a lawyer.

Hodson, Randy and Teresa A. Sullivan. The Social Organization of Work. Wadsworth Publishing Company, California, 1990.