Alienation, Work Structure, and the Quality of Life: Can Cooperatives Make a Difference?

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Abstract
Description and explanation of life quality have been hindered by the failure to link the aspirations and experience of individuals with the structure of the social settings they occupy. This is an ethnographic study of the structural grounding of social wellbeing, using the concept of alienation to examine the impact of the objective working environments of Mexican American cooperative farmers on their subjective life quality assessments. The findings indicate the inadequacy of the dominant focus on income as a measure of life quality. They also suggest the importance of a) identifying possible variations among working populations in the ways that group values may affect concern with workplace control, and b) exploring workers' actual perceptions of the differences between ideal goals and reasonable expectations.

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