Working life has undergone changes since the 1990s that have entailed both threats and challenges for employees. While these transformations have resulted in advances and benefits for some employees, they have been experienced less positively by others. When examining these changes, it is therefore essential not only to focus on what has actually taken place, but also to take the perceptions of individuals into account. By expanding the knowledge of both the negative and positive aspects of working life from the individual's perspective, we can gain a better understanding of the nature of the changing working life. Such knowledge would help provide insight into individuals’ reactions and also aid in determining how different aspects of working life can be dealt with in the most positive way. The purpose of this book is to provide a step in this direction by focusing on how individuals react to the salient phenomena of contemporary working life, and how organizations can provide the most beneficial environment for their employees.

Working life in transition

Observers describing the emerging working life indicate that recent decades have been marked by a number of transitions (e.g. Burke and Nelson, 1998; Tetrick and Quick, 2003). These changes include technological advances that minimize the need for manual labor, improvements in information technology that maximize the accessibility and ease of communication, and expanding globalization that has made it possible for employees from different parts of the world to call each other colleagues.

Working life has gone through numerous changes in recent decades, as has been observed and commented on by a number of researchers and practitioners (e.g. Burke and Cooper, 2000; Gowing, Kraft, and Quick, 1997; Gallie, White, Cheng, and Tomlinson, 1998; Howard, 1995; Pfeffer, 1997). Some of the changes often described in the literature relate to the increased occurrence of reorganizations, happening not only through changes in ownership but also in connection with downsizing (Burke and Nelson, 1998; Pfeffer, 1997), which have been found to bring about both a diminished degree of predictability and an increased experiencing of job insecurity for individuals (Ferrie, Shipley, Marmot, Stanfeld, and Smith, 1998; Sverke, Hellgren, and Näswall, 2002). However, it is not only organizational and structural changes that define the new working life, as it has been argued that the work itself, as well as its conditions, has also changed (Howard, 1995; Burchell, Ladipo, and Wilkinson, 2002).

One of the more prominent changes has been the gradual transition from a product industry to a service industry (Tetrick and Quick, 2003). The demands placed on the individual have accordingly become more mental than physical in nature, as the object of work has had less to do with the manufacturing of finished products. What characterizes service-oriented work, rather, is the process of communication, in which the concern is to identify the needs and wishes of the customer.