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 development of problem drinking among workers. An understanding of workplace cultural factors is essential for minimizing risks of drinking problems among employees.

Currently, the dominant approach to alcohol problems in the workplace considers the primary area of employer responsibility to be the treatment of alcohol-impaired individuals. However, a growing body of research suggests that this approach, while critical to employees who are alcoholics, is incomplete. Individual, treatment-oriented approaches may be of little benefit for workers who are not alcoholics but whose drinking patterns place them or others at high risk for alcohol-related problems, such as accidents, injuries, or automobile crashes coming to or from work. As public health researchers have long maintained, preventing problems from occurring, or reducing the risk of their occurrence, is a far more defensible strategy than the "downstream" approach of treating problems after they have already occurred.

Scrutiny of drinking behavior in the context of specific occupational settings has revealed an intriguing relationship between workplace environments and levels of drinking. One conclusion of this growing body of research--conducted mainly by anthropologists and sociologists--is that cultural factors offer an explanatory framework for that relationship. The word "culture," in this context, refers to an organized set of understandings that participants within a work setting share regarding behavioral comportment. These shared understandings, acquired through a process of socialization to the work environment, include supervisors, and nonworkers; ideal conduct in the performance of work tasks; knowledge of how to perform tasks; and values regarding specific kinds of work. These understandings produce patterned behavior that is relatively consistent over time.

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

All workplace cultures possess a set of rules, or norms, regarding appropriate behavior, as well as procedures for instituting these norms through behavioral regulation and handling of offenses. These rules may be formalized in that they comprise a set of written standards (policies and regulations). Although written rules are used as standards of behavior, they may be tacit in the sense 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 culture to job-related drinking, the following discussion considers dimensions of the workplace that have been shown to influence alcohol use. These dimensions are discussed under four conceptual headings: normative regulation of drinking, the quality and organization of work, factors external to the workplace, and drinking subcultures. To explain how these interrelated dimensions of workplace culture influence drinking behavior, we draw from published literature, as well as from studies we have conducted in heavy machinery assembly industries over the past 10 years.

By describing cultural dimensions of work-related drinking--and the way they are linked together--we identify environmental risk factors for the development of drinking subcultures and alcohol-related problems. Alcohol researchers have conceptualized risk factors in the work environment in terms of social control, alcohol availability, stress, and alienation. We subsume these concepts and add new ones in our cultural approach. As demonstrated below, elements of certain risk factors overlap in their relationship to drinking subcultures and to work-related drinking levels.

Normative Regulation of Drinking

We term the first, and by far most significant, dimension of workplace culture "normative regulation of drinking." This conceptual heading encompasses interacting and overlapping elements 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. Both types of standards have equal regulatory force. Alcohol and other drug-related behaviors are subject to this same set of normative controls. In some industries, regulations regarding alcoholic beverages on the job site, drinking during work hours, and alcohol-related behavior at work are spelled out in great detail. In other industries, such regulations are taken for granted with the simple expectation that drinking behavior, in general, conform to some particular cultural model: "professional," "competent," or "hardworking." Traditions of drinking at lunchtime (the martini with lunch in a restaurant or a beer in the local tavern), on breaks with co-workers, or at company-sponsored recreational events or union meetings, as well as implied understandings between employer and employees about what constitutes "normal" versus "problem" drinking, are all examples of regulated norms. Within this definition, drinking norms may conflict with one another. For example, there may be a formal policy about drinking mandated by upper management that is all but ignored by the majority of employees, who are responding to less socially distant behavioral expectations that make alcohol use appropriate--even desirable--under some circumstances. As discussed below, understanding the relationships between, and the causes of, different sets of drinking norms is an important task in prevention research.

Social Control.

The consequences of patterns of normative regulation of alcohol in the workplace have long been a subject of research. Based on studies of business executives and engineers who were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, Roman and Trice (1970) proposed an explanation that identified low supervision and lack of visibility of work and worker as risk factors for those who come into the workplace with physical or psychological predispositions to problem drinking. This model, referred to as the social control model, proposed that deviant drinking is promoted by the absence of some form of clear, unambiguous social regulation.

More recently, studies using ethnographic methods have lent support to this social control model, and have added to it by identifying additional social control factors that are applicable to a number of employees, and not just to those who may be predisposed to alcoholism. When extended to the entire employee population, social control in the work setting may be further differentiated into formal and informal controls.

Formal social controls include written policies on bringing alcohol into the workplace, drinking on the job, or being drunk on the job. Written policies usually contain procedures for disciplining employees who break the rules and treatment procedures for helping the alcohol-dependent employee. Also included under formal social controls are other policies that are not specifically related to alcohol, but that are indirectly related to opportunities to drink or to coming to work with a hangover. For example, paid lunch hours are sometimes offered as an incentive for workers to remain on the premises during lunch break, thereby avoiding drinking opportunities. At the opposite pole, sick-leave benefits that start payment only after 1 or 2 days of being absent from work encourage employees who would otherwise report in sick to come to work under the influence of alcohol or with a hangover.