17 - Work motivation

Summary

During 1992 and 1993, I undertook a field study in the Northeast of the United States to learn why wages and salaries seldom fall during recessions. I interviewed more than 330 business people, labor leaders, counselors of unemployed workers, labor market intermediaries (headhunters), labor lawyers, and management consultants. The purpose of the study was exploratory; much of my effort went into the search for hypotheses rather than tests of specific ones. For this reason, I did not require informants to answer a fixed list of questions, but informed them of the purpose of the study and invited them to tell me what they thought was relevant. I intervened only occasionally to seek clarification, show interest, or nudge the discussion in new directions.

Only after informants had spoken at length did I ask specific questions to cover points that interested me. I usually avoided asking about economic theories until the end of interviews. Such questions sometimes stopped conversation, because the theories seemed naive and the questions led respondents to try to think like an economist, rather than to explain their world concretely in their own terms. Some business people refused such open-ended interviews, probably because they feared that while talking loosely they might say something that would embarrass them or hurt their company. I concluded that low response rates might make a random sample unrepresentative. (I had much less difficulty gaining the cooperation of the other types of respondents.