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With data collected from nonmanagerial employees of four companies during the recession of 1975, this paper attempts to utilize the unemployment context as a contextual variable in explaining individual job satisfaction. It was expected that area unemployment rate would affect job satisfaction less strongly than would a more subjective measure of context perceived by each respondent. It was also expected that when no referents were provided the respondent in evaluating job satisfaction, this evaluation would be affected by local employment conditions. Our findings show that while unemployment rate has no direct relationship with job satisfaction, when used as a measure of context it influences the ability to predict job satisfaction. When the rate is high, variables that have usually been found to be good predictors predict less well or not at all. The perceived context measure was not as good a predictor as we had expected. Finally, the more global measure of the dependent variable, general job satisfaction, is more easily influenced by climate factors than the measure of comparative job satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the industrial relations practices of companies based in Japan and the U.S. As Japan becomes more industrialized and labor costs increase, when labor is no longer in short supply, Japanese industrial relations practices and work-related values should come to resemble more closely those of other industrialized societies. The cultural diversity argument emphasizes cultural variables. Employers and employees are seen to behave in a manner consistent with values to which they have been socialized in their particular cultures. Culture is perceived to be more or less homogeneous with a society and thus one can speak of the importance of the individual person in the U.S., a consequence in part of the early American folk heroes, the pioneer settlers of the expanding West. American workers are more oriented toward their occupation than their employing company and career progression not infrequently means movement from one company to another. American companies are oriented toward viewing their employees more as producers and are less likely to invest company resources in social activities for employees.