DIMENSIONS OF ALIENATION AMONG MANUAL AND NON-MANUAL WORKERS.

The pervasive use of the alienation framework in interpretative sociological works has generated a need for empirical studies of alienation it self. Empirical measures of powerlessness and normlessness are developed for political and economic areas, following the leads provided by Seeman's conceptual analysis. The alienation scales developed in the present study are combined with Srole's anomie scale and Seeman's status-orientation scale for factor analyses. The findings provide empirical support for Seeman's argument for the conceptual independence of alternative meanings of alienation, but do not support the sociological works hypothesizing significant relationships between mobility commitments and alienation. A high degree of similarity is found in the dimensional structure of alienation for samples of manual and non-manual workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]