Early factories brought together men, women and children who had been involved in farming and/or cottage industries. They had to endure low wages, poor conditions and autocratic management because most of them had nowhere else to go. It was a very rare owner who worried about job satisfaction, as workers could easily be replaced. In the past forty years, industrial sociology and business administration have developed as academic specialities. Studies have shown that a man's attitude toward his job and his adjustment to it are important components of his performance on that job. In the same period, there has been a great increase in the complexity of industrial technology in many types of manufacturing, so that the workers' performance has become more difficult to regulate through direct supervision; trained workers who are dissatisfied and leave may be difficult or at least expensive to replace. Job satisfaction has therefore become an important topic of concern for managers as well as for social reformers.

The low point of work satisfaction is often taken to be the large-scale, mass production factory; auto assembly plants are characteristic in that each man does a very small task over and over, with no control over the work process, no sense of participation in the creation of the final product and continual pressure to produce. Considerable nostalgia is expressed for the ‘good old days’ when independent craftsmen were responsible for a complete production process.